Beijing Continues To Deliver

Beijing's athlete's set about smashing records and turning in historic performances at the 29th Olympiad, but where are all the crowds ?

• USA Swimmer, Michael Phelps continues to turn the Olympic Games into his own personal swim meet. Last night, Phelps added another two Gold Medals to his personal tally to make it five for these Games and 11 in total for his career. He is now the winningest Gold Medalist ever and here's the scary part, he's not done yet. He has another 3-races left to compete in and only one of those is a team event (4X100m) so it's a pretty good bet that he's going to pick up an astonishing 8 Gold Medals. He is of course an absolute certainty to win the award for athlete of these games.
  
• Spain got a scare on the basketball court when they needed overtime to defeat host nation China. Spain's ball handling in the 2nd & 3rd period's was ordinary but in the end, China weren't able to land a knock-out blow. Spain's impressive 17-year-old Ricky Rubio, played a lot of big minutes down the stretch and his maturity defied his tender young years.
  
• As the saying goes, 'Timing is Everything' and yesterday we saw Russia take on Georgia in the women's beach volleyball. While their countries began a war over the weekend, it would have made for a tense atmosphere on the er, beach. I still think beach volleyball doesn't belong in the Olympics anyway.
  
• It shouldn't surprise us, but as always, corporate sponsors who spend millions of dollars at these events get first choice for the prime seats but often they fail to turn up or turn up late and deny 'real' fans the opportunity to attend, leaving empty seats at some of the biggest events. The organizers don't seem to be particularly interested in appeasing the pay-less fans either as the corporate dollars always make the bottom line read better and sadly, that is of far more importance to them at the end of the day.
  
• Australia's new golden girl, Stephanie Rice added a second Gold to her tally in the women's 200m individual medley. She edged out Zimbabwean Kirsty Coventry who collected her third Silver Medal. Normally, three Silver medals would be a wonderful achievement but you sense that Coventry is getting frustrated at constantly falling just short of the top prize.