Despite the home field advantage, I've been amazed at how bad China is kicking everyone's butt at the Olympics - including the good, ol US of A. It may be a sign of the times and I'm more than a little embarrassed.
One thing that I noticed is that many of the Chinese athletes use very smart strategy in competition. The first time I witnessed it was in the women's semi final. The Chinese player was losing and wanted to change momentum, so she stalled .. went to change her racket and stalled some more. It worked to her advantage for some time (I believe she came back to win the set), but wasn't enough to defeat the Russian player.
Tonight I was just watching the women's gold medal beach volleyball game between the US and China. The US players (Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh) and have not lost in a long time and the last time they did was to the same Chinese team Wang Jie and Tian Jia. The US was in control one set and a couple of points up, when one of the Chinese players obviously feigned injury to attempt to change the momentum. It didn't work either, but in reality, was probably their only chance today.
I cannot remember seeing US athletes applying the same strategies - am I blinded to it, is it something we shouldn't be doing or something we should apply to remain competitive?
BTW - Congratulations to Misty and Kerri - a great win! (I don't care if I ever see another volleyball match again - I've seen at least 20 in the last couple weeks, but only one basketball game - what gives? NBC coverage has been terrible and has a lot of room for improvement in 4 years. I hope they don't have the contract for the winter olympics in 2010 Vancouver ...
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