THE FEVER IS SPREADING

My weekend started off a little slow. On Saturday I watched a bunch of Olympic coverage and then went out to a comedy show with Monica and crew. It was pretty mediocre but I still managed to have fun. On Sunday I was incredibly saddened because Isaac Hayes died. I’ve loved that man’s music for quite a long time and I certainly love Chef. I haven’t been so broken up about the death of someone I didn’t know for a long time.

Watching more Olympics seemed like the only thing to do. I caught the China/USA basketball match. There was some sloppy ball on both sides but I really enjoyed watching the game. I wanted the US to win but wanted China to do really well. I love that Yao Ming, such a stand up fellow. I thoroughly enjoyed the women’s synchronized springboard competition. I love diving. Getting my first taste of both Men’s and Women’s gymnastics was also fantastic. The US women had a real rocky start and I saw many individual medal hopes dashed but I think they could end up strong in the team competition.

The highlight of the evening had to be the swimming and the highlight of the swimming was the men’s 4x100 relay. France had done a lot of trash talking, and they had reason. The US wasn’t going to go down easy though. And this is how the race went down. If you haven’t seen it don’t read this. Actually, feel free to read it, but check out the video first.

For the first leg Phelps was up for the US and Leveaux was up for the French. Phelps put in a respectable time of 47.51 to Leveaux’s 47.91. Both were eclipsed by Eamon of Australia who had the fastest first leg in a 4x100 relay ever at 47.24. Up for the second leg was Weber-Gale (47.02) for the US and Fabien (47.05) for France. This brought the US into the lead. I’ve been seeing people talk about how Cullen Jones almost blew it for the US. Sure, he had the slowest leg of the team at 47.65 but was up against France’s fastest leg by Bousquet at 46.63.

And let me just say something here about Cullen Jones. This is a man who teaches swimming to Black children because he knows exactly how dangerous not knowing how to swim can be because he almost drowned as a child. Black children are almost 3 times more likely to drown than white children. He also had to swim in the relay heats the night before and earned his spot on the team with the three fastest swimmers because he had the best split from those in the heats. If Jones had led off the race and Phelps was swimming third people would be saying Phelps almost blew the race since his time was almost a full second slower than Bousquet's. Lay off him people.

Anyway, what it really came down to was the final leg, Lezak vs. Bernard. The US was .69 seconds behind the French. When you are 32, the oldest male member of the US swim team, and chasing down the world record holder things might look a little grim. Not so for Lezak, he put in the swim of his life. Got the fastest split time in history, and took the gold. It was quite a night.