Olympic athletes to rally in Seattle on Thursday. Apolo Ohno won’t be there since he’s appearing on the Tonight Show. I fondly remember logging onto Battle.net in 2002 for a few leisurely games of Starcraft. It was the day after Ohno got his gold after the South Korean that finished ahead of him was disqualified. And the Battle.net channel was filled with a lot of “HATE USA” “DIE OHNO” messages and users spamming URLs pointing to images of Ohno falling in the other final and grabbing a South Korean to make sure he fell too.
I like Apolo Ohno, but has there ever been an athlete appearing happier and being celebrated by the media for bronze medals? On the other side there’s Michael Phelps, who I’m not fond of as a person, but a single bronze a couple years ago would have been a failure. Michelle Kwan, AKA me and Dan’s Olympic hero, is essentially Dan Marino on ice because of her bronze and silver medals. In Olympic finals, Apolo Ohno has been the first to cross the finish line only once. But I guess that goes with the laid back nature that people (including me) enjoy.