U.S. defeats Spain for the gold

The United States men's basketball team just finished a perfect Olympics with a fabulous 118-107 victory over Spain, giving the Americans their first gold medal in a major international tournament since the Sydney Olympics in 2000.

Let me extend one final [thank] you to NBC for its horrendously confusing schedules. When I checked its online listings late last night, I saw that the gold medal game would run from 1:30 to 3:30 a.m. Mountain time. (Even put in my cable company and everything.) When I woke up at 1:30 Mountain time, you guessed it, the U.S. was holding a 69-61 halftime lead and I'd missed Dwyane Wade's impressive first half. Great. Of course, NBC's Olympic website still says the game starts at 1:30.

At least we got the matchup I wanted. Last week I got an e-mail from my brother, a missionary in Spain, who was ecstatic about the United States' 37-point victory over them in the opening round. He said that ever since he got there he's had to hear the Spanish jawing about how their team, which won the 2006 World Championships, is better than ours. Now it's his turn to gloat.

Anyway, the second half got off to a terrifying start for fans of the U.S. Spain quickly cut the lead to four points, then held it in the four-to-six range for several minutes as they out-hustled and out-shot the Americans, who were struggling to get any decent looks. The game had all the feeling of a classic upset, where the underdog just kept hanging and hanging and wouldn't go away. I began to worry that, despite how well they'd done to this point, my fears about our team's makeup were actually well-placed.

The U.S. built the lead to as much as ten late in the third, but lost it almost as quickly. A three-pointer by Spain's Rudy Fernandez cut the lead to 91-89 with 8:13 remaining in the game. But that's when Kobe Bryant, long considered the missing ingredient from our last few international teams, took over.

Bryant drove down the right side for a tough shot to put the lead back to four. The next time up the court, he drove and found a wide-open Deron Williams on the left, who canned a three. Bryant next found Dwight Howard down low for a power dunk, then responded to another Fernandez three with one of his own to make the lead nine points with just over six minutes to play.

Just before the three-minute mark, Kobe hit another three and was fouled shooting. He just stood at the three-point line, brought up his finger, and shhhed everybody. This is exactly the kind of thing that normally makes me hate the guy, but tonight I finally get why Lakers fans love him so much. Naturally, he made the free throw for the four-point play.

The U.S. made some more free throws at the end, but the outcome of the game was no longer in doubt. The Americans finished with a high-scoring victory (225 points in just a forty-minute game, remember) and brought the gold back where it belongs.

Postscript: This will be the last post on this blog. Thanks for reading!

Phelps wins 8

Michael Phelps just won his eighth gold medal of this Olympics, and the 400m medley relay was the seventh race he won with a new world record.

It was such an incredible meet, especially the finishes to the 400m free relay and the 100m butterfly, that it's hard to put in perspective. (With his win over Crocker in '04, with his amazing .01 touch this year, and with his leg of the 400m medley relay just finished, I think Phelps swimming the butterfly for one hundred meters is officially my favorite thing to watch in sports.) The closest I can do to giving this justice is to think of what Mark Spitz said last night on NBC about how the greatest athletes know how to win. I've never been dominant enough at anything to know what that phrase really means, but it's as close as I can come to describing the zone some athletes get in where any victory is possible.

What's amazing is how unsurprising Phelps' triumph was. Yes, my faith faltered during that 100m butterfly, but for most of the week it felt likely that Phelps would win gold eight times. Only one other athlete has lived up to such high expectations in my time as a sports fan, and that was Michael Jordan in his last years on the Bulls. At first I thought Jordan deserves the edge because he did it night in and night out over a period of years, but then I consider Phelps' performances in the 2004 Olympics and 2005 and 2007 Worlds and I'm not so sure. Have you ever seen anyone else this good?

Thoughts on the Olympics' first week

I woke up early this morning to watch the U.S. beat Spain live in basketball, one of the few live events I've seen this year. (Which reminds me, I screwed up again on the 200 IM, accidentally checking Phelps' Wikipedia page for his career medals breakdown before the race was shown live in Mountain time. Thanks again, NBC!)

Anyway, the Americans—or Redeem Team, as they are so cutely called this year—dominated the Spaniards with superior athletic ability. Fittingly, Coach K had us looking like a Duke team, except like one from the late-90's, when they were good: they combined pressure defense and exquisite ball movement. Carmelo continued his torrid shooting with four threes, and Dwyane Wade especially continued his great play. LeBron James was good today but overall my opinion of him is almost down...he's still a little too prone to the what-the-heck-are-you-doing-type plays where he pulls up for a three when it's far from the best shot. However, he pulls some of them off, too, and has had some sick blocks already in the tourney. It has been a blast watching the U.S. team and I feel much better about our gold medal chances.

