Random Post-Olympic Thoughts

• Please forgive me, but I can't think of table tennis, water polo or beach volleyball as sports (no matter how much our female medalists love W.) They say what makes water polo exciting is the fighting going on underwater. Then show us that, for heaven's sake. Otherwise, I can't bear to see grown men bobbing around in those silly caps.
  
• When did divers become so freakishly stringy? The horrors of over-refined training, I think. They used to be the most aesthetically pleasing of all athletes.
• Taking nothing away from Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt, my favorite moment was when the Aussie denied the gold medal in platform diving to the Chinese. The judges' scoring was so obviously anti-American (not that our guys would have medaled, necessarily, but when the Norwegian judge gives you a 9 and the Venezuelan judge a 7, routinely --and when the calculus is reversed for Chinese divers making obvious mistakes, it gets old) that I felt a little frisson of the Cold-War-era rivalry. Yay, a free country won, in spite of judicial favoritism. The Chinese were expected to sweep all eight diving events, but Matthew Mitcham denied them.