China made history today by winning its first Olympic gold medal in the Team event of Women’s Gymnastics. China won the gold medal with a total of 188.900 points.

The United States won the silver medal with a total of 186.525 points and Romania won the bronze with a total of 181.525 points.

China entered the Team final as favorites, but it was pushed all the way by a determined United States. The two sides’ first rotation was the Vault, with the United States taking a slender lead.

The second rotation for China and the United States was the Uneven Bars, which is regarded as China’s specialty. China did not disappoint, gaining the lead with a dominant display on the apparatus.

He Kexin and Yang Yilin were outstanding in the Uneven Bars, scoring 16.850 and 16.800 respectively. Despite the best efforts of the United States’ Nastia Liukin, who scored 16.900, the United States could not overcome China’s dominance of the apparatus.

The United States gained slightly more points than China in the Balance Beam, a rotation that was marked by the mistakes of the United States’ Alicia Sacramone and China’s Cheng Fei. Sacramone was clearly affected by her mistake and also performed poorly in the next rotation, the Floor Exercise.

The United States could not afford to make any mistakes against a disciplined Chinese side. China’s Li Shanshan improved her country’s chances of winning the gold medal by scoring 16.050 in the Balance Beam. This was an individual score that even the elegant Liukin could not match.

China’s most experienced campaigner Cheng Fei sealed the victory with a solid performance in the Floor exercise.

Romania surprised Russia by winning the bronze medal. Romania performed well in the Floor Exercise, with only China receiving a higher score. Russia scored poorly in the Balance Beam and finished with a total score of 180.625.

Abhinav Bindra wins India’s first Gold in Beijing Olympics 2008   ,

Chak De Bindra! Chak De India!

(11-AUG)

History has been created. Indian sportspreson Abhinav Bindra has won a gold at Beijing Olympics for the Men’s 10m Air Rifle final after shooting a total of 700.5. He has thus become the first Indian individual gold medallist ever at the Olympics. He scored 596 (joint fourth) in the qualifying round and out-scored all other shooters in the finals with a round of 104.5.

Abninav Bindra specialises in the field of Air rifle. He was the youngest Indian participant at the 2000 Olympic Games. He won six gold medals at various international meets in 2001. In the Air rifle event at the 2002 Commonwealth Games, Manchester, he won Gold in the Pairs event and Silver in the individual event. At the 2004 Olympic Games, he broke the Olympic record but failed to win a medal. He is a recipient of the Arjuna award in 2001 and the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna award for the year 2001-2002. Abhinav Bindra’s potential talent was first spotted by Lt. Col. J.S. Dhillon. He was Bindra’s first coach.

Abhinav Bindra is the brightest star among a new breed of talented Indian shooters. Born on September 28, 1983, Bindra is quite often criticized for not delivering on the promise he showed as a child prodigy. (source)

Apart from being a shooter, Abhinav Bindra holds an M.B.A. (Masters in Business Administration). He is also the CEO of Abhinav Futuristics.

BEIJING — For Alicia Sacramone, the oldest member of the United States gymnastics team and the team’s leader, the final moments of the Olympics were spent staring at the floor exercise with tears welling in her eyes.

The Americans were just a point behind the Chinese going into the last rotation, the floor exercise. The gold medal seemed up for grabs.

But Sacramone, 20, started off the event by falling on her second tumbling pass, then stepping out of bounds. And with those errors, the gold-medal chances for the United States slipped away.

She and her teammates on the floor — Shawn Johnson and Nastia Liukin — all had stepped out of bounds during their floor routines. The top score was Liukin’s 15.2, which was not enough to overtake the Chinese.

To end the day, the United States women sat looking solemn while the Chinese competed on the floor to a raucous, pro-China crowd that cheered, “Come on!”

China’s floor routines weren’t perfect, but they were good enough for the team to win the gold medal, the second gymnastics medal for China at the Beijing Games. Neither the men’s nor the women’s team won a medal at the 2004 Olympics.

The Chinese scored 188.900. The Americans won silver, with 186.525. Romania won bronze with 181.525.

Not long before that final event, it seemed that the Americans had a chance. On the balance beam, the Chinese star Cheng Fei had fallen. She rushed off the platform with an ashen, devastated look. Every person inside the packed National Indoor Stadium seemed to gasp.

