Phelps Wins Olympic Gold No. 2 as India Gets First

Aug. 11 (Bloomberg) -- A last-gasp relay victory maintained Michael Phelps's bid for a record eight Olympic titles in Beijing as five more world records fell in swimming and India got its first individual gold medal in Games history.

Jason Lezak overtook Alain Bernard of France with his final stroke to win the 400-meter freestyle relay for the U.S. team and keep Phelps on course to surpass Mark Spitz's one-Games record of seven gold medals in 1972.

``It was unbelievable, Jason finished the race better than we could have asked for,'' Phelps told reporters at the Water Cube pool after winning his second gold medal at the Beijing Games. ``Jason in the last 50 was incredible.''

The relay win helped give the U.S. 12 total medals, one less than China, which heads the medals table with 13, including eight golds. China, hosting its first Olympics, is trying to end the U.S. run of three medal-topping Games. The U.S. has captured three gold medals in Beijing.

The winning relay time of 3 minutes, 8.24 seconds chopped almost four seconds off the world record the U.S. team set in qualifying yesterday. It also left Phelps within one win of tying the mark of nine career gold medals held by Spitz, Carl Lewis, Paavo Nurmi and Larissa Latynina. The 23-year-old races in the 200 freestyle tomorrow.

Records Abound

Japan's Kosuke Kitajima retained the 100 breaststroke gold in a world-record time of 58.91 seconds and can collect his fourth career Olympic title if he wins the 200 breaststroke.

``My performance was perfect and ideal,'' Kitajima, 25, told reporters. ``I would have been baffled if you do not say that was perfect.''

Australia's Libby Trickett won the women's 100 butterfly for her second career gold and Britain's Rebecca Adlington took the 400 freestyle for her first.

World records also went to Australia's Eamon Sullivan, whose relay lead-off leg of 47.24 seconds broke Bernard's mark and helped secure the bronze, and to Kirsty Coventry of Zimbabwe in a women's 100 backstroke semifinal.

Italy's Federica Pellegrini later broke the women's 200 freestyle in the evening heats, winning in 1:55.45 to shave 0.07 seconds off Frenchwoman Laure Manaudou's mark.

On Target

Abhinav Bindra wrote his name into Indian sports folklore by winning the men's 10-meter air rifle competition and upsetting silver medalist Zhu Qinan of China. He is the first athlete from his country of 1.1 billion people to win an individual gold medal in the 112 years of the Olympic Games.

``I was not thinking too much, I just tried to shoot well,'' Bindra, 25, told reporters at the Beijing Shooting Hall after ending a 28-year gold-medal wait since India's winning field hockey team at the Moscow Games.

China clinched its seventh gold medal when favorites Lin Yue and Huo Liang took the synchronized 10-meter platform title, aided by a messed-up attempt from their main Russian rivals in the second-last round that was met by cheers in the Water Cube.

The eighth gold came when Chen Yanqing won the 58-kilogram weightlifting title with an Olympic record combined total of 244 kilograms. That made her the first women's weightlifter to successfully defend an Olympic title.

by:Grant Clark

Source:http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news

Olympic torch relay begins final leg

BEIJING, Aug. 6 (Xinhua) -- The Olympic torch relay began its final leg in Beijing from the landmark Forbidden City Wednesday morning.

At the Meridian Gate of the Forbidden City, the torch was handed over to the first bearer, Yang Liwei, the country's first astronaut, by Liu Qi, president of the Beijing Organizing Committee of the 29th Olympic Games (BOCOG).

The Olympic flame will travel in the Olympic host city for three days joined by a total of 841 torch bearers.

On its first day, the torch will travel 16.4 km in just over four hours through seven districts, passing city landmarks, including Tian'anmen Square, the egg-shaped National Center for the Performing Arts and Qianmen (the Southern Gate). It will end at the Temple of Heaven.

Among the 433 bearers, there are big names and ordinary people. Yao Ming, China's most popular basketball star, was the ninth bearer.

Zhang Yimou, the famed film director and chief director of the Games' opening and closing ceremonies, will also bear the torch on Wednesday.

