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Sally Pearson and Anna Meares.... Wait... That's not right

So this blog is in some ways a sequel to my previous blog about losing. Finally we have tasted some success with three gold medals in only two days. I’ll certainly say this for losing... it makes winning taste that much better when it finally arrives. This is where I should make some sort of Rabbitohs comment, but I’m too superstitious to predict anything so I’ll shut up about that right now.

First Tom Slingsby did what he was originally expected to do in Beijing, by dominating the Laser class sailing regatta and winning gold comfortably. He was dominant throughout the series and he helped ease the collective pressure and anxiety the entire nation was feeling, even if 99% of the country hadn’t heard his name until about an hour before he officially won the event, or even the next day.

In fact, Australia is not done in the sailing as we have teams who are in front/favoured to win three other categories. The Men’s 49er class literally just need to show up and start their final race to claim gold, the Men’s 470 class are in front, but those dastardly Brits are not too far behind so they will have to earn it by sticking with the Brits in the final race, much like Slingsby did with his Cypriot challenger to win his. We also went undefeated during the round robin stage of the Women’s 6m Elliott class, although that event works differently to the others, so they are now in a quarter final battle against the Dutch and you never know what could happen there.

Meanwhile, whilst the sailing is great, the real story is the success of our very own Golden Girls. Sally Pearson and Anna Meares have been high profile athletes for years and carried not only the burden of expectation they knew they would have, but also the increased pressure of needing to make up for the nation’s poor showing to date.

If Anna had lost to her arch-rival Victoria Pendleton again, everyone would be disappointed by understand as Pendleton has been the best in that field for so long, but to finally get one up over her great rival with the entire country needing her to do it, took super human balls to go along with her super human thighs.

Sally on the other hand, I can’t even begin to imagine the pressure on her going into her final. Many people had simply assumed she’d win gold and that would be that. But Sally was facing several worthy opponents, as well as the fact that hurdles is one of those sports where it can all go wrong very quickly and out of nowhere. No hurdles race is ever guaranteed, as the tiniest clip of a hurdle and you are put off for the entire race and you don’t even need to fall over. But knowing the stakes, knowing how close she came four years earlier, knowing the pressure and expectation she carried, she went out there and ran an Olympic record to win by the barest of margins. If Anna Meares has super human balls, then Sally Pearson must possess Vince McMahon’s legendary grapefruits.

Now the two of them can fight over who gets to carry the flag at the closing ceremony.

So where to now for the Aussies?

Firstly I’d say the remaining Australian contenders should be able to relax just a little as whilst 4 gold medals isn’t great, we should add those sailing golds and the pressure to come through will subside, if only the slightest bit. Plus, I would imagine it would be very inspiring to the remaining athletes to see what Anna and Sally accomplished.

The best case scenario I can fathom now would be somehow getting to 10 gold medals. That would require winning the three sailing events, the men’s hockey and another couple of events such as the BMX events, the open water swimming, equestrian, maybe Steve Hooker finds form at the right time or perhaps the Opals find a way past the Americans in their semi final. More realistically I think we can get to eight, which is two-thirds of what I predicted before the Olympics and considering how dire things looked a few days ago, it isn’t the worst result.

Not getting to double digits would hurt, but we have certainly uncovered some stars of the future such as Jessica Fox and Vaucluse’s own Steve Solomon.

When you think about it, it would be quite amazing to get to eight when we will have won a total of two gold medals from the three sports that usually are our bread and butter in swimming, cycling and rowing. If those three sports alone get their act together going into Rio, we should be fine. Although that is a massive ‘if’.

But, if nothing else, it won’t be so hard to watch the rest of these Olympics after we finally got that sweet, sweet taste of victory.

News Flash: Losing isn’t fun

We're all watching... and taking photos on iPads

Ok so I know I’m not breaking any new ground by declaring that no one likes losing. But the thing is that how much losing sucks relates to the context of the loss itself. One example of this is Bill Simmons’ Levels of Losing, but that’s not specifically what I’m talking about here.

What I’m talking about is differences between losing at an event like the Olympics and losing, for example, a footy game.

