It all comes back to me now – the heat, the dust, the antiquity, the frustration when Adam Nelson could not prevent his foot from squiggling over the foul line.
By the slimmest of margins, Nelson fouled on his final shot in the 2004 Summer Games, which meant somebody else won the gold medal by virtue of a tiebreaker. Nelson had two millenniums of history all around him on the most memorable day of the entire Olympics. The hosts had placed a medal event at the site of the ancient Games – the shot-put for men and women, fairly contained in one small corner of the old field. I remember arriving the night before, walking the grounds in the dark with a few friends, sensing the old Olympians in the cosmic dust. Every step, every breath, was a privilege. Competitors and their followers had walked these hills and paths long ago. Everybody got it, from the spectators to the athletes to the reporters. My daughter Laura Vecsey, then with the Baltimore Sun, made the trip out from Athens. This was the best day. "It was surreal," said Cleopatra Borel, a shot-putter from Trinidad, who did not win a medal, but was exhilarated all the same. "You can't believe that athletes just like myself competed here. I know it was an all-male environment back then. This can never, ever happen again like this. Even if they ever have something back here, it can never be like this again." Borel was right. Now, eight years later, that day in ancient Olympia is being re-arranged. The sample from Yuriy Bilonog of Ukraine has been judged to contain an illegal substance, untraceable by methods available in 2004. It looks like Adam Nelson is going to get his gold medal. There is a warning out to all the cheaters, in all the sports. Be careful, pal; time and pharmacology may judge you yet. The news about Nelson’s gold medal: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/sports/four-2004-olympians-stripped-of-medals-in-doping-re-test.html The column I wrote from Olympic in 2004: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/18/sports/olympics/18CND-VECSEY.html?pagewanted=all
Barbara Alpert
12/8/2012 05:57:49 pm
Hi George,
George Vecsey
12/9/2012 01:03:24 am
Barbara! 12/4/2013 02:36:31 pm
http://www.myfreecreditreportx.com/how-many-free-credit-reports-per-year-are-you-entitled-to Such a good event 12/9/2012 06:09:09 am
George
Brian Savin
12/11/2012 11:37:52 am
Raises interesting and important questions. What is "sport"? What is "amateur?" What is "cheating"? The Olympics is about national politics, having nothing to do with those questions. The brightest person I ever met (and not really a cynic) said to me that most every human interaction these days is about power, sex or money. Altruism? Not much. A foot on the line? In the scheme of the way this competition actually works, why should that be any big deal? The Olympics story is a sad story in need of top to bottom reform that is not likely to come. And that leads to even larger questions about why we still innately know that sport is important.
credit report
11/12/2013 01:01:31 pm
Nice writeup. I enjoy your posts and agree with your opinions. keep it up <a href="http://www.myfreecreditreportx.com/what-are-the-3-credit-bureaus" rel="follow">who are the 3 credit bureaus</a> 8/5/2013 11:16:10 pm
Zest is the secret of all beauty. There is no beauty that is attractive without zest.
credit
12/12/2013 01:11:02 pm
http://www.myfreecreditreportx.com/how-many-free-credit-reports-per-year-are-you-entitled-to Pretty! This has been a really wonderful post. Thank you for supplying this information. - I agree with you 10/1/2013 11:08:30 am
Pretty! This has been a really wonderful post. Thank you for supplying this information.
credit
12/16/2013 01:18:56 pm
[url=http://www.myfreecreditreportx.com/how-many-free-credit-reports-per-year-are-you-entitled-to/]how many free credit reports do you get[/url] It's very helpful that you shared this information. Thanks Comments are closed.
|
QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online. The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal…. After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness. The progress stems mostly from three factors: First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot. Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.) Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year. “Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.” That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.” That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data. One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines. Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks. Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths. The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions. Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately Republican and white. Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.) *** From the great Maureen Dowd: As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop. But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels." --- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing. *** "Putting out the paper," we called it. Much more than nostalgia. ---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html Categories
All
|