FanNation

Ping pong diplomacy

There will be absolutely nothing diplomatic about the way China's table tennis stars summarily dispatch of the rest of the world at the Olympic tournament this year. Throughout the next few days I'll be highlighting the big Chinese stories of the Games - and we'll be doing all we can in Beijing to cover Team China in depth as well. China is reportedly bringing its largest-ever contingent of athletes to compete, and the one sport in which they're assured to boost their medals holdings of all colors is table tennis - pingpangqiu ("ping pong ball") in Mandarin.

Okay, I'm impressed

Last week I was a tad harsh on USA Track and Field for having taken so long to realize that the powers that be in the doping world are crooked coaches, not just dirty athletes, and that the coaches had to be banned well before they could amass large numbers of athletes who tested positive. Today in my email box, I received USTAF's response to Marion Jones' request to have her prison sentence commuted - a letter to President Bush urging him to reject her request. The response from USATF to the news was fast and unequivocal. Coming as it does under the helm of brand-new CEO Doug Logan, it's a welcome development. The full text of the letter is below; and of course all of us at SI will have much more to say about the developing stories in the world of performance-enhancing drugs as Beijing marches ever closer.

Dirk in tears; passport stamped to Beijing

On a day where we were bombarded with news items about the headaches the Olympic broadcasters are still going through to secure access to everything they need to do their jobs in Beijing, and a bus bombing in Kunming, Yunnan province, after months of warnings about possible terrorist threats to the Olympics, the one piece of good Olympics-related news had to do with a grown man crying.

There are definitely a few places where public crying is okay in my book (for both genders): wedding days, the birth of a baby, when the New York Giants upset the Patriots to win the Super Bowl in the last minute of the game, and when a bazillionaire NBA star who has done just about everything he could do in his sport has just qualified to compete in the Beijing Olympics. Dirk Nowitzki and the German national basketball team qualified for the Olympic tournament yesterday, the first time Germany will be there since Dirk was all of fourteen years old. There was just something lovely about seeing that for Dirk, as for many of his internationally-born-and-bred colleagues in the NBA, this game isn't all about money. (Note that I feel the same way about many of the American players; our men's national team in particular has grown leaps and bounds in positive attitude since Athens.) There really is something to this phenomenon of giving the best athletes in the world the opportunity to represent their countries in the greatest international sporting event in the world. For all of the negative press that these Olympics are generating outside of China, this was a good day to have a good story from one of the good guys in pro basketball. He's going to have a great time in Beijing, and something tells me that somewhere in a locker room in China where the Chinese national team is practicing, Yao Ming is smiling for his fellow seven-foot Texan-playing NBA superstar. Who, by the way, will play him when China matches up against Germany on August 16.

Dealing with injury

Injuries are a fact of life for professional athletes and even us weekend warriors – but when those injuries come just weeks before the biggest event of your life, it can be devastating.

I’m thinking of Abby Wambach today, the U.S. soccer player who was slated to be one of the stars of the Beijing Olympics but sustained a fracture to her tibia and fibula during the team’s Olympic tune-up match against Brazil on Wednesday. It’s painful to watch an athlete in prime condition go down – the crowd at the U.S. track Olympic Trials gasped loudly in shock when Olympic sprint favorite Tyson Gay toppled out of the 200-meter quarterfinals with what turned out to be a mild hamstring strain. Gay’s fortunate that qualified in the 100-meter event earlier in the Trials before sustaining his injury, or he would be out of Beijing as well due to the unforgiving nature of the qualify-or-stay-home nature of the track Trials. Paul Hamm is even more fortunate than Gay – his sport, gymnastics, allows for an athlete who can’t compete in the U.S. Olympic Trials to get a medical exemption as long as the athlete can demonstrate the fitness to compete by the time the Games arrive. (In Hamm’s case, the moment of truth is tomorrow, when he’ll participate in an intrasquad meet in front of the Olympic selection committee.) The same could be said for figure skater Michelle Kwan, who got a medical exemption to compete at the 2006 Olympics, which would have been her third Games. Sadly, she reinjured herself during her first practice session in Turin and had to withdraw.

USATF statement on Trevor Graham

I wish I could say I'm proud of USA Track and Field for the statement they issued yesterday regarding the lifetime ban of track coach Trevor Graham, whose athletes were caught up in doping scandals galore (including Marion Jones). But honestly, it feels like too little, too late. It was obvious to track insiders for a long time that corrupt coaches were the power players on the doping scene - not only in this country but others. (China, at least on paper, bans its coaches for life if just two of an athlete's coaches test positive for doping - though I've heard from track insiders on that side of the pond that those bans are not uniformly enforced.)