When your team loses a footy game or whatever sport you hold dear, of course it sucks and you’d much prefer to win, but in context it’s usually not that hard to swallow. If you follow a team doing well and they drop a game or too, well it’s a long season and no one goes undefeated (usually). If you follow a team that sucks, well at least they are developing young players, implementing a new culture, whatever the guys running the club are telling you they are doing to keep you going while they suck. Plus if you don’t win the championship, there is always next year and the year after that and the year after that.

The Olympics is very different. First and foremost, it’s every four years. Yes there is the Winter Olympics too, but most countries seem to be more into one than the other. So it’s easy to explain why there is so much interest and excitement and pressure on each event when there isn’t a next year. It’s not just the athletes who have to wait that long for their next opportunity; it’s all the fans watching too.

See the thing with the Olympics is that for fans, unless you are Chinese, it’s 99.9% losing. In most events, even if your country has someone who qualified, they are just making up the numbers or maybe making the final and having a very respectable finish, but not really contending for gold. Sometimes I find it easiest and more fun to watch events Australia didn’t even qualify for, like most weightlifting weight divisions, so I can simply enjoy watching the competition and not really feel any tension or pressure about the result.

Now that 99.9% losing is expected due to the amount of events in the Olympics and for a country like Australia we don’t mind it as long as every once in a while we do get that sweet taste of victory. Eventually you become accustomed to a certain level of success, so no one expects Australia to compete with the Chinese or Americans on the medal tally, but certainly to finish top 10 and push for top 5. So when the Olympics turns out the way it has so far, things go ugly very quickly.

Without those semi-regular victories to enjoy between watching the guys and girls in green and gold come last or simply out of the running, it becomes difficult to continue to cheer on the entire Olympic team.

See the dirty secret about sport, even individual sports, is that fans don’t really care about the athlete themselves for the most part. Especially in sports you aren’t living and dying with each week like you would for your football team. What fans are supporting is what the athlete represents, be it the local team or the entire country. James Magnussen isn’t being supported by the nation because he is James Magnussen, he is being supported because he is the Australian representative in the 100m freestyle (and maybe in his case because he is good looking). When he showed over the past couple of years that he was the best in the World at that event, it built up the hopes of a nation that he would be one of those few and far between tastes of victory. That’s why some of the comments I have seen about James and other Aussie athletes who didn’t win don’t surprise me.

On the scoreboard there is no difference between Magnussen winning silver and someone like young Jessica Fox winning silver in the canoeing, but it’s all about the expectation built up over months or years prior. Fans don’t really have a right to expect anything, but it is human nature that they will. So we celebrate an unexpected silver medal in one sense and get disappointed by “winning” an unexpected silver in another.

For me personally, I would celebrate if the Australian Boomers won a bronze medal more than I would celebrate any gold medal we could win in everything else.

Is it fair on the athletes who prove they should be considered the favourite to win gold that we malign them if they don’t, whilst we celebrate others overachieving to the same result? Of course it isn’t. So I really hope James Magnussen and others don’t feel betrayed by their own country, but fans are selfish and it’s not something I see changing any time soon.

Now if only we could actually win something sometime soon, we’d all feel a little bit better.

Go Australia.

The Crashes

Searching for answers

So we are now a couple of days into the Olympics and both Australia and Great Britain (sorry... Team GB I’m supposed to say right?) have had some disappointing results. For the Brits, the Men’s Road Race didn’t go as planned when they put all their eggs in the Cavendish and no one was going to let that one happen. They would have been better served to at least send one team member, maybe Millar, into the breakaway and give themselves another option when the inevitable lack of help eventuated.

Without medalling, Stuart O’Grady had a wonderful ride and finished 6^th, a great effort for a great statesman for the sport and Australia. The Brits just fell short of gold in the Women’s Road Race but couldn’t get past the amazing Marianne Vos from The Netherlands.

Both Australia and Great Britain have been disappointed in the pool as well. For the Brits, Rebecca Adlington couldn’t grab gold in the 400m freestyle and for Australia, I think we all know what happened in the 4x100 freestyle relay.

I can’t pretend to know for sure why the team failed to meet expectations. Were expectations of gold that unreasonable when we had the favourite and one of the other contenders for gold in the individual 100m? Not to mention two other highly rated swimmers in the other two spots. Was it all mental after there was such an air of expectancy that they couldn’t handle the pressure?

