Word: medal
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...assiduous following of the rainy women's final between the red bikinis - a.k.a. China - and the white bikinis - a.k.a. the U.S. (The lighter-hued bikinis prevailed.) Friday was gloriously sunny, so I figured it would be a good time to check out the vibe at the men's gold-medal match between Brazil and the U.S. Sure enough, the radio reporter in front of me was broadcasting shirtless. (In case you're wondering, the reporter was male.) The air in Beijing's Chaoyang Park smelled like sunscreen, and the cheerleaders shook their groove thangs. Things were looking fine. But here...
...British Olympians scoffed, as it turned out, at the sheer modesty of the 35-medal target set out by UK Sport, the body that distributes government cash to athletes. And they laughed in the face of UK Sport's hope for an eight-placed finish in the 2008 medal table. In short, their ambitions proved most un-British-like. "The performance of 'Team GB' in the Olympics is moving beyond the sublime and towards the ridiculous," said an editorial in Britain's Daily Telegraph. "We are British, for heaven's sake - how are we supposed to cope with such...
...offer a sense of perspective. French officials have apparently suggested the dominance of Britain's cycling team in 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...
...Cold War. Part of it was the venue itself - a squat, concrete block of Communist architecture, an almost quaint anomaly amid the city's gleaming new sports cathedrals. Inside, the U.S. and Russian men's volleyball teams faced off for the right to play in Sunday's gold medal match. Their respective fans were whipped into states of shared hysteria and the Chinese joined in, just for the fun of it. Though relations between Washington and Moscow are worse than they have been in two decades, the atmosphere wasn't as tense as the epic U.S.-Soviet Olympic encounters...
...with his family, who flew back to the U.S. early last week. He returned on Aug. 17. Improbably and imperceptibly, the U.S. men worked its way through its draw, then beat Serbia in five sets to reach the semifinals. A win would secure the U.S. its first medal since 1992 and first shot at gold since the Seoul Games of 1988, when the Soviet Union still existed...