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The biggest star of the Olympics?

Who is the biggest star of these Olympics?

A few to choose from!
-----Added 23/8/2008 at 12 : 14 : 26-----
edit..

I dont think this worked, its supposed to have a poll!!

Can someone delete?

well, don't be hasty. Maybe an open thread without multiple choices would be more fun anyway. We can probably guess who some of the athletes could be. For me it's pretty much a tossup between Phelps and Bolt. Both utterly dominated and set records with every race. I might have to give the edge to Phelps because of his dominance at a wider range of events. What are the chances that he could win ALL of those events, even being as good as he is? If Bolt ran the 400 or something, it would definitely be him. Still it was awesome to see Bolt simply run away from other world class sprinters.

Well... the options I listed were

1 - The Lightening Bolt
2 - Michael Phelps
3 - Chinese women's coxless 4's
4 - Ben Ainslie
5 - GB cycling team
6 - Kenenisa Bekele
7 - Nastia Liukin
8 - Yelena Isinbayeva
9 - Tirunesh Dibaba (a criminally understated achievment)

To me Bolt takes it by a long way.

Phelps ot 8 golds sure, but if Usain could enter the 100M, the 110M, 120M while wearing a hat, the 130 when you start from a standing position, etc etc.. he could win as many medals as they could make up...

What Phelps did was great I suppose, but to be honest I dont think he brought 1/10th of he excitement to the event that Usain Bolt did... and I really do think its kind of a joke to have 4 or 5 different swimming races over the same distance when they swim in a different style.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Strange Famous (Post 2511914)

I think the 120m wearing a hat would be fascinating! We could have Mexico wear sombreros, American could wear cowboy hats or baseball hats, the French berets, of course, it would be great! Seriously,i know what you mean about so many swimming events but I guess it all comes down to both Bolt and Phelps winning every race they competed in. Honestly the best performance was the final leg of the men's (swimming) 400m relay where the US narrowly beat the French. I guess if I was cynical, I would say the best performance was really the Chinese government saying that those gymnasts were really 16 years old with a straight face, and then being indignant when they were questioned about it.

does the star necesarily have to be the one winning gold?

eric the eel (from equitorial guinea. google him if you odnt know who he is) was the standout star of the Sydney Olympics for me by a long shot, and he almost drowned.

so does the star of the olympics need to have won gold?

I loved Eric the Eel, and he sums up what the Olympics is about. Sure - it is about excellence and elite athlete's at the top of their game but its also about personal goals. Here was a guy who basically got into the games by taking advantage of the rules around developing countries, a swimmer from a land locked country who couldnt afford to get into the only swimming pool in his city for much training, and consequently worked out his tactics laying on his belly on the floor of his living room.

By some accident of fate the other two men were disqualified in his heat - and he was left to swim 100 metres in a solo race, and it must have started to strike him then that he basically couldnt swim. He actually did ok until the turn, when he inadvisedly tried a kick turn and got into trouble... he made it most of the way back but started to grind to a halt, 15 metres from the end I remember the lifeguards poised for the most improbably of rescues, and the crowd starting to roar him home as he somehow thrashed his way through the water to make it home again.

I remember reading about him, how before his race he was trying to get autographs of his favourite swimmers and they were blanking him, but after what he did they all wanted pictures with him, Thorpe gave him a swmsuit, etc.

He went out and challenged himself, and came through it and did something that by all rights he shouldnt have been capable of... I think it is bloody heroic to do a 100 Metres freestyle in the olympic games when you cant actually swim, and even greater that he made it home - in whatever time.

_

so heroes dont need to win to be great, in my opinion.

But I also think you have to be pretty special to overshadow the lightening bolt

Bolt, no question. The sprints are the marquee events of the Games and simply winning the 100 would put an athlete in with a shout - but given all that Bolt has achieved (3 gold medals and 3 world records) he easily outdistances anyone else. No offense to Phelps, but at the end of the day, swimming is a distant second to track at the Games and top swimmers inevitably win multiple medals (I think Kirsty Coventry from Zimbabwe won 4 herself). So Bolt number 1 and Phelps number 2. A lot of candidates for third spot:

I thought Natalie du Toit was amazing. Chris Hoy was fantastic. The kayaker from Togo. The tae kwon do guy from Afghanistan. Eric Lamaze. Bekele doing the double at 5,000 and 10,000.

