Category Archive: Rio Olympics

Rio’s Golden Favorites: Simone Biles in Women’s Gymnastics

She was a six-year-old when she walked into a placed called Bannon’s Gymnastix in Houston, Texas. Simone Biles was there on a day-care field trip, watching other gymnasts, mimicking their moves, apparently so well that one of the coaches took down her name. The parents were contacted and Biles fate was sealed.

Today, the Columbus, Ohio native is not only the very best female gymnast in the world right now. Biles, who is the first woman to win three consecutive all-around world championships and the recipient of the most gold medals (10) in the history of world championship competition, is considered by some the best ever.

Simone Biles
Simone Biles at the 2015 P&G Gymnastics Championships where she won her third consecutive.

 

High performance athletes are different from us mere mortals. In the Biles’ family, January 1 is not about non-committal new year’s resolutions. Goals are set. Concrete ones. Ones that you are held accountable for. Here’s Buzzfeed’s Dvora Meyers explaining what Simone’s mother, Nellie, told her:

Nellie told me that her daughter had tried to delay their goal-setting talk that day. “She just avoided me like the plague,” she said. But Biles couldn’t avoid her mother, just as she could no longer avoid questions about the Olympics as she had in previous years. That morning in January, I watched Aimee Boorman, Biles’ longtime coach, write out the 2016 competition schedule on a large, laminated calendar to be hung on the gym walls: the American Cup, Classics, national championships, the Olympic trials, and a whole month blocked out for training camps and then the games. Everything was oriented toward Rio — and all eyes were on Biles.

Nellie is not actually Simone’s mother, she is her biological grandmother who, along with her husband Ron, took Simone in after Simone’s biological mother struggled with substance abuse. Clearly, the grandparents changed Simone’s destiny.

Today, Biles is considered a game-changer, her power and speed never before seen in women’s gymanstics. As the Huffington Post gushed, “she has an immensely difficult tumbling pass named after her, a double back layout with a half twist. If you’re the first person to complete a new trick in competition, you get that trick named after you forever. This is the Biles.”

At Rio, Simone Biles is a sure thing to win gold in at least the all-arounds. The question, like with Kōhei Uchimura for the Japan mens’ team, can Biles lead the US women’s team, the current reigning Olympic champions, to gold. Golden glory awaits.

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Rio’s Golden Favorites: Kohei Uchimura in Men’s Gymnastics

Uchimura holds up six fingers

At the 2015 World Gymnastics Championships in Glasgow, Scotland, after the competition ended, Kōhei Uchimura beamed into the camera and raised one finger at a time, until he showed the world six fingers, one for six consecutive world championships since 2009. Actually, it’s seven if you include the 2012 London Olympics. In fact, he is the only gymnast, either male or female, who has ever won more than two world championships in a row.

Such consistent superiority at the highest levels of gymnastics competition have left experts with little more to say about “Superman” Uchimura, except that he is the greatest gymnast who has ever lived. As USA Today put it:

There have been gymnasts who have won more medals, and those who claimed more golds. But no one – no one – has dominated like Uchimura or done it for so long. That just doesn’t happen in gymnastics, where the difficulty of the skills and the constant repetition required to perfect them means the best gymnasts have all the staying power of a Kardashian marriage. It’s simply too grueling to stay at the very top for more than one Olympic cycle.

Uchimura is amazing because he doesn’t believe he has to show he can make the most difficult maneuvers, which he probably could do. But his goal is perfection, and the beauty that perfection can reflect. Here is a wonderful interview of Uchimura conducted by the International Federation of Gymnastics (FIG), in which he says the following:

Beauty of movement is my goal. My father used to say that a hundred imperfect movements cannot match a single beautiful one, and this is something I have always kept in my mind. I could perform more difficult skills, but if I did I would have problems. For instance, I don’t have the energy that I did, and I can’t keep my feet taut, so I always aim for a balance between technical difficulty and execution in my routines. This is where the beauty of gymnastics comes in.

