Random Olympic Thoughts

• Why do swimmers get the opportunity to win medals for different swimming styles, like the breast stroke, the butterfly or back stroke? It's like giving track & field athletes the opportunity to win medals for doing the 100m whilst hopping, mincing or moonwalking.
• Laban Tall discovers Times columnist Matthew Syed rehashing a piece he wrote last year almost line for line, with just a plagiarised paragraph to change things since last year.

• Syed's column was a critique of Jon Entine's theory, that he explained in his book "Taboo: Why Blacks Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk about it" that black people are better natural athletes than white people. The book includes this priceless paragraph:

"When stripped of the drug factor, what appears in the history books as a decades-long duel between European and African American female sprinters has been a fraud. Black female sprinters are a cut above, much like their male counterparts. Marion Jones is the indisputable top female sprinter...the epitome of an elite athlete...gifted with the explosive speed and jumping ability that mark the prototypical athlete with West African ancestry.... Although she now trains feverishly, Jones is as close to being a born athlete as exists in sprinting."

• What sort of people tell a little girl that she's being kicked out of her role in the Olympic opening ceremony because she isn't attractive enough? Chinese communists that's who.
• Isn't it sad that despite a British competitor putting in thousands of hours of hard work in order to win a canoing silver, he will still be less famous than John "Canoe Man" Darwin.
• Is spell check right to insist that "Canoing" is the correct spelling and "Canoeing" is wrong?