Agree with most of that - but you namecheck Bekele and not Dibaba? Surely their achievements are at least equal?

To me, I think Phelps beats out Bolt by a very close margin. Yes, I agree, Bolt's performance at these games was superhuman and amazing. I will wonder just how fast he could have run the 100m had he sprinted 100% of the race, instead of coasting the last 10%. However, Bolt's event is just running, putting one foot in front of the other as fast as possible. Phelps won 8 golds in swimming, sure, but they were in freestyle, butterfly, IM, relays, etc. The all-around excellence in different swimming techniques is what gives him the edge in my view.

Of course, I do hope that they both compete and succeed in 2012.

Quote:

Originally Posted by yellowmac (Post 2512005)

I see what you are saying but given how people like Spitz and Thorpe have done similar things, so what Phelps has done - while remarkable - isn't really surprising. Had he not achieved 8 medals, it actually might have been more of a shock.

Also, many, many WR were broken in the pool due to the technology of both the pool and the suits, and many racers got close to Phelps.

What Bolt has done is utterly unprecedented. Only Jesse Owens has similar achievements to his name (prior to the Berlin Olympics he set 3 or 4 world records in one day) but to be fair, track was not as competitive then as it is today. No one got close to Bolt - he utterly destroyed the fields, and in the 100, without seemingly trying very hard. The scale of this achievement is fantastic. 3 WR in the same games is off the charts in the modern era and worldwide, more people care about this than Phelps.

I would venture to say that had Bolt been American we would not be having this conversation, such would the media saturation by NBC, etc be.

And Strange, yeah fair point about Dibaba - I watched Bekele's races a lot more closely and was so amazed at how fast he finished. As a recreational/age group runner I silently compare my times at various distances to his and realize jus how much faster he is than me, it blows my mind! I can relate to Bolt - I've run low 11s in high school so I can at least understand 9.69, but moving into middle distance running these guys are so much faster than me it's like they're from another planet. I'm running 25 minutes for the 5KM and these guys are pounding it out in 13 minutes!

Quote:

Originally Posted by highthief (Post 2511983)

Agreed. All of the above. Maybe add the Mongolian guy who won their first medal. And that Muslim chick who participated at risk to herself cause the men don't believe women should be in sports. She's either a runner or a swimmer and she is covered from head to toe. Poor thing.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jorgelito (Post 2512050)

And that Muslim chick who participated at risk to herself cause the men don't believe women should be in sports. She's either a runner or a swimmer and she is covered from head to toe. Poor thing.

Yeah, I think she was from Bahrain and actually made the final in either the 200 or 400, can't recall which. Good for her.

Quote:

Originally Posted by highthief (Post 2512027)

On your last point there, I'll admit that media saturation of Phelps likely has given me an implicit bias. The only thing that would be different had Bolt been American is that this debate between Bolt and Phelps would be occurring in the mainstream media as well.

On the technology point, I've actually been wondering about this myself. Yes, a lot of people wore those Speedo LZR magic suits that helped break records... how much technological innovation has taken place on the track? Clearly there hasn't been a wardrobe change, so what else has taken place? Better shoes? Better track? I heard one of the commentators say something about Beijing having a "fast track"... what does that mean? Bouncier rubber in the tracks or something? I guess what I'm wondering is how much of the evolution in the world record time is from technology, and how much is it from sheer human physiological evolution?

Also, I counter your Spitz and Thorpe argument with the fact that Carl Lewis in '84 did similar things, winning the 100, 200, 4x100, and the long jump, to boot.

Interesting debate. I do hope that Phelps and Bolt have restored the luster of the Olympics globally. They've done the job for me personally, as I found '08 to be much more captivating than '04 or '00.