At the ripe age of 27, the Kita Kyushu native believes he is peaking at the right time for Rio, and that this is the last chance for him to maintain this level for all-around competitions, although he does leave open the possibility, as he says in the FIG interview, of competing for Japan at home in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

The Rio Olympics will probably be the last when I am at the top of my game. I want to be faultless. As the 2020 Olympics are being held in Japan, I want to carry on until then. [But] the risk of injury increases with age. One can carry on competing on the horizontal [high] bar for longer than the other apparatus. My technique is good, and I’m capable of scoring highly, so I would choose the horizontal bar.

The question is, can he lead the Japan team to its first overall gold championships since 2004, and perhaps spark another golden age of Japan’s men’s gymnastics when they won gold at six consecutive Olympics from 1960 to 1976. Uchimura will have London Olympic teammate, Koji Yamamoto, Ryohei Kato and Yusuke Tanaka, as well as a 19-year-old talent, Kenzo Shirai, who is a world champion in the floor exercise.

But there is no question: Unless Uchimura has an injury in Rio, there is very little stopping Superman from repeating as Overall Champion at the Olympics this summer.

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Thank You Mom’s “Strong”: P&G’s Powerful (and Dark) Two-Minute Tribute to Mothers

As Olympians finalize their preparations for the 2016 Rio Olympics, parents of Olympians too are gearing up for the emotional roller coaster. At times, mothers can have an outsized impact on the development of their children – think Duke Ellington, Richard Nixon or Norman Bates.

Thank you Mom Strong 1

In homage to one of their biggest customer segments, global fast-moving consumer goods company, P&G, has continued its “Thank You Mom” campaign, launching one of its most talked-about commercials two months ago. Hollywood director, Jeff Nichols, was hired to create its flagship commercial as a run-up to the Games. And while he took an uncharacteristically dark turn in theme, the commercial proved to be a viral hit.

Thank you Mom Strong 2

The 2-minute commercial, Strong, tells the stories of athletes whose mothers protected them, sheltered them, comforted them during difficult or even dangerous times: a tornado, a car crash, air turbulence, bullying.

Yes, there are violins that help pull at your heartstrings.

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Rio’s Too Close to Call: 100-Meter Sprint, Men’s and Women’s

Schippers Thompson Fraser-Pryce Gardner
Clockwise: Schippers, Thompson, Gardner, Fraser-Pryce

The crowns of the fastest men and women in the world reside in the Caribbean island of Jamaica. Both Sherry-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Usain Bolt have won gold in the premier track and field event, the 100-meter dash, at the past two Olympics in London and Beijing.

For Fraser-Pryce, winning gold in the 100-meters at the Rio Olympics will not be easy. Her fastest time in 2016 or 10.93 merits tenth best for the season, a few big competitors with faster times.

Dafne Schippers, 24, won gold in the 200 meters at the world championships, and silver in the 100 meters last year. But in quick succession, the Dutch sprinter has won gold in the 100 meters at the European Championships in Amsterdam as well as the Diamond League championship in Monaco on July 15. However, two huge rivals did not compete at that event, Elaine Thompson, 24, of Jamaica and English Gardner, 24, of the USA, owners of the two fastest times in 2016.

gatlin bolt
Gatlin and Bolt

As for the men, the chief competitor to Usain Bolt is American Justin Gatlin, the much maligned sprinter who won gold in the 2004 Athens Games, but missed the Beijing Olympics in 2008 while serving his second ban for use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs. He returned to the tour in time to place third at the London Games, and has recently won the US Olympic Trials in the 100-meters, sending him to Rio as the oldest sprinter ever to make a US team.

In 2016, Gatlin holds the fastest time in the 100 meters at 9.80. Usain Bolt has been cautious, holding himself back from competing, particularly as he had recently suffered a hamstring injury. But his fastest time this year is 9.88, and clearly Bolt rises to the occasion. Just recently Bolt demonstrated that the injury is not an issue by dominating in the 200-meters championships at the London Anniversary Games on July 22.

Will Jamaicans Bolt and Fraser-Pryce repeat as the first three-time gold medalists in the 100-meters, or will time catch up with them?

Can’t wait to find out.

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Rio’s Golden Favorites: Brit Mo Farah and the 5K

Mo Farah after his 5k victory at the london Anniversary Games
Mo Farah after his 5K victory at the London Anniversary Games.

