Sports : life magnified

Whether it is Shani Davis becoming the first black male to win an olympic gold, Kjetil Andre Aamodt of Norway becoming the first Alpine skier to win four career gold medals or Janica Kostelic becoming the first woman alpine skiier to achieve the same feat (30 minutes after Aamodt achieved his feat!), there is no dirth of historic feats.

I regret not being able to watch all this action on TV. My TV here at the hotel just has a disturbed Ten Sports. No ESPN, STAR Sports or Zee Sports (though I do not know if any of the stations are covering the games).

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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Joey Cheek won the 500 metres speed skating gold. With it he won $25,000 cash bonus.

What did he do with it?

As you know, there’s been some media but not a ton [about] the Darfur region of Sudan [where] there has been tens and tens of thousands of people killed. My government has labeled it a genocide, and so I will be donating money specifically to refugees in Chad where there are over 60,000 children who have been displaced from their homes….

Yes he donated the money and urged fellow Olympians to do the same. For him it is not about the money.

I have been blessed by competing in the Olympics in speedskating. If I retired yesterday I would have gotten everything in the world from speedskating and from competing in the Olympics. So for me to walk away today with a gold medal is amazing…. And so, I’ve always felt that if I ever did something big like this I wanted to be prepared to give something back.

Sportsmen are role models, yes. Sportsmen can also make a read difference. They enjoy a platform from which they can impact several lives by their examples, and setting examples. In India, Tendulkar donates to many charitable causes away from the spotlight. Schumacher made some praiseworthy donations last year. Steve Waugh has set an example in Calcutta.

Sport can indeed make differences in more ways than one.

Hat tip - Road to Torino blog.

52 year old Anne Abernathy or Grandma Luge, as she is better known, has pulled out of the Olympics because of a wrist injury.

Abernathy has a lot to be proud about. Reports CNN:

She has also built up a cult following of luge fans around the world, having beaten cancer and bounced back from a string of injuries including 12 operations on her knee.

She was appearing at her sixth Olympics in Torino after a career that began in Calgary in 1988 and carried the flag for her country in Friday’s opening ceremony. She became the oldest female Winter Olympian when she competed aged 48 in Utah four years ago. The previous title-holder was Canada’s Edwina Chamier, an Alpine skier who took to the slopes of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1936. But Abernathy was not the oldest competitor at the Games — that distinction goes to 54-year-old U.S. curler Scott Baird.

As Grandma Luge says, she is an inspiration to a lot of women, specially to those above 50:

It’s a big deal for a lot of women that someone over 50 is going out there and doing it.

Chad Hedrick has won a gold medal. He has vouched to win 4 more. If he manages the same, he will emulate Eric Heiden who won 5 gold medals in the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid.

An opening ceremony described as filled with rhythm, passion and speed to showcase Italian culture kicked off the Olympics. Italian cross-country skier Stefania Belmondo lit the Olympic flame.

Winter Olympics, 2006 kicks off in Turin today. Already there have been athletes testing positive. CNN explains some sports being at the Winter Olympics.