Track Fans Only

First a rant. NBC sucks huge ones in their coverage. They have NO live blog of any of the night events tonight on the track and none of their videos or coverage are open if you live outside the US. I can understand the coverage not being open outside the US, but seriously no live blog. NBC you suck.

The good news is that Taiwanese tv carried the men's 10,000m live tonight. I saw the end of the race and it was great. A standard Ethiopian strategy of sitting on the Kenyans and making them work then unleashing a monster last lap. It was superhuman. The winner Kenenisa Bekele, ran a 53 second last lap. The guy was absolutely flying and he could have run faster but he took his foot off the gas with 30m to go when he was ahead of everyone. The sad part for Ethiopia was their legend, Geb, wasn't able to medal in his only event of the Games and finished in 6th place. For the US it was interesting, Galen Rupp (who I used to get beaten by in high school) was the top American in 13th place, he beat Abdi (who was 15th but 20 seconds back) who should have done much better. Nevertheless that was a VERY impressive run by Rupp. Here is a video of the last 8 minutes of the race: http://www.ethiotube.net/video/435/Beijing-2008--10K-Men.

The other bad news is that the US has so far performed very poorly on the track. Day one it was the shot putters, day 2 was Tyson Gay, and today it was the US 100m women getting swept by Jamaica as well as Bernard Lagat not making the 1500m finals.

Looking ahead it will be interesting to see how Lagat takes the blow and responds in the 5,000m against Bekele. Also tomorrow is the 400m, this is a strong American event and we'll see Jermey Warnier in action and see how his recent coaching change has impacted him (if the trials are any indication the result wasn't good). The 400m hurdles is also an American strength so we'll see how that goes too. I'll be paying attention to how the young American team in the 800m does, particularly Nick Symmonds. Most of all I, and all of China, will be watching the 110 hurdles with the Chinese track god Liu Xiang. He hasn't raced for a long time (this was a killer for Tyson Gay), there are rumors about his injury bugging him in recent days, and he is under the most intense pressure of any athlete of the Games (both from his own countrymen because he had the Chinese Olympic head tell him that if he loses his life essentially amounts to nothing and since his Cuban rival is breathing down his neck). My prediction: if Liu is healthy he wins since he's a big meet guy but if his leg is still giving him problems then it's an open race. The danger is that his leg isn't well and could be aggravated over several rounds and add to that the pressure and stress after not competing for so long and he has a mountain to climb.