London Olympics

The Olympics are in a few months. They’d throw me out.

Right now, I would fail an Olympic-style drug test so hard it would make your teeth rattle. None of this A sample/B sample business, both specimens would probably just glow in the dark.

Why? Because I’m in the throes of a come-down from a workout that makes Pumping Iron look like Anne of Green Gables, and to survive it I took an array of stimulants which would give most people a coronary just looking at the bottle.

Continue reading "Can professional sport ever really be “natural”?" »

London Olympic organisers LOCOG are officially loco. They are not, however, low cost.

In an unprecedented step, LOCOG will charge people ten pounds to enter the main Olympic stadium precinct and watch events on the big screen. Up to 70,000 such tickets are for sale.

They will also charge people to watch the road cycling in the Surrey countryside, as well as charging ten pounds to watch Olympic tennis on the big screen on the famous “Henman Hill” at Wimbledon – the small patch of grass named after the mostly unthreatening Pom who lost four Wimbledon semi finals.

Continue reading "Ten pound poms to charge Olympic fans to breathe" »

It’s that time of every four years again. REVEALED: The official Olympic opening ceremony uniforms.

What do you think? Stylish? Awful? One question on our mind is why they chose white bottoms, don’t they know how easily they stain?

Here’s what our ceremony uniforms looked like in Sydney in 2000, in Athens in 2004 and Beijing in 2008. Bit of a mixed bag.

What else is on your mind this morning?

In one of the world’s most impressive displays of bristling military might, the UK armed forces are creating a £600 million Olympic ‘ring of steel’ that includes installing surface-to-air missiles on apartment building rooves.

There’ll be an aircraft carrier with 800 Royal Marines, Navy ships, RAF helicopters, private security, and 13,500 service men and women – more than are deployed in Afghanistan, according to the Daily Mail.

The Thames will be filled with laser-equipped sharks. Graeme Garden will be in charge of intelligence. The Ministry of Funny Walks will train a handpicked squad of bobbies. Dad’s Army will be brought out of retirement to shepherd small children across the road.

Continue reading "Keep Calm and Carry On - it’s just the Olympics" »

At the Beijing Olympics, Australian women took home eight of our 14 gold medals. At the Vancouver Winter Games, women won both our golds. Our last tennis Grand Slam champion was a woman, our last golfing World Number One was a woman, our last cricket world champs were women, our last world surfing champ was a woman and our best horses at the moment are all female too.

That last point might seem a trivial addition, but Black Caviar has reminded us all lately that you don’t need dangly wedding tackle to be a sporting superstar. Gai Waterhouse’s mare More Joyous and Mark Kavanagh’s filly Atlantic Jewel both also won emphatically on the weekend, just in case anyone missed the point,

Without question, these three lady steeds are easily the best horses currently racing in Australia. And it’s an interesting coincidence that Black Caviar will lead the equine Aussie charge in England this northern summer, just as our females will do likewise at the London Olympics.

Continue reading "The female of the species is more sporting than the male" »

America got Ralph Lauren. Britain got Stella McCartney. We got… more green and gold.

Australia’s 2012 London Olympic competition uniforms have been unveiled, and even though Sally Pearson cartwheeled down the centre of the runway, nothing could save us from yet another dreary Olympic uniform.

With the exception of Cathy Freeman’s headsock back in 2000, Australia’s competition outfits have been a wash of crop tops, tight shorts, misfitting t-shirts and the obligatory green and gold for decades.

Continue reading "Our uniform distaste for our daggy fluoro Olympians" »

This weekend, as the world remembered events in the north eastern Japanese town of Fukushima, Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe would have done well to reflect on his past deeds in the south western Japanese city of Fukuoka.

It was at the 1997 Fukuoka Pan Pacific Championships that 14 year old Ian Thorpe first announced himself to the world, winning silver in the 400m freestyle in an Olympics-strength field.

Four years later, with three Sydney Olympics golds under his belt, Thorpe won an unprecedented six gold medals at the Fukuoka World Championships. Those performances made him an imported icon of Beckhamesque stature in Japan.

Continue reading "It’s time for Thorpey to get over his black line fever" »

It’s time to give Nick D’Arcy a break. The story going around today is that D’Arcy has been cleared by the Australian Olympic Committee to compete for selection at the London Games.

It’s a story I chose to run as part of our morning sport package on Sky News, but not discuss in our panel chat this morning on Sportsline. It’s an old topic and it’s time to move on.

It’s been almost four years to the day that D’Arcy’s Olympic dream was shattered and his life turned upside down. Up until that point in the bar late on that dreaded night, D’Arcy was on the cusp of realising his dream. All those training sessions, early mornings, long programs, strict diets, missed parties, big sacrifices and endless laps up and down the pool were about to be worth it.