I watched the team competition in women's gymnastics, but not the individual all-around. After watching Nastia Liukin in the team competition I wasn't remotely surpised by her gold medal win; she was awesome under pressure. Even though I couldn't care much less for her sport it's always cool watching people come through like that. I felt bad for the telegenic Alicia Sacramone, who hurt the U.S. team when she fell off the balance beam, but as a fan was kind of annoyed by how rattled she was by it. I almost knew she'd make a big mistake on the next event, the floor exercise, where she fell again. For once, though, I was grateful for the tape delay, because I checked online to make sure we were just getting silver, then immediately went to bed. I also realized that by the next Olympics I will be way too old to call even the older gymnasts attractive ever again.

Does anyone remember the quote-unquote scandal of the American track-and-field guys showboating in Athens? Shawn Crawford and Justin Gatlin were winning the 100m semifinals, and one of them (I think Crawford) turned to the other one and started waving at him to go by. NBC announcer and former Denver Nuggets forward Tom Hammond laid into them for what I guess he thought was bad sportsmanship, but which I thought was just two guys fired up in the moment. Anyway, so tonight in the 100m final Usain Bolt slowed near the end to celebrate early, too, spreading his arms out and thumping his chest. I didn't hear a single negative word about it, nor did I want to. Combined with the public perception of the last few Dream Teams, it made me wonder, do Americans hold each other to a higher standard, and if they do, isn't that kind of stupid?

I can't decide whether I liked or hated the swimming announcers. On one hand, I liked the insight and how they were willing to make predictions, or tell me that some team leading a relay didn't really have a chance because the rest of their team was weak or whatever. And they were always right on that stuff. However, they had this weird way of trying to manage my expectations that felt annoying. Outside of Phelps, I liked watching the whole U.S. men's team and the women, too, at least when Katie Hoff wasn't cranking her goggles tight an inch deep into her skull. I especially liked watching Dara Torres, who first competed in the L.A. Olympics (!) and almost won gold in the 50m free tonight. It's cool to see a veteran getting it done like that.

Microsoft Silverlight, the plug-in for watching video on NBC's Olympic website, slowed my work and home desktops to a crawl and delivered intermittent choppiness on both streaming events and replays. The framerate smoothed out on my MacBook under both Vista and OS X, so there is hope if buying a new computer just for the Olympics makes sense to you. Still, I got the sense that the video experience was precisely engineered to be watchable, but also just bad enough that TV would always be preferable. I am pretty glad to be able to catch some stuff live, though. I hope in 2010 things look better and we can watch everything live.

NBC, on the whole, has been awful so far. The tape delay is absolutely killing me, and I saw the results to the men's 100m track final today about fifteen times on the Internet before it was televised. As always I love the replay of that race from the camera that glides alongside them...that always looks so epic. But for nights when I could be watching Michael Phelps live, but instead am stuck hearing about the mating habits of panda bears, I give out only one grade: F-.

I got David V'd

Today I was discussing with commenter David V about how'd he accidentally learned the results of the men's 4 x 100m freestyle relay yesterday before he'd seen the race on TV. At first, I didn't even believe him that the race wasn't live, thanks to some annoyingly deceitful tactics from NBC. (If my fact-checking is accurate, they did it again tonight. The "LIVE" graphic was up in the right-hand corner through the men's 100m backstroke, in which Americans Aaron Peirsol and Matt Grevers went gold-silver. But judging from the times on NBC's website (which say the event took place at 10:31 a.m.) and online world clocks (which say it was about 11:30 a.m. in Beijing when I was watching) the race was tape-delayed here by about an hour.)

One reason I didn't believe him was that I'd thought I'd checked ESPN.com frequently before the race Sunday night but had seen nothing of the American team's victory. I couldn't imagine what ESPN could have to gain from not spoiling NBC's surprise, other than not pissing off their own readers, which would actually be kind of sweet. I had to know if they put it up before the broadcast. My curiosity got the best of me tonight and I went to the site before when I thought the race would be televised and immediately saw the main story, that Phelper had won his third gold in the 200m free.

However, I couldn't (and, as far as I can tell, still can't) watch the video online yet, and I somehow miscalculated and missed watching it live. So I feel kind of screwed but can't tell for sure. Since I missed it, I guess it's possible NBC really did show it live...anyone know what's going on here?

As a postscript, I really liked a quote from another cool New York Times article about the Olympics and American swimmer Branden Hansen:

“In the United States, we raise the bar so high on ourselves,” Hansen said. Then, referring to Michael Phelps, he added, “Now to even be noticed, you’ve got to win eight gold medals. The poor guy’s swimming his mind out. And everybody’s saying, ‘Okay, one down, seven to go.’ Let him enjoy the one. You don’t know how hard it is to get on the blocks and do what he’s doing.”

