>>>>Hello, TC. How is life on Isle of Man?
>>>
>>>Pretty similar to North Carolina, actually ;-)
>>
>>One of the contestants in the Olympic 250K bike race yesterday was from the Isle of Man. They showed an area map, so now I know where it is.
>
>That would be Mark Cavendish, aka "SuperManx". Interesting that Vino won it - he's a tough guy but pretty old for an elite cyclist.
Maybe he's still doping, who knows.
I just finished watching the women's road race on the recorder. What an exciting race. I hope there is no disappointment in Lizzie Armistread. She finished one bike length behind the best in the world, Marianne Vos of the Netherlands. Better yet, she was gracious in defeat. A class act. One of the things I most like about the Olympics is I find myself admiring and cheering for athletes from around the world. By default I cheer for the U.S. athletes but I don't forget that everyone there trained just as hard and wants to win just as much.
Just for fun, here is something that put a huge smile on my face yesterday. Elder stateswoman Natalie Coughin is credited as airplane choreographer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPIA7mpm1wUA tip of the hat to Ryan Lochte. This guy is not messing around. He blew Michael Phelps out of the pool yesterday in arguably the most difficult swimming event, the 400 IM. A lot of attention was paid to Phelps not medalling -- the first time for him since 2000 when he was 15 years old -- but even at his 2012 best he was not going to beat Lochte. American TV coverage had a nice feature from John McEnroe, who spent some time with Lochte at his home in Florida. It did not necessarily contradict Lochte's reputation as a fun-loving flake but it showed the other side as well, the steel side it takes to excel that much. There was footage of him weight training, sweating in buckets, and rolling over 650 pound tires in his yard. (Try that sometime).
Lochte and Phelps have two more head to head matchups coming up, which are shaping up as highlights of the games. Lochte is sitting on top of the swimming world after yesterday but even he is not taking anything for granted. "I'll tell you this," Lochte said. "The next race he is in, he is going to light it up." Which already proves him wiser than the guy who came closest to beating Phelps in the Beijing Olympics four years ago, an Eastern European who was considered a serious threat to Phelps in one of the finals. He came up to Phelps before the race and said something to him, which from the body language looked like smack talk. "That's right," commentator Rowdy Gaines said, "poke the tiger with a stick." You still have to think it's Lochte's time but the king is not dead yet.
