A photograph of wrestlers Jordan Burroughs and Sadegh Goudarzi is being hailed as the single image to encompass the spirit of the Olympics. Jack Moore of Buzzfeed first posted the image of Burroughs, an American, and Goudarzi, an Iranian, hugging after the New Jersey native beat his Middle Eastern competitor for first place [in freestyle wrestling].Text from Huffington Post. Captioned photo via America Wakie Wakie.
"The Olympics used to include art competitions. Between 1912 and 1952, medals were awarded in architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture... An exhibition at the 1932 games drew 384,000 visitors to the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art...Text found in the Futility Closet. Image ("Jean Jacoby is the only artist to win two gold medals. He won his second with the above drawing, titled Rugby") credit here. Additional information at Wikipedia.
The categories included epic literature, chamber music, watercolors, and statuary; the 1928 games even included a competition in town planning.In two cases champion athletes also won art competitions. Hungarian swimmer Alfréd Hajós, left, who had won two gold medals in Athens in 1896, took home a silver medal for designing a stadium in 1924. And American Walter Winans won gold both as a marksman in 1908 and as a sculptor in 1912.
In 1954 the art competitions were dropped because most of the participants were professionals, which was held to conflict with the ideals of the games. But the Olympic charter still requires hosts to include a cultural program “to promote harmonious relations, mutual understanding and friendship among the participants and others attending the Olympic Games.”"
Mark Worsfold, 54, a former soldier and martial arts instructor, was arrested on 28 July for a breach of the peace shortly before the cyclists arrived in Redhouse Park, Leatherhead, where he had sat down on a wall to watch the race. Officers from Surrey police restrained and handcuffed him and took him to Reigate police station, saying his behaviour had "caused concern".Further details at The Guardian.
"The man was positioned close to a small group of protesters and based on his manner, his state of dress and his proximity to the course, officers made an arrest to prevent a possible breach of the peace," Surrey police said in a statement.
Worsfold, whose experience was first reported by Private Eye, claims police questioned him about his demeanour and why he had not been seen to be visibly enjoying the event. Worsfold, who was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 2010, suffers from muscle rigidity that affects his face. He was released after two hours without charge or caution.
"It could have been done better. I was arrested for not smiling. I have Parkinson's," he said, adding that he realised the officers were working long hours and trying to control the event properly, but they had not, in his case, acted correctly.
A German sports reporter, Siegfried Mischner, has claimed Owens carried a photograph of himself shaking hands with Hitler and called it 'one of my most beautiful moments'.More at the Daily Mail.
Mischner, 83, says he and several other reporters saw the handshake behind the stands at the Olympic stadium but never mentioned it. Owens and other eyewitnesses always maintained that the story of Hitler's snub was exaggerated...
'After all those stories about Hitler and his snub, I came back to my native country and I couldn't ride in the front of the bus,' Owens recalled. 'I had to go to the back door. I couldn't live where I wanted. Now what's the difference?'
Owens was given a tickertape parade in New York. But when he arrived at the Waldorf Astoria hotel for a reception in his honour, he was instructed to take the service lift rather than the normal guest lift, which was reserved for whites.
President Franklin Roosevelt never congratulated Owens or invited him to the White House. 'Hitler didn't snub me - it was FDR who snubbed me,' Owens said.
And Owens had his own memories of Berlin which differed starkly from the propaganda version. While the Nazis vilified the black American athletes, the German people cheered on Owens and his team-mates, clamouring for photos and autographs.
The following is quoted directly from the IOC: "The five rings represent the five continents. They are interlaced to show the universality of Olympism and the meeting of the athletes of the whole world during the Olympic Games. On the Olympic flag, the rings appear on a white background. This flag translates the idea of the universality of the Olympic Movement. At least one of the colors of the rings, including the white background, can be found on the flag of every nation in the world."... Baron Pierre de Coubertin conceived both the symbol and the flag. Not coincidentally, Coubertin was the founder of the modern Olympic Movement.But... note this in the Wikipedia entry:
Prior to 1951, the official handbook stated that each colour corresponded to a particular continent: blue for Europe, yellow for Asia, black for Africa, green for Australia and Oceania and red for America (North and South considered as a single continent); this was removed because there was no evidence that Coubertin had intended it...Here's the cited 1951 reference*:
“Unlike most Olympic teams around the world, the U.S. Olympic Team is privately funded and we’re grateful for the support of our sponsors,” USOC spokesman Patrick Sandusky said in a statement...More at the Washington Post. Too bad Jon Stewart is off for the summer. And if for some bizarre reason you want to dress like this yourself...
