Word: golds
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...thing the Chinese government wants is a doping scandal on home soil. About $20 billion is being spent on Olympics-related preparations. But even though seven years of Olympics priming has only heightened Chinese hopes for domination, sports officials in recent weeks have scaled back expectations of a record gold-medal harvest. In March, the deputy head of the Sports Ministry cautioned that China didn't expect to surpass the U.S. The modesty may have been tactical. For Athens, Chinese sports officials put their target at just 20 gold medals. In fact, China won 32. Nearly 60% of China...
...brightest of these stars is Liu Xiang, a 110-m hurdler whose world-record-breaking sprints disprove the notion that Chinese bodies are somehow inferior to foreign ones in high-piston sporting events. (After winning a gold in Athens, Liu said his "victory has proved that athletes with yellow skin can run as fast as those with black and white skin.") When I met Liu shortly before Athens, I was struck by his individualism; unlike many Chinese Olympians who didn't choose their sporting careers, Liu actually liked hurdling. Although he did mumble some variation of the patriotic theme...
...activities"--a catchall for anything from commercial shoots to the occasional night of karaoke--to get in the way of his training. The pressure to win is almost unimaginable: a recent Internet survey found that the Chinese public's No. 1 Olympics wish was for Liu, 24, to strike gold. Four years ago, Liu surprised me with his rebel streak. "The thing about rules is that they are made by people," he said, "and they can be broken by people too." But with so much riding on the Olympics, China's government will do all it can to ensure that...
They started with pipes and air conditioners. Then they came for Dan. "They literally cut him off at the knees," says Judy Moore, vice president of the neighborhood association in Los Angeles' historic Carthay Circle. Dan is a 7-ft. (2 m) bronze statue of a gold miner that stood in a Los Angeles park for 84 years, holding his sifting pan like a deep-dish pizza. Appraisers say he's worth $125,000. In February, thieves sliced Dan in two and took him to a scrap yard to be melted down for $900. Why did a couple of crooks...
Property owners, it turns out, do not watch the commodities market as keenly as druggies do. "People think of copper as cheap, like sand," says OneBeacon Insurance Group executive Charlie Sidoti. "But now you have to think of it like gold. You would never leave gold sitting out in the yard." OneBeacon estimates that it has seen a 300% increase in claims of copper theft in the past 18 months. Home foreclosures have worsened the trend, as empty buildings are easy targets for the time-consuming task of ripping out pipes and wiring. In California, theft of copper irrigation systems...