Mango Debuts
I am anxious for the start of the wrestling with Spencer Mango kicking things off at 55KG. Mango opens with a Romanian that he has split matches with this season. The road does not get any easier as he would possibly have Park the 2007 world silver medalist from Korea in the quarters and a win there would set up a likely match with 2X World Champion Soryan from Iran. You can read about Spencer’s draw at themat.com.
After reading an article about Spencer in the St. Louis Daily News, you can’t but cheer and pull for the young wrestler. The article can be found here. It is often quoted that Henry Cejudo is the future of American Wrestling. Well at just 22 years old, Mango could also be looked at as the future of American Wrestling. Mango brings a fun and exciting style of wrestling that would attract the non-wrestling fan to the sport. I was at a wedding this weekend with quite a few wrestlers and many were excited to watch Mango compete.
As I mentioned in a previous blog, the online coverage at nbcolympics.com has been excellent. For those of you, who want to watch live, wrestling will begin at approximately 9:30pm EST. The finals are scheduled for 4am eastern time. Nbcolympics.com has an email and text notification system to remind you to tune in.
Mike Zadick
The message boards have been burning up with information that Mike Zadick will be able to compete at the 2008 Olympics after the Bulgarian team had a string of bad luck. First world medalist, Anatoly Guidia ruptures his Achilles tendon, his replacement Ismail Redzhep, is involved in a serious car accident trying to get back to Sofia to get to the games. Redzhep suffered broken ribs and is also out of the Olympic Games. The United States is trying to get Zadick in as the replacement. Contrary to what is currently on the message boards, Zadick is not officially in the event. If Zadick can get in the event, this has the makings of one of the biggest stories of the Games.
Michael Phelps
You can’t turn on a TV or read the news without an update on Michael Phelps every couple of minutes. On my way to work this morning, I listened to Fox Sports Radio and they talked about what he was going to do between the morning and evening sessions.
I am not sure how many others felt the same way but it was really something I did not need to hear a discussion on. I think what he is trying to accomplish in his sport is an amazing feat. He is trying to do something in swimming that no other person has ever done. I will follow his quest and cheer him on as he strives for the eight gold medals. It will be something worth applauding if he accomplishes his goal. However, I do find the excessive media coverage to be a bit much at times. Why should an athlete who gets an opportunity to go for eight gold medals be given more media coverage than the athletes who have no opportunity to match the feat themselves?
If he gets eight gold medals, the pundits will consider him the greatest Olympic athlete of all time and they will also declare his Olympic performance the greatest ever single Olympic performance.
Writers make bold comments such as the greatest Olympian ever or greatest Olympic performance ever by a single athlete, it really is an unfair comment as you are not comparing apples to apples. Olympians in other sports do not get the opportunity to compete and go for multiple medals unlike sports like swimming.
If 18-year old Jake Deitchler can repeat his performance at the Olympic Trials here and win gold, I would rank that performance as high as anything Michael Phelps will accomplish in these games. He would accomplish something as an American that has never been done before.
The race last night was an amazing race, to get Phelps his second gold. An interesting side note was that Phelps had the third best time of the four relay members. Without the incredible comeback last night by Jason Lezak in the last 100 meters, there would be no eight gold medals for Phelps.
One of the interesting tidbits about Michael Phelps in his pursuit of eight gold medals is that our sport only offers seven gold medals in each style for the men and four for the women. Even if our entire Greco team won six gold medals, Phelps could still outshine the entire team with eight by himself.
Let’s continue to cheer for Phelps in his quest for history in his sport but not lose the focus of the other remarkable athletic accomplishments happening at the games.
In what not to read
In trying to post news stories on the Olympic Wrestling I have come across a few stories that are better off left not to be read. While the wrestling stories have been very positive here are a couple stories where the authors did make some negative reference to our sport.
• http://savannahnow.com/node/549464
• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-katovsky/chinese-takeout—-how-to_b_117402.html
Sport I least Understood
Unlike our esteemed writers above, I will not take a cheap shot at another sport even though I am scratching my head on trying to understand the dressage portion of Equestrian. I think I watched about 30 minutes of this on Saturday and I had no clue what was going on. I decided that this was not my cup of tea so I did not stay around to watch the team portion. I will say that the cross-country portion of the Equestrian is pretty cool. That is the beauty of the Olympics and that you have your eyes open to new sports. Some sports you might become lifelong fans of and others, you might not care to ever watch again.
1 Comment
August 12, 2008 at 8:19 pm
[...] that it is tough to win an Olympic swimming gold but, once you reach that standard, there are plenty to harvest. Many of the top swimmers seem capable of racing over 100 metres, 200, 400, often in a variety of [...]