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.
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.
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!”
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.
Aleka Katselli creating the sacred flame, from the book Tokyo Olympiad 1964, Kyodo News Service
Aleka Katselli was 12 when she was handpicked to be a priestess of the Temple of Hera in Olympia, Greece. She was with the High Priestess, Koula Prastika, who lit the first sacred flame for the Olympics in 1936, which then travelled by torch to Berlin, where it was used to light the Olympic cauldron – the first time this ceremony had taken place.
Katselli holding the sacred flame aloft, from the magazine Orimpiku Tokyo Taikai Tokushyuu, No. 2, by Tokyo Shimbun
As a child in 1936, Katselli remembers little. But in 1956, Katselli was 28 when she became high priestess, and was responsible for generating a flame from the sun, and making sure this sacred flame was passed to the long line of torch bearers who would transport the gift of Prometheus to a land that would embark on world peace through sport.
Lighting the Olympic flame is one of the most sacred moments of my life. What is important is to believe, to believe in the bottom of your heart that what I do at this moment is very sacred. You must believe. Especially here in Japan, when they say the flame is sacred, they really believe it as I believe it.
She told The Mainichi Daily News that the ceremony in Olympia is “not just a dance. It is a solemn walk which must be choreographed with the utmost dignity, grace and precision. Participants begin rehearsing the steps one week before the actual ceremony.”
It is likely that Katselli appeared that she truly believed the flame to be sacred. High Priestesses are often from the acting profession so that they can display a regal bearing worthy of channeling spirits from the beginning of time.
In fact, Katselli was a prominent actress in Greece, starring in the film of the 1962 Greek Tragedy, Electra, written by Euripedes, which could be considered base material for Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Katselli portrayed Queen Klytemnestra, who conspired with King Aegisthos to murder her previous husband, King Agamemnon.
Katselli also had a role in the 1960 film, Never on Sunday, which many Olympians at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics would have been familiar with. Produced for the film of the same name, “Never on Sunday”, would win an Oscar for Best Original Song, the first ever for a foreign-language film, and would go on to become a pop classic covered by Bing Crosby, Lena Horne, Doris Day and Andy Williams among many others. Enjoy the version below by Connie Francis.
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
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.
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 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.
Just days after the rescue, four of Four of the heroes pose for a picture. From left to right: Gerry Vultee, Owen Hale, Bill Herwig and Duke Kahanamoku. ,Courtesy of Paul Burnett
It was a lazy weekend at Newport Beach in Los Angeles on June 14, 1925. Three-time Olympic gold-medal-winning swimmer, Duke Kahanamoku, had just woken up and stepped out of his tent on the beach at 6:40 in the morning for a swim. When he looked out onto the choppy waters of the Pacific Ocean, he saw a disaster unfold. A yacht named Thelma, carrying 17 people heading out to sea looking for tuna did not see the checkered flag, indicating unsafe waters.
Suddenly, a squall struck and waves as high as twenty feet high, were pounding the Thelma, and Kahanamoku watched the yacht list at a 45 degree angle on top of high waves, glass breaking, rigging and men flying overboard. Kahanamoku grabbed his surfboard and lept into the frothy waves.
Kahanamoku grabbed one man, then two, then a third, plopping them all on his surfboard before heading back to shore. By then, two of his camp friends, Owen Hale and Jerry Vultee, met him halfway and took the three survivors to safety. Back went Kahanamoku, as thrillingly relayed by David Davis in his biography of Kahanamoku, entitled Waterman.
Duke turned around, inhaled mightily, and jumped on his board. He dug into the water toward the Thelma. He secured two flailing fishermen and maneuvered them onto his board, then kicked towards Hale, Vultee, and safety. (Local meteorologist Antar) Deraga telephoned for assistance while his wife and a nurse, Mary Grigsby, wrapped the survivors in blankets and tried to resuscitate the unconscious men. Two bystanders, Charlie Plummer of Balboa and William McElhannon from Santa Ana, assisted in the rescue. For a third time, Kahanamoku turned to the sea. He picked up stragglers and placed them on his board until, finally, he could do no more.
Of the 17 on the Thelma, 12 were rescued, 8 saved solely by Kahanamoku.
