| August 7 |
- Beijing 2008: The blog
- Meet the four scribblers, including author John Krich and former national gymnastics champ Jennifer Sey, who'll bring you Salon's take on the games.
- 1960: The birth of today's games
- An interview with David Maraniss, whose new book argues that many current Olympic issues can trace their roots to Rome.
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| August 8 |
- Clip and save: SPOILER ALERT
- If you don't want to know who won that event you're planning to watch later, don't come around here.
- Why are gymnasts so young?
- Half of the Chinese "women" may be under the minimum age of 16. Something's wrong when you have to be a kid to win.
- The "bitter sea" of Chinese life
- Our correspondent returns to Beijing for the games -- and finds the same old dreary place.
- You control the vertical
- With 3,600 hours of coverage planned from Beijing, you get to decide what to watch -- and what to skip.
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| August 9 |
- Why watching the Olympics is torture for me
- As a former top gymnast, I know what it feels like to stand on a 4-inch-wide plank, carrying the world on your 16-year-old shoulders.
- An opening that keeps the door shut
- Filmmaker Zhang Yimou's minimalist update on the mass rallies of old fails to illuminate the modern society China is trying to build.
- Breakfast of also-rans
- What do McDonald's, Budweiser and other advanced nutritional supplements have to do with the Olympics?
- Show the games live
- NBC can't keep getting away with delaying the events we want to see for 12 to 15 hours.
- A view of a killing
- The reaction to the fatal attack on American tourists in Beijing is very different from the U.S. response to the 1996 Atlanta bombing.
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| August 10 |
- No way in
- With 1.3 billion potential scalping customers, no scalpers and a bureaucratic snafu for press ducats, Olympic tickets are tough to come by.
- The pressure cooker
- In their different ways, the Olympic events on the dazzling first full day in Beijing showcased the ultimate athletic feat: Overcoming fear.
- Let 'em eat steroids
- Plenty of legal and illegal things enhance performance. When I was a gymnast, I'd have taken any of either that would have made me better.
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| August 11 |
- Insecure security
- China's tight grip might be at odds with the Olympic ideal of togetherness, but it's been building high walls for centuries.
- Precision vs. power
- The scrappy American women's gymnasts captured my heart, but I'm rooting for the Chinese -- they need some joy in their lives.
- You want some freedom fries with your crow?
- A trash-talking frog is croaking today.
- Phelps: Eight is enough?
- The swimmer is gaining on the all-time gold-medal record. But he's really excited about a football jersey.
- Sports vs. schmaltz
- The ultimate combat sport of the modern Olympics is action battling features for TV time. Schlock, in retreat for a while, has rallied.
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| August 12 |
- The other marathon: Getting around Beijing
- It's not just athletes, but fans, who have to be in top shape for the Olympics.
- Milli Vanilli plays Beijing
- In cheating news, mini-scandals about deception at the Opening Ceremonies have replaced drug busts. For now.
- That moment
- Togo's first medal! Even if it's not "what the Olympics are all about," it's one of those great things that help make the games.
- "No fear, no regret"
- In the men's team gymnastics final, no one lost.
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| August 13 |
- The beast
- As a former elite athlete, I turn into a horrible, condescending jerk when I watch the Olympics with armchair fans like you.
- Boxing: The point of absurdity
- American Rau'shee Warren's loss, crazy as it was, was business as usual in a sport that's been gutted by its scoring system.
- How did Team USA gymnastics get so good?
- What happened since the mid-1970s that turned the women's gymnastics program into the tour de force it has become? The Karolyis happened.
- The strange smile of George W. Bush
- Bush looked weirder than he ever has during his Bob Costas interview -- but he made more sense. Too bad it's too late.
- Asian athletes kick butt
- Sports are coming on strong in a region that has traditionally favored scholarship. Example: Thailand's prodigious women weightlifters.
- Good riddance, baseball
- Great sport, but the Olympics are right to give it the boot. Tennis should go too. But not softball.
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| August 14 |
- Phelps, Phelps, Phelps
- The American phenom has been annoyingly omnipresent. That's too bad, because there are other things happening, and because he's not annoying.
- Softball too: See ya
- As Yahoo's Dan Wetzel points out, the U.S. is the only country playing the sport at a high level.
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern aren't gold
- The two American gymnasts were bit players in the men's all-around finals. But NBC treated them like Hamlet.
- Clear the beach!
- Volleyball in sand. Skimpy outfits. Americans good. We get it. Can we have a little basketball on TV please?
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| August 15 |
- Watching Nastia's gold and Shawn's silver
- As a former elite gymnast myself, it's hard to watch Olympic competition. But then Nastia Liukin and Shawn Johnson blew me away.
- Grace under pressure, and over power
- It would have been great to see Shawn Johnson's explosive athleticism win the women's gymnastics gold.
- Get the names right
- NBC's lazy approach to pronunciation isn't limited to non-American athletes. The Peacock even butchers "Beijing."
