"Huge chunks of time evaporate without you even noticing. In fact, time kind of loses its definition. You sleep when you’re near a bed, you eat in the empty spaces.* It’s like you’re living in a casino and it doesn’t really matter if it’s 1 p.m. or 4 a.m., if it’s light outside or dark, if it’s Tuesday or Friday; you just keep going to the next Olympic thing, always keeping your ear to the ground for the big story that you might be missing at gymnastics or water polo. *There’s a thing among sportswriters that I’ve started to call the “McDonald’s Vow.” At every Olympics, there’s a McDonald’s at the Main Press Center. Well, just about every sportswriter I know comes to the Olympics vowing not to eat at that McDonald’s. One of the ideas of the Olympics is to embrace the culture, to try the local food, to eat healthier. This McDonald’s Vow is often kept as long as 25 minutes, depending on jet lag. By Day 10 of the Olympics, sportswriters begin to look like Morgan Spurlock in “Super Size Me.”" - × × ×

“It’s a bit of a shock when you pick up a newspaper and find out that there’s stuff happening elsewhere in the world, too.” - × × ×

“But then it happened. Instead of Bolt and the other 100-meter medalists, they brought in the winners of the hammer throw: Hungary’s Krisztian Pars, Slovenia’s Primoz Kozmus, Japan’s Koji Murofushi. These are the last three Olympic gold medalists in the hammer throw — Koji in Athens, Kozmus in Beijing, Pars in London. So, let me say up front that I have the highest respect for them and the greatest admiration for their sport, even if that thing they throw does not look like a hammer. These throwers are tremendous athletes and deserve as much coverage as they can get. However, well, there was a bit of contrast between this giant room filled with hundreds of reporters from all around the world waiting for Bolt … and the medalists in the hammer throw. I guess that’s what brought the laughter up a few inches. It seemed to me that the hammer throwers were up there, looking over this room, and thinking: “Well, yes, these are the London Olympics. This must be the sort of coverage hammer throwers get at the Olympics.” At this point, my writer friend — who was going a bit loopy as well — and I began to wonder what exactly one of these hammer throwers would have to say to get the reporters in the room to write about him instead of Bolt. Sadly, the only thing we could think of was, “I have a laser on the moon and I am planning to destroy the Earth.” - × × ×

#рубрика_прекрасное - × × ×