Where's Kobe Bryant? No foreign athlete got a bigger reception than Kobe. Wouldn't that qualify as "biggest star"?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Halx (Post 2512238)

Where's Kobe Bryant? No foreign athlete got a bigger reception than Kobe. Wouldn't that qualify as "biggest star"?

lets not kid ourselves.. egos go against the spirit of the olympics.

So let's leave Usain Bolt out of the conversation.

I thought the class and poise shown by Tom Daley showed great things to come.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Halx (Post 2512277)

So let's leave Usain Bolt out of the conversation.

If you're going by egos, I agree with Hal. Rogge criticized Bolt for his showmanship, and you can't possibly think that the Kobe we saw in China was his typical past self in the NBA. Did you see the reaction that the fans gave him when he was trying to get to his seat during one of the women's games? He was mobbed by everyone trying to touch their demi-god.

Quote:

Originally Posted by yellowmac (Post 2512231)

On the technology point, I've actually been wondering about this myself. Yes, a lot of people wore those Speedo LZR magic suits that helped break records... how much technological innovation has taken place on the track? Clearly there hasn't been a wardrobe change, so what else has taken place? Better shoes? Better track? I heard one of the commentators say something about Beijing having a "fast track"... what does that mean? Bouncier rubber in the tracks or something? I guess what I'm wondering is how much of the evolution in the world record time is from technology, and how much is it from sheer human physiological evolution?

Also, I counter your Spitz and Thorpe argument with the fact that Carl Lewis in '84 did similar things, winning the 100, 200, 4x100, and the long jump, to boot.

Interesting debate. I do hope that Phelps and Bolt have restored the luster of the Olympics globally. They've done the job for me personally, as I found '08 to be much more captivating than '04 or '00.

I think the difference re the track versus the pool technology is easy to assess. Vast numbers of swim records were rewritten these games. Even guys finishing 2nd or 3rd were breaking the old world records.

On the track, 3 world records were set - all by Usain Bolt and no one got close to him. So while the track may be fast, unlike in the pool, the technology involved does not appear to have influenced record setting greatly overall.

And yes, Lewis did win 4 golds in 84 - a massive achievement - but he did not set 3 world records while doing so, so I do think Bolt's achievement is on a slightly higher level!

I agree with your last point, there were a lot of great points of interest in the Games even beyond Phelps and Bolt.

If you take the angle of who is the biggest name outside of the specific achievments in this games (ie - Kobe Bryant) - I would say that Roger Federer is a bigger star than him.

I say Phelps by quite a bit. He did something that collectively is going to be insanely hard to beat. Spitz's 7 golds stood for decades. Now someone has to take 9 to top Phelps. He also beat the lifetime golds won and is now only a couple medals away from having the most total medals won in a career.

So what if records were being broken right and left. That is irrelevant. Winning the race is what matters. Records are secondary. Phelps won 8 of them with a few in such a dramatic fashion that will never be forgotten.

There are always amazing performances in every olympic game competition and this one was no different. Obviously Phelps' accomplisments will go down in the record books along with some others. I believe that the real stars of the olympics are always the people of the hosting country. It's nice to see the pride and generosity shown by the folks of each hosting city (for the most part minus the stabbing this year, et. al. for previous years). I think the human story of anything is always a really nice tact.

I personally feel Eric the Eel was the biggest star. The courage and resilience it took for him to do that was incredible, and awesome.

Sure, many stars were at the games, as always. Their stories are also important, but Eric is someone who can inspire us all as human beings. I'll never run the fastest, jump the highest, or throw the farthest. But I can go out and try my damnedest, just like he did. And sometimes, just like he did, I'll succeed.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Anxst (Post 2514772)

I don't think he was part of these Olympics, was he? I barely remember him from Sydney - but I didn't find Sydney that memorable to begin with.

Yeah I thought we were talking about these Olympics.

But here, for your consideration:

Somalia's runners provide inspiration - Olympics - Yahoo! Sports

Quote:

Somalia’s runners provide inspiration

By Charles Robinson, Yahoo! Sports

BEIJING – Samia Yusuf Omar headed back to Somalia Sunday, returning to the small two-room house in Mogadishu shared by seven family members. Her mother lives there, selling fruits and vegetables. Her father is buried there, the victim of a wayward artillery shell that hit their home and also killed Samia’s aunt and uncle.

