Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘olympics’

See the medals ceremony here.

Kol ha’kavod to Israeli windsurfer Gal Friedman for winning Israel’s first-ever gold medal.

Gal Friedman holds up Israeli flag

Now that’s a sight you don’t see every day. It makes me want to stand up and cheer! I wish I could have heard Hatikva being played at the medals ceremony.

Allison thinks it’s really cool that his name is “Gal”, which in Hebrew means “wave”.

To Lori-Ann Muenzer in track cycling. Woohoo!

Other athletes with good chances at a medal are Caroline Brunet (kayak), Alexandre Despatie (diving), and Perdita Felicien (hurdles), as well as the baseball team and the star sailing crew. There may be a few medals still to come for us at the games.

Update: Despatie won silver in springboard. But in a shocker, Felicien fell in the hurdling race and didn’t even finish.

“Judging irregularity” is what they’re calling it. I call it judging corruption. Not since the 2002 figure skating have we seen this nonsense. First, a “judging error” cost South Korean Yang Tae-young the gold in the men’s all-around finals, falsely awarding it to American Paul Hamm. Then, Canadian Kyle Shewfelt was robbed out of the bronze of the men’s vaulting finals, despite the fact that the Romanian athlete who edged him out fell off the vault. (Canada’s appeal, by the way, was rejected… by an official who also happens to be Romanian. Coincidence? Doubtful.)

By the last event – the men’s high-bar finals – the crowd was fed up with the judges. And they let them know, by booing loudly when Russian Alexei Nemov got a score that they perceived as too low. The crowd kept on booing so long, in fact, that the next competitor – American Paul Hamm – had to wait them out before he could start his routine.

In the end, the only person who could calm them was Alexei Nemov. Showing incredible sportsmanship considering he’d just lost his chance at a medal, he applauded his competitors and urged the crowd to calm down so that the event could go on.

Now that’s class. If only the judges showed some.

Finally, O Canada is heard over the sound system as Canadian gymnast Kyle Shewfelt wins gold on the floor event.

Disappointments, however, for the men’s eight rowing team and for diver Emilie Heymens, both gold favourites, and both shut out for medals.

Finally, a medal in a real sport: silver in rowing. We missed gold by 8/100 of a second.

So the good news is, Canada finally won another medal in Athens – a silver, this time.

The bad news is, it’s in trampoline.

Trampoline??? That’s an Olmypic event??? Okay this confirms it: there are way too many sports in the Olympics.

We Canadians may be depressed about only winning one bronze so far. But Israel, on the other hand, is ecstatic about its bronze medal in judo, won by Arik Ze’evi. The medal is Israel’s first in Athens and fifth in the country’s entire Olympic history. All the more so because the medal was won in the sport of judo, in which the gutless Iranians refused to face Israel.

Way to go!

One week. One bronze medal. Zero glory.

This sucks.

We Canadians don’t exactly have an abundance of medal-contenders at these games. Which makes this all the more painful:

[Dave] Calder, a native of Victoria, and Chris Jarvis of St. Catharines, Ont., were disqualified from the men’s pairs Olympic rowing semifinal Wednesday for leaving their lane just before the finish line.

The story seems a bit fishy, though, because the Canadian team will be allowed to compete in the B-finals:

Jarvis, 23, said the decision was “not a sensible outcome.”

“First, we displayed medal potential the entire race,” he said. “If FISA is willing to change the ruling to allow us to race, why not allow us to race in the final that we have qualified for?

Why indeed?

The South African team claimed that the Canadians interfered with their oar, but the Canadians insist there was no contact. In any case, this is a really tough break for the Canadian team, which was certainly in medal contention until this time. All that training, all those years of hard work… all to end in a tough break. Ouch.