Breakfast of Olympians

Cereal maker Kelloggs had a box of corn flakes featuring Olympic gold medal gynmast Gabby Douglas ready to go not 24 hours after she stood on the podium.

With the press release today comes a packaged quote from Douglas: "The support from fans around the country has been amazing, and it's a huge honor to see ourselves on a cereal box that our fans can all own and enjoy!"

Nor is that the only way Kelloggs is going to cash in on the 16-year-old. She'll headline the company's Tour of Gymnastics Champions that kicks off a U.S. tour on Sept. 8.

Reuters supplied photo

 

How and why Gabby won

A move-by-move analysis of the women's gymnastics competition manages to explain exactly why American Gabby Douglas won gold and Russia's Viktoria Komova won silver.

Using a graphics interface format, or GIF, the Atlantic wire's Elspeth Reeve deconstructs the two arch-rivals on the balance beam, the floor sequence, the horse and the bars. Full points to Komova for artistry and to Douglas for athleticism. In a continuous loop, you can see the American has toes that seem to be able to hold their grip on the balance beam and keep her upright.

Komova was leading after the preliminaries. Another continuous loop shows her wobbly dismount from the horse, an excruciating moment she'll probably play as a continuous loop in her mind for years to come.

At the end, the very end, it was just as close as it seemed: Komova 61.973, Douglas, 62.232.

AP/U.S. gymnast and gold medallist Gabrielle Douglas, center, Russian gymnast and silver medallist Victoria Komova, right, and Russian gymnast and bronze medallist Aliya Mustafina stand on the podium.

 

 

 

T-Rex goes for gold

Twitter lets athletes hear from Justin Bieber. It gets ride of some competitors even before their events for tweeting their inner racist. It sets off revolutionary uprisings among burned ticket buyers.

It gives the rarified world of museum curators a way to talk about Donald Duck not wearing pants.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art started it by launching the hashtag #MuseumOlympics and inviting museums around the world to showcase their collections and compete for Twitter gold.

"Famous Seven from #Canada who painted the beauty of the Canadian landscape #MuseumOlympics," offered a post from Wendy.

Art scholars debated the role of the nude in sculpture vs. the original Greek Olympians, sculpted nude male bodies.

"Donald Duck usually doesn't have pants on!" tweeted the Walt Disney Museum helpfully.

Harvard Art Museums offered a 1960s black and white photograph of boys diving. The Philadelphia Museum of Art posted a 1997 Chinese photograph of day labourers posing in a shallow pond in Beijing. The Andy Warhol Museum sent in Warhol's "Muhammad Ali, 1977."

The  Royal Ontario Museum thought maybe its T-Rex could be a contender for Olympic archery ... if his arms weren't so short.

 

A little bit of Olympic corn

English farmer Tom Robinson has turned a 15-acre corn field into a maze of springer Usain Bolt. Families, rabbits and would-be Olympians can try to find their way through the labrynth from now until harvest in September.

Robinson is no ordinary farmer. His National Forest Adventure Farm in the Midlands is, as the family told the British newspaper The Guardian in 2005, a way to actually make money farming. He's been carving a maze in one of his cornfields since then, using a theme that has something to do with current events.

And it makes the maize maze different every year, and a new challenge.

The Robinsons figure they can make more money running part of the farm as a theme park than they would ever get from the $1,000 worth of corn ripped up annually to make the maze.

 

Why Gabby Douglas can't do this

The Flying Squirrel, gold medal gynmast Gabby Douglas, can do things that defy gravity. But she can't do what Olga Korbut did at the 1972 Games.

What's now called the Korbut flip, a backward somersault on the uneven bars, has been banned because it's just too dangerous.

It's even hard to watch now without cringing.

 

The Belorussian, now 57, won four golds and two silvers in the Olympics and revolutionized gymnastics as a competitive sport. She lives in Scottsdale, Arizona where, according to her website, she enjoys hiking, exercising and cooking.

What Michael sleeps in

The Michael Phelps brand is protected even when he's sleeping.

The 27-year-old swimmer, the most decorated Olympic athlete is history, sleeps in high-tech compression pyjamas that massage every single one of his overworked muscles.

"The older I get, the more I have to pay attention to the smaller things that make a difference," Phelps says in an interview with Yahoo Sports, sounding almost like the rest of us.

"For me, recovery is so big."

Under Armour, which makes the $130 Recharge Suit, pays Phelps an estimated $15 million in sponsorship fees. But he does actually use the product, a lot.

"I swim, I get a message, I get an ice bath, I put it on," he says. "I take a nap with it on. I sleep in it.