Let him enjoy the one. I love that. There is such a small margin for error in the Olympics. We see this when we watch someone who barely qualified at trails make the finals of an event, or we hear about some veteran who missed out four or eight years ago for the smallest-sounding reasons. The one that always gets me is when a world-record holder can't quite break through for gold. Considering all that, it's amazing Phelps has even gotten as far as he has already, especially in a sport that lends itself so well to specialization.

U.S. wins men's 4x100m free relay

Some of my favorite and most dramatic American wins in the last two Olympics have taken place in the pool.

In 2000, swimmers Gary Hall, Jr. and Anthony Ervin tied for the gold in the splash-and-dash 50m free over a field including Russian Alexander Popov, who'd won the gold in the event in both 1992 and 1996. (Don't think Popov was over the hill: he'd set the world record in the event a few months before the 2000 Olympics.)

In 2004, Michael Phelps trailed U.S. teammate and world-record holder Ian Crocker by a body length at the turn of the 100m butterfly, but chased him down for the gold and set a new Olympic record.

Neither was as cool as what just happened.

* * *

The 4 x 100m free relay was billed as a showdown between the United States and France, but the color commentator, whoever that is, seemed awfully sure the Americans didn't have a chance.

It seemed odd, considering the United States team had set the world record in the race the day before with their B team. But France's talent in the top-three spots was sure to beat the Americans' overall depth. Well, sure to the French, at least.

"The Americans? We're going to smash them. That's what we came here for," said 100m free world record holder and French cleanup hitter Alain Bernard before the race.

Someone from France was talking trash about the U.S. before one of Phelps' races? The cynic in me wondered what NBC had slipped Bernard to say that. The drama was almost too good to be true.

The announcers were in agreement that whoever won the race would have to beat the fresh world record handily, and they were absolutely right. The top five finishes in the race all would have broken the world record set the day before.

Anyway, Phelper led off for the Americans, but the team trailed Australia when he came out of the water. Garrett Weber-Gale was second and kept us right in it, but I started to wonder how we would ever make our move. During Cullen Jones' first fifty meters, the gold medal began to look all but out of reach as France's sprinters began to pull away.

Bernard jumped into the water ahead of American anchorman Jason Lezak, who only needed to chase down that world record holder to win it. He wasn't losing any distance on the first fifty, but it still seemed like the U.S. would lose the event for the third straight Olympics. On the swim back, though, he turned it on like no one has before, catching Bernard at the very end and touching eight-hundredths of a second earlier than the Frenchman. Lezak swam his hundred meters in 46.06 seconds, the fastest-ever split in this race. And the U.S. team just went crazy.

I love the Olympics.

* * *

I am a huge fan of Phelps, one of the dominant athletes of his generation, and watched hours of gymnastics tonight just to be sure to catch his races. I'm just a little afraid I'll be sick of hearing about him by the end of the Games. After the race, NBC showed Lezak's finish, all right, but also kept emphasizing how much Phelps had been cheering, and how excited he was when he saw the U.S. won. Hey, they're all excited. I just sensed that the story of the 32-year-old Lezak, who'd been on the silver and then bronze-winning relay teams in Sydney and Athens, would have been more interesting. In any event, Phelps qualified for the 200m free finals about an hour before leading off the relay, and you can watch him compete for gold in that race Monday night (American time).

UPDATE: You can catch video of the race at NBC's Olympics site, though it will prompt you to install Microsoft's Silverlight plug-in.

Favre traded to Jets (I think)

In a move that must be breaking hearts across Wisconsin, the Green Bay Packers have traded quarterback Brett Favre to the New York Jets. It's a sad finish to an avoidable saga.

We never found out the answer to the most important question: why wouldn't the Packers take Favre back? He had them a home game from the Super Bowl just a few months ago, right? I didn't just dream that, did I?

My impression based on the news of the last few days is that Favre was willing to stay in Green Bay (and even compete for his job, which is lame), but that the Packers were ready to move on. I'm going to assume that's true. I've heard many reasons why the Packers were so eager to go forward without Favre, and most of them had two things in common: they involved Aaron Rodgers, and they were incredibly stupid.

Common was the contention that the team owed something to Rodgers, who has, after all, endured three years on the bench despite a sparkling career quarterback rating of 73. This is so absurd it's practically offensive. Where to start with the rhetorical questions. Okay, first off: does every Packer who sits for three years get an automatic starting job? Don't the Packers at other positions who risk injury and unemployment on every play deserve a front office that will build the best team possible? Did the team perhaps already reward Rodgers for his three years of service with a paycheck? Does the franchise really owe Rodgers more than its three-time MVP and one-time Super Bowl champion? Does Rodgers really "deserve" not to wait as long as, say, Steve Young?

