text:
What was billed as the biggest showdown of the London Olympic Games almost never came to pass. During the third leg of the morning qualifying heat in the four-hundred-metre individual medley, swimming's quadrathlon, Michael Phelps, the great American merman, appeared to be treading water. "You can't get a gold medal from the morning," he said afterward, shrugging off his performance as energy conservation. The Hungarian Laszlo Cseh had caught Phelps during the backstroke portion of the race and then built a lead during Phelps's leisurely breaststroke. Phelps began swimming again in the final leg, the freestyle, and nearly beat Cseh with a push in the closing metres—or so it looked to the naked eye. Lucky for Phelps, there are now electronic sensors in the walls, and the scoreboard revealed that his Gumby-like wingspan had, in fact, provided him with the first touch. He sneaked into the evening finals by seven hundredths of a second.
That close call was nearly the 2012 equivalent of Dan O'Brien failing to clear the bar in the pole vault at trials in 1992, and thereby missing out on Barcelona entirely, after months of Reebok's ubiquitous Dan & Dave campaign, promoting a rivalry between two American decathletes for the unofficial title of World's Greatest Athlete. The Dave Johnson to Phelps's Dan O'Brien in our equation is, of course, Ryan Lochte, the free-spirited skateboarding enthusiast. Whereas Phelps is built for a life spent largely underwater, with an elongated torso, size-14 flippers, and what must be webbed fingers at the end of those squid arms, Lochte has the upper body of a gymnast, buffed by training habits that might seem better suited for an event set in the desert: flipping huge tractor tires, pulling chains. After Beijing, in 2008, where Lochte won two golds and two bronzes but was nonetheless accorded the respect of a prominent skeet shooter, he dedicated himself to dethroning his teammate. Phelps helpfully obliged Lochte's efforts for a while, devoting much of the next three years to Vegas jaunts and posing for the bong paparazzi. He seemed not to let the fact that he was skipping practice stop him from maintaining his fabled high-calorie diet, either, and this spring, in the promotional run-up to London, while Lochte graced the cover of Vogue Phelps came clean to Details about what the tabloids have called his "fat period." He'd since slimmed down, having finally found his motivation, but he showed up for his official team photo looking like a vagabond, unshaven and in need of a comb. It all came off as a kind of taunt: O.K., Ryan, I gave you the head start you need, now let's do this.
In Beijing, Phelps did win gold in the morning. That's how important swimming had become in the Phelpsian era. The organizers inverted the schedule so that the men's four-hundred-metre individual medley could be shown live, in prime time, on the East Coast. Phelps delivered, and broke his own world record. "What Michael Jordan did for basketball is what I always wanted to do for swimming," Phelps said recently, and in some respects he has succeeded. The Dan & Dave campaign arrived on the crest of track-and-field's domestic popularity, in the era of Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Flo-Jo, and Carl Lewis, while the United States Olympic swim trials under Phelps's reign have grown into an arena-filling spectacle, themselves televised over several days in prime time. This year, the trials attracted more than a hundred and sixty thousand people to Omaha, many of whom lined up to participate in a marketing gimmick called the Michael Phelps Swim Spa Challenge. Lochte, who had been dominating the world championships during Phelps's Odyssey years, edged Phelps in the four-hundred-metre individual medley, and then ceded superiority in the next three events in which they swam head to head. Phelps, finding his stroke, appeared to regain momentum.
British pride would never bend to NBC's will, as the Chinese had, so the big race was set for Saturday night, Greenwich Mean Time, and promised to be the hottest ticket of the week. Whether Phelps's morning scare was to blame for the scattered empty seats as the start time approached or whether the new practice of following the Games on Twitter was threatening to supplant live attendance was hard to say. An m.c. tried to coax the spectators into making noise, but many of them—in the athletes' section, in particular—were too busy holding their iPads up to film the pool. Phelps's lousy preliminary heat had deprived us of the familiar camera shot where the two Americans collapse toward one another, across the same middle-lane divider, looking up at their times. As the eighth and final qualifier, Phelps would be swimming from an outside lane, exposed to the reverberating wake of the others. But surely if anyone was capable of summoning what swimming geeks call "outside smoke," it was Phelps.
What we got instead of a duel was a "damp squib," as someone told the BBC. Lochte dominated from the start, and Phelps proved that his sluggish morning routine wasn't a function of overconfidence. In finishing fourth, he failed to medal for the first time since Sydney, when he was fifteen. No one had really expected him to sweep the board again, and he still had six races left to swim, but suddenly it was possible to imagine that he might not earn even the three medals required to surpass the Soviet gymnast Larysa Latynina as the most decorated of all Olympians.