Continue reading "Mr D’Arcy’s pride should come ahead of our prejudice" »

Back in 2004, all eyes were on an Australian female hurdler as our Olympians readied themselves for Athens. Our strongest ever Olympic team would eventually win 17 gold medals, yet the pre-Games hype was all about Jana Pittman, who would go on to win nothing.

So here we are eight years on and again, the focus is on a female hurdler. Only this time it’s different. This time the hurdler is naturally charming, not attention-seeking. This time she’s fit and firing, not half broken down. This time you sense she’s doing it for all of us, not just herself.

Sally Pearson was 22 when she won silver in the 100m hurdles at Beijing. The race was thrilling. But it was THAT post-race interview with Seven’s Pat Welsh which really burned her name and face into our minds.

Continue reading "This Sally’s no lay down, she’s a lay down misère" »

Just when womens boxing thought it was making progress, it has been dealt a brutal double left jab right cross combo right where it hurts the most – between the legs.

Next year female boxing will make its Olympic debut at the London Games, but celebrations and preparations have been soured by a push by the Amateur International Boxing Association (AIBA) to have the competitors wear skirts in the ring.

I kind of thought if there was one sport you didn’t want to piss off then it’d be boxing and the girls aren’t happy.

Continue reading "Boxing skirts the boundaries of credibility with sexist rule" »

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” the English lit great Samuel Johnson famously once said.

A whole bunch of people seem to be tired of London life lately. Or at least intent on mindlessly smashing the great city to pieces.

The past 72 hours haven’t been pretty. The Guardian is calling it the Battle of London. We’ve seen pictures of double-decker buses overturned and engulfed in flames. Looters smashing their way into stores. Rioters hurling planks of wood at bobbies. Buildings that survived two world wars destroyed by rioters.

Continue reading "The great ire of London" »

IAN Thorpe’s comeback to Olympic swimming could be as disastrous as the former champion’s illegal flop into the pool at the 2004 Olympic trials. Thorpe’s freakish ability to carve up the pool and wipe out his opponents has been proven time and time again. But his powers to overcome hurdles to make it back on the Olympic dais are weakening, year by year.

Thorpe will make the Australian Olympic team. He is such a perfectionist that he will make it happen. But whether he wins an individual medal – or a world record for that matter – is now a topic of great debate. It’s been almost 10 years since Thorpie smashed a world record – Manchester’s 2002 Commonwealth Games in the 400m freestyle. His world records were broken over a period of five years – when his body was still growing. In 2002, Thorpe was just 19. He never broke a world record after Manchester.

After Thorpe stopped growing, we never saw the form he produced as a teenager. Here are 10 reasons why Thorpie won’t set the world on fire in London 2012.

Continue reading "10 reasons why Thorpe won’t claim a world record again" »

In a letter to IOC boss Jacques Rogge, Iran’s Olympic Committee chief Mohammad Aliabadi has today declared the London 2012 Olympics logo racist, because apparently, you can see the word Zion in it, if you twist your neck 45 degrees and drink half a bottle of the kind of spirit which is heavily frowned upon in Iran.

The obvious cynical, Western reaction is to point out that Iran is trying to distract its own populace from overthrowing the state by drumming up anger about yet another trumped-up fiendish Israeli plot.

But here at The Punch, we’re not so sure. We think the Iranians may actually be onto something. Because if you look at Olympic logos down the years, it appears many of them were trying to tell us something we were all too swept up in Olympic fever to notice.

Continue reading "Is the London 2012 logo a racist, Zionist plot?" »

Oddly-coloured, self-indulgent and attention-starved. That’s how Ian Thorpe came across at yesterday’s glitzy, jam-packed press conference.

Yesterday, I wrote glowing things about Thorpe. I couldn’t, and still can’t, say enough about his genuine, intelligent commitment to the welfare of indigenous Australians.

Then came his presser, where none other than the CEO of Virgin Blue announced Thorpe’s comeback to competitive swimming.

Continue reading "@IanThorpe’s epic press conference fail" »

If they were handing out gold medals for the most bizarre Olympic mascots, the recently unveiled characters for the London 2012 games would wins hands down.

That is, if they had hands. Wenlock and Mandeville (catchy names) were apparently “created from “the last two drops of British steel used for the London 2012 Olympic Stadium.” More like an alcohol and substance fuelled creativeworkshopthinktank.

To me they look like the result of a frenzied sexual encounter between a secondhand Logie award and a Teletubbie. And the blue one looks like it has an incontinence problem.

Continue reading "The Poms are a weird mob" »