Now I have to cheer for the Chinese

Apparently no one on the Spanish basketball team thought that the above picture of the team posing “slit-eyed” for an advertisement before the games was in bad taste.  It’s really quite surprising to see such overt racism from a national team going into the Olympics.

So, given the fact that the Chinese are playing this team this evening in Beijing (tomorrow morning here in the States), I’m going to have to cheer for the Chinese team.  This type of racism, especially at a team-wide level, is simply not acceptable.

From The Guardian via The Huffington Post.

This should be an awkward game

Apparently there will be a preliminary women’s beach volleyball game between Russia and Georgia at the Olympics on August 13 at 10:00 local time.  Given the current conflict between the two countries, I don’t expect that the two teams will have a friendly outlook toward each other.

I’ll be interested in seeing what happens, simply because of the political situation.

U.S. Open Final: Djokovic becomes Chokovic

Over the course of the last week, I have had a major distraction from my studies in the form of the U.S. Open.  One of my housemates is a tennis player and avid tennis fan so I have often found the station turned to USA, which was airing most of the tournament.

Tennis is an addictive game to watch.  If you know how it works, it can be very interesting to see the amount of skill that goes into winning a match in one of these Grand Slam tournaments, of which there are four, in order:  the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and finally the U.S. Open.

Today was the last day of the U.S. Open with the final event being the Men’s single’s final between the top-ranked Roger Federer against Novak Đoković (spelled Djokovic during the tournament).  Federer beat Djokovic in 3 sets, which is the minimum number.

But don’t let that number deceive you—Djokovic played a very close match with the first two sets being determined in a tie-break rounds.  Not only that, in both sets, Djokovic was the first to break Federer’s serve.  Indeed, in the first set, he had 5 set points during his serve.  For this reason the nickname that we used when watching the game changed from “The Djokester” to “Chokovic”.

It was almost painful watching him fail to win those sets, but it was a good match of tennis, perhaps not as exciting as some of those featuring Rafeal Nadal, but it still had its moments.