- Why we identify with Olympic athletes
- Yes, their feats are unimaginable -- but they pull us up with them.
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| August 16 |
- A tale of two Beijings
- It wasn't the Red Army that killed feudalism -- it was the Olympics.
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| August 17 |
- The bluest day
- Sun shines bright on Beijing at last -- a perfect day for pure sport, beckoning all to party (and spend) within the Forbidden City.
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| August 18 |
- Short people got no reason to live
- It isn't enough that tall men get all the girls and win all the elections. After Usain Bolt's ridiculous world-record sprint, now we can't even run away from them anymore.
- 33 and fabulous
- The most astonishing event of the women's individual gymnastics event finals was turned in by a 33-year-old mom.
- Where have you gone, Allen Iverson?
- The U.S. men's return to basketball dominance is a lot less interesting than those fascinating days of dysfunction in Athens.
- The naked city
- Beijing's artists deserve a gold for the sheer wealth of their audacity and talent.
- Baseball gets chippy
- Six hit batsmen, two collisions, an injured catcher and a woozy top prospect. No wonder big-league teams want no part of the Olympics.
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| August 19 |
- Dare to struggle, dare to win!
- Nike darling Liu Xiang let down his nation. Shouldn't the poster boy for the new China have crawled across the finish line -- no matter what?
- Gymnastics tiebreakers are nuts!
- Crazy rules cost American Liukin a gold. Then again, all gymnastics rules are crazy, and sane ones wouldn't have helped her.
- Why do runners "shut it down"?
- Saving energy for the final is one thing, but slowing down before the tape in heats looks like a recipe for disaster.
- Memo to NBC gymnastics commentators: Shut up!
- Their overheated, U.S.-obsessed reaction to Monday night's uneven-bars final made America look like a banana republic.
- Mom favored for Sap-o-Meter gold
- Slate has a scientific method for measuring the mawkishness of NBC's coverage.
- Fool's gold
- The real question to ask after Liukin and He's routines: Why can't there be a tie?
- Paulie Walnuts has been located!
- The scary "Sopranos" mobster showed up in Beijing, cunningly disguised as an American pole-vault coach.
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| August 20 |
- The mystery of beach volleyball
- Those hand signals the women flash behind their butts: They must be explained. Again.
- Lolo Jones' Olympian failure
- Steps from gold, she clips a hurdle and falters, leading to an agony that's unique to the games.
- Sweet swift deities in spikes
- My day of track and field was glorious, but I long to turn the Olympics back to the purity of my boyhood dreams.
- Babe Ruth and the Nippon Ham Fighters
- NBC's baseball announcers make stuff up about both. And insult West Virginia for good measure.
- In defense of race-based rooting
- At the Olympics, you sometimes find yourself rooting for athletes because of their race. And that's OK.
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| August 21 |
- Hacker: Gymnast He is 14, not 16
- A blogger uses Google and a Chinese search engine to find government documents showing the uneven-bars champ's birth date as Jan. 1, 1994.
- Softball stunner
- After the second straight Olympics in which a U.S. women's team has been on the wrong side of a "miracle," it's time for women to try baseball
- Chasing the dragon
- For young stars like Shawn Johnson and Lolo Jones with their whole lives ahead of them, the Olympics are a tough act to follow.
- Running into history
- Usain Bolt's performance was the greatest individual athletic feat of our time.
- Rogge: Usain in the membrane
- The IOC chief criticizes the magnificent Bolt for celebrating. Is he an idiot or just crazy?
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| August 22 |
- All hail Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh!
- I love the American beach volleyball champions -- and it isn't just because they have great derrieres.
- The U.S. track team loses its grip
- In a nightmarish 30 minutes, the world's track powerhouse is humiliated -- while amazing little Jamaica laps it again.
- Hench items
- The U.S. track and field debacle and NBC's shabby treatment of the games' glamour event. Plus: Keri Walsh. And: Teddy Atlas.
- The Frodo smile of Laura Wilkinson
- The great diver's farewell look showed us all how to say goodbye.
- Really, honestly ...
- Enough with the diving, NBC.
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| August 23 |
- What I couldn't write in China
- Relative press freedom hasn't led to rampant muckraking, but it's not all smiles and "Have a great day!" beyond Olympic Beijing.
- What happened to the real Olympics?
- By only showing snippets of classic events like the decathlon, high jump and pole vaulting, NBC is missing what makes the Olympics special.
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| August 25 |
- Athletes are just people
- The outrage over Usain Bolt's chest-pounding proves that we expect athletes to be heroes -- and when they're not, we turn on them.
- Scoring the Beijing Olympics
- They get a 9 for pomp and spectacle, but only a 3 for furthering world understanding and a 2 for the fan experience.
- The eternal flame
- Like all the Olympics, the Beijing games leave us with abiding memories -- and a spark of inspiration.
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