Russia and Greece Try and Fail to stop US athletes; Saints Cyril and Methodius Puke
Mood:  celebratory
Now Playing: the National Anthem of the United States of America
Topic: Take THAT, you...
Despite two separate attempts on the part of Greek and Russian rooting sections to bring unending shame upon the Olympics, American athletes prevailed (fancy talk for "they kicked some serious ass.")

You'd think the Russians would have taken the hint from Fate, seeing how the Cold War turned out, huh?

"Americans sweep 200m amid jeers" by Jeremy Laurence, ATHENS (Reuters) contains the nauseating details, but in short:

"Shawn Crawford led an American sweep of Olympic medals in the 200 metres in Athens, ignoring the jeers of a hostile crowd livid that their local hero was not on the starting line after missing a doping test.

The packed 75,000 crowd at the Olympic Stadium began chanting "Kenteris, Kenteris!" and "Hellas, Hellas!", holding up the start of the race by about five minutes.

Costas Kenteris, Greece's 2000 Olympic champion in the event, withdrew from the Games after missing a drugs test in mysterious circumstances the day before the opening ceremony."

Showing that logic is no longer the Greek national long suit, the Greeks booed three young men who hadn't done a damn thing wrong except be American and NOT disqualify themselves from competing by failing to show for their doping tests, the way the local favorite Kenteris did repeatedly.

Result: we won, they lost. Get used to it, Hellas.

Before that, the Russians (and doubtless some Greeks who stumbled in from the 24/7 Hate America First Ouzo Fest) tried the same stunt at the men's horizontal bar final; thirteen thousand frenzied jerks raised such a fuss over their boy Alexei Nemov of the Russian team that the event's chief official, Adrian Stoica, "emphatically urged" Canadian judge Chris Grabowecky to increase his score of Nemov's performance - and Grabowecky caved in to the request.

After this, the crowd decided to boo and shout while Paul Hamm competed for the men's high bar event - and to Alexei Nemov's eternal credit, he came over at Hamm's request to try to calm the crowd down; the crowd wasn't having any of that "sportsmanship" crap, and the shaken Hamm went home with a Silver.

Fortunately, he still had his Gold in the Men's All-Around Gymnastics, and he and his twin brother Marvin also went home with Silvers from the team all-around.

Now I suppose the "Blame America First" crowd's crack Excuses For People and Countries Who Screw Us Over Laboratory is working overtime to explain how this fits in with the great Olympic Tradition.

Already, we have an early Quisling System report from the Tacoma, WA News-Tribune's Scott McGrath "Poor Paul Hamm - he had a shot at immortality"on how Paul Hamm "blew it" for not handing his Gold over to the South Korean Yang Tae-young who may or may not have deserved it after a scoring table mistake - one which the South Korean's coaches failed to appeal in time to change the award decision.

Experts looking at the video tape have seen both unawarded points and previously unremarked errors in Yang's performance. Unfortunately, this helps neither Paul Hamm nor Yang Tae-young; Hamm has since been asked to decide whether or not he deserves one of his life-long goals - a decision NOT in his job description as Olympic athlete, while Yang will always wonder whether his performance in 2004 would have gotten him a Gold if his coaches and the judges had been paying attention.

Bruno Grande of the FIG gymnastics regulatory body (any European can tell you why that particular acronym is so appropriate this year - their version of "unintentional truth") basically wimped out of any organizational claim to integrity by saying - in spoken words, and everything - that they weren't going to decide to award the Gold to the South Korean even though their assessment of the situation showed he'd earned the medal - then for the hard part, pantomimed - I wish I were kidding, but the man pantomimed an official communication - the act of removing the medal from around his neck and said that this is what Hamm should have done.

So the Blame America Firsters are saying it's Paul Hamm's fault that no one, not one person responsible for deciding who earned the Gold Medal in the Men's All Around Gymnastics Event this year had the necessary integrity to do anything but draw a fat paycheck.
___

It's a real "Oops" for the Blame America Firsters that the Greeks, who have been being built up as noble successors to the Athenians of old and the other Hellenic idealists who gave us the Olympics by the world and US press, turned out to be among the least well-behaved national delegations at the Olympics.

And the call that Russia was finally going to be ready to play in the big leagues, sportsmanship-wise, well, that was probably wrong, too. The Russian fans definitely did not deserve their country's athletes - who, by contrast, are uniformly a class act both in performance and sportsmanship.

This isn't a chauvinistic slap at the Greeks and Russians as Greeks and Russians.

The Greeks are supposed to have given us democracy, although I think the Swiss/Helvetii's Neanderthal forebears may have given it to us much earlier, based on the anthropological and historical evidence. Then again, my wife and kids say that even stronger evidence - including a striking visual similarity to that poor fellow they dug out of the Tyrolean Alps in the early 1990s - indicates that I, myself, am a Neanderthal, and I have never been a Democrat.

There are a whole lot of other things the Greeks gave us, such as ill-conceived, generations-long wars of conquest (I'm thinking Athens-Syracuse and Sparta-Everyone Else In The Neighborhood) that I'm not going to talk about.

And doubtless the bleachers got a little raucous when (say) Delos gave Athens a good shellacking in the discus, but the number of writers who have described the original Olympics as being a more-or-less sportsmanlike business over a span of centuries leaves little room for doubt that what we've seen in this Olympics is an aberration.

Now, the Russians don't have the direct historical connection to the Olympic tradition that the Greeks do, but they owe their very alphabet and the precursor to their language to a couple of Orthodox monks named Cyril and Methodius. Methodius was apparently standing behind the door when the alphabet for half of Eastern Europe's modern languages was named, as we now call it the "Cyrillic" alphabet. But they were both canonized as saints, so I suppose the important bases were touched.

We don't know how Saints Cyril and Methodius felt about what would, to them, have been the ancient Greek Olympics. Perhaps they, using the wonderfully contracting lens of hindsight, lumped it in with the Paganism and other horrible things the ancient Greeks did before Christ, His Disciples, and Roman Imperial converts - on each side of the Empire - became available to explain matters to the rest of central Europe.

But in Heaven, I'm sure that they are doing the saintly equivalent of puking when they consider what their compatriots and/or cultural beneficiaries are doing in Athens, at the Olympic Center right now.

If the dearly departed were eligible to represent their countries in the Olympics this year, Greece would at least have taken Gold and Silver in the 1000-meter Horizontal Hurl.

Can we please get Jimmy Carter to p-off the Russians again so they boycott the next Olympics? Maybe foment another Amur River border crisis in 2008? I know old James Earl's got yet another foreign policy fiasco in him before he dies... the way he helped us get taken to the cleaners by the North Koreans in the 1990s was prime, disastrous Carter magic.