Anthony Lane

Is one of the best writers alive. See his New Yorker Olympics coverage here and here. A snippet:

The best thing about the shot put was the cars. After the shot landed, and the distance had been measured, the precious sphere would be retrieved by an official and placed in the cockpit of an automobile: two feet long, bright red, with a tail fin—in short, the idealized vehicle that I drew during chemistry lessons when I was nine years old. Now it exists, for real, and there are two Chinese fellows with the best job in the world, who get to steer it back to the shot-putting circle by remote control. (It can also bring a hammer, or even a javelin, which slots neatly into the fin.) I followed the gaze of the spectators around me, and realized that most of them had entirely lost interest in what was happening on the track, so urgently were they tracing the progress of the cars, and so hastily were they revising their list of what they want for Christmas. One question, though, will linger after the Games are done. The red supercars are equipped with windshields, but why? Who needs to see out? Are there tiny drivers tucked in there, bred specially for the event?

Liu Xiang is a Pig

Not in that way. In a 1984-way. All Chinese athletes are equal, but some are more equal than others:

Liu is exempted from having to run qualifying times to ensure his place on the team. His preparations are deemed more important. He is tended by a special team of coaches, doctors and gofers. They train him, feed him, supervise him and drive him around. In Beijing, he shares a two-bedroom apartment in an athletic dormitory with his hurdling coach, Sun Haiping.

That's from a NYT magazine profile. It's a good background look at the man expected to be one of the top stories of the Olympics.

The Olympics are shiny...

And are distracting the media and the public from more important news like this and this.

Chinese Sports Culture

A very good op-ed in the New York Times. Interesting quote:

But for the most part, Chinese athletes perform best in sports that few Chinese care about. This is a country without private guns but with crack sharpshooters. With few public pools but the best divers. Fencing, canoeing, women’s softball — China excels at these despite the fact that very few Chinese show an interest in them.