"This is my time," Lochte said afterward, wearing a diamond-encrusted dental supplement, and slyly undermining Phelps's legacy by referring to him as "one of the world's greatest swimmers." I couldn't help thinking that the real breakout star of the four-hundred-metre individual medley was a Qatari man named Ahmed Ghithe Atari—Atari the Qatari—who swam in the morning qualifying round. Atari never had a shot at qualifying for the evening session. That much was clear from the minute he dived in and failed to remain underwater for much more than half of the fifteen metres that swimmers are allowed before they must surface and commence stroking. At the end of the first leg, he trailed a nonentity from Barbados by a third of the pool's length. By the backstroke phase, he seemed to be almost luxuriating in defeat. Had he not been indoors, you might have mistaken him for a restless sunbather. Here, I felt, was someone the cynical British hosts, with their dismissal of sub-regal pageantry, could appreciate: Atari was no upstart striver; he was just happy to be there. He had the pool to himself for the entirety of his last lap, and as he crawled to the finish he received a sustained ovation.
The first new world record at the Games was set some twelve hours before the official parade of athletes at the Olympic Stadium ("Usain Bolt has already opened a gap on his delegation," one of the BBC commentators said), and before the film director Danny Boyle made a spectacle of the National Health Service. Its proud owner was a "blind archer"—one with very poor vision, at any rate—from South Korea. In his sport, the bull's-eye is seventy metres distant. "When he looks at the target, apparently, he sees a blurry outline," I heard a British journalist exclaiming over the phone. "It looks like paint dripping wet." Long pause. "Yeah! Isn't that great?"
I'd gone to Lord's Cricket Ground, where the archery events were held, because I'd read a brochure suggesting that these might be "the Greatest Olympic Games in Archery's History," and because back in May I'd met an American contender named Brady Ellison, and he had proposed that we were in the midst of a quiet archery boom in the United States, owing to the popularity of "The Hunger Games." "Archer shops all across the U.S. are sold out on everything," he said. "They have to turn people away."
Ellison is twenty-three, and handsome in the manner of a rugged outdoorsman, with a scruffy blond goatee. He grew up on a cattle ranch in Arizona and learned his specialty the way an ancient Olympian might have, by hunting elk, deer, and hogs with a bow and arrows. I was drawn to his folksy charm and to the seeming accessibility of his excellence, in contrast to the inhuman conditioning of the swimmers. "It's a sport that anyone can do, so if you're not the fastest and can't jump the highest . . ." Ellison said, which set me to daydreaming. The Olympics are an inevitable occasion for playing what-if. What if I, too, wanted to compete for Team U.S.A.? Which event would be my best bet?
"I do cardio, even though I don't really look like it," Ellison said. "I started working with a nutritionist this year. Cut a lot of dairy out. Bread, starches. It's really just meat and vegetables now." Reporters dutifully jotted this down, until one of them remembered that he was talking to an archer, and asked why. "Because he said so," Ellison said, meaning the team's medical technician, and shrugged. "Now I'm hoping to live a little longer. My fiancée and I got engaged a couple of weeks ago. I'm wearing a promise ring." He held up his left hand. I also noticed that he had the Olympic rings tattooed on his other forearm, such that they'd be on display for the camera whenever he pulled his arrow back.
Heading to London, Ellison was the world's top-ranked archer, and, in anticipation of a star turn, he said that he'd spent the past year ridding himself of certain obsessive habits. "I've changed, and tried to be a role model for the kids," he said. He quit chewing tobacco. "And when I quit chewing I switched to caffeine," he went on. "Got over the nicotine in a couple of days, but then it was, like, coffee times fifty." From caffeine, he moved on to sugar (Jolly Ranchers) and then toothpicks (a hundred a day) and, finally, sunflower seeds, which he deemed clubbable.
The brochure promised an archers' rivalry worthy of Phelps and Lochte, calling Ellison "the Rafael Nadal of archery," and likening his chief competition, the vision-impaired South Korean Im Dong-hyun, to Roger Federer. Im did not look as though he'd been cutting back on dairy or keeping up with cardio. He had a mop of reddish hair and the gait of a baker. This was merely the ranking round, to determine seeding. Sixty-four archers lined up simultaneously and fired away at more than twenty targets. "There's a huge difference in how we shoot," Ellison said. "I shoot Coach Lee's system, which is biomechanically correct. Im Dong-hyun and a lot of the Korean guys, they shoot like a Korean. It's a lot more push-pull—a very fast type of shooting."
