Irish boxer Kenny Egan is in the light heavyweight final against Xiaoping Zhang as I type. Naturally, I can't see it live in this country ... instead I get to see a bunch of overpaid millionaires play basketball against Spain. Here's hoping the Spaniards win.
Best I can do is follow the fight round by round on RTE (video not allowed outside Ireland, damn it!). We've two bronze medals already this Olympics (for boxing). A gold would be nice, given that it's only the fifth time in Olympic history that an Irish boy has made a boxing final.
Update: End of round 1 ... Egan is down 2-0.
Update: End of round 2 ... Egan down 5-3.
Update: End of round three ... he's down 7-5. There's still hope but he's going to have to give it everything. A win here would be Ireland's first gold since 1992.
Update: And it's over. 11-7. No doubt the home crowd is going wild.
That last round clearly didn't help. Maybe I'll get to see it sometime tomorrow.
A silver is good. Over the years we've won nine gold, twenty-two silver, and 16 bronze (not including the ones when we were, ahem, "Great Britain & Ireland"), so the extra medals wont hurt.
And while I'm at it ...
The IOC ranks nations by the number of gold medals won. The US ranks by number of medals. I wonder why? Sorry folks ... China is winning, and by a long shot.
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You might want to read the BBC's live coverage. To give you an indication of their views on the fight, this is the comment on the following bout:
I think the lack of coverage might have been a blessing in disguise.
Being British, I don't mind which way they score the medals: we're still above the Aussies.
You could try the Channel 4 (GB) alternative orders.
Order by population, GDP, Human rights, Olympic or US style.
@Bob: Really? See what Snowflake writes about it...
http://scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts/2008/08/the_real_olympic_perfo…
Yes, Lassi, I saw that. You see he has to fudge the figures. And also see where Estonia is (and they keep on winning the wife-carrying).
As far back as I can recall, the US as always done total medals.
Why is China so far out of balance on gold medals?
German television quotes Egan as having said; "The only way I could have won this fight was to knock out the points judge!"
Once upon a time I held out the hope that nations would send their best amateurs to compete in the Olympics out of a spirit of friendly competition. Once upon a time I thought that differences between nations could be set aside for a brief space of time. And then I saw the tragic ending of the 1972 Munich games. Are the Olympics really anything more than hype and merchandising anymore ?