Word: goldings
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...still. Half a century or ago or so, we didn't believe a human could run a 4-min. mile - until Roger Bannister proved us wrong in 1954 when he ran it in 3 mins. 59.4 secs. At the 1936 Games in Berlin, sprinter Jesse Owens won the 100m gold with a blistering time of 10.3 secs - today, that's par for junior level speed athletes. We now have better equipment, better training and improved nutrition, along with faster tracks and, crucially, a lot more endorsement money to be made by running as fast as possible, and that's uncovered...
...appears that Bolt takes advantage of a little of both. At 6 ft. 5 in., he's nearly half a foot taller than many other gold-medal sprinters; compared to his Olympic competition, Bolt's step was 1 ft. longer, allowing him to cover 100m in 41 steps. The other athletes needed, on average, 47. That helps, considering Bolt isn't the best starter - he's relatively slower off the block, but he separates himself at the end of the race, when "he's still able to turn his legs over fast enough with high power," says Ed Coyle...
...Brits forget the dismal summer. They've stopped talking, too, about the housing crisis. Even the start of another soccer season has come and gone unnoticed. Instead, the plucky people of Britain, traditional home to fair play and the fourth-placed finish, have only one thing on their minds: Gold. Golds for cycling, golds for rowing, golds for sailing, and - quashing the myth that Brits can only win while sitting down - even golds for running. For Britain, beamed an editorial in The Independent on Wednesday, the Beijing games "have offered more than mere diversion from a dismal summer of grey...
...Britain is awash with precious metal. By the time Iain Percy and Andrew Simpson had grabbed the country's fourth sailing gold of the games on Aug. 21, British athletes - track star Christine Ohuruogu, the only member of the team to win standing up, among them - had bagged 39 medals, including 17 golds - Britain's best haul in a century. Only the far larger countries of China, with 46 gold medals, and the U.S., with 28, have done better in Beijing...
...Beijing may be down more to performance-enhancing drugs than our bulldog spirit. (If it'd raced as a separate nation, the cycle team would currently be ninth in the medal table.) And John Coates, head of the Australian Olympic Committee, was even gracious enough to applaud a British gold in the pool as "not bad for a country that has no swimming pools and very little soap...