The whistling of the arrows was viscerally thrilling at first, inspiring Robin Hood fantasies, but then the excitement waned. Ellison has 20/10 vision, and told me that he can "see the ten line," referring to the innermost of the two yellow circles at the center of the target. I certainly couldn't see it, and had to take the announcer's word—"Ladies and gentlemen, there is a very real possibility that a world record won't just be broken but shattered here at Lord's Cricket Ground today"—for the fact that we were witnessing history. Archery, I've concluded, is a made-for-TV event.
Ellison had his revenge in the team competition the next day, eliminating Im and the Koreans with a perfect ten on his final shot, on the way to a silver medal, the Americans' first in London. But the ranking round was Im's. He earned six hundred and ninety-nine points out of a possible seven-twenty, besting his own mark of six hundred and ninety-six. Afterward, I stood near a Korean-American reporter in the mixed zone, through which all Olympic athletes are required to pass while exiting. I was hoping that she might translate Im's victory speech for me. But Im wasn't interested in chatting. The Roger Federer of archery walked straight past, holding his right index finger up and wagging it vaguely in the direction of a video camera.
Brady Ellison wasn't alone among the American Olympic hopefuls in thinking that he was due for some long-deserved attention, and maybe some more cash flow to subsidize his year-round training. The Games are a competition not merely among athletes from different countries but among cash-strapped sporting institutions and federations for a boost into mainstream respectability. Swimming hoards the gold, for now, and women's gymnastics takes silver, but the competition among novelty acts for bronze is fierce. Even sprinting, which anchors the Olympics' second week, isn't immune to such anxieties: after Usain Bolt was disqualified for false-starting at the 2011 world championships, in Daegu, South Korea, there were desperate pleadings that the rules ought to be more forgiving, lest the sport's popularity flag any further.
"If we were to win in London, that would put badminton on the map," Howard Bach, a Vietnamese-American, said, glancing over at his doubles partner, Tony Gunawan. "That would erase a lot of the naysayers. They would slowly see: Hey, competitive badminton is indoors, not in back yards. No beers. This could be like the next Miracle on Ice." Bach granted that the likelihood of this was not great—"That would be like asking Chile to win in basketball"—and, sure enough, he and Gunawan were eliminated after just two matches. (They may deserve medals anyway, for going down honestly, unlike the South Korean and Chinese women who, for differing strategic reasons, attempted to throw the same match at the same time, producing the racquet-sports equivalent of mutually assured destruction.) Badminton shall remain in the back yard, with beers.
My May encounter with Ellison took place in a Dallas hotel, where more than a hundred aspiring members of Team U.S.A. had assembled for a media summit, among them a triathlete who works for Ernst & Young, a skeet shooter who collects rare children's books, the platform-diving daughter of the ex-Mets and Twins pitcher Frank Viola, and Michael Phelps, whose shadow loomed so large over the proceedings that it was sometimes difficult to have a conversation, even with an archer or a synchronized swimmer, without his name coming up. ("If somebody sees you in the airport, they're, like, 'Really? Do you know Michael Phelps?' ") After a couple of days in Dallas, I was ready to diagnose an epidemic of athletic Stockholm syndrome, in which gymnasts and divers and volleyball players and equestrians have internalized and, in some sense, accepted the mocking premise behind a lifetime's worth of questions like "Why don't you play a real sport?" When in doubt, they could at least point to Phelps, a rare crossover talent who can hang with LeBron and David Beckham.
Defensiveness is the Olympian's default ("This is no cartwheel show"), and is combined with an optimist's conviction that fortune is about to change. "It's a really special time in the U.S. to be a decathlete," a medal contender named Trey Hardee said, invoking Dan & Dave as both a cautionary tale and a source of inspiration. "Every year, there's more and more exposure for synchro, which is awesome," the duet-swimmer Mariya Koroleva told me. "Trampoline, it continues to grow," the gymnast Logan Dooley said. "Just put it like that: the sport always continues to grow." In the Olympic movement, every specialty is gaining ground.
