I write about China. I love basketball. There was no way I was going to be able to avoid getting sucked into the Linsanity. He almost makes me forget how much I hate the Knicks.
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Another week another column for The Global Times. (And in case you’re wondering, my soul feels no less decayed than usual.) This one is on basketball with a little foreign relations thrown in by way of metaphor. Enjoy. And so the Red Sox squeezed past the Angels into the ALCS against the…Tampa Bay Rays!?!? Doesn’t matter. What is important is deciding where to watch the games as the playoffs heat up. Last year it was the Rickshaw, but I’ve been hearing about quirks in service as management focuses its attention on the hyper-successful Sanlitun’r start-up Saddle. Goose and Duck seems an obvious choice, and if they were still back at Chaoyang Park West Gate it would be a no brainer, but now they’re out halfway to Tongzhou. (Okay, just the other side of the park, but it’s a perception thing…) Maybe hanging in my little courtyard with the US feed from MLB.com? Decisions, decisions, decisions… From yesterday’s Lithuania-China game… There has been a bit of bally-hoo in the press about China putting an end to US Olympic dominance, a dominance which doesn’t seem to jibe with history. I took a look at the medal counts for the Summer Olympics, and since 1956 (not counting the boycott years of 1980 and 1984, a total of 11 Olympics) the US has topped the gold medal chart five times. Not bad, but three of the five have come since 1996. From 1956 to 1996, the US only placed first twice, finishing second to the USSR in 1956, 1960, 1972, 1976, 1988, and to the Unified Team in 1992. In fact, in 1988, the USA finished third behind both the USSR and East Germany. Now admittedly we have had a bit of a good run since 1996, but I’d hardly call the US track record over the past fifty years of Olympiads ’dominant.’ Nor would it seem prudent to link gold medal tallies with the health or prosperity of a particular country or economy or to the stability of its political system. After all, in the years between Seoul and Barcelona, of the top 10 countries in terms of overall gold medals in 1988: the top two (USSR and GDR) ceased to exist, four |
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