Curling the Olympic event

I suppose I can understand why curling is an Olympic event this year since the events are in Vancouver. However, how did curling get into the Olympics in the first place. I cannot believe they took softball out of the Olympics in 2012 but curling is considered an event.

To me, it seems like a bar game on ice. Most people know this game as shuffleboard. These games will be played for 12 days during the Olympics. Thats 12 out of the 14 total days which the Olympics happen. How much athletic fitness do you really have to be in to participate in this event. I hear that one of the competitors is 5 months pregnant. I can't imagine any other event where someone could be 5 months pregnant and competing.

For those that do not know about curling, I've posted a video for your education. Notice how the lady says its similar to darts. We might as well add that into the Olympics.

Safety for sports

I may not know much about the sport of luging but when I saw the course with its metal pylons, I thought to myself, did anyone not think of putting padding on them before the death of Nodar Kumaritashvili. Only after someone died did they decide to put some padding on them. For a sport that is as dangerous as it looks, with lugers speeding at over 80 mph on a piece of metal, one may have figured to perform some safety checks and reduce any risks of injuries.

Its unfortunate that simple things like padding is not put on walls where people may crash into. This occurred when Aaron Rowand of the Philadelphia Phillies dove into the wall to catch a flyball and broke his nose. The wall was pure metal. Luckily, padding was put on afterwards. I am guessing that the designers felt that the padding took away from the aesthetics of the overall look of the baseball field.

Saints are going to Disney World

Congratulations to the Saints in winning the Super Bowl. The team that has never won a Super Bowl just added one to its history. It is a storybook ending considering that New Orleans has not had much to cheer about since Hurricane Katrina. The victory gives the people some excitement and pride for their own city.

Even in misery and sadness, sports is an important way of keeping spirits up. Professional baseball lifted spirits after 9-11 as well helping us temporarily forget reality. It gave people a sense of normalcy.

Tattoos that big of a deal?

I was going through some photos of Li Na since she did not seem so muscular looking during the Beijing Olympics. I came across this photo where someone had to show that Li Na had a tattoo. Now this is probably the most unflattering photo that they could find with her returning a ball. Couldn't they find another photo to illustrate that she had a tattoo instead of using this one? Yeah, WTF.

State system for sports

I've been watching the Australian Open and for first time since Michael Chang, Asians being very competitive in the sport. Li Na and Zhang Jie from China are both in the semi-finals. These athletes are all products of China's state-sponsored sport system. I have heard from people that China is cheating by basically producing these stars.

The government began to emphasize sport as a form of nationalism; a way for citizens to bring global honor to their country. Thus, it created state-sponsored athletic facilities in which both males and females trained from an early age to become competitive athletes.

After Beijing won the right to host the 2008 Olympics, the country's State General Administration of Sports unveiled a Cabinet-approved policy called "Winning pride at the Olympics." The program built on China's long-standing "Gold-medal strategy" of targeting sports that offer the most Olympic golds because of different weight classes or race lengths such as weight lifting, fencing and canoeing. It didn't matter that most Chinese knew nothing of these sports. The point was to accumulate gold medals. China targeted  women's sports since facilities and resources are usually given to men in other countries. As a result, women's sports, which tend to receive less funding in the West, received a cash infusion. Around the same time, the nation's athletics czars started the "119 project," which aimed for success in the few remaining disciplines in which the country was still weak.

This philosophy of equal access for male and female athletes throughout modern Chinese sport history contrasts with the struggle of American female athletes to receive the same treatment and recognition as their male counterparts. Historically, sport in the U.S. has been seen as an inherently masculine pursuit and consequently women have not been able to participate in sport the same way as men. For example, though women have participated in each Olympiad since 1900, it took decades for American women to be permitted to compete in Olympic sports other than those deemed “socially acceptable” such as archery and tennis. These sports are slowly becoming more acceptable for American women to compete in and unlike China, American women do have the choice of free will to select a sport they enjoy.

It is obvious that China and the United States have vastly different sports systems in place. The Chinese government controls the access to and training of elite athletes throughout the country. The United States, on the other hand, allows athletes to self-select their sport of choice and to fund their own participation. While each country obviously operates a very different sport system, the question that arises for many is whether or not one system is better than the other. Many sensibilities would say that the United States system of free choice is the better of the two. However, the other side could be argued as well. China continues to produce highly competitive athletes and many of these athletes come from impoverished families in distant villages who would probably have lived a struggling life. Instead they have the opportunity to become famous stars and reap the financial benefits of it. Consequently, without knowing where these athletes come from and the conditions they lived in, it is difficult to criticize the Chinese system. I am sure some of the impoverished families in the United States would be grateful that their children be given the same opportunities.

Genetically Engineered People?

 Until recently, China had the tallest man, Bao Xishun at 7 ft 9, and the shortest man, He Pingping at 2 ft 5 who was made famous taking a picture with the woman with the longest legs, in the world. The tallest man is now Sultan Kosen standing at 8 ft 1. I sometimes wonder if China does some kind of experiments to create things like that the tallest and shortest.

Look at Yao Ming. There is already a conspiracy theory that Yao Ming was an experiment led by the Chinese government in an attempt to dominate in all the Olympic events. The boy's parents, after all, were retired basketball stars whose marriage the year before Yao was born had made them the tallest couple in China. So imposing was their size that ever since childhood, the two had been known simply as Da Yao and Da Fang—Big Yao and Big Fang. Still, the medical staff surely had never seen a newborn quite like this: the enormous legs, the broad, squarish cranium, the hands and feet so fully formed that they seemed to belong to a three-year-old. At more than 5 kg, he was nearly double the size of the average Chinese newborn. The name his parents gave him, from a Chinese character that unifies the sun and the moon, was Ming, meaning bright.

Rumor has it that this conspiracy started over two generations ago, when Chairman Mao Zedong exhorted his followers to funnel the nation's most genetically gifted youngsters into the emerging communist sports machine. Two generations of Yao Ming's forebears had been singled out by the government for their hulking physiques, and his mother and father had both been drafted into the sports system.Wang Chongguang, a retired Shanghai coach was quoted as saying, "We had been looking forward to the arrival of Yao Ming for three generations."

It would not surprise me if the tallest man on earth would again be someone from China.