Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Who's Up and Who's Down

Who's Up? :)

1.
The Canadian Olympic Team: It was looking tense there for the first week, but in the end, Canada had a very successful Olympic games with many fantastic story lines. If I had to identify three things I'll remember from these games, they'll be Simon Whitfield's silver medal in the triathlon (the one moment that actually caused me to yell at my television), Eric Lamaze's gold medal in show jumping, and all the Canadian athletes who broke Canadian records and set personal bests, though may not have medalled. GO CANADA!

2. Natalia Paderina and Nino Salukvadze: In my view, the most important story of the Beijing Games.

3. Vijay Singh and Sergio Garcia: The pair of them got the FedEx Cup Playoffs started in an exciting way, with matching 25-ft putts on the first sudden-death playoff hole at the Barclay's this week. Anybody who watched Sergio's gigantic grin and playful shove to his opponent after Vijay sunk his putt could tell that these two were having a little fun out there.

Who's Down? :(


1. Posted without comment:

2. The New York Yankees: Any opportunity to include them on this list... The Yankees are not looking like a playoff-bound team, and the Steinbrenner siblings can't seem to figure out how they feel about it, with one brother announcing that he's looking to next year and the other stating that the Yanks are still in it. Bums, the lot of them.

3. The LPGA: The Ladies Tour is desperate to stay alive, and didn't do itself any favours this week by releasing news that it will now require players on the tour to speak English. There are approximately 73 ways that the tour could have approached the issue of player-sponsor communication, and this was the worst of the options. That this will be a RULE, and that players will potentially be prevented from playing if they don't meet the tour's standards, reeks of discrimination, heavy-handedness, desperation and short-sightedness. Think of it this way... would the PGA ever tell Camillo Villegas that he couldn't play because his English isn't good? I don't think so...

2 comments:

Julie said...

I'm not very knowledgable about sports stuff. But that guy kicking the ref in the face?? He deserved to be banned for life.

Patrick C said...

The LPGA's language thing is a bit... strange.

On the other hand, at least one of the big Greek soccer clubs (AEK Athens, maybe?) requires players coming up through its youth program to be fluent in FIVE languages before they play for the first team!