Mo Farah had not competed much in 2016. While Farah, who won gold in both the 5,000- and 10,000-meter races at the London Olympics, as well as gold in both races at the 2015 World Championships in Beijing, the Brit had not run competitively all that much in 2016. And his results have been up and down as well.

But on July 23rd, returning to the stadium he won double Olympic glory, Farah restored faith in his fans, and gave hope to the possibility of being the first person since legendary Finn, Lasse Virén, to accomplish the double-double: winning gold in the 5K an 10K in two consecutive Olympics. At the London Anniversary Games, Farah won the 5,000-meter race convincingly, finishing well ahead with his trademark kick. His time of 12 minutes 59.29 seconds was his best since a tune-up to the London Games in June, 2012. In other words, his 33-year-old legs are feeling young.

“This is my best ever form heading into a major championships,” he is quoted as saying in The Mirror. “I am in good shape and it’s great to win before Rio. I just have to keep my feet on the ground as it’s harder to defend an Olympics than win it first time because people have had four years to work out how to beat you.”

Farah winning 5k at 2012 London Olympics
Farah is pictured celebrating his sensational 5,000 men’s final victory at the 2012 London Olympics

Four-time Olympic gold medalist, Michael Johnson, knows something about the challenges of repeating as champion, and so he knows Farah has to be wary of the competition. “It gets more challenging for Farah now he’s older. He’s dominated but the Kenyans are trying to figure out how to beat him. They are coming up with a plan and hoping to catch him on an off-day. It’ll be fun because it’ll make it even more competitive.”

The Kenyans agree. Farah’s 10,000-meter rival from Kenya, Bedan Karoki has said, “he has always beaten us in the last lap, but we have worked on that and hope to turn the tables against him this time in Rio. We are very good in lapping — indeed much better than him — but he waits until it matters most, and that is what we have worked on this time.”

Farah agrees, saying as much after his victory in the London Anniversary Games.

But while there is little evidence to show in 2016 that Farah has what it takes to win the 10K in Rio, at the very least, he is the clear favorite for the 5,000-meter race in Rio.

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Rio’s Golden Favorites: Chris Froome in the Cycling Road Race

Chris Froome wins 2016 Tour de France
Chris Froome wins the 2016 Tour de France

On Sunday, July 24, Chris Froome celebrated his third Tour de France victory. He is the first person since the legendary Spaniard, Miguel Indurain, in 1995, to win consecutive Tour de Frances. (Of course, that doesn’t include the American cyclist who must not be named.)

But despite winning the premier cycling event of the year, Froome wants to bring gold back to Britain at the 2016 Rio Olympics. In fact, Froome was on Team GB at the 2012 London Olympics, where he and his teammates ensured victory for Bradley Wiggins in the road race. This year, Team GB will be looking to propel Froome to gold.

According to the BBC, Froome “can climb and time trial with the best in the race and has one of the strongest teams ever assembled around him.” In the tour, he did just that, and also, fortunately, avoided injury.

As sometimes happens, the crowds on the narrow mountain roads can narrow the path like so-much cholesterol. On Mont Ventoux, a television motorbike was forced to stop suddenly, creating a quick pile up. The speed was slow, but cyclists fell and bikes became unwieldy. Froome’s bicycle was crushed by another motorcycle, so he simply decided to jog up the hill, finding bicycles along the way to get him where he needed to go.

His biggest rival, Tom Dumoulin, was not so fortunate. In a separate incident, he collided with another cyclist, and ended up breaking the radius bone in his left forearm. With essentially, a broken wrist, it is unlikely that Dumoulin will recover in time for Rio.

Other rivals include Nairo Quintana of Colombia and Alberto Contador from Spain will compete on the 241.6 km course that starts at Fort Copacabana that goes West along the beaches, sweeps North and then East inland, before returning to the fort. Barring injury, Froome is looking to pull into Fort Copacabana and take the road race gold medal for Great Britain again.