This is the Olympic story we never heard.

It’s about a girl whose Beijing moment lasted a mere 32 seconds – the slowest 200-meter dash time out of the 46 women who competed in the event. Thirty-two seconds that almost nobody saw but that she carries home with her, swelled with joy and wonderment. Back to a decades-long civil war that has flattened much of her city. Back to an Olympic program with few Olympians and no facilities. Back to meals of flat bread, wheat porridge and tap water.

“I have my pride,” she said through a translator before leaving China. “This is the highest thing any athlete can hope for. It has been a very happy experience for me. I am proud to bring the Somali flag to fly with all of these countries, and to stand with the best athletes in the world.”

There are many life stories that collide in each Olympics – many intriguing tales of glory and tragedy. Beijing delivered the electricity of Usain Bolt and the determination of Michael Phelps. It left hearts heavy with the disappointment of Liu Xiang and the heartache of Hugh McCutcheon.
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But it also gave us Samia Yusuf Omar – one small girl from one chaotic country – and a story that might have gone unnoticed if it hadn’t been for a roaring half-empty stadium.

***

It was Aug. 19, and the tiny girl had crossed over seven lanes to find her starting block in her 200-meter heat. She walked past Jamaica’s Veronica Campbell-Brown – the eventual gold medalist in the event. Samia had read about Campbell-Brown in track and field magazines and once watched her in wonderment on television. As a cameraman panned down the starting blocks, it settled on lane No. 2, on a 17-year old girl with the frame of a Kenyan distance runner. Samia’s biography in the Olympic media system contained almost no information, other than her 5-foot-4, 119-pound frame. There was no mention of her personal best times and nothing on previous track meets. Somalia, it was later explained, has a hard time organizing the records of its athletes.

She looked so odd and out of place among her competitors, with her white headband and a baggy, untucked T-shirt. The legs on her wiry frame were thin and spindly, and her arms poked out of her sleeves like the twigs of a sapling. She tugged at the bottom of her shirt and shot an occasional nervous glance at the other runners in her heat. Each had muscles bulging from beneath their skin-tight track suits. Many outweighed Samia by nearly 40 pounds.

After introductions, she knelt into her starting block.

***

The country of Somalia sent two athletes to the Beijing Games – Samia and distance runner Abdi Said Ibrahim, who competed in the men’s 5,000-meter event. Like Samia, Abdi finished last in his event, overmatched by competitors who were groomed for their Olympic moment. Somalia has only loose-knit programs supporting its Olympians, few coaches, and few facilities. With a civil war tearing the city apart since the Somali government’s collapse in 1991, Mogadishu Stadium has become one of the bloodiest pieces of real estate in the city – housing U.N. forces in the early 1990s and now a military compound for insurgents.

That has left the country’s track athletes to train in Coni Stadium, an artillery-pocked structure built in 1958 which has no track, endless divots, and has been overtaken by weeds and plants.

“Sports are not a priority for Somalia,” said Duran Farah, vice president of the Somali Olympic Committee. “There is no money for facilities or training. The war, the security, the difficulties with food and everything – there are just many other internal difficulties to deal with.”

That leaves athletes such as Samia and 18-year old Abdi without the normal comforts and structure enjoyed by almost every other athlete in the Olympic Games. They don’t receive consistent coaching, don’t compete in meets on a regular basis and struggle to find safety in something as simple as going out for a daily run.

When Samia cannot make it to the stadium, she runs in the streets, where she runs into roadblocks of burning tires and refuse set out by insurgents. She is often bullied and threatened by militia or locals who believe that Muslim women should not take part in sports. In hopes of lessening the abuse, she runs in the oppressive heat wearing long sleeves, sweat pants and a head scarf. Even then, she is told her place should be in the home – not participating in sports.

“For some men, nothing is good enough,” Farah said.

Even Abdi faces constant difficulties, passing through military checkpoints where he is shaken down for money. And when he has competed in sanctioned track events, gun-toting insurgents have threatened his life for what they viewed as compliance with the interim government.

