On Phelps Phever & Stagnant Roadside Ditches
Posted by Jimmie R. Markham | August 23, 2008
There’s a reason why Swimming has supplanted Track & Field as the top dog in Olympic sports. It’s no wonder why we’re relegated to searching out obscure Norwegian feeds to view our favorite Olympic events live while the rest of the world is suffering from Phelps Phever live on NBC.
No it’s not a vast conspiracy by NBC and the IOC to force Track & Field fanatics how to deal with delaying their gratification. Simply put, when it comes to "putting it all on the line" at the biggest, most-celebrated sporting event in the universe, for forty years our sport has been as stagnant as a roadside ditch filled with mosquito larvae while the sport of swimming is a gushing wellspring of improvement. Don’t believe me? Here are the charts that prove my case. The graphs show the gold-medal winning times in the 400m, 800m and 1500m from 1960 to 2008 along with their equivalent gold-medal-winning times in the swimming events:
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Topics: Blog, Commentary, Jumps, Olympic Games, Throws |