All Hail Bolt and the Slovenians..

Further to my last post, I would now like to say with some certainty that Usain Bolt is indeed the greatest ever Olympian, in my opinion. Certainly he is the greatest of these games. I have very puplicly made it clear how annoyed I am getting at the Phelps hype, especially living in the States. However the truth is I think what he has done is very very impressive, and he still seems like a good chap. But when I remember the 2008 Olympic games, I will only remember Bolts runs.





Is it not easier to get more medals in swimming then athletics? I think so. The problem I have is that there are four races of each distance available to an athlete, all four using a different technique to reach the finish. Your arms and legs move a different way in each, and the way you turn around is different too. You also enter the water a different way.





There is only one way Bolt can get gold in 100m. He can not run backwards, or skip, or run without bending his knees. I dare say he would have got more medals then Phelps had he been able to. There are more ways to move through water then there are to move on land.





However, none of this takes away what Phelps has achieved after all, its not his fault the events are designed differently.








Another though I had when looking at the medals table, was the proportion of medals to population. I thought of this because GB are now 3rd in the medals table, behind only the international juggernauts of the USA and China. With this in mind I sought to come up with a medals table were the number of people available to a country is reflected in the medals table. Below is what I cam up with; (i am not yet skilled enough in HTML code to work out how to remove the enormous gap between this text and the table, you just have to scroll down LOADS)

Country	Medals	Population
Chinese Taipei	2		0.00
Slovenia	5	2029000	405800.00
NZ	8	4274800	534350.00
Jamaica	5	2714000	542800.00
Armenia	5	3002000	600400.00
Australia	35	21394309	611265.97
Estonia	2	1340600	670300.00
Bahrain	1	760168	760168.00
Belarus	11	9690000	880909.09
Denmark	6	5489022	914837.00
Norway	5	4778500	955700.00
Cuba	11	11268000	1024363.64
Lithuania	3	3361100	1120366.67
Netherlands	13	16445000	1265000.00
Mongolia	2	2629000	1314500.00
T&T	1	1333000	1333000.00
Slovakia	4	5402273	1350568.25
Georgia	3	4395000	1465000.00
Switzerland	5	7637300	1527460.00
Azerbaijan	5	8467000	1693400.00
Finalnd	3	5318105	1772701.67
GB	33	60587300	1835978.79
Bulgaria	4	7640238	1910059.50
Kazakhstan	8	15422000	1927750.00
Hungary	5	10043000	2008600.00
S.Korea	24	48224000	2009333.33
Czech Rep	5	10403136	2080627.20
France	29	64473140	2223211.72
Latvia	1	2268000	2268000.00
Croatia	2	4555000	2277500.00
Cananda	13	33350000	2565384.62
Kyrgyzstan	2	5317000	2658500.00
Romania	8	21438000	2679750.00
Ukraine	17	46059306	2709370.94
Austria	3	8340924	2780308.00
Germany	28	82191000	2935392.86
Sweden	3	9215021	3071673.67
Italy	19	59619290	3137857.37
Zimbabwe	4	13349000	3337250.00
Panama	1	3343000	3343000.00
Russia	42	141888900	3378307.14
Greece	3	11147000	3715666.67
USA	79	304900000	3859493.67
Singapore	1	4588600	4588600.00
Kenya	8	37538000	4692250.00
Poland	8	38115967	4764495.88
Serbia	2	9858000	4929000.00
Spain	9	46063000	5118111.11
Japan	22	127690000	5804090.91
Togo	1	6585000	6585000.00
Tajikistan	1	6736000	6736000.00
Uzbekistan	4	27372000	6843000.00
DPR Korea	6	48224000	8037333.33
Tunisia	1	10327000	10327000.00
Portugal	1	10623000	10623000.00
Ecuador	1	13341000	13341000.00
Chile	1	16763470	16763470.00
Algeria	2	33858000	16929000.00
China	76	1325600000	17442105.26
Cameroon	1	18549000	18549000.00
Argentina	2	40301927	20150963.50
Colombia	2	44513090	22256545.00
Turkey	3	70586256	23528752.00
Ethiopia	3	79221000	26407000.00
Malaysia	1	27170000	27170000.00
Morocco	1	31224000	31224000.00
Brazil	6	187495000	31249166.67
Indonesia	5	231627000	46325400.00
S.Africa	1	47850700	47850700.00
Thiland	1	63038247	63038247.00
Iran	1	70495782	70495782.00
Egypt	1	75212000	75212000.00
Vietnam	1	87375000	87375000.00
Mexico	1	106682500	106682500.00
India	1	1136876600	1136876600.00