The crass commercialization of the Games is a perennial topic of grousing. Good luck to anyone who brought a MasterCard or a Discover card with him to the Olympic Park, in Stratford, hoping to stock up on T-shirts featuring Wenlock, the one-eyed mascot. Visa only, please—and that goes for the A.T.M.s, too. So great was Visa's investment in Phelps going into London that a couple of months ago the company's head of global sponsorship marketing, Ricardo Fort, personally ironed a pink shirt for him in a midtown Manhattan hotel basement while Phelps conducted phone interviews to promote Visa's Go World campaign, pausing occasionally to reload on calories with yogurt and granola. Phelps's agent, Peter Carlisle, was on hand, too, examining a rough cut of the commercial that you may now have seen a dozen times, with a Morgan Freeman voice-over asking what would happen if lightning were to strike twice—that is, if Phelps were to dominate again. The commercial featured an especially boisterous spectator in Beijing who happened to be Phelps's sister's ex-boyfriend. "That could be a problem," Carlisle said, and requested that he be cropped out.
Carlisle is not just Phelps's agent but a more tactful version of Michael Ovitz in the so-called Olympic space. He heads Octagon's Olympics and Action Sports division, by far the largest of its kind, which represents more than fifty competitors and personalities in London, including the gold-medallist gymnast Aly Raisman, Dan O'Brien, and Apolo Anton Ohno, the celebrity speed skater, who's now working for NBC. "The moment people realize how funding works, it would be a major problem for the Olympic movement," Carlisle said. "The billions of dollars that cycle through the Games, you'd be shocked how little of it gets to the athletes." In other words, don't pity the butcher who got busted by the London Organizing Committee's paramilitary brand enforcers for hanging a sign with rings of sausages, and hold back the tears for Kate Middleton's parents, who nearly ran afoul of trademark law when they advertised their party-organizing business with the slogan "Let the Games Begin." Instead, pour one out for the contestants themselves, who'd surely be in favor of such protectionism—if only they could build a brand.
"A lot of these athletes will win a gold medal in these random events, and we'll get many, many inquiries about athletes that want to go pro and talk to us," Carlisle said. "There are so many athletes with great stories, but it's very difficult to market them, and it's gotten more difficult." The more globalized the Games' economy—Visa's Olympic campaign went live in seventy-one countries, up from forty-five, in Beijing—the fewer and bigger the opportunities for capitalizing. "It'd be really hard to market an archer," Carlisle told me, for example. (Sorry, Brady.) "Going into China, we had the opportunity to work with a Ping-Pong player from the U.S. with the last name Ping," he added. "Whitney Ping! So I figured, like, if ever we're going to have a scenario, it's this one, you know? And—nothing. No traction."
Carlisle and his colleagues were still debating whether to represent Holley Mangold, an irreverent twenty-two-year-old weight lifter with a compelling backstory (she played on the offensive line at her high school, in Ohio, and her brother, Nick, plays for the Jets) and a penchant for painting barbells on her fingernails but only an outside chance of competing with the burly Chinese and Russian women in her super-heavyweight class. "She ought to be marketable," he said. "But the American marketplace demands gold."
A beach-volleyball stunner Mangold is not. "I have a beautiful cyst growing out of my torn meniscus," she boasted, in Dallas. "It looks really creepy." But I was grateful to her and to her teammate Sarah Robles for their tutorial on the finer points of the sport—the variations of style within the two required lifts, the snatch and the clean-and-jerk. The split-snatch, for instance, is "super old-school and lame," according to Mangold, who narrated as Robles demonstrated and looked a bit like a cheerleader hoisting leaden pompoms, with one foot forward and the other foot back. And the squat jerk, which Mangold demonstrated, by lifting and crouching simultaneously, and only then standing, is for showoffs. "Usually, you'll see Chinese people doing it," Mangold added—and, indeed, I did, when Lu Xiaojun set a new world record in the seventy-seven-kilogram weight class and received a standing ovation for his peacocking.
"We have faster start times than a lot of swimmers," Robles added. "And higher verticals than volleyball and basketball players. We're really athletes."
The American marketplace may demand gold, but the British marketplace, beneath that veneer of indifference, turns out to be enchanted by any sheen at all. (Before the Games began, the novelist Nick Hornby asked that his fellow-countrymen be placed "under suicide watch.") Taking a breather from one too many rides on a double-decker, I turned on the telly just in time to hear a commentator shout himself hoarse: "Great Britain have taken a bronze in the men's team final! I can't believe I just said that! This is absolutely extraordinary!" He was referring to gymnastics, an event category that I permitted myself to skip entirely, after seeing the kinetic video of Lynn and Rick Raisman watching their daughter Aly's performance on the uneven bars.
