Citius Altius Fortius

It is curtains on the Athens Olympics and what a tragic tale we are left to live with. Well I’m not talking about the way this Olympics was organized. With due respect to all the Environment protection bodies, who cried enough with the accusation that this was the least environment friendly Olympics, I think the Greeks did a tremendous job in organizing this four yearly festivity of sports. Considering that even a few months before the opening ceremony, Greece was heavily behind schedule and everybody from the press to the International Olympic committee had decided that Greece would not make it, the fact that this tiny nation put up this mega a show is itself praise worthy in every sense. The tragedy in the games was that the very essence of the games was not achieved. The motto of the Olympics as mentioned in the blog’s title means “Faster” “Higher” and “Stronger” and that’s exactly what was not displayed in the games. This was probably the only games, where just one record was broken in athletics. There were loads of records that tumbled in various other events though, particularly in swimming. But in the most ancient of the events viz. running, jumping and fighting, there was nobody who ran faster, fought harder and except for Yelena Isinbayeva, jumped higher than the previous games. This must have got to do a lot with the very stringent measures taken by the IOC to check athletes for doping. Well whatever the cause could be, we have to wait another four years to witness the athletes live the Olympic Motto.

India’s performance at the games could hardly be described as tragic. If any of us had expected anything better, that would have been foolishness not optimism. What a haul we have had. Thanks to Major Rathore, One Silver!!!! And for the records that is the only silver won in the games by independent India. The world’s seventh largest nation with the second largest population on earth finally ended up as the 66th nation on the medal tally, far below countries we have never even heard off. To make matters worse our women weight lifters were banned for using performance enhancing substances. Poor souls, why did they even have to do it? If at least they had won some medals and then been stripped of them, the whole thing would have made better sense. Could we have been in sorrier state than this? I better hope not! Our honorable sports minister says that the sports ministry is not to be blamed for this debacle. That’s quite true. The ministry was formed after all to serve only 2 purposes. One is to assign a senior party member the status of a minister. And secondly to provide politicians and bureaucrats free trips to sporting events around the world. Was there any better way of making use of the tax payer’s money????

After spending weeks of late night agony watching the Olympics, the US Open came as a special treat. Late night television viewing had never been better. Yes, the competition itself was good, but what I’m talking about is the ladies event of the open. With the ladies sportswear turning smaller and shorter by the day (all in the name of sports fashion) watching these skimpily clad ladies run around the court was certainly very entertaining to say the least. And to add to that, there were those gorgeous Russian ladies.... These Russians certainly have a lot of very attractive girls playing tennis. Anastasia Myskina, Maria Sharapova, Svetlana Kuznetsova, Elena Dementieva and of course Anna Kournikova.... Who cares whether you can pronounce their names are not, at least they make the sport a lot more interesting. The other girls are good too. Oh yes! The Williams, Mauresmos and the Capriatis without doubt play excellent tennis. But they come no way close in comparison to those long Russian legs. And more importantly it’s very difficult for a simple man like me to find women more muscular than me attractive.... So as long as there are these entertainers in sports, people like me will have only one thing to say: Let the games begin....