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Jolanda Čeplak: Slovenia’s golden bullet won a bronze medal yesterday. (pic. source)
It was closer than close in the women’s 800-meter race yesterday. Slovenia’s Jolanda Čeplak and Morocco’s Hasna Benhassi finished in second place with the exact same time: 1:56.43. (Both runners were just 0.05 seconds behind the gold-medal winner, Kelly Holmes, of Great Britain.)
To determine second and third place, the judges consulted the Oracle of Delphi, or maybe rolled some dice — Lord knows what they did, but they decided that Benhassi should get silver and Čeplak bronze. The Slovenian Athletic Association protested the decision, but they were shot down faster than you can say “Rajmond Debevec.”
Slovenes may be disappointed, but Čeplak was upbeat after the race. Quoth she:
“This medal is like gold to me. The race was very good, especially in the last 100m. There was a point during the race that I felt disappointed but I gave my best for the medal.” (source)
That’s what I call class. Hearty congratulations to her, and to Slovenia’s other medalists so far.
And now, for your consideration, here are three super-interesting Olympic links:
1) DFL: Celebrating last-place finishes at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens.. This wonderful site keeps track of everyone who finishes at the bottom of their group. For example, Luvsanlkhundeg Otgonbayar of Mongolia finished last in the women’s marathon on Sunday, almost an hour and a half after the winner. The site also has a table for the total number of last-place finishers, where Slovenia is currently (and gloriously) in the top twenty. (via Matt Haughey)
2) Tobias Schwarz’s Power Projection Capability: Nevermind China, the United States, or the Bollocks — it’s the European Union that is gobbling up medals like some kind of medal-eating monster, as the graph on this page demonstrates. In the comments, there is also a link to the fascinating site Olympic Medals per capita, which shows that Slovenia is currently (and gloriously) in the top twenty worldwide.
3) Plans for the Olympic Stadium in Beijing 2008: Amazing stuff. The panel has picked this one (B11) as its top choice. I don’t blame them, although all of the suggestions are pretty spectacular. (via Zhiqi Qiu)
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I just found this: a media release by the Austrialian government which tallies medals in relation to the country’s number of inhabitants.
Thanks for the link! I was recently thinking about how easy it is to rearrange Olympic data to reflect well on almost any country. (Except India, which is awful by any measure.)
For example, if I put together a table measuring how young a country is vs. how many medals it has, Slovenia would surely come out somewhere near the top. I suppose it’s all a matter of how you look at it.
At least Slovenia has some way of rearranging the data in its favour. But what’s notoriously medal-short Canada supposed to do? It’s over 130 years old, has lots of landmass, numerous climate zones, a sizeable population, people have good average incomes . . . maybe count the days of winter in relation to summer olympic achievement? Though, arguably, that wouldn’t go far either–there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of heated indoor pools and gyms.
bravo joli