Olympics

Photo by Jack Gruber, USA TODAY
Michael Phelps (left), Garrett Weber-Gale (right), and Jason Lezak (in water) celebrating their gold medal in the men's 4x100 freestyle relay.

I typically need to watch a couple events before I really get into the Olympics, but after last night I'm fully into them now. Anyone that missed it needs to hunt down a video clip of the 4x100-meter men's freestyle relay final. While Michael Phelps will get the most publicity, if he gets the 8 gold medals he better be thanking Jason Lezak, the oldest man on the American swimming team, for it. What Lezak did in the final leg of the relay was simply amazing. With only 50 meters left the announcers were saying that the US team should be able to hold off the others to get the silver medal. The Lezak just turned it up a knock to get within half a body length of the France's Alain Bernard (the French were heavy favorites) with only halve the length of the pool left. At that point I still was like there is no way he can catch them, but Lezak turned it up another knotch and ran down Bernard to just barely touch the wall before him. Seriously he was going so fast it seemed like he was going to come right out of the water. Dem and I were so excited and thankful that we decided to stay up and wait for Phelps' race...which I'm going to call it Lezak's race now. Lezak had a great quote after the race when asked about his performance, "To be honest with you I got really tired of losing."

This is also a lesson in trash talking...don't ever trash talk about your top competitors publicly. I know that its important to have confidence, but you have to be smart about things in public. I suspect that Lezak may not have been able to pull off the fastest split in history if he didn't have the aid of Bernard's comment (“The Americans? We’re going to smash them. That’s what we came here for”) helping to give him some extra motivation.

USA! USA! USA!