I skipped the diving, too, out of solidarity with the nearly five thousand fans whose tickets placed them so high up in the wings of the Aquatics Centre that the ten-metre platform was invisible—obscured by the low stingray swoop of Zaha Hadid's ceiling. Doubles canoeing presented a real dilemma: do you go flat water, and catch the Belarussian Bahdanovich brothers, or white water, and see the Slovakian Hochschorner twins? In the end, I took Mayor Boris Johnson's advice, and went to Horse Guards Parade, near Buckingham Palace, in search of "wet otters"—Johnson's euphemism, in an op-ed for the Daily Telegraph, for the women of beach volleyball.
There seems to be some confusion about the beach-volleyball uniforms. I got a call from my wife, in New York, who was amused by what she thought of as the creative attempts by some women contestants to show as much skin as possible without actually wearing bikinis. No, it's just cold. Notice the spectators, many of them wearing windbreakers and carrying umbrellas. These are the first Games in which the authorities had the decency not to require women to wear bikinis, and, furthermore, to enforce a Brazilian-style maximum on the bottom half. Members of the U.S. men's basketball team may have been disappointed when they showed up at Horse Guards Parade, on Monday night, to cheer on the two-time defending champs, Kerri Walsh Jennings and Misty May-Treanor, who had availed themselves of long sleeves. But I was there earlier that afternoon, to scout the U.S. team's chief competition, the Brazilians Juliana Silva and Larissa França, and it was only partly cloudy. The air temperature was sixty-six, the sand—delivered in thirty-five hundred truckloads from Sussex—was seventy-nine, and the bikinis were on. "Every team can decide how small they want them to be," Ilka Semmler, of Germany, the Brazilians' opponents, said. "If they want to sell sex, that's fine. But that's not our intention."
It is indisputably the intention of the event's organizers—as though it were a cathartic release from the repressed discomfort of watching ninety-pound girls on the uneven bars. The Olympics are nothing if not a convention of salesmen. In the match that I watched, there was a technical timeout called, and a different group of women in swimsuits occupied the court to wriggle around atop beach balls to the Katy Perry song "California Gurls": "Daisy dukes, bikinis on top / Sun-kissed skin so hot / We'll melt your popsicle."
"Meanwhile, back on center court, it's Brazil versus Germany!" the announcer reminded us, with a wink, as play resumed. In the next set, with Brazil well on its way to victory, there was an official conga line.
The address I was given for Greenwich Park, where the equestrian events are being held, was on Romney Road. Mitt himself had left town by the time Rafalca, his wife's fifteen-year-old Oldenburg mare, made her Olympic début, and he had distanced himself verbally as well, informing Brian Williams, "I have to tell you, this is Ann's sport. I'm not even sure which day the sport goes on." Even so, it is safe to say that no athlete in London has done more to attract attention to his or her sport in recent weeks than Rafalca. Her event is dressage, which is a little like figure skating before the invention of double axels, Salchows, and camel spins. Neither speed nor strength seems to be a necessity. There are marks for movements like "extended trot" and "collected walk." The choreography is rigid. Discipline and presentation are all.
I liked Rafalca when I first saw her trotting out to the center of the ring. She's a handsomely light shade of chocolate, with a vigorous black shock of a tail. She points well, and looked quite good at the piaffe, a form of strutting in place, with high steps. After several minutes in the spotlight, though, she seemed to labor. Her pirouette to the left looked slow and mannered, and her pirouette to the right began with a bit of a lurch and an over-large first step. I heard a pair of heavy snorts during a brief cantering interlude, and then noticed that the background music that happened to be playing was a little New Age-y, rather than the standard classical fare. There was something off about it.
If Rafalca suffered any bias from the judges on account of her celebrity, I couldn't discern it. Her highest marks came from a Dane and her lowest from a Dutchman, with the American judge somewhere in between. Total score: 70.243 per cent.
"Is that good?" one reporter asked another, down in the mixed zone.
"I'm just writing down numbers."
"Doesn't sound very good."
"I think I actually know less about this than about badminton, which I was at yesterday, for that controversy."
Soon Jan Ebeling, Rafalca's rider, appeared, to take questions on the horse's behalf. "I think she's peaking just at the right moment," he said. "I think it really ended up being a good thing for the sport."
