olympics

WOW!

1/100th of a second ahead of Croatia’s Milorad Cavic.

If there’s a single moment that will be remembered from the Beijing Olympics, that will be it. We’ve been re-watching it at least a half-dozen times in slow-mo the past few minutes, and… just amazing, man!

He’s now tied Mark Spitz’s record of most gold medals during a single Olympiad. And tomorrow, Phelps might have one more for his collection....

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And no, there is not an extra “0” in that number.

The New York Post reports on the special diet that has Michael Phelps breaking swimming records like nobody’s business at the Olympics. The guy is on a staggering twelve thousand calories a day eating regimen. A typical person usually takes in around 6000 calories every day. Phelps has been nearing that amount with each meal! Mostly lots of carbohydrate-rich fare like pasta.

The boy better figure in some Wheaties too if he wants to have his picture on the front of their cereal box 😛...

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Right after my last post, Michael Phelps shattered another world record and earned his fifth gold medal at the Beijing Olympics. That’s now eleven gold medals overall across two Olympiads, firmly cementing his place as the winningest Olympic competitor ever.

If he goes on winning gold in the rest of his events, Phelps will not only make his own record all the more unreachable but he’ll break Mark Spitz’s record of having earned seven gold medals in a single Olympiad.

Do it, dude!...

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Butterfly is perhaps the most strenuous stroke of competitive swimming. And Michael Phelps won the 200 meter butterfly with a time of 1:52:03 early Wednesday morning at the Beijing Olympics.

Phelps is now the most-winning Olympic athlete in history: ten gold medals so far in his career, with four in Beijing alone. And he’s got a chance to bring home four more.

Go Michael! 🙂...

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Remember how legendary Nadia Comaneci and Mary Lou Retton became when they each scored a perfect 10 in their Olympic gymnastics competitions? Heck, “Perfect 10” has become a part of our vernacular because of their achievements and those of other gymnasts. Well, we can kiss any hope of seeing some 10s at the Beijing Olympics goodbye ‘cuz a new scoring system completely gets rid of the traditional 10.0 grade.

In its place is a convoluted scheme that not only doesn’t reward poise and grace, it darn nearly penalizes it: demanding that gymnasts produce “bigger and better”…

Nastia Liukin of the United States team, for example, performs a routine on the uneven bars that has a sky-high difficulty value of 7.7. Her father and coach, Valeri Liukin, crunched numbers last year to invent the complex, high-scoring routine.

He did the calculations on a Post-it before handing it to his daughter

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They unveiled the logo for the 2012 London Olympics earlier this week and it’s so magnificently malformed that some are claiming that it could trigger seizures in people with epilepsy…

It reminded me of something that happened almost ten years ago. On December 17th 1997, Japanese television broadcast an episode of the popular Pokemon show. During the episode there is one scene that has intense rapid red/blue blinking. In the minutes and hours following that scene, hundreds of Japanese children were rushed to hospitals because that sequence caused those kids to suffer seizures, convulsions, fainting, extreme headaches and nausea! The flashing was taken out of subsequent airings of the episode.

So… wanna see it? Here it is, with the original video unedited. If this link goes bad just do a search on YouTube for “pokemon” and “seizures” or “epilepsy”. But I’m seriously warning you: I watched this thing, and ...

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