…what are the odds that **nothanks **is just another **umkay **waiting to happen? I mean… even the usernames seem oddly similar in a fashion. When umkay was asked what her username meant, she just responded something like she couldn’t think of anything to put so just put that. And now, nothanks has said it was is way of just not coming up with a username.
Also remember sezyou, or whatever it was.
Perhaps I’m just a skeptical asshole but I’m starting to think that nothanks is probably not who he is claiming to be. Very similar to umkay, his story is believable enough (he’s not claiming to be the Queen of England) that it doesn’t outrightly seem impossible that such a person is posting here, but he’s interesting enough of a guy (an olympian, even one who didn’t get a medal), that he’s going to suck a lot of people in.
Compounded with a recent join date and the fact that ALL of his posts have been in an “Ask the two-time olympian” thread (unless my search skills really suck), I’m thinking the probability that he is a troll is pretty high.
I don’t hang out in athletic circles, and I know at least a dozen Olympians, two of whom won gold. Not to diminish the accomplishment, but it’s not that huge a deal.
It’s not like he’s pretending to be Usain Bolt. Sometimes the services of a Troll-Finder General are necessary, but this doesn’t seem like such an occasion.
Yeah, I have my suspicions too. None of them logical of course. So I’ll reserve judgement. Unless it comes to light that he is a fraud. Then I can say: I KNEW IT!!
Come to think of it, so do I, especially when I lived in the Czech Republic. Several friends of mine were on the bobsled team, one was a coworker. Another guy I used to share an office with (in the U.S.) was a former world record holder in the pole vault.
I met Ditta Constantina, the women’s gold medalist in the Marathon in Beijing. She seemed pretty normal and approachable, though she had a distinct bursting-with-internal-energy-glow thing going on that was pretty neat-o.
I run into a professional triathalete on a regular basis. She claims to drink a lot of beer. She has the glow thing going on too and is very attractive.
I’m hardly a celebrity myself, and I can think of two people in my own world like this, so I guess I am saying I am another data point saying the guy’s claims are not too implausible. If you spent all your time training for sports, what kind of thread would you start if not ‘ask the Olympian’?
My sister married a guy whose daughter’s leg was splinted by the dad of an Olympic speed skater.
But that’s as close as I’ve gotten… where are you people running into all these Oly’s? Or do you just randomly yell out “Okay, anybody in this library been in the Olympics?”
I was in college with an Olympic rower (he was a grad student and a coach, rather than on the school’s team). He was very quiet about it, and I’d known him for at least a year before I found out. It did make me feel better about losing every physical contest we ever engaged in (we did a lot of field work together, and there was a fair amount of sitting and waiting).
Regardless of how he came about his knowledge of the Olympics, and the rarity or lack thereof of Olympic athletes, I found myself wondering how a first-time poster even knew to start an “Ask the …” thread. He got it in the right forum on the first try and seems to be able to form sentences properly. He didn’t claim to be a longtime lurker like most people who start their first thread do, and he hasn’t posted in any other threads. Maybe I’m a skeptical asshole too, but that all looks suspicious to me.
I remember seeing him! He did this complicated dismount, landed hard, and we all thought he’d sprained an ankle. But he straightened up, saluted the stands, and let forth a hearty “Regards, Shodan!”