20th August 2012, 9:52 PM
I didn't see much of the Summer Olympics but I did see the Canada vs. USA women's soccer semi-finals and that was one of the most frustrating cheats I've ever seen in my entire life. I pretty much lost faith after that. I've followed the women's soccer team pretty closely and having it ripped away from them in such an obviously unfair fashion was just too much, especially after Christine Sinclair, who's the best soccer player in the world, gave one of the best performances in the history of the game. It's just not right. I was hoping that Spain would beat the USA in the men's gold medal basketball game as a way of kind of balancing out the universe but that unfortunately didn't happen. Fortuna hath befallen us all. The universe is in disarray. Beyond that, Canada almost won bronze in the 4x100m relay, but after the scores were initially posted and the runners were all draped in Canadian flags, it was found out that one of the runners put his pinky toe on the inside line and they were disqualified. My God was that ever incredibly disappointing, especially when it looked to everybody that they'd already medalled. It appeared that Canada had found its way back into the sprinting scene, but nope. (As an aside, Canada has a good-and-bad history in sprinting; you might recall Ben Johnson set the 100m world record at the '88 Seoul Olympics but later had the record revoked and his medal stripped after he tested positive for steroids. Worse still, the gold medal went to Carl Lewis, and the two of them were pretty strong rivals. Later in '96 in Atlanta Donovan Bailey set the Olympic and World Records in the 100m - the Olympic record remained until Usain Bolt beat it in '08. At the time there was a very intense rivalry between American Michael Johnson [200m and 400m champion] and Donovan Bailey. For an interesting read, check out this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey–John...metre_race). Also, Canada's flag-bearer Simon Whitfield, who won gold in the triathalon in 2000 (his victory is one of the all-time greatest moments in Canadian Summer Olympics history) and silver in '08 crashed his bike during this year's triathalon and didn't even finish the race. Ouch. I think my home country ended up winning a single gold medal, in the Trampoline. We're all very proud of her, but all-in-all, this was a very frustrating Olympics and I'm almost glad I didn't have all the time I normally have to watch them.