I think we’ll only really know the answers to that when we see what the Missile and Roberts can do in the individual 100m. I just hope they come out for redemption as opposed to breaking under the spotlight.

Meanwhile the Australian teams for the most part have not gotten off to the best of starts. The Hockeyroos, the Boomers, Men’s Volleyball, Men’s Water Polo all lost. I’m probably forgetting someone else too. The Opals won as they were expected to and whilst I didn’t see the game, I’m told it was a shaky performance. I expect them to find form and go into the gold medal match as a legitimate 50/50 chance.

I must admit the relay upset has shaken my confidence in Australia reaching double digit gold medal, but I guess that can all be fixed if the boys make up for it in individual events. I hope by the end of the swimming we take at least 4 gold from the pool. Emily Seebohm can certainly help out with that target tonight/tomorrow morning.

Also, yeah it goes without saying, but how good are China? They have kicked these Games off on fire. Every time I change the channel, which is a lot, there is a Chinese kid not only winning, but dominating their event. Weightlifting, shooting, diving, swimming... they just keep coming. I guess it’s a reflection on where we are headed as a planet in general. I, for one, welcome our new Chinese overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted online personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.

I’m exhausted already. So many more nights to go.

Two Weeks of Sports Fan Bliss

The Beast and Bolt can dance too

If you’ve been living under a rock the London Olympics are about to get underway this weekend and as you may well have guessed, I couldn’t be more excited. The Summer Olympics and the FIFA World Cup have to be the two biggest sporting events in the world and if you aren’t a football fan then you don’t even care about that one. Even the people I know who simply aren’t into sport have at least some interest in the Olympics.

To name every single event or athlete I’m excited to see would take forever, but I decided to go through several of the things I’m most looking forward to, both from an Australian perspective and also just as a sports fan in general.

First and foremost, you can’t go past the men’s 100m race where the amazing Usain Bolt looks to defend his title from Beijing. For the last 4 years everyone assumed the winner of this race was a mere formality and we just wanted to see what time Bolt would run and how he would celebrate. Not anymore. This race is absolutely up for grabs now after Bolt recently lost his national trials to his training partner Yohan “The Beast” Blake. Blake is also the reigning World Champion, but Bolt was DQed for a false start there.

Americans Tyson Gay and recently back from drug suspension Justin Gatlin (that’s his new full name) will look to play spoiler as well. I still expect Bolt to go to another level and win it, but this race is much more interesting than you might realise.

As a basketball junkie I always get excited to see how the Boomers perform as well as simply watching the American team. There has been a lot of trash talk lately about who would win between the 1992 Dream Team and this year’s team (the answer is the Dream Team and you need to give yourself an uppercut if you even doubt this). The Americans just won a warm up match against their biggest challengers Spain and anything less than gold in convincing fashion would be a shock. Spain, Argentina and France are all good teams as well and will be the biggest challengers.

The Boomers team goes in without our best player in Andrew Bogut and I think our history of making the quarter finals and then bowing out will continue. Hopefully some of our boys can perform well enough to get some international recognition and maybe even open the eyes of some NBA scouts.

Both the track and road cycling will be fascinating as the British hosts look to dominate, as they already began to do in Beijing. Australians have legit medal contenders in most cycling events and I’d love to see us kick it off with gold in the men’s road race, which is the opening event of the Games (not counting the football which has already started).

Everyone knows Australia has great medal chances in the pool and Sally Pearson in the hurdles, but also make sure to watch Mitchell Watt in the men’s long jump. I don’t know how or why, but ever since Jumpin’ Jai Taurima in Sydney we have become serious contenders in the long jump. Apparently white men can jump.

The media and experts seems to be predicting disaster for Australia in the medal tally this year, but I optimistically think we can get into double digits for gold. If the Aussies who are supposed to win, do win, I think people will be pleasantly surprised. Between swimming, diving, cycling, athletics, hockey, sailing, rowing, shooting, equestrian, kayaking, canoeing, beach volleyball and women’s basketball (and I’m sure I’m missing a couple random wins we might pick up like in martial arts or something) Australia has a chance to push 15 gold. I’m going to say 12 and hope I’m short.

I’m sure I’ll write more specifically about some of these events and our medal hopes and results during the event but for now I just feel sorry for all of you with day jobs who can’t stay up all night to watch.