We’re all getting had:
If I want to go fast in the water I’ll get on a motorboat.
A conspiracy theory.
Those are rare.
The photo in your link shows Phelps winning.
Step back from the bong, dude.
Upon viewing the tape, the protesting Serbians agreed that Phelps had won.
Conspiracies aside, I pit Phelps because, I don’t know, 13 golds just seems… Greedy.
I think I’d be overjoyed with just one.
Milorad Cavic on his own blog:
More from Cavic here:
It doesn’t sound like Cavic is disputing the result and seems pretty happy just to have won the silver (his goal was to win bronze). There’s no conspiracy, but I think Cavic deserves props for pushing Phelps to the absolute limit that way. How many guys can say they came within a 100th of a second of beating Michael Phelps?
OK, so you guys have had a few sips of the Kool Aid. Enjoy the Olympics!
BTW, remember Liston not coming out of his corner in Miami even though he was winning and the punch that Ali landed on Liston in Lewiston, ME. It helps to have the opponent getting a piece of the future action of the anointed superstar which was the arrangement with Liston.
Too many miracles in Beijing for me but hey, it makes money.
How do you explain the photo?
The fact that the replay confirms Phelps’s win is sipping “the Kool Aid”? I have no idea what Ali and Liston has to do with Phelps and Beijing, but whatever dude.
He came within a 100th of a second of dead-heating with him. Let’s have it right.
OK, let’s ignore the photos and timer. Let’s pretend there was a conspiracy and consider the mechanics of * trying * to fix this race and make it convincing. There’s no way of knowing in advance what the finish would be like. So how would a time keeper look at that finish and decide, in the 0.01 second available to them, that they are going to throw the race to Phelps? The only way to do it would be to decide in the last few feet of the race that you were going to, say, delay one of the swimmer’s touch by a couple of thousandths of a second and, oh yeah, do it in such a way that the high speed cameras supported it. This would require super swift calculations and reflexes on a par with a Phelps’ own. And the * only * scenario in which it would even be possible (or useful) would be the one we saw – a virtual dead heat. Otherwise, the dozens of cameras focused on the finish would reveal the shenanigans. So your conspiracy theorist would have to assume that the time keepers and judges would be willing to risk disgrace and the shattering of Olympic credibility for the sake of Phelps, just in case this one very unlikely scenario occurred. Occam’s razor sez it’s easier to believe that Phelps out touched Cavic rather than there’s some insanely skilled conspiracy to throw the race.
(Looking at the photos of the finish, the only reason it even looks fishy is that Phelps seems to have touched first with his right hand and the view on TV was of his left which seemed to touch just slightly later than Cavic.)
And based on his comments, Cavic is a class act and I wish he had tied with Phelps for the gold. I think in most people’s minds, he did.
You do what typically happens when the fix is in. You show the guy that you can beat him then you pull up at the last instance. It’s been happening in horse racing and boxing since anybody place the first bet.
Remember the old LA Lakers? The first team to ever win the first 4 games of a 7 game series and still lose the series.
He doesn’t have to. He’s played the Conpiracy![sup]TM[/sup] card, and you have to prove that the result could not possibly be the result of a conspiracy.
Sheesh, didn’t you read the rules of the game?
(Of course, Finagle makes a good try to play by the rules, but I’m sure the Illuminati have the computers and mind-control lasers to perform the deeds he claims are improbable.)
On preview: Spartydog, are you seriously arguing, now, that it wasn’t jiggering by OMEGA’s timepiece, but that a human can judge a race closely enough to throw it by a hundredth of a second at the finish line?
I do want to add my admiration for Cavic. He’s proven himself to be a real class act.
Wait…they won 4 in a 7-game series, and then kept playing?
And then they somehow lost the other, uh…5?
You undermine your own argument with every post.
So which was it? Did Omega rig the wall? Or did Cavic get the payoff to pull up at the last second?
Did you guys get the super slow-mo of the finish at 15,000 frames per second? That will be one of my all time enduring sports memories. You wouldn’t write a script where the guy going for the equal record wins by the smallest measurable margin, but watching Cavic glide toward the wall as Phelps throws in the half stroke is just delicously agonizing. Phelps’s arms leave the water and inch by quarter inch catch up to the outstretched arms of Cavic. Fantastic.
How people can’t see the drama in sport often has me amazed.
Here is the super slow-mo from several angles. Even more amazing from underwater watching Phelps’s arms going backward to get the half stroke in. What guts.
Congratulations! If you had stuck to an evil scheme involving Phelps, Omega, NBC, and the IOC, you’d have a run-of-the-mill conspiracy theory no better or worse than LBJ, Cuba, and the Teamsters taking out JFK. But by apparently accusing another swimmer of the superhuman feat of throwing a race by 100th of a second, you’ve moved into X-Files territory.