Positive Energy - Olympics highlights, Day 13

I'm Erik Stuart, a 30-something married guy living in San Mateo, CA. I'm in eBay's corporate strategy group, and I lead eBay's efforts to look at & develop relationships with internet startups. (Posts about Web 2.0, the internet, and anything else are my fault and don't reflect on my employer, except to the extent that they hired me and continue to keep me around.) I'll also blog about sports, games, musical theater, economics/physics/other science stuff, and whatever else strikes my fancy.

Olympics highlights, Day 13

Top highlight: Definitely two of them, the first being US women winning gold in women’s soccer. I won’t claim to be a soccer expert, so I can’t refute some of the after-match reports that Brazil dominated play, but my view was that the Americans had a clear game plan which they executed well: play a very disciplined defense, and send lots of long balls forward with the notion of getting occasional chances for the speedy US forwards against the less-disciplined Brazilian defense. For a team that lost its best player right before the tournament (and was missing another starter), and then allowed two goals in the first 4 minutes of the first game, this was an amazing result.

Also: the US men sweeping the 400m dash. In a Games where the supposed-to-be-dominant US track team has been hugely disappointing, at least we still rule the quarter-mile. (Of course, Usain Bolt will probably start training in the 400m and win that in London.)

Other notes/highlights:

An incredible diving duel between Chen Ruolin from China and Emilie Heymans from Canda. Emilie made the women’s 10m platform the first diving event this Games in which the top Chinese diver(s) were tested, and Chen responded with a spectacular final dive to keep the Chinese streak (now 7-for-7) going.
Gold for the Professor and the Thin Beast on the beach volleyball court - the US duo responded well after a shocking opening loss to Latvia.
A shocking upset of the US softball team by Japan. It’s sad that softball is being removed from the Olympic program; I hope sincerely that it will be reinstated for 2016. Add to the softball loss the upset of the US women’s water polo team by the Netherlands, and the excellent performance so far of US team sports was slowed a bit. The dominating win by the US women’s indoor volleyball team over Cuba tempered this trend, however.
An impressive win for Cuban Dayron Robles in the men’s 110m hurdles. I wonder if his dorky-cool glasses will start catching on?

And now for the lowlight: how do both American sprint relays (along with several other teams) drop the baton? This is incomprehensible to me. I ran the 4x100 relay in middle school, and I wasn’t a great runner by any stretch, but we never dropped the baton. How can Olympic athletes fail to get the stick around the track - especially in the heats, where there isn’t any need to shave off hundredths of a second by making perfect exchanges? Sigh.

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