Under Armour product designer David Ayers says the suit's lattice weave, a sort of Spiderman motif, squeezes all the major and minor muscles simultaneously so "those off days go away."

AP/Italian swimmer Federica Pelligrini gets a hand putting on her compression suit after practice at the London2012 Games on July 27.

Please, sir, we want some more... tickets

A tech geek's attempt to help his girlfriend get gymnastics tickets is turning into a British revolution.

Thousands of people latched on to Adam Naisbitt's website and Twitter account, @2012TicketAlert, after hours and days of futile fighting with the official London Games ticket site. The folks at Buzzfeed graphically dramatized their hour-long failed attempt to buy tickets for anything at all.

The 32-year-old Naisbitt enlisted more than 9,600 followers in a few days, until the London Olympic Committee spotted him and blocked its server. In all, 250,000 people have used the site, he said.

What had been a Twitter stream of grateful Games goers turned into an angry flood of posts that brought the BBC to Naisbitt's door. With shot after shot of empty seats and a website that could mangle the most determined ticket buyer, the pressure is mounting on the London organizing committee to relax their iron grip.

Naisbitt wasn't making money from his site, he told MSN Sports. He just opened it to the public after realizing he'd found a way to get around http://www.tickets.london2012.com/,

The site is run by TicketMaster.

 “Their website is really, really bad. It’s the Olympics of 2012 and the website has been coded like it’s 1995,” he told MSN.

Reuters/ Empty seats at soccer match Aug. 1 at Hampden Park, Glasgow

 

 

Horse's angst

There are not just a few political types on the right and the left in American politics hoping a horse named Rafalca takes a few tips from the Chinese women's badminton team.

Rafalca, owned by the wife of  U.S. presidential contender Mitt Romney, is competing in today's dressage event. Not a Joe the Plumber kind of sport.

"I'm not sure why the horse has to be in the most upper-class hoity-toity Olympic event ever invented," conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer kvetched on Fox News.

On the left, Rafalca is a source of unbridled glee.

MoveOn.org has put together 30-second campaign spots for TV that let the horse do the talking, in a breathlessly bad Austenesque English accent. The message: "After Mitt Romney repeals health care and ships your jobs overseas, I daresay your life won't be nearly as pampered as mine. After all, you're not one of his horses."

Rafalca and his rider, Jan Ebeling, finished 24th after Thursday's competition, which is okay for the political types. (And 10 behind the top Canadian, Ashley Holzer on Breaking Dawn.)

 Romney supporters fear a medal would be a little too high profile and make the Republican candidate the butt of horse jokes right through the November election.

London2012 photo/Jan Ebeling rides Rafalca

 

 

Asthma and elite athletes

Asthma is the most common chronic malady among Olympic athletes and the way they train could be the reason, an Australian study has found.

"Inhaling polluted or cold air might explain the cause in some sports," says researcher Kenneth Fitch of the University of Western Australia.

Years of intense training, particularly in endurance sports, may be to blame, Fitch says, particularly since asthma shows up in older athletes. Indeed, American swimmer Dara Torres was 41 when she won three medals at the Beijing Games -- and she had asthma.

The U.S. Centres for Disease Control, on its page for kids, tries to encourage youngsters with asthma to stay active by talking about how successful Olympic athletes are who have the respiratory problem.

Fitch studied five Olympics and put the prevalence of asthma among athletes as eight per cent. His study is published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

 

German rower leaves over neo-Nazism

A 23-year-old woman on the German Olympic rowing team has left the Village over her alleged connection to neo-Nazis, her own Olympic committee has announced.

"The team management welcomes this step," German chief of mission Michael Vesper says.

The German Olympic Committee and the German Rowing Association insisted rower Nadja Drygalla believed in and upheld the values of the Olympic Charter. Still, the two groups said, she decided to leave to spare her team the embarrassment.

Vesper announced Drygalla had left on Thursday and he held a news conference today to elaborate.

"If we had had even the slightest indication that someon ein our squad was xenophobic, this person wouldn't have been on the Olympic squad," he told the German sports news agency SID.

Drygalla is allegedly romantically involved with Michael Fischer, a member of the far-right National Democratic Party, in her hometown of Rostock. The newspaper Der Spiegel describes the party as racist and extremist, but still legal.

Vesper says authorities only learned of the connection Thursday and had a 90-minute "detailed and intense conversation" with Drygalla, Der Spiegel reports.

AP/German women's rowing team; Nadja Drygalla is the third rower from the front, with blonde hair, holding her forehead