Bob Bowman, Michael Phelps's professorial coach, is a horse enthusiast, too, and a couple of years ago he recommended that Peter Carlisle watch the movie "Secretariat," as a kind of swimming allegory. "I was alive at the time"—1973—"but I don't remember anything about it," Carlisle told me. "Just the name. And you know he's the best, but you don't really understand it." Carlisle began summarizing his recollection of the movie for me. "He was the underdog in the Kentucky Derby against his rival—whose name I don't remember," he said. "Then he goes to the Preakness, and still the favorite is this other horse, and Secretariat just nudged him out. But the dig was that he wasn't going to be able to run the longer distance in the Belmont, and all the while the other horse's trainer is yapping, yapping, and the rivalry continues to the point where you really think Secretariat's the underdog. So he gets to the Belmont and blows the other horse away by, like, twenty-something lengths—still, to this day, the fastest. No one's even come close to running that lap in the same time. But I can't even remember the other horse's name—who, if you took away Secretariat, was the fastest horse that had ever run." He looked at me. "Do you know who Secretariat beat?"
Leaving aside the confusing bit about underdog status, the implication was that Phelps is Secretariat and Ryan Lochte, with his dental grille and his boastful designs on claiming the sport's mantle, is the also-swam. What had seemed foolhardy about the analogy on Saturday night, after the debacle of the four-hundred-metre individual medley, came, by Tuesday, to make some sense. Lochte's star turn—his "time"—was proving short-lived, as he suffered a letdown in the four-by-one-hundred-metre freestyle relay and the two-hundred-metre freestyle races that followed, winning only a silver instead of two more golds. What's more, it emerged that even in his finest moment Lochte had been beaten, by a girl! This was the sixteen-year-old Chinese dolphin Ye Shiwen—Yeah, She Wins, for those keeping score on Twitter. Ye's final freestyle lap in the women's four-hundred-metre individual medley took just 28.93 seconds, to Lochte's 29.10. Compounding the humiliation, Ye played it Bruce Lee-cool on social media, unlike Lochte, who had been tweeting in spurts and with what sometimes seemed the voice of an OMG tween ("Good morn LOCHTE NATION!!! thanks for all the great support! U guys are the best. How is everyone??"). "The first day's competition is finished," Ye wrote. "The score is satisfactory."
The Games had their first doping alarm, and their first dose of geopolitics, as some in the American swimming faction led the way in crying foul, and the Chinese and other athletes responded with indignation. On Tuesday night, after Ye had passed her first battery of drug tests and then set another Olympic record, in the two-hundred-metre individual medley, a Chinese reporter in the mixed zone explained the nature of her countrymen's anger. "It's because the U.S. has Phelps, and China has so many people, so why can't they have just one like him?"
The Ye controversy threatened to overshadow the Americans' own teen heroine, seventeen-year-old Missy Franklin, a Phelps-like prodigy who began snorkelling before her third birthday and had sponsors clamoring for her endorsement at fifteen. Franklin has thus far maintained that she intends to swim in college, instead of turning pro. She just finished her junior year at Regis Jesuit High School, in Aurora, Colorado. "She called at three-fifteen in the morning, from France," D. A. Franklin, Missy's mom, said on Tuesday evening, standing near the pool entrance with her husband, Dick. "She said, 'Momma, did you hear about the shootings in the theatre?' She said, 'I'm just so scared.' I said, 'What are you scared about?' She said, 'I'm just scared to be here. I'm scared for my friends. My friends were all going to it. I want to know what theatres they went to and I can't reach them now.' " Franklin dedicated her first gold medal, in the hundred-metre backstroke, to the victims.
If there is to be another Secretariat in American swimming, Missy Franklin, with her perpetual smile, is the most plausible candidate. By resisting the lure of sponsors and prize money, she had already forfeited more than her parents make in a year. D.A. and her husband have met with Carlisle, but she remains Missy's agent for now, having recently taken a leave from her job as a physician to manage the many requests for her daughter's time. "This is all unfamiliar territory," she said. "We're not naïve, either. There's going to come a point, perhaps, where we just say, 'Missy, a lot of people don't ever earn this in their whole life.' I don't know. It's hard. It's hard being parents."
But the night belonged to Phelps, who redeemed his week with a strong finish in the four-by-two-hundred-metre freestyle relay to capture his fifteenth gold and nineteenth medal in all, topping Latynina—with more to come. An hour earlier, he'd seemed to wilt again, surrendering a large lead in his strongest event, the two-hundred-metre butterfly, to the lunging South African Chad le Clos. In so doing, he gave us the gift of Bert le Clos, Chad's father, whose tearful interview with the BBC ("It's like I've died and went to heaven, and whatever happens in my life now is plain sailing. It's plain sailing!") actually ennobled the parent-cam genre. Chad called beating Phelps "the greatest moment in my life," and Phelps himself even managed to look happy, in coaching the victor on how to mug for the cameras. After four Olympic Games and countless Visa commercials, he'd learned to lose with grace. ♦


text:
There are now more ebay sellers in the USA offering free shipping on these cheap stuff since they buy them from manufacturers and ship huge quantity cheap and then sell them in the USA. On the other hand, we micro-businesses can't get any discounts. Any solution?