With that fall, China’s chances of beating the world champion United States team seemed to fall with her.

But in the close competition between the United States and China, fates can change quickly. Halfway through the competition, China was ahead by 1.125 points.

Sacramone then fell mounting the beam. Then she and her two teammates made mistakes on the floor. The Chinese pulled away.

Leading up to the Olympics, on-line sports registration lists in China suggested that half the Chinese women’s team — He Kexin, Yang Yilin and Jiang Yuyuan — did not meet the age requirement of turning 16 in 2008. The international gymnastics federation and the Chinese team officials said those gymnasts were eligible, and that the ages on their passports were correct.

The controversy, though, led to more examination of the gymnasts on both sides.

For sure, the Chinese team’s body types and those of the women on the United States team are opposites. The Chinese gymnasts are curveless, with an average height of 4-feet-9 and an average weight of 77 pounds.

The women on the American team, generally more muscular and shapely than the Chinese, are three and a half inches taller and 30 pounds heavier.

“I think the U.S. women look healthy, not decrepit like some gymnasts used to look because of eating disorders and those type of things,” said Dominique Dawes, a former Olympic gold medalist for the United States. “It’s nice to see gymnasts finally looking like young women, not children.”

Still, when the Chinese and American women went head to head in the team final, it wasn’t only a test of athlete versus athlete, but also system versus system.

The manner in which two countries train their women’s teams could not be more different.

In China, the gymnasts often are sent to sports schools as children, sometimes as young as 4 or 5. They leave their families and their normal lives behind.

There, they train for hours every day and are taken care of by women who serve as surrogate parents. They eat in cafeterias, where they often use one bowl and one plate, washing them after every meal. They sleep in communal bedrooms, often in bunk beds. If they are lucky, the young ones see their parents on weekends, but that is not guaranteed.

Though the system is trying to change, many sports schools still focus on sports over everything else. Education often is secondary.

Bela Karolyi, the former coach of gymnastics legends like Mary Lou Retton and Nadia Comaneci, said that kind of centralized training system is on its way out.

“They are living, training and breathing in the training camp and, sure, that’s efficient, but the world is moving forward,” Karolyi said. “I wouldn’t give it another Olympic cycle. I think this type of preparation will be eliminated forever, even in a place like China.

“Can you imagine if we plucked our girls out of their homes when they were 5 or 6, then kept them and trained them never let them go home?” he said. “In America, that just would not happen, never. We’d have a hundred lawyers knocking on our door because it does not work that way. For us, this system works the best.”

Karolyi , whose wife, Martha, is the women’s national team coordinator, said he prefers the system used in the United States — a semi-centralized system that allows the athletes to live and train at home.

In that system, the gymnasts train with their own coaches, then travel to the Karolyi ranch and national team training center outside Houston about every seven weeks so they can be evaluated by Martha Karolyi and other members of the national team staff.

There, the gymnasts go through a battery of tests, like how high they can jump and how long they can remain in a handstand on the balance beam, and their performance is compared to that of their teammates.

“It’s great because seeing the other girls kind of pushes you to work harder when you go home,” said Nastia Liukin, who is coached by her father, Valeri. “For me, it’s perfect because if you’d have to live at a training center, I kind of think you’d end up one-dimensional.”

Shawn Johnson, who trains not far from her home in West Des Moines, Iowa, attends a public high school, where she hangs out with her friends on weekends and even was the ball girl for the football team one year.

She went to the prom this year in a sparkly yellow dress and, yes, she stayed out late.

Johnson said she couldn’t imagine life any other way.

“Gymnastics is a big part of my life, but certainly not everything in my life,” Johnson said. “I’m a person first, and a gymnast second.”

BEIJING — The United States 4×200-meter freestyle relay team smashed the world record on Wednesday morning, helping Michael Phelps keep his gold-medal streak alive. The relay victory, in 6:58.56, helped Phelps earn his fifth medal of these Games, as he attempts to break Mark Spitz’s record of seven gold medals in one event, which Spitz set in 1972. Earlier in the night, Phelps had earned his fourth gold medal with a world-record performance in the 200-meter butterfly.

Phelps swam the opening leg, giving his teammates a substantial advantage. Ryan Lochte, Ricky Berens and Peter Vanderkaay continued to add to the lead, becoming the first relay team to break the 7-minute barrier, and beating the old record of 7:03.24.

