Archive for the ‘The Olympics’ Category
Medals for Misers, a believable UK Sport programme
MEMO
To: All UK Sport employees
Re: New (and cheap) way of getting Olympic medals at London 2012
From: John Steele (your friendly chief executive)
Dear all,
First of all, congratulations on a very successful European Championships . The British team exceeded the maximum target of medals, which was 10. This is great news. Although the targets have come in for [...]
Olympic dream is being strangled by target practice
In exactly two years time, the Olympic flame will be lit at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games in London. The Games has the potential, with its emphasis on sustainability, to alter the landscape of British sport for generations. It could, and it is a large conditional, have the effect that the 1992 [...]
The Winter Olympics: a lesson in sport
Athletes of all sports could learn a lot from the Winter Olympics and Vancouver 2010.
Take the drama of the men’s short track speed skating 1000m final, where the new Olympic record holder Sung Si-Bak lost out to to his compatriots Lee Jung-Su and Lee Ho-Suk because he didn’t want it as much as they did. Overwhelmed [...]
Separated at birth: Frankie goes to Wolverhampton
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It’s genius we know. But for so long, Pope and Swift never clocked on that Frankie Fredericks and Chris Iwelumo are near identical. Never before have we seen two men with more closely matched, open-mouthed running styles than the crocked Premiership striker and Africa’s finest ever sprinter. Such is the similarity that we are currently investigating [...]
Brilliant Bolt in danger of becoming a clown
Usain Bolt, the standalone fastest man this planet has ever seen, should be celebrated as the finest athlete of all time. Yet, there is a real danger that the Jamaican is fast becoming athletic’s court jester, a comedian for his amusingly honest post-race interviews and famous victory pose, the man known for eating chicken nuggets before winning [...]
Praise be to the polyurethane suits, the saviour of swimming
To polyurethane swimsuit or not to polyurethane swimsuit, that is the question. The 13th FINA World Swimming Championships may have been and gone but The Great Swimsuit Debate rumbles on as loud as an outboard motor. The polyurethane suits, which improve swimmer’s buoyancy and reduce drag, were the cause of 43 new world records to [...]
England is the sceptred isle of sport
The 2010 Rugby Women’s World Cup. The 2012 Olympics. The 2013 Rugby League World Cup. The 2015 Rugby World Cup. All major sporting events. All coming to England in our lifetime.
This sceptred isle, it is fair to say, is back on the sporting map. England is awash, fully booked even, with major sporting tournaments for the next decade. What a time [...]
Tom is no average Joe
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Tom Daley is quite obviously not your average fifteen year old. Britain’s youngest ever Olympian and now a World Champion, the Plymouth Plunger certainly knows how to break the moody teenager mould.
Daley should, if he were to conform to the teenager sterotype, be hiring and firing girlfriends with alarming regularity, sneaking into the room of the latest love interest whilst on [...]
The real Real McHoy
Sir Chris Hoy’s publicist must be working overdrive because the British Bullet’s bandwagon (a two wheeler of course) has been everywhere recently. Last night, he was busying himself at Pinewood Studios as a guest on BBC2’s comedy panel show Would I Lie to You . Unfortunately, I was there too.
I say unfortunately because, being partial [...]
Spoilt Pendleton peddling backwards
It is often a tough task to teach children the art of understanding idiom. Yet, thanks to an interview with Victoria Pendleton in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday, literacy conscious parents are now able to demonstrate to their younger ones what it means to ‘call a spade a spade’ and ’shoot oneself in the foot’. In one foul swoop, the [...]