Olympics

It's been very strange to watch the Olympics here. It so much lower key than in Australia, without anything like the hype. There is an expectation that none of the British athletes are going to win medals, which takes a lot of the fun out of it, I suppose. There's not even much about it in the papers, except a bit of speculation about Ian Thorpe's sexuality... and he's Australian! The British have strange heroes as well: their female marathon runner, who, despite the rest of the country's gloomy certainty of defeat, thought she had a chance, collapsed as soon as it became clear she wasn't going to get a medal and didn't even finish the course. She was hailed as a great champion who had run in impossible conditions and the Americans were blamed for insisting the race be run at a certain time. The Americans might be responsible for a hell of a lot of what's wrong with the world, but I don't think they can take the blame for that, when it didn't stop the other athletes finishing!