“Once, the insurgents were very unhappy,” he said. “When we went back home, my friends and I were rounded up and we were told if we did it again, we would get killed. Some of my friends stopped being in sports. I had many phone calls threatening me, that if I didn’t stop running, I would get killed. Lately, I do not have these problems. I think probably they realized we just wanted to be athletes and were not involved with the government.”

But the interim government has not been able to offer support, instead spending its cash and energy arming Ethiopian allies for the fight against insurgents. Other than organizing a meet to compete for Olympic selection – in which the Somali Olympic federation chose whom it believed to be its two best performers – there has been little lavished on athletes. While other countries pour millions into the training and perfecting of their Olympic stars, Somalia offers little guidance and no doctors, not even a stipend for food.

“The food is not something that is measured and given to us every day,” Samia said. “We eat whatever we can get.”

On the best days, that means getting protein from a small portion of fish, camel or goat meat, and carbohydrates from bananas or citrus fruits growing in local trees. On the worst days – and there are long stretches of those – it means surviving on water and Angera, a flat bread made from a mixture of wheat and barley.

“There is no grocery store,” Abdi said. “We can’t go shopping for whatever we want.”

He laughs at this thought, with a smile that is missing a front tooth.

***

When the gun went off in Samia’s 200-meter heat, seven women blasted from their starting blocks, registering as little as 16 one-hundredths of a second of reaction time. Samia’s start was slow enough that the computer didn’t read it, leaving her reaction time blank on the heat’s statistical printout.

Within seconds, seven competitors were thundering around the curve in Beijing’s Bird’s Nest, struggling to separate themselves from one another. Samia was just entering the curve when her opponents were nearing the finish line. A local television feed had lost her entirely by the time Veronica Campbell-Brown crossed the finish line in a trotting 23.04 seconds.

As the athletes came to a halt and knelt, stretching and sucking deep breaths, a camera moved to ground level. In the background of the picture, a white dot wearing a headband could be seen coming down the stretch.

***

Until this month, Samia had been to two countries outside of her own – Djibouti and Ethiopia. Asked how she will describe Beijing, her eyes get big and she snickers from under a blue and white Olympic baseball cap.

“The stadiums, I never thought something like this existed in the world,” she said. “The buildings in the city, it was all very surprising. It will probably take days to finish all the stories we have to tell.”

Asked about Beijing’s otherworldly Water Cube, she lets out a sigh: “Ahhhhhhh.”

Before she can answer, Abdi cuts her off.

“I didn’t know what it was when I saw it,” he said. “Is it plastic? Is it magic?”

Few buildings are beyond two or three stories tall in Mogadishu, and those still standing are mostly in tatters. Only pictures will be able to describe some of Beijing’s structures, from the ancient architecture of the Forbidden City to the modernity of the Water Cube and the Bird’s Nest.

“The Olympic fire in the stadium, everywhere I am, it is always up there,” Samia said. “It’s like the moon. I look up wherever I go, it is there.”

These are the stories they will relish when they return to Somalia, which they believe has, for one brief moment, united the country’s warring tribes. Farah said he had received calls from countrymen all over the world, asking how their two athletes were doing and what they had experienced in China. On the morning of Samia’s race, it was just after 5 a.m., and locals from her neighborhood were scrambling to find a television with a broadcast.

“People stayed awake to see it,” Farah said. “The good thing, sports is the one thing which unites all of Somalia.”

That is one of the common threads they share with every athlete at the Games. Just being an Olympian and carrying the country’s flag brings an immense sense of pride to families and neighborhoods which typically know only despair.

A pride that Samia will share with her mother, three brothers and three sisters. A pride that Abdi will carry home to his father, two brothers and two sisters. Like Samia’s father two years ago, Abdi’s mother was killed in the civil war, by a mortar shell that hit the family’s home in 1993.

“We are very proud,” Samia said. “Because of us, the Somali flag is raised among all the other nations’ flags. You can’t imagine how proud we were when we were marching in the Opening Ceremonies with the flag.

“Despite the difficulties and everything we’ve had with our country, we feel great pride in our accomplishment.”