After being lit at the birthplace of the Olympic Games in Olympia, Greece on March 24, the 2008 Olympics torch traveled to Beijing on March 31 for a ceremonial kick-off of its global trip.

Under the theme "Journey of Harmony," the relay lasted 129 days and took the torch 137,000 km through six continents, the longest distance of any Olympic torch relay since the tradition started at the 1936 Berlin Games.

Source:http://en.beijing2008.cn/news/

The flame arrives in Beijing for Wednesday's Torch Relay

(BEIJING, August 5) -- The sacred flame arrived in Beijing on Tuesday, August 5 at 4:20 p.m. for the last leg of the 2008 Torch Relay before the official start of the Games. The sacred flame will tour China's capital city from August 6-8.

Source: http://en.beijing2008.cn/news/

Beijing Olympic Torch Relay in Tangshan winds up

(BEIJING, July 31) -- Chen Guoying, mayor of Tangshan, lit the cauldron at Caofeidian Island Hotel Square at 12:05 on Thursday, bringing the Tangshan leg of the Olympic Torch Relay to an end. This is also the last stop for the sacred flame in Hebei Province.
The torch relay in Tangshan was divided into two stages. 59 torchbearers participated in the first part, which spanned 2.7 kilometers. This section of the relay followed a theme of all-round relief efforts and goodwill for Wenchuan County of Sichuan Province, which was devastated by an earthquake on May 12. A few of these torchbearers were selected from the numerous model workers who had served at rescue operations in Sichuan and elsewhere.
The second part, covering 7.4 kilometers with 149 torch bearers, was carried out at Caofeidian Industrial Zone, a promising large-scale industrial area still under construction.
Another highlight of the Torch Relay in Tangshan was that many torchbearers were former Olympic or world champions. Among them were Qian Hong (Women's 100 meter Butterfly champion, 1992 Olympic Games), Niu Jianfeng (Women's Singles champion, 2003 ITTF Professional Tournament), Yun Yanhong (46kg champion, 1994 World Women's Weightlifting Tournament), and Wang Kenan (3m Springboard Men's Doubles champion, 2004 World Cup Diving).
Tianjin will host the next leg of the Torch Relay on August 1.

