YES. THANK YOU. Finally, someone gets it. (Wow, I finally found a use for the quote function! :))
Well, the coverage isn’t quite over here in late-late time zone land, but for us, the answer to the OP is a resounding outstanding. Check it out: most golds and silvers, second most bronzes. There are a few tiny quibbles, most notably with the womens’ 4x100 relay (I’m willing to concede that there’s a possibility of wrongdoing, at the same time conceding that there’s a snowball’s chance in Kilauea Crater that any of them will ever get busted), but in all, our side kicked butt.
I’m glad for this, not out of nationalistic fervor (which died roughly two minutes into NBC’s '96 telecast), but because the issue is finally settled now and we can start talking about something else now. One of the most irritating things about Beijing was the idea that “everyone other than the United States agrees that China came out on top”. This bizarre sucking up to China (especially after all the pollution and human rights issues got completely swept under the rug) was aggravating. Well, folks, the country which invented reality TV and and turned the NFL draft into a sacred ritual and foist the Kardashians onto an unsuspecting world just aced the Olympics, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
At the same time, it’s a sobering wake-up call to China that the party is over and that the almighty capital-see Communism is no longer the free ride it once was. Let’s not sugarcoat it here. If the goal was to win the most gold medals, or simply the most medals, or get the best result according to some points system (and I’m perfectly fine with 4-2-1): fail, fail, and fail. They corralled the best athletes they could find, worked them to the gills, favored events where their natural agility and body control gave them an advantage, and constantly drove home a win win win mentality*…and it wasn’t enough. The lesson is clear: If you’re going to compete in the Olympics, it had better be for a reason other than outdoing the most driven, merciless sports machine in the world. Buddy, we don’t need Chairman Mao cracking the whip or ponying up the bucks; we do just fine on our own, thank you very much.
Hey, how about that clean sweep by the men’s basketball team? What a thrill ride that was, especially after the debacle of 2004 and all the talk about how our dominance was over and the rest of the world had caught up. Guess what, folks, an inch or a mile, every win counts the same. If anything, the rest of the world should be even more intimidated now, because they don’t have much room to improve. I just looked it up: Since 1948, a total of 17 Olympiads, we’ve only legitimately failed to win the gold twice (1972 was a robbery and 1980 was a boycott), 1988 and 2004. '88 was, of course, the last year we used amateurs and what really drove home the folly of that. '04, as far as I can tell, was just lousy timing; IIRC we had almost no actual superstar-caliber players and there was some serious morale and attitude issues.
Be interesting to see just what spin the various nations put on Rio now that the biggest storyline has a big coffin nail in it. Maybe now we can focus on individual athletes and events. Would definitely look forward to that.
- And again, I concede that doping may have also been a part of it, and possibly for Jamaica’s success in sprint events too, although it’s so prevalent at this point that there’s no point in singling out any one country.