So USPS pricing does not make sense
I also had to rip them apart since every single one has my address printed on the application.
QuoteSo USPS pricing does not make sense Tell that to their pensioners, and healthcare provider. It's their healthcare and pension costs that is out of control and that's why USPS is in the deep hellhole it is right now. And their only solution to their out-of-control costs problem is to try increasing revenue by raising rates for all of us.

subset: commoncrawl


text: Show Hide image Politics 3 April 2012 Not a dull grey man in a suit - Mehdi Hasan on Sayeeda Warsi The Tories won't win the next election without appealing to black and Asian voters. Sign-up Sayeeda Warsi is under friendly fire. Her critics inside the Conservative Party have queued up in recent days to deride and denounce her as "incompetent", "invisible" and "not up to the job" of party chair. According to the Daily Telegraph's front-page splash on 2 April irate Tory backbenchers want "a senior MP . . . appointed as full-time Conservative Party chairman, ending the current arrangement where [the] job is shared by two peers". The attacks on Warsi from fellow Tories, since her elevation to the House of Lords and promotion to the party's front bench in 2007, have been as vicious as they have relentless. A now-notorious post on the ConservativeHome website described her appointment as "the wrong signal at a time when Britain is fighting a global war against Islamic terrorism and extremism". The website's influential editor, Tim Montgomerie, has called her a "lightweight" and loudly urges David Cameron to sack the baroness from her post as party chair. Judged by the intensity and sheer volume of the anti-Warsi vitriol, it is difficult to come to any other conclusion than that her critics don't like her because she ticks three very un-Tory boxes: she is female, Asian and Muslim. Since it is 2012 and they can't say as much in public, her right-wing opponents target instead her alleged lack of "competence" and "ability". Such criticisms are unfair and untenable. Consider the recent record of self-inflicted Tory wounds. Warsi can't be blamed for the "pasty" or "granny" taxes (step forward, George Osborne). Nor can she be held responsible for the panic over petrol (step forward, Francis Maude). And it was her co-chairman, and Cameron's close friend, Andrew Feldman, who appointed the seedy Peter Cruddas, of Sunday Times video infamy, as party treasurer. On the issue of Cruddas and the "Cash for Cameron" debacle, a source in Conservative Campaign Headquarters tells me, Warsi didn't disappear or go to ground: she wasn't asked to take to the airwaves on the Monday morning because the decision had already been taken to send out Maude and the party's deputy chairman, Michael Fallon. "Downing Street decided they needed a dull grey man in a suit to shut the story down," says my source – though, of course, Maude's glib reference to "kitchen suppers" did the exact opposite. Nonetheless, "Maude and Fallon are seen as dispensable; Warsi isn't." Shuffled off But for how much longer? One cabinet minister tells me Cameron is under "horrendous pressure" from his backbenchers to sack Warsi. Encouraged by Fallon and his supporters, they want a stronger, more ultra-Conservative figure, based in the Commons, not the Lords. Ultimately, though, it was Cameron's decision to split the chairman's job between Warsi and Feldman, despite the last disastrous experiment with co-chairs – Liam Fox and Maurice Saatchi, under Michael Howard. And it was the PM who insisted Warsi tour the country's Conservative associations, week in, week out, in her role as a "campaigning" chairman, rather than stay in London and tour the TV studios. Despite the collapse of the Conservative vote in Bradford West on 29 March, Warsi has had some success at the polls. "When was the last time a party in government won local council seats?" says an aide. The Tories, according to their internal calculations, had expected to lose 300-odd seats in the local elections of May 2011 but ended up gaining 85 new ones – and winning the AV referendum. But none of this seems to matter. Warsi irritates and infuriates right-wing, male, Westminster-based Conservatives. Her outspoken comments on Islam and Muslims haven't helped her cause; in a much-discussed speech last year, Warsi declared that Islamphobia had "passed the dinner table test" in the UK. At the time, Downing Street briefed reporters that she had failed to clear her speech with the Prime Minister. Cameron is said to have later conceded to Warsi that he agreed with much of what she said. But it was too late. Friends of Warsi note how the speech, and the official reaction to it, sent out a message to the right of the party, especially the neoconservatives, that she was "dangerous". Tory commentators intensified their calls for her to be sacked and shifted to a less visible role, such as British high commissioner in Pakistan. "It's fucking patronising to suggest she should be shuffled off to Pakistan," says a friend. "Perhaps they think she'll be out of sight, maybe blown up by a bomb and