Competing in the 200-meter butterfly Wednesday morning at the Water Cube — an inhospitable place to anyone who has dared dive in with Phelps — he captured his fourth gold medal of the Beijing Olympics and continued his march toward a record eight golds. He had less than an hour to take the podium and then rest before his next event, the 4×200 freestyle relay, scheduled for 11:19 a.m. local time. Phelps finished in 1 minute 52.03 seconds, topping his world record of 1:52.09. Laszlo Cseh of Hungary won silver in 1:52.70, and Takeshi Matsuda of Japan took bronze in 1:52.97.

If Phelps remains unbeaten, on Saturday morning he will catch Mark Spitz, who holds the record with seven golds at the 1972 Munich Games, and will pass him on Sunday morning in the 4×100 medley relay.

With each lap in the pool, Phelps has commanded more attention on the Olympic Green and around the world. NBC, the Olympics rights holder in the United States, knew such a run of golds would be great theater, so it prevailed on the Games’ organizers to hold swimming finals in the mornings in Beijing to capture live prime-time audiences in the States. The time of day has not appeared to matter to Phelps, who will be the heavy favorite in each of his remaining races.

In the 200-meter freestyle Tuesday, he left the field far behind and crushed his own year-old record. Sixteen months after becoming the first swimmer to crack the 1:44 barrier, he was the first to go under 1:43.

Three, two, one … Fire!”

And with that, the medal round in the women’s 10-meter air rifle officially began Saturday, the first leg in the race for which country will take home the most medals at the 2008 Beijing Games. Thirty minutes later, the winner was not China or even the United States, but the Czech Republic: Katerina Emmons shot a perfect qualification round and ended up shooting her way to first place, setting an Olympic record in her event. The Chinese shooter Du Li, who won the gold medal in Athens in 2004, was a favorite to take first in this event, but she entered the final round tied for second place and finished in fifth. The American Jamie Beyerle took fourth. Du’s performance surprised even Emmons, who later expressed sadness that her Chinese competitor did not join her on the medal stand, attributing Du’s sub-par performance to the pressure of competing in her home country. “She can shoot way better than she did today,” Emmons said in a press conference after the medal ceremony. “For her I think the Chinese press is putting a lot of pressure on the athletes, and it’s really hard to handle.” Emmons said the language barrier made it impossible to speak with Du, but she said the effect of the increased scrutiny was obvious. “I can’t imagine being in her shoes,” she said. Although air rifle is one of the Olympics’ more obscure events, reporters thronged the shooting venue Saturday morning, eager to document the awarding of the Games’ first gold medal. International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge presented the medals to Emmons and the two other winners, the Russian Lioubov Galkina, who took silver, and the bronze medalist Snjezana Pejcic, from Croatia. Emmons is the wife of the American rifle shooter Matt Emmons, and she was bombarded with questions about their unlikely love story. Emmons was in contention for the gold medal in Athens when, in a freak error, he shot at the wrong target. Katerina offered her sympathy later that day, and they fell in love. “The fact that we’re here together is awesome,” she said. “We work as a team and the team is one of the best teams in the world, I think.”

Swiss star’s reign is over after thrilling final

Nadal: first Wimbledon title The best final ever Rafael Nadal claimed his first Wimbledon title in epic fashion on Centre Court with a five-set victory over world number one Roger Federer which will rank as one of the greatest Grand Slam finals. Nadal squandered a two-set lead and two Championship points in the fourth set tie-break before summoning one final challenge and sealing a 6-4 6-4 6-7 (5/7) 6-7 (8/10) 9-7 victory as darkness fell. Nadal had stood on the brink of victory after taking the advantage in the fourth set tie-break and holding two points for the title, the second of which Federer saved with a simply sensational backhand winner. But in a match interrupted by two brief rain delays, Nadal finally seized his chance in the 15th game of the final set, breaking Federer then serving out and marking his victory by crumbling to the court. “It’s impossible to explain what I felt in that moment… winning my favourite tournament, it’s a dream,” Nadal said after becoming the first man to win the French Open and Wimbledon back to back since Bjorn Borg in 1980. Of Federer he added: “He’s still the number one, he’s still the best, he’s five times champion, now I have one.”