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Will Pokémon Go Compete at the Rio Olympics? Unfortunately, the Game Never Qualified

pikachu
Pikachu

Broadcaster at the Rio Olympics:

The Belgian has the lead, 30 meters on the Ethiopian struggling to stay in the race. With only a lap to go, we are clearly on the brink of….wait…my goodness! Two people have wandered onto the track, a girl and a boy…what are they doing on the track? They’re just walking, staring at their phones…and here come the leaders waving their arms, shouting. LePlante and Kidane veer to the right and pass them…they’re just standing there! Now the rest of the pack is shouting at them as they past the boy and the girl n their right and left…. OK, finally an official has come to escort them off the track. We saw this happen two days ago, when a teenage boy from Canada walked onto the mat during the semi-finals of the bantamweight wrestling competition. Could this be, yet again, another Pokémon Go attack?

On July 13, the Mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Eduardo Paes, wrote on his Facebook page on July 13 that he welcomes Nintendo to roll out the gaming phenomenon, Pokémon Go. “The whole world is coming here. Come too!”

Eduardo Paes facebook pokemon go

With everything going wrong in Brazil, the mayor knows that Pokémon Go is right now the hottest item in pop culture, so just talking about it is easy publicity for the upcoming Rio Olympics. Launched to phenomenal fanfare in Japan, the game starring such characters as Pikachu, Squirtle and Fennekin, Pokémon Go is scheduled for launches in Asia. Unfortunately, with scant few weeks left, it does not appear that Pokémon Go will be making it to Brazil any time soon.

I guess they’ll just have to settle for the Olympics.

August 4, 2016: As it turns out, Pokémon Go launched today in Rio.

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Rio’s Golden Favorites: Swimmer Katie Ledecky

US swimmer Katie Ledecky poses on the p
US swimmer Katie Ledecky poses on the podium after winning gold in the women’s 800m freestyle final during the swimming event at the London 2012 Olympic Games on August 3, 2012 in London. AFP PHOTO / FABRICE COFFRINI (Photo credit should read FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/GettyImages)

Katie Ledecky is as close to a sure thing there is. The 19-year-old already has a gold medal from her 800-meter freestyle victory at the 2012 London Games. Gold in the 400- and 800-meter freestyle at the Rio Olympics are considered a near lock.

Owner of the fastest times in 400- and 800-meter women’s swimming this year, Ledecky, the world record holder in both events owns eight of the ten fastest 400-meter times and nine of the top ten fastest 800-meter times…ever.

More incredibly, Ledecky has blossomed into a rare swimming competitor that has excelled at both mid and short distances. She also owns the fastest time in the world in the 200-meter freestyle, showing a diversity of performance that hasn’t been seen since the 1968 Mexico City Games. Back then, it was American teenager from Annapolis, Maryland, Debbie Meyer, who achieved an incredible swimming trifecta, winning gold in the 200, 400 and 800-meter freestyle events.

Katie Ledecky and Debbie Meyer
Katie Ledecky and Debbie Meyer

As Meyer reflected in this New York Times article, “When I watch her swim, it brings back so many memories.”

The Stanford University enrollee is primed for golden success in the 400 and 800 meters. Additionally, she has qualified for both the 200- and 100-meters. The Freestyle Queen will reign in Rio. The question is not how. It’s how many.

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Rio’s Golden Favorites: Women’s Brazilian Beach Volleyball

Talita Antunes and Larissa Franca
Talita Antunes (L) and Larissa Franca of Brazil in action at Copacabana Beach, September, 2015

They own the top two spots in FIVB’s Provisional Olympic Rankings. Additionally, the next Olympics are being held on their home court, on the sands of Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro.

Clear favorites to win gold, and maybe silver, are the beach volleyball women’s pairs from Brazil.

The female duo of Talita Antunes and Larissa Franca are primed for gold, with a recent win over American competition in Switzerland, April Ross and London silver medalist Kerri Walsh Jennings. At the end of 2015, FIVB players, coaches, and officials voted on who the best players were: Talita Antunes was voted Best Spiker, while Larissa Franca was voted Most Outstanding.

Agatha Bednarczuk and Barbara Seixas
Agatha Bednarczuk and Barbara Seixas of Brazil celebrating at a competition in Prague, 2015.

The second ranked team of Barbara Seixas and Agatha Bednarczuk were voted “Team of the Year” over their compatriots after having gathered the most points in 2015 in the race to FIVB’s World Tour crown.

