That's Greek to Me

The swimming competitions at the Olympics have been intense. Real nail-biters. Tuesday night's men's freestyle relay final had me on the edge of my seat as the American team just beat out the Aussies by a microscopic 13/100th of a second. It was a little nerve-racking to see the time gap created by Michael Phelps' dominating start vanish with the next two swimmers and to watch as Klete Keller had to battle Ian Thorpe stroke for stroke down the last 50m. That had to have been the closest finish ever. It was also great seeing the American women's team repeat the same feat for gold last night (and for a world record to boot). Natalie Coughlin, the Berkeley phenom, cut through the water like it was air. The men's individual all-around gymnastics competition was even more entertaining. Midway through, the Chinese gold-medal favorite choked when he missed a hold on the horizontal bars and had to completely stop and restart his routine. The anguish on his otherwise stoic face was apparent. The overall favorite to win gold, American Paul Hamm, had choked as well, having fallen over the mat into the scorer's table after he landed off-balance after his vault. The spectators were in collective shock (as were the NBC commentators who were fumbling for words to express the magnitude of their disbelief). This opened the way for the two upstart Koreans who were solid the entire night and were the only ones not to have committed any serious gaffs. By the last rotation, they were almost assured the gold and silver medals. But Hamm had the very last routine in the finals, on the horizontal bars. He stood in fourth place and by his own account, was resigned to battling for bronze. To earn gold, he would have had to score well above 9.80, an unlikely feat given the miserly scoring by the judges that night (there had been only two prior scores above 9.80). Hamm went for the jugular and put on an amazing display. His three consecutive "release and grabs" and his nailing the high arch dismount earned him the gold by the slimmest point margin in history, 12/1,000th of a point. It was quite a show.