So as you can see, it is the humble Slovenians who deserve the most praise in these games. I couldn't find a population stat for Chinese Taipei, but unless they have a population of 800k or less, they won't take top spot. I simply took the population of a country and divided it by the number of total medals won by that same county. The final column shows the number of people in that counrty for every medal won. Of course this table doesn't tell the whole story. There are funding issues within certain countries, as well as political ones which make them unable to compete to the level that they are capable of. Nevertheless, it still makes interesting reading.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/olympics/2008/08/is_phelps_really_the_greatest.html

Uncanny.

Next

My fan recently informed me that its been 2 months since my last post, which isn't very impressive. So allow me to update you;

The summer is so nearly over and its been pretty busy.

If you'll permit me, I would like to briefly discuss the weather, which has been fantastic. Its so incredibly refreshing to just know that tomorrow will be another shorts, t-shirt and sandals day. Its the American dream isn't it? Or at least what it appears like on Dawsons Creek. Ask your older sister.

But whilst its positively thrilling to be in America when the sun is out, it is quite the opposite once the Olympics start. The coverage on TV is pretty decent, its on most of the day. The problem is that they just win everything, and they know it. And I'll confess that whilst I am a fan, the Micheal Phelps thing is starting to get a little annoying. I scoffed when ABC refered to him as the 'greatest Olympian', but when the same thing was said on the BBC website, it got me thinking as to what exactly makes someone the greatest Olympian?

Now, naturally I'm very biased, but Steve Redgrave won 5 golds in 5 Olympics spanning 16 years, which to me is far more impressive. He has stayed at the top of the world for 16 years in a much much tougher sport. The same argument is often seen in football when talking about the best ever players. No doubt there have been many better defenders then Paulo Maldini, but he has been playing consistently for one of the top teams in the world for 20 years.

So is the greatest Olympian judged on consistency or medals tally? It is here were I will have to concede defeat. All my arguments for Steve Redgrave are subjective, they are opinion, open to endless debate. Micheal Phelps has cold hard numbers on his side, more gold medals then anyone else, and for that reason alone I'm afraid its too hard to argue against him being the greatest. Not in my opinion though, and he'll also never be a knight!

Everyone is getting rather excited over here for the start of the 'real football' season, as am I, although we mean different things. The Seahawks kick off their season this Saturday and there is a small chance I might go see them against Chicago. If not though its no big deal as there 5, FIVE! televised Premiership games this weekend, 4 of which are crap, but I'll watch them anyway.

Finally on a more social note, tonight sees the start of 4 straight evenings of parties. Granted most of them are for people who are leaving, but no matter, they are parties none the same.
The first is this evening for a girl who is leaving, the second is tomorrow evening for the whole staff I think, and the third is a little unique. It is a pool party. Don't ask, I don't really know but it will give me something to talk about in my next blog. Finally there is one on Saturday for another girl who is leaving which I may not be able to attend if I get seahawks tickets.

And I really don't want to be a blog spoil sport but it takes so long to put pictures in that I'm not going to bother. The advise from blog websites is to always do it it make you blog 'interesting' but I'm hoping to make up for it with stunning entertaining writing.

Good day