Source:http://en.beijing2008.cn/news/

Olympic swimmer Shanteau has testicular cancer

By PAUL NEWBERRY, AP National Writer

ATLANTA (AP)—When Eric Shanteau touched the wall second at the U.S. Olympic trials, he was overcome by the joy of reaching a lifelong goal.
The celebration didn’t last long.
Shanteau had barely locked up his trip to Beijing when he was forced to deal with a gut-wrenching choice: Should he have surgery for the testicular cancer hardly anyone knew about? Or, should he put it off for another month so he could swim at his first Olympics?
Shanteau chose the Olympics. Surgery will have to wait.
In an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, Shanteau said he learned just a week before leaving for the U.S. Olympic trials that he has cancer.
“I was sort of like, ‘This isn’t real. There’s no way this is happening to me right now,”’ he said by telephone from the team’s pre-Beijing training camp in California. “You’re trying to get ready for the Olympics, and you just get this huge bomb dropped on you.”
His doctors cleared him to compete at the trials in Omaha, Neb., determining he wouldn’t be at great risk to delay treatment. Then, Shanteau surprisingly made the team in the 200-meter breaststroke, finishing second ahead of former world-record holder and heavy favorite Brendan Hansen.
He’s putting off surgery until after the Olympics because it would keep him out of the water for at least two weeks, ruining his Beijing preparations. The 24-year-old Georgia native will be monitored closely over the next month by U.S. Olympic team doctors and vows to withdraw if there’s any sign his cancer is spreading.
“If I didn’t make the team, the decision would have been easy: Go home and have the surgery,” said Shanteau, who grew up in suburban Atlanta. “I made the team, so I had a hard decision. But, by no means am I being stupid about this.”
Still, there are no guarantees.
“With any cancer, you want to find it early and treat it early for the best outcome,” Dr. Brett Baker, the Austin, Texas-based urologist who delivered the news to Shanteau, said Friday. “That was my recommendation. It’s difficult to say in his scenario what to expect. The risk, of course, is that time is an opportunity for disease progression.”
Seeking out advice from team doctors and other outside experts, Shanteau came up with own plan. He will have his blood tested once a week and a CT scan done every two weeks through the Olympics, hoping that will be enough to keep a handle on the disease.
“If something comes up abnormal,” he said, “then that’s kind of a barrier I shouldn’t cross.”
In most cases of this type, Baker said it’s impossible to know for sure exactly what type of testicular cancer the patient has—or, even the very slight chance that it’s not cancer at all—until the tumor is removed surgically for a biopsy.
“Sometimes, the best decisions are not always exactly the way the doctor sees it,” Baker said. “I don’t consider him crazy at all. I think if he’s happy and content with playing it out this way, that’s the most important thing.”
If Shanteau can’t compete, the Americans would add Scott Usher as their second swimmer in the 200 breast. The third-place finisher in Omaha was told of Shanteau’s condition the day after the race and encouraged to keep training.
“I’ve been trying to play in my head what I would do in his situation,” Usher said Friday before heading to a solo training session at Purdue University. “I don’t know if I would have taken the same route he has, to be honest. … Cancer is not something you want to mess around with.”
It was found after Shanteau noticed an abnormality and was finally persuaded by his girlfriend to see a doctor in Austin, where he trains on a star-studded team that includes Hansen, Ian Crocker and Aaron Peirsol.
On June 19, exactly one week before he was scheduled to leave for the trials, Shanteau heard that awful word.
Cancer.
“It almost numbed me,” he said. “I’ll remember that day for the rest of my life. Talk about a life-changing experience. That’s as big a one as you can have, I think. You’re changed for the rest of your life.”
If everything had gone according to expected script in Omaha, Shanteau would have already gone through surgery and be on the road to recovery. But the improbable happened in the 200 breaststroke, where Hansen—considered a lock to make the team—faded badly on the final lap. Scott Spann powered by to win the race, and Shanteau passed Hansen as well to claim the second spot on the team.
Shanteau was going to the Olympics.
But his thoughts quickly shifted to the cancer.
“A lot of people kept asking me after that race, ‘What was going on? We thought we would get a little more reaction out of you,”’ he said. “That kind of made it a little bittersweet. It went well. I made the team. Then I had to go back and deal with reality.”
Only a few close friends and family knew about Shanteau’s condition before the Olympic trials. He decided to go public with his story because he hopes to inspire others with cancer.
According to the National Cancer Institute, testicular cancer is relatively rare, accounting for 1 percent of male cancer cases in the U.S. It’s often diagnosed in younger men. About 8,000 men are diagnosed and 390 die from the disease each year.
The cancer is usually slow to spread and highly treatable, but follow-up care is extremely important because of the risk of recurrence, the NCI said. Surgery to remove the affected testicle is the most common form of treatment.
Mark Schubert, head coach and general manager of the U.S. team, supports Shanteau’s decision to swim in Beijing.
“Eric is handling this situation with courage and poise, and his decisions to compete at the Olympics and to share his story for the benefit of others, are evidence of that courage,” Schubert said. “While we are hopeful that he will be able to compete, Eric’s heath remains the absolute top priority.”
Shanteau’s camp already has heard from the agent of Lance Armstrong, who overcame the same disease and won the Tour de France seven straight times.
“Lance’s agent told my coaches that I’m the closest thing to Lance Armstrong that there is on the planet right now,” Shanteau said. “If I can have a fraction of the impact that he’s had, just a tiny little bit, then I think what I’m going through will be good.”
Up to now, Shanteau’s biggest international accomplishment was finishing fifth in the 200 breaststroke at last year’s world championships in Australia. He faces long odds to make the medal stand in Beijing, having posted only the ninth-fastest time in the world this year.
“Making the Olympic team was the hard part,” he said. “The Olympic Games should be fun. I’m not worried about swimming fast there.”
At the trials, Shanteau couldn’t help but think about his disease when outside the pool. He put it aside as soon as he entered the water, however.
He expects it will be the same in Beijing.
“I want the swimming aspect so badly,” Shanteau said. “I know what I’m risking … but it’s basically just a longer recovery time. After the Olympics, I’ll have nothing but time. That’s why it wasn’t too hard to make this decision.”

Source: Yahoo! sports.