Full Moon Over Sydney Remember the quaint old days when athletes shook hands after a victory? Now they shed their clothes. Following an early-round win, the Italian soccer team celebrated with a mini-striptease that would’ve made Brandi Chastain duck and cover. As 93,000 Aussies watched, the Italians yanked off their shorts, then took a bare-butted victory lap you probably won’t be seeing on NBC. Of course, Italy’s show was a bit less diplomatic than Chastain’s. The squad they’d just knocked off was the home team–Australia.
Damn the Thorpedo, get Katie! The Olympic torch crisscrossed Australia, but the most outrageous part of its journey was the “violet mile” of Sydney’s Oxford Street, the gayest stretch of a city gay enough to make San Francisco look like Burlington, Vt. Drag queens in feather boas and skintight sequins lined balconies to watch. Said one: “I wish Katie Couric was here with us. I’d love to meet her.” Turns out Couric was only a mile away at NBC’s studio.
Keep Out Of His Way Gymnast Blaine Wilson is America’s best hope ever for a men’s all-around gold, but the tattooed, tongue-studded acrobat got off to a dismal start. While Team USA finished fourth overall in last week’s qualifier and earned a trip to the final, Wilson stumbled to 14th individually. (The slate gets wiped clean for the finals.) “I wanted to choke somebody,” he said, “but I didn’t have anyone to choke.”
No. 1 With a Bullet In 1991 Nancy Johnson was suffering from nerve damage in her arms and legs so severe she had trouble holding a rifle. This weekend she captured America’s first gold medal in Sydney, narrowly winning the women’s 10-meter air-rifle competition. Johnson, whose husband, Ken, is on the men’s shooting team, finished 36th in Atlanta. Her victory wasn’t sealed until the final shot: with near-perfect aim, she scored a 9.9 out of 10, winning by just two tenths of a point.
Faster Than A Speeding Pool World records fell like dominoes at Sydney’s aquatic center on Saturday: five in less than 90 minutes. The athletes were fast, sure–but the pool was even faster. A swimmer’s biggest foe is turbulence caused by the racers, and the center’s pool reduces that by being deeper (an extra meter–the more water, the less it moves), smarter (buoys divide the lanes, smoothing rough water) and better designed (water drains off the deck, not back into the pool).
Podman To The Rescue The sharks in Sydney harbor are this Olympics’ most overhyped disaster-waiting-to-happen. But the gobbling of a triathlete would be the worst kind of PR, so officials dispatched a team of guardian divers to hover a meter below the racers. Each diver wore a contraption called a POD, which emits an electrical current designed to irritate the tiny pores on a shark’s nose and scare it away. POD, by the way, stands for “protective ocean device–only slightly more descriptive than calling it a “thingy.”