***

As Samia came down the stretch in her 200-meter heat, she realized that the Somalian Olympic federation had chosen to place her in the wrong event. The 200 wasn’t nearly the best event for a middle distance runner. But the federation believed the dash would serve as a “good experience” for her. Now she was coming down the stretch alone, pumping her arms and tilting her head to the side with a look of despair.

Suddenly, the half-empty stadium realized there was still a runner on the track, still pushing to get across the finish line almost eight seconds behind the seven women who had already completed the race. In the last 50 meters, much of the stadium rose to its feet, flooding the track below with cheers of encouragement. A few competitors who had left Samia behind turned and watched it unfold.

As Samia crossed the line in 32.16 seconds, the crowd roared in applause. Bahamian runner Sheniqua Ferguson, the next smallest woman on the track at 5-foot-7 and 130 pounds, looked at the girl crossing the finish and thought to herself, “Wow, she’s tiny.”

“She must love running,” Ferguson said later.

***

Several days later, Samia waved off her Olympic moment as being inspirational. While she was still filled with joy over her chance to compete, and though she knew she had done all she could, part of her seemed embarrassed that the crowd had risen to its feet to help push her across the finish line.

“I was happy the people were cheering and encouraging me,” she said. “But I would have liked to be cheered because I won, not because I needed encouragement. It is something I will work on. I will try my best not to be the last person next time. It was very nice for people to give me that encouragement, but I would prefer the winning cheer.

She shrugged and smiled.

“I knew it was an uphill task.”

And there it was. While the Olympics are often promoted for the fastest and strongest and most agile champions, there is something to be said for the ones who finish out of the limelight. The ones who finish last and leave with their pride.

At their best, the Olympics still signify competition and purity, a love for sport. What represents that better than two athletes who carry their country’s flag into the Games despite their country’s inability to carry them before that moment? What better way to find the best of the Olympic spirit than by looking at those who endure so much that would break it?

“We know that we are different from the other athletes,” Samia said. “But we don’t want to show it. We try our best to look like all the rest. We understand we are not anywhere near the level of the other competitors here. We understand that very, very well. But more than anything else, we would like to show the dignity of ourselves and our country.”

She smiles when she says this, sitting a stone’s throw from a Somalian flag that she and her countryman Abdi brought to these Games. They came and went from Beijing largely unnoticed, but may have been the most dignified example these Olympics could offer.

I really like this story and wish it had been more widely reported on. Did NBC even mention it? Anyways, she has my vote.

That's a good story, for sure.

Quote:

Originally Posted by yellowmac (Post 2512005)

I will wonder just how fast he could have run the 100m had he sprinted 100% of the race, instead of coasting the last 10%.

Well, I guess I have my answer... as low as 9.55 (!) seconds.

ESPN - Physicist subtracts showboating, says Bolt could have run 9.55 in Beijing 100 - Trackandfield

Quote:

OSLO, Norway -- A physicist has done the math, and says Usain Bolt could have run the 100-meter Olympic final in 9.55 seconds if he had not slowed down to showboat.

What if Usain Bolt didn't hotdog it at the finish of the 100-meter final? The research says 9.55 seconds.

"We estimate that he could have finished the race in a time between 9.55 and 9.61," Norwegian physicist Hans Eriksen said Friday in a telephone interview.

Bolt won the final at the Beijing Olympics last month in 9.69 seconds, shaving 0.03 seconds off the record he set in May.

Eriksen, a physicist at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Oslo, said he got the idea to examine just how quick Bolt could have gone after hearing Bolt's coach say the Jamaican could have run 9.52 seconds.

"We saw the final on television and then spent the whole weekend researching," Eriksen said. "It was fun. We've done more serious research work, but this one got far more attention."

Eriksen and his colleagues analyzed TV footage of the race, focusing on Bolt's position, speed and acceleration, as well as that of runner-up Richard Thompson.

Both sprinters slowed before the finish line, but Bolt's chest-beating celebration some 20 meters before the line cut his speed more.

"We don't mean to say that this is the final and ultimate result," Eriksen was quoted as saying in New Scientist magazine. "Instead, it's a fun application and simple physics."

Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press