Kahanamoku said little of this superhuman feat. But said J. A. Porter, chief of police in Newport Beach, “The Duke’s performance was the most superhuman rescue act and the finest display of surfboard riding that has ever been seen in the world.”
While surf lifesaving has become a profession as well as an international sporting competition, particularly in Australia, Davis explains that Kahanamoku himself wrote that his actions over 90 years ago made the surfboard de riguer for beach lifeguards.
“{The rescue] helped sell lifeguard service on the wisdom of keeping paddleboards at he guard towers. The boards soon became standard equipment on the emergency rescue trucks as well as at the towers. In short, some good sometimes comes from the worst of tragedies.”
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.
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.)
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.
Eiji Tsuburaya and his Ultraman creationsUltraman is 50 years old! He’s still battling kaiju! And he hasn’t aged a bit.
It was July 17, 1966 when the first episode of Ultraman aired on Japanese televisions. Since then, Ultraman has been re-packaged in close to 40 different television series or movies, and is an internationally recognized phenomenon, on the same level as Pokemon, Hello Kitty and Doraemon.
Ultraman is the brainchild of Eiji Tsuburaya, who at the time was producing a newly launched series called “Ultra-Q“, what might be called a Japanese version of the television series Twilight Zone or Outer Limits, which were popular in the early 1960s.
Ultra-Q was not unpopular, but the broadcaster, Tokyo Broadcasting System did some research and discovered that the kids loved the episodes with all of the giant monsters (known in Japanese as “kaijyu“). This was particularly true thanks to the popularity of the Godzilla movies. As it turned out, Tsuburaya understood that. After all, he was the co-creator of the Godzilla movies. So after the first season of Ultra-Q ended, Tsuburaya decided to devote his series to kaiju, by introducing a character that would forever defend the world from the bad ones.
In one of those quick feats of legerdemain, Tsuburaya changed the name of his series from Ultra-Q to Ultraman. Broadcast in color, Ultraman burst on to the scene, and thus was born a cultural icon that all Japanese in their 40s, 50s and 60s can remember with nostalgic bliss.
But where did Tsuburaya get the term “ultra” from? That takes us back a couple of more years to 1964 and the Tokyo Olympics. Japan had just begun its run of men’s gymnastics dominance, by winning the team gold at the 1960 Rome Summer Games. They were expected to do well on their home turf in 1964, but they knew they would have tough competition, particularly with the Soviet Union. In an interview of the Helsinki Olympics medalist and member of a committee dedicated to strengthening gymnastics in Japan, Tadao Uesako, the Japanese newspaper, Daily Sports, revealed Japan’s gymnastics strategy.
Men’s gold medal gymnastics team from Japan: Takashi Ohno, Takuji Hayata, Haruhiro Yamashita, Takashi Mitsukuri, Yukio Endo, from the book Tokyo Olympiad 1964, Kyodo News ServiceIn 1964, international scoring for gymnastics worked on a three-level scale of A, B and C, where level C was considered the highest level of difficulty for a particular discipline or routine. It was Uesako’s view that Japan’s gymnasts were aspiring to levels beyond C, or as he called it, “Ultra-C“. And from that article, another foreign word (or in this case, prefix) entered the Japanese lexicon.
So there you have it – Tsuburaya made the leap from “Ultra-C” to “Ultra-Q”, thanks to the Japanese men’s gymnastics squad that took gold, ultimately sticking the landing on Ultraman.
She grew up in Flint, Michigan, a city so poor and underserved that the local government doesn’t care their children are being poisoned by lead in the water. But she had a talent – to hit, and hit hard.
Claressa Shields is the world’s strongest female boxer in the middleweight class (75kg), and is a favorite to win gold at the 2016 Rio Olympics. In fact, she could become the first American to win boxing gold in two successive Olympics.
She is a marketing phenomenon heading into the Summer Games – the most recent being her appearance in the recent Sports Illustrated The Magazine’s Body issue, which features nude photos of some of the most famous athletes in the world. But it is the documentary, T-Rex, which tells the story of a fragile young girl turning into a determined woman and Olympic champion, that put her firmly on the American pop culture map.
Will she have strong competition at the Rio Games? Of course, she still has to be win her three or four contests. But as Shields stated recently in Slate’s sports podcast, Hang Up and Listen, she has fought all her known competition and beat them all at least once. And when she won the middleweight women’s world boxing championship on May 27 this year in Astana, Kazakhstan, she beat the only strong contender she had not faced, Nouchka Fontjin of the Netherlands.
