OTC members fall short
Skies are blue. Security is tight. Protests are minimal.
The Olympics are going great, but Colorado Springs, Colo., is missing a gold medal.
At the midpoint of the Beijing Games, five U.S. Olympic Training Center residents have won medals – a silver and four bronzes by three shooters, a wrestler and a gymnast – as the chances for hardware continue to dwindle.
The lack of golds isn’t a shock, considering the U.S. trails China 27-16 in the gold medal count with eight competition days in the books and eight remaining. The Americans lead the total medal count 54-47 over China.
Colorado Springs got its silver from shooter Matt Emmons, who finished second in 50-meter rifle prone, failing to repeat as Olympic champion. Emmons will compete today in rifle 3-position, the final shooting event.
Shooter Corey Cogdell won a bronze in trap by prevailing in a sudden-death playoff, and the International Olympic Committee gave shooter Jason Turner a bronze in 10-meter air pistol after a North Korean tested positive for a banned substance.
The other bronzes came from gymnast Joseph Hagerty, part of an unheralded U.S. men’s squad that shocked the world in the team competition, and Greco-Roman wrestler Adam Wheeler, who is 3-1 in Beijing.
Start them young
Anybody wanting to discover the secret of China’s success at table tennis need only meet Li Zhuoming, a 10-year-old prodigy.
Li practically emerged from the womb with a paddle. His father is a coach, his mother a retired player, who started teaching him at an age when most toddlers could do little more than toss a ball around the playground.
He now boards at the Xuanwu sports school in Beijing, with a curriculum that includes math, Chinese, English and six hours a day of table tennis.
Sellouts mystify
Tickets were in such short supply for Friday night’s field hockey match between Australia and Pakistan that some relatives of players couldn’t get any, and those who did had to fork over as much as $130 to buy them from scalpers. At the box office, clerks told disappointed ticket seekers that the game was “sold out.”
But inside the 17,000-seat Olympic Green Hockey Stadium the bleachers surrounding the field were a sea of blue – the color of the rows and rows of empty plastic seats.
It’s one of the great mysteries of the Beijing Olympics: In what is reportedly the first sold-out Games in Olympic history, many venues are far from full.