Centralis Herald - Sports Section - Jane McNamara
A nervous start
Everyone remembers the famed pronouncement made by the chef de mission in the morning of the first day of competition. It is the expectation that the Electrumite team is held against, and is therefore, always viewed with great interest, mainly by journalists more than anyone else. The pronouncement sets out exactly how many medals the team is aiming for, and how many of those should be gold. This is why it was interesting to see that incoming chef de mission Miyagi Impor, a former Olympian himself, eschew that procedure entirely and just said, "Players should try their best. It is silly to set such an expectation for them and chastise them when they fail. I know how that feels, and I'm not going to subject our team to those pressures again." Many had been swayed by Impor's words, but others, not so much. And it didn't help that we had our usual unfruitful and inauspicious start (which will surely improve, as it always does).
Anyways, let's get on to today's events, or as an unspeakably long newspaper in an unspeakably long nation name would call it, the mechanistic results regurgitation.
Let's start with the results in Kelssek. The main event we were looking forward to doing well in, but failed at, was the women's road race. Our lead rider and team captain, Concetta Vamvakinou, unfortunately didn't finish herself in what could be described as a catastrophically disastrous race. Richardson, one of Electrum's five riders had the misfortune of running into a large crash at the beginning of the race, and she immediately fell to the ground with no chances of continuing onwards. This already made it very hard for the Electrumite team to recover: with four athletes, each athlete in the Electrumite team had to work harder, and it didn't help that as soon as the crash started, there was a slow down towards the back of the peloton, creating an opportunity for a breakaway group. As usual, the industrious Electrumites tried to lead the peloton into a chase with Vamvakinou doing well to stay in front at some stages of the course but it went even further downhill when Vamvakinou fell and injured her knee on a particularly fast entry into a steep descent. One silly mistake, and the Electrumites knew it was over. The peloton of course did catch up, but by that time the Electrumites were exhausted.
In the weightlifting, the ageing Neil Baker couldn't achieve the highs of his gold medal record from the last edition, instead coming in a respectable fifth: as usual, he started off easy with perhaps ten or so kilos off his attempt last year on both his snatch and clean and jerk and passed both successfully. However, it was his second and third attempts at both which didn't come to plan, with constant red lights, and no white, he was just unable to get into position properly, he had to settle for fifth place. There was a glimmer of hope in the beach volleyball though. Tina Price and Brigitte Keyes comfortably defeated Ricchetti/Nicholls from Elejamie, all it took was several consecutive serves by Price to give the Electrumites the comfortable leads they needed to win their individual sets.
Over on the Vekaiyun side, with the aquatics and the team sports, Peter Clark made it to the finals of the 100m breaststroke event, while Maryanne Noland failed to qualify out of the 400m IM by an agonisingly close 4 hundredths of a second. Such is life at the Olympic Games, athletes miss out by hundredths, and what that means is that a whole year's worth is thrown out the window, just like that. It need not even be a bad day: an average day at the Olympics is enough to get knocked out, such is the reality of such a large field competing for eight spots.
Our women's football team drew with the Kiaser Colonies whilst our men's basketball team continued in their recent run of dominant performances in the Olympics with a crushing 56 point victory over again, the Kiaser Colonies. What made it interesting was the high level of Electrumites who made their way to the Kastruviyey Arena -- there had been a resurgence in basketball in recent months after the creation of a new domestic tournament by Basketball Electrum. The problem is that BE aren't doing enough to capitalise on that support as they are currently refusing any and all attempts to field an international team in the IBC because of what they call a large chasm of disparity between the best teams and the worst teams. The fans I spoke to in Provinsk were upset at the decision, but there is nothing they can do about it now. Their only fix of international basketball is at the Olympics, so they're going to take all the opportunities they can get to watch these matches before the next Olympics.
And those were today's notable results. Really, we shouldn't be too nervous about where we are on the medal tally: the events we're good at tend to be at the tail-end of the Olympics, so there's still plenty of time to improve. And it's not about the results that's important, what's important is that our athletes strive to be the best they can be. Encouraging children to take up sport, and the creation of new role-models should be the goal after all.
Jane McNamara is once again the lead journalist for the Centralis Herald at the Olympic Games. The Herald, in conjunction with Network ENN are Electrum's broadcasters for the Olympic Games. She is part of an expert team that will be reporting on the Games of the XII Olympiad, joined by tennis expert Ameerah Gauchi, basketball expert Gilbert Halliday, soccer expert Stewart Faraday, and sports journalists Reece Duffy, Enver Hassan, Kimiko Shigaraki, Kate McNamara and Marco Jensen.
