Throws
Swiss You Can’t Miss
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
Bob Ramsak has posted a preview of the Weltklasse Zürich meet over at the IAAF’s Golden League website. Don’t forget to join Tom Borish over at TrackShark.com for a live video feed and some live blogging of the meet this Friday, August 29th!
On Phelps Phever & Stagnant Roadside Ditches
Saturday, August 23rd, 2008There’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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Beijing Event Countdown Timer: Day 9
Saturday, August 23rd, 2008
Clay claims “world’s greatest athlete” moniker, wins Olympic decathlon
Friday, August 22nd, 2008
BEIJING - Bryan Clay upgraded his 2004 silver medal to 2008 gold in the decathlon, dominating competition during Friday evening action at the "Bird’s Nest" National Stadium.
Clay (Glendora, Calif.) got his evening off to a very strong start, throwing a season-best 70.97m/232-10 to place third in the javelin. The performance earned him 904 points, bringing his total up to 8,269 with one event remaining in the 10-event competition. Ahead of the field by 479 points, his only competition was himself in the final event, the 1,500m.
Never a favorite event for Clay, he endured through the accumulated fatigue of two days of competition to finish in 5:06.59 for 522 points, bringing his winning total to 8,791 and becoming the first U.S. gold medalist in the event since Dan O’Brien in 1996. Andrei Krauchanka of Belarus took the silver with 8,551, and Leonel Suarez of Cuba finished third with 8,527.
Thoughts About the Men’s 800m Heats
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
Wilfred Bungei (KEN, 1:44.90) and Yuriy Borzakovskiy (RUS, 1:45.15) were the auto-qualifiers in heat 1. Absolutely no surprise there.
Abubaker Kaki (SUD, 1:46.98, in photo above, center) ran the first 200m of heat 2 in 25 seconds… and looked like he was jogging! He refused to let anyone pass him. Several men challenged him throughout the race so he visibly switched gears every time to hold them off. What a great job of psyching them out. They all quickly backed down. He went on to win his heat easily. Mohammed Al-Salhi (KSA, 1:47.02) had the best kick and outran Dmitriy Bogdanov (RUS, 1:47.49) for the 2nd qualifying position.
Pawel Czapiewski (POL, 1:47.66) made the first major tactical error of the heats and it may have cost him the semi-finals. He sprinted to the front some 550m into heat 3, nicely shifting gears and looking strong. Then he relaxed too much and let both Michael Rimmer, (GBR, 1:47.61) and Mbulaeni Mulaudzi (RSA, 1:47.64) outkick him in a slow heat.
Comparing Beijing To The Best Of All Time
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008
For which event at these Beijing Olympics have we seen the best performance in comparison to the world record in that event? We’ve seen 3 world records so far (or should I say we haven’t seen three records so far, not if we’re relying on NBC TV for our Olympic viewing!), so one of these performances, by definition, has to be the best:
| M | 100m | Usain Bolt | JAM | 9.69 |
| W | 3000mSC | Gulnara Samitova-Galkina | RUS | 8:58.81 |
| W | PV | Yelena Isinbayeva | RUS | 5.05 |
But which one is the best? I did an analysis of every event competed thus far at the Beijing Olympics and compared those performances to the world records for those events. Who came out on top? Gulnara Samitova-Galkina, whose 3000m steeplechase world record of 8:58.81 was 0.51% better than her previous world record of 9:01.59. Bolt was next. His 9.69 was 0.31% better than his previous world record of 9.72. Isinbayeva’s 5.05m mark was 0.20% better than her previous mark of 5.04m. Angelo Taylor’s impressive win in the men’s 400m hurdles was even more impressive than I had thought. His gold medal-winning time of 47.25 seconds was only 1% slower than Kevin Young’s world record of 46.78 seconds. That’s even better, percentage-wise, than Tirunesh Dibaba’s and Pamela Jelimo’s performances in the women’s 10000m and the women’s 800m, respectively. That’s saying something. Even more impressive than Young’s performance was Cameroon’s Françoise Mbango Etone, who won the gold medal in the women’s triple jump with a performance of 15.39m, just 0.71% slower than Inessa Kravets’ world record of 15.50m.
Beijing Track & Field Medal Count (After Day 4)
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008Gold = 3 points
Silver = 2 points
Bronze = 1 point
| NAT | Gold | Silver | Bronze | Total Medals | Total Points |
| USA | 3 | 3 | 5 | 11 | 20 |
| RUS | 4 | 1 | 3 | 8 | 17 |
| KEN | 2 | 4 | 2 | 8 | 16 |
| JAM | 2 | 3 | 5 | 12 | |
| ETH | 2 | 1 | 3 | 8 | |
| BLR | 2 | 3 | 5 | 7 | |
| UKR | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 6 |
| GBR | 1 | 1 | 2 | 5 | |
| POL | 1 | 1 | 2 | 5 | |
| NZL | 1 | 1 | 2 | 4 | |
| AUS | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | |
| BRN | 1 | 1 | 3 | ||
| CMR | 1 | 1 | 3 | ||
| CUB | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | |
| EST | 1 | 1 | 3 | ||
| PAN | 1 | 1 | 3 | ||
| ROU | 1 | 1 | 3 | ||
| SLO | 1 | 1 | 3 | ||
| ECU | 1 | 1 | 2 | ||
| FRA | 1 | 1 | 2 | ||
| RSA | 1 | 1 | 2 | ||
| TRI | 1 | 1 | 2 | ||
| TUR | 1 | 1 | 2 | ||
| MAY | 1 | 1 | 1 | ||
| CAN | 1 | 1 | 1 | ||
| CHN | 1 | 1 | 1 | ||
| GRE | 1 | 1 | 1 | ||
| LTU | 1 | 1 | 1 |