When General Motors left as a sponsor, the USOC signed a $24 million deal with German automaker BMW that raised eyebrows. At the time, the USOC highlighted the carmaker’s 42-year history of selling cars in the United States and the fact that BMW has 7,000 American employees.
The USOC and the International Olympic Committee also were criticized for sticking with BP as a sponsor after the deadly oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico.
$598 for the women’s blazer and $498 for the silk skirt. The men’s blazer is a staggering $795, flat front trousers $295 and nubuck shoes are $165. And that damn beret? $55.Outrageously priced, outsourced clothing. To complete the image they should have deferred payment for it to the next generation.
Before heading to the 2012 London Olympic games, the U.S. Women's National Volleyball Team stripped down for ESPN.
But there is even trickery, deception and lying in disabled sports. There are plenty of dissemblers among the participants, people who, in medical inspections, deliberately paint their state of health in more dramatic terms than it is, thereby competing under false pretenses in events that are becoming increasingly popular and also provide the opportunity to make a lot of money...More at the link.
There are competition-like tests, in which the athletes, depending on the type of sport involved, have to demonstrate which movements they can perform on wheels, while throwing the javelin or in a sailboat. There are 41 classes in track & field alone. The lines between the classes are fluid...
In the 1996 Paralympics in Atlanta, 11 athletes were sent home after cheating their way into favorable classes. At the Sydney games in 2000, the Spanish mentally handicapped basketball team won the gold medal. It later turned out that 10 players were completely healthy. They had never completed the IQ test that was supposed to have been administered...
There are similar cases in winter sports. Athletes still joke about a Russian cross-country skier who competed as a visually impaired athlete at the Turin Paralympics in 2006. After she had reached the finish line with her escort, she turned her head to the display panel, which showed that she had won a medal. The allegedly blind athlete then threw her arms up into the air and cheered.
The Olympics are slated to cost taxpayers $14.7 billion. In this time of “austerity,” youth clubs and libraries are being shut down as expendable fripperies; this expenditure, though, is not negotiable...I like the concept of an "austerity Olympics," but of course such a thing will never happen.The Games’ security plans grow ever more dystopian and surreal. There will be snipers in helicopters; jets; warships in the Thames; more British troops on duty in London than in Afghanistan.“They won’t do it,” Marqusee says, “but what would have been nice is if they’d made these the Austerity Games in a nice way. Just get rid of everything else, it’s not appropriate, it’s just going to be the sports, and we’ll enjoy it, everyone’ll go half-cost, no big hotels.” With the pleasure of the Londoner by choice, he continues: “And you know, this is London! No, we’re not going to compete with Beijing, we’re not that kind of place anyway, we’re not an authoritarian state that can get 10,000 people to march up and down. But why not be, you know, just who we are?...
Everyone knows there’s a catastrophe unfolding, that few can afford to live in their own city. It was not always so... Rich areas of this city have long been unusually mixed. “In Britain even 30 years ago, 30 percent of the population lived in council housing. And it has a proud and treasured part to play in life for ordinary people.” But that stock has been depleted for years. Houses taken from the pool were left unreplaced, at rates accelerating fast under Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme from the 1980s. New Labor did little to reverse this. The shortage is severe. Rents are rocketing, house prices, stagnating gently or not, are utterly prohibitive...
Diasporas have sustained us. It’s a terrible cliché, multiculturalism through food, but there’s a reason it’s what Londoners reach for. Smart restaurants like St. John have rehabilitated English fodder, glorying in pork, blackberries, eulogizing offal. Fine. If you’re of a certain age and grew up here, you remember that aside from the lucky, rich or recently immigrant, we had no food. We gnawed bread like bleached plastic, cheese like soap. We yowled, a hungry people. New Londoners took pity before the rest of us succumbed to malnutrition and misery, and shared their cuisines. Indian, Jamaican, whatever — name a culinary tradition, it won’t be too far to find, near the greasy spoons keeping the faith. Each new group of incomers brings something — now Polish food has mainstreamed, and there’s dense bread in the corner shops, krufki in supermarkets...
The Antikythera mechanism (top photo) was recovered in 1900 from a Greek shipwreck dating to about 100 BC. Made of bronze and of amazing complexity, it consists of at least 30 gears which allowed it to function as an astronomical computer (like an orrery), specifically for calculating solar and lunar calendars. More details are available at the Wiki page. The lower image is a modern reconstructed replica.