(On the flip side, does Favre really "deserve" the starting spot? Um, YES, if he's the best quarterback on the roster (something it sounded like he was willing to prove). We're talking sports! Isn't it a meritocracy?)

Another idea that while keeping Favre around now will help the Packers in the short term, it will only infuriate Rodgers and spur him to leave at the end of his contract. Um, so what? It's no big loss. Besides, even if Rodgers really is a star, they'll tear up his deal and give him a new one that keeps him in town before he even hits free agency. When was the last time an awesome quarterback switched teams? (Um, not counting tonight.) It never happens.

Also, the Packers had plans already! And those plans didn't include Brett Favre, who said he was retiring! Seriously, I don't get this. Putting Favre in your plans makes you a much better football team. Don't you think the rest of the team craves the stability that would bring? Imagining myself in a young player's shoes, I'd much rather have a shot to prove myself with the Hall of Famer throwing to me, rather than some bonus baby who could be erratic and make me look bad.

I also think the issue has become clouded because Favre has fallen out of favor with many football fans for a few reasons. One, he gets a ton of pub out of proportion with the kind of player he's been the last few years (though he was great during last season specifically). Fine, whatever, I hate hype, too, though this guy is a legit legend. Many people are also saying Favre has been a jerk about this whole thing and put the Packers in a tough spot. In my book, he hasn't been nearly as big of a jerk as so many players have been. I mean, set aside the truly controversial guys (Leonard Little, anyone?). But if Barry Bonds wasn't enough of a jerk to lose his shot at 755, then Brett Favre definitely wasn't enough of a jerk to lose his starting spot in Green Bay.

Also, I keep seeing people suggest on the Web that the league or Packers should somehow be able to force Favre to stay retired. After all, he made a decision. And you're not allowed to change your mind in life! It is funny how many people saw Favre's return coming even when he announced his retirement, even if they meant it in jest.

Anyway, as I've said before, I feel terrible for Packers fans. But I feel terrible for all NFL fans now. First of all, the whiny bastards who keep announcing how sick they are of Favre now have to hear about him more. Actually, that part makes me happy. But why does Favre have to go to the Jets of all teams?

The Packers were 13-3 last year. The Jets? 4-12. I enjoy raining on your parade, Jets fans. Let's be realistic: there is no way Favre takes you to the Super Bowl, so why even bother? Also, Super Bowl III aside, I've always thought of New York's AFC sqaud as one of the lamer franchises in the league. Forget the past; can a 4-12 team have much of a roster? Who's Favre going to throw to, Al Toon?

It all adds up to some incredible lameness. The Packers won't be any good, the Jets won't be any good, and Favre will eventually leave the game unsatisfied. The Packers were a flawed team last year, but give 'em Brett for one more year and who knows what happens? Guess we'll never get to find out.

Reason No. 123 to Love the Broncos

A Few Seconds of Panic, Stefan Fatsis' new book about his time with the Broncos as a kicker before the 2006 season, includes on its one hundred sixty-second page the following awesome quote:

This year's per-team salary cap is $101,866,000, and the Broncos will come as close to that number as possible. Fully funding the team was a condition Shanahan set when he became head coach in 1995; a few years earlier, he had spurned an offer from Bowlen for reasons of internal politics and authority.

Bowlen says he wouldn't do it any other way. 'I'm not going to be judged on how much money this organization made,' he tells me one day. 'I mean, [f], that doesn't even enter the equation. Zero. It's, 'How many games did he win? How many Super Bowls did he win?' There's not a lot of things that I really want other than winning Super Bowls. I mean, what do I want, a bigger house? No. More space in Hawaii? Own my own jet? I mean, none of that makes a hell of a lot of sense to me at this stage in my life.'

If the Nuggets' cheaping out on Marcus Camby has bothered you half as much as it has me, then Bowlen is surely a breath of fresh air. With as much as I complain when some owners let me down, let me say how much I appreciate what Bowlen's ownership has meant for my favorite team over the past two-plus decades.

* * *

I just finished reading A Few Seconds of Panic, and without spoiling anything, let me just say that if you're a serious Broncos fan, it's an absolute must-read. The book chronicles Fatsis' attempt to turn himself into an NFL-caliber placekicker despite being in his early forties. In other words, it's half semi-serious attempt, half awesome insider's look.

If you're reading the book just to hear about the Broncos, as I did, know two things going in. The first is that, focusing on the 2006 camps and preseason, it's already a little dated, as key players on the team include guys like Jake Plummer. This didn't bother me at all. (If anything, it made me miss Plummer, and the book reconfirmed my feelings on him and the still-developing Jay Cutler.) The second point is that the first few chapters are mostly about Fatsis and very little about the Broncos; believe me when I say the payoff is worth the wait. Broncos lovers will love this book.  HPS recommended.