that'll be the end of her." Warsi isn't without allies in the cabinet but they are few and far between, including Dominic Grieve, Kenneth Clarke, Andrew Lansley and the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg. She has repeatedly clashed with cabinet heavyweights such as Osborne and Michael Gove, the Education Secretary. I'm told that Gove tried to stymie efforts by Warsi to set up a cross-government working group to tackle anti-Muslim hatred. Warsi, however, persisted – and succeeded. But, says a senior Tory source, it was a "long, hard battle". So will the outspoken peer quit the cabinet? Jump before she is pushed? I doubt it. Warsi is a battler. Here is the only Tory frontbencher to have taken on both the BNP's Nick Griffin (on BBC1's Question Time) and the Islamist buffoon Anjem Choudary (on BBC2's Newsnight). Yet the attacks on her continue. Simon Heffer, writing in the Daily Mail on 31 March, claimed that the Tory peer was "incapable of motivating the party's volunteer workers because her own 'progressive' views are diametrically opposed to the those of more traditionally conservative activists". Allies of Warsi inside Conservative HQ dispute that there is a disconnect between the chairman and and the grass roots and point out how well she is received by constituency associations around the country each week. They dismiss the hostile posts and comments on sites such as ConservativeHome as "Westminster chatter". But there is a much bigger issue here: will indulging "more traditionally conservative activists" win a majority for Cameron's Conservatives at the next election? As I pointed out in last week's issue, it will be difficult for the Conservative Party to win a parliamentary majority in 2015. Where will the extra votes come from? The major factor in deciding not to vote Conservative is not being white. Labour continues to monopolise the votes of most black and minority ethnic (BME) communities and, in the 2010 general election, just 6 per cent of BME voters opted for the Conservative Party, compared with 37 per cent of white voters. The Tories were their own worst enemy: Michael Ashcroft, the then deputy chairman who ran the marginal seats strategy, refused to prioritise BME voters or target seats with substantial BME populations. In 14 of the top 50 seats where the Tories narrowly came second to Labour in 2010, non-white voters made up more than 10 per cent of the population. These included key marginals such as Tooting, Birmingham Edgbaston and Luton South, all of which slipped through the Tories' fingers. It would be unfair, however, to ignore the progress that the Conservatives have made in diversifying their parliamentary party: the number of non-white MPs increased by 450 per cent in 2010 – from two to 11. Paul Uppal, a Sikh, now represents the Wolverhampton South West seat once held by Enoch Powell! But there is still a mountain to climb. Take Birmingham City Council, currently controlled by a Conservative-Lib Dem coalition. In a city where one in three voters isn't white, the Conservative group on the council is all-white. Tory strategists are worried it will fall to Labour in May's local elections. Warsi, with the aid of Cameron's former adviser Steve Hilton, tried and failed to persuade the reactionary Tory council leader, Mike Whitby, to select more BME candidates. Speak plainly To her opponents' consternation, the Conservative chairman won't stop pushing her agenda. She is on the verge of hiring a new adviser, to be based in CCHQ and tasked with getting the party to focus on BME communities. I'm told that at a recent meeting with backbench Tory MPs, a defiant Warsi declared that "unless and until campaigning with BME communities is institutionalised and embedded in every aspect of what we do as a political party, we cannot win an overall majority in 2015". Over the past two years, she has struggled to persuade her all-white ministerial allies to internalise this argument. But the appointment of Andrew Cooper, founder of polling company Populus and über-moderniser, as the Prime Minister's director of political strategy in February 2011 has helped her cause. "Cooper brought hard data with him to help win the argument on the importance of BME voters," says a senior Tory source. Late last year, he presented his empirical evidence at a meeting of Conservative cabinet ministers in the Prime Minister's suite of offices behind the Speaker's chair in parliament. Cooper identified more than 30 urban seats, with big BME populations, that need to be gained to secure a Tory majority in 2015. "It was where her argument was finally won," says my source. It might be unpopular to say so in liberal circles, but I can't help but admire the plain-speaking, hard-working, and "progressive" (© Simon Heffer) baroness. As a northern, working-class, Asian, Muslim woman, she is a huge asset to a Conservative-led cabinet that is seen as distant, unrepresentative and out of touch. But she has been let down by the more unreconstructed and short-sighted sections of her party – as well as by the Prime Minister. When I interviewed her in October 2010, I called Warsi "