Boomers unhappy despite making Team USA sit up and take notice
although Boomers still haven't beaten them, they are getting close enough to smell it
Greg Baum is chief sports columnist and associate editor with The Age
although Boomers still haven't beaten them, they are getting close enough to smell it
Is world sport prepared to finish what Mack Horton and Lilly King have started? By world sport, I mean not just athletes and authorities, but media and fans and the pressure they can bring to bear.
The Olympics fancy themselves as the United Nations of sport, but this week would be described by foreign correspondents as a ticking time bomb.
The more Mack Horton and Sun Yang avoided contact - body, eye, incidental - the more of a contact sport this became.
Rio de Janeiro's opening ceremony made a virtue of a vice, and a statement of a virtue. The vice was a cut-price budget roughly a tenth of London's four years ago and spare change from Beijing's before that.
In England this week, jousting was proposed as a future Olympic discipline, as if big-time sport in its battle to beat drug cheats has not already had more than enough trouble with Lances.
Russia's participation in next month's Rio de Janeiro Olympics is hanging in the balance ahead of the release in Toronto of a report into allegations of state-sponsored doping at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.
When Nick Xenophon and Andrew Wilkie announced their mission to loosen the nexus between gambling and sport in Australia on Thursday, it was not hard to imagine that in the offices of some corporate bookies, the first thing they did was to frame a market on the likelihood of the politicians' success, complete with cash-back options and bonus bets.
Decades ago, a mate coaxed me into joint ownership of two racing greyhounds. Their breeding and talent was on a par with our budget, but for a while we had fun toddling around Victorian country tracks, winning and losing small amounts, doing a lot of passive smoking, but never having to wait in a queue for food, a beer or a bet.
Either Roger Federer is the Hawthorn of tennis, or the Hawks are the Federer of the AFL. As in a quinella, either way round wins.
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