Sports : life magnified

Canadian Duff Gibson created history when he became the oldest individual gold medalist at the Winter Olympics at the age of 39 (Men’s skeleton title). He broke the record of Magnar Solberg who was 35 when he won his last gold. The oldest athlete to win it in a team event remains, as CNN reports:

The oldest Winter champion for any event is Jay O’Brien, who was 48 when he won four-man bobsleigh gold for the United States at the 1932 Games in Lake Placid.

At the summer games, Oscar Swahn was the part of the Running Deer shooting team at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics which won gold. . He was 64-years and 258-days old. Incidentally he is also the oldest olympian. As the official Olympic site reports:

After World War I, Swahn returned to the Olympics -at the age of 72. He won a silver medal in the running deer double-shot team event and also competed in the individual and team single-shot contests.

With India’s population, it surprises many that India is not a force at the Olympics. R.J.Elliott wonders the same in a comment in Aaman’s recent article:

I’ve always found it a bit baffling that India, with over one billion citizens, doesn’t seem to have much success in either the Winter OR the Summer Olympics…and that they don’t seem to have many (any?) nationals playing at the professional level in the US in any of the four major American sports. Surely there is a 7-foot 6-inch Indian fellow out there who would like to make millions playing in the NBA. Or a 35-pound Indian who would make a good offensive lineman in the NFL. But where are they?

Winter Olympics

Most commonwealth nations have performed poorly at the Winter Olympics. Apart from Canada who had won 31golds and was at number 10 in the all time Winter Olympic medal table before the games started, Commonwealth nations have had little to show. Poor performances at the Winter Olympics is not an India specific or South Asia specific phenomena.

Great Britain have won 8 golds in all, and among them are medals from an era when not many nations competed in the Olympics. Australia hadn’t won a medal before 1994. Australia loves its sport passionately and evidence of that is its improvement in the Winter Olympics. 40 athletes are competing for Australia at the Torino games, almost double the size in recent times. However, I might add that the latest gold medal winner for Australia, Dale Begg-Smith, is Canadian born.

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Roger Federer is a kid at heart. Aren’t we all. But this regardin Federer is out of the closet now.

Federer and all Federer fans like me are very excited that Wimbledon will host the 2012 Olympics. Will it be the fitting end to a superb career, the crowning glory when Federer wins the Olympic Gold medal at 30 at then retires in 2012? There is a lot of time to wait but it is already the possibility makes it all very exciting.

Cricinfo has put up this article on cricket and the Olympic games as Lords is likely to be host of the Archery event in 2012.

Apart from the sole Olympic cricket game, 26 first-class cricketers have competed at the Games in other sports.

And the legend of WG Grace has so much more to it:

A teen-aged Grace had actually competed in the National Olympian Games, an early attempt at reviving the Olympics back in 1866. He made a high-speed dash by cab from The Oval to Crystal Palace to win the 440yds hurdles race and dashed back - all while playing for All England against Surrey and apparently with the approval of his captain VE Walker, later to become MCC president.

More on the soley cricket Olympic game was found as I searched the cricinfo archives in this article. I spoke onthe 12 a side games and various side matches being there in cricket in the past and the Olympic game between Great Britan and France, which Great Britan won (scorecard) was a 12 a side game spread over 2 days. The story is amusing as players didnt even know they were taking part in the Olympics!

And so ended the competition. Neither side seemed aware that they had taken part in the Olympics, and the match was only retrospectively formally recognised as being an Olympic contest in 1912, when the International Olympic Committee met to compile the definitive list of all events in the five modern Olympiads up to that point.

Meanwhile, other sports are not new in Lords as cricinfo reports:

Although Lord’s is renowned as the home of cricket, this will not be the first time that it has played host to alternative sports. The ground has rackets and real tennis courts behind the pavilion, while one of Britain’s first running tracks was put in place at the ground in 1837.

A Canadian lacrosse team played an exhibition match at the ground in 1883, while Oxford and Cambridge played their Varsity hockey match on the ground from 1969 to 1991, when the fixture moved to Reading. And even baseball has had a look-in. It hosted the first match on British shores in 1874, and teams from Canada and the USA were frequent visitors until 1914.

Olympics will be held for the first time in Britain since 1948 when London host it in 2012. London won outdoing favourites Paris 54-50 as BBC Sport reports.

Personally I would have liked to be in Paris in 2012 but London is not that bad either. Any way the French Open and Wimbledon being my favourite tennis tournaments in that order, I should have visited the two cities before 2012 in all probability.

See all you sports lovers from around the world in London in 2012 then!