She’s (Nouchka) pretty tall, she’s a heavy hitter. For the last two years, I just can’t wait to fight her. I can’t wait to run into her. She was ranked number 3 in the world, and when someone’s ranked that high, and I hadn’t fought them, there’s always some talk. I want to prove the doubters wrong, prove that I’m the best, prove that I cannot be beat by anybody. For the last two years, she’s been an opponent I’ve been hitting on in the gym against her because I thought she was top competition. I fought her in the worlds and dominated her, 3-0. She was competitive. But I was just great.
Shields is 74-1 in her career, a two-time world champion, gunning for a second Olympic gold. Chances of success? High.
But it was not to be. Not only did Yang fail to win gold, he fell to a disappointing fifth place. In fact, Yang was in ninth place at the end of day one, but had a very strong day two in which he won the 400-meter hurdles, pole vault and javelin throw events, clawing his way to fourth place before the final event. But Yang’s 13th-place finish in the final 1500-meter race meant that two Germans, a Russian and an American would finish ahead of him in the final placements.
A chance at a first-ever gold medal for Taiwan faded into that cool evening of October 20, 1964. Two explanations have been provided for Yang’s disappointing results: a recent change in the way scores were tallied for the decathlon, and Yang’s mysterious illness.
The decathlon scoring system was always considered complicated, as administrators have time after time adjusted the benchmarks and formulas to come up with scores that were perceived as fair so that athletes were satisfied with their points for a strong jump, or a speedy run, as well as with their points for a fantastic jump or a spectacular run. In 1964, the scoring tables were revised yet again. And the rule changes appeared to be heir apparent, Yang, at a disadvantage. Technology advancements in plastics resulted in the increasing prevalence of fiber-glass poles. Yang had mastered the new pole more quickly than others, enabling him to claim a world indoor record in the pole vault. As legendary New York Times sports writer, Arthur Daley, explained in a preview to the 1964 Olympic decathlon, the scoring revision hurt Yang.
“Not too long ago the International Amateur Athletic Federation updated and revised the decathlon scoring tables. This has hit Yang harder than most because he no longer can make a blockbuster score of fifteen hundred points in the pole vault. He still will be the decathlon favorite but not by the preponderant margin that once had been assigned to him. “
Daley went on to quote Yang that he wasn’t overly worried. “Of course I lose points by the new tables,” he said. “But I don’t think it will affect me over the whole thing.” Others, though, believed that Yang was indeed psychologically affected by the rule changes, particularly regarding the pole vault.
Willi Holdorf and C.K. Yang after the decathlon’s 1500-meter race in Tokyo 1964, from the book Tokyo Olympiad 1964 Kyodo News Service
Based on the revised scoring system, Yang’s world record of 9,121 points would convert to 8,087 points, which is significantly higher than gold medalist Willi Holdorf’s winning point total of 7,887. But clearly, at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Yang did not come close to his world-record times and distances of his 1963 world-record setting effort. The explanation at the time was that Yang was not 100% healthy. As his coach Ducky Drake said, Yang hurt his left knee about five weeks ago. He never got into shape and this was reflected in his performances.” Another report said that Yang was suffering from a cold.
But Yang’s buddy, Rafer Johnson, revealed in his book, The Best That I Can Be, a shocking explanation for Yang’s unexpected performance in 1964. Remember, this is the time of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, Mao’s China and Chiang Kai-shek’s Taiwan.
In the 1970s, C. K. had dinner with a man from Taiwan’s counterpart to our FBI. They were talking about the 1964 Olympics when the man dropped a bombshell: C. K. had been poisoned, he said. Because of the tension with mainland China, Taiwan had assigned two bodyguard to C.K. at the Games. Despite that precaution, this man told him, a teammate had spiked C. K.’s orange juice at one of their meals. Shortly afterward, that athlete and two Taiwanese journalists defected to Red China. C. K. had always considered himself unlucky for having gotten ill at the wrong time. Instead, he may have been a victim of political warfare. “I was so angry I thought I would cry,” he told me.
Woah.
For more stories on C. K. Yang, see the following:
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