The Brazilian women will be ranked #1 in two of the four pools at the Rio Olympics. Home sand advantage goes to Brazil.

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Tampering with Tamper-Proof Urine Sample Bottles: How to Beat a Urine Test in Russia (and in the US)

Berlinger Urine Sample Bottle
Swiss manufacturer Belrlinger’s urine sample bottle explained by the NY Times.

I have enough trouble taking the cap off those child-proof bottles for pain medicine. I’m sure it’s not easy to open up one of Berlinger’s urine sample bottles.

The design of this bottle is based on 20-years of experience of designing and manufacturing security bottles according to Berlinger & Co AG, and that the Swiss company “welcomes all endeavours to further investigate these allegations.”

The allegations are that the lab in Russia in charge of testing urine samples of high-performance athletes had figured out a way to open up sealed urine sample bottles in order to switch out tainted urine with clean urine. The New York Times has covered the state-sponsored doping scandal in Russia extensively, and a recent article provided details of how athletes beat the urine tests.

Today, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) released its report on the allegations of Russia’s doping and cover-up of doping, not just of track and field athletes, but all high performance athletes. As a result, the recommendation for a Rio Olympics ban on Olympians from Russia have expanded to all athletes.

As many now know, the head of the drug-testing lab for athletes in Russia was a man named Dr Grigory Rodchenkov, and he described in detail how tainted urine samples were passed through a small round hole in the wall of the testing facility, to be returned with clean urine samples. Before the bottles were returned, however, someone had to figure out how to re-open the supposedly tamper-proof bottles without any obvious evidence of tampering.

famous russian hole in the wall
The now famous Russian hole in the wall.

The bottle, which is part of Berlinger’s “BEREG-KIT”, was designed to be opened only one way once sealed – by breaking the cap into two parts with the use of a special tool in the kit. Somehow, Russians involved in the conspiracy to cover up drug usage figured out how to open the bottles up without breaking the cap. Here’s how the Times explained the process:

In Room 124, Dr. Rodchenkov received the sealed bottles through the hold and handed them to a man who he believed was a Russian intelligence officer. The man took the bottles to a building nearby. Within a few hours, the bottles were returned with the caps loose and unbroken. Dr. Rodchenkov’s team emptied and cleaned the bottles with filter paper and filled them with untainted urine collected from the athletes months before the Olympics.

This made me wonder – what are the ways in which urine tests can be compromised. I thought I would uncover stories only about athletes, but in the United States in particular, needing to cheat on drug tests is far more common than I had thought. I’ve lived in the US for only three adult years, so I was surprised at the level of drug testing that takes place in schools, hospitals and places of employment, very often as a part of the pre-employment screening process.

With a relatively high number of recreational drug users in America comes a need to cover up drug remnants in the system. According to this website, there are three basic ways to “fool” a urine drug test:

  • Diluting a urine sample with water,
  • Substituting your urine, or
  • Adulterating a sample.

Apparently, tampering in the first and third ways are easily detected by lab technicians, but “substitution”, assuming you are not being observed up close when peeing into a cup, is the best way to beat the test. Not only that, the tools to beat the urine tests are available online. I had no idea.

A quick search took me to this product called “U Pass Synthetic Urine” for only $11.74. U Pass comes with a bottle of “100% Toxin Free Synthetic Urine” and two heat pads that can be used to warm the sample just before the test. (After all, you can’t hand a sample of urine to a security person that doesn’t feel somewhat warm.)

u pass

According to the website, THC Clean, subtitled “The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for THC Detox & Passing Your Drug Test”, U Pass works and doesn’t work, and that “… you need good quality synthetic urine in order to not get caught.”

But perhaps the most important advice provided in the THC Clean site is that drug tests and drug-cheating techniques are changing all the time: “When reading synthetic urine reviews online and other people’s experience with synthetic urine, on forums and such, it’s important to look at the date. Drug testing evolves constantly, which means the same brands and methods may or may not still be effective. If older than a year, you may want to look for something more recent.”

Drug testing is a cat-and-mouse game, but one in which the mice are sponsored by well financed and highly motivated players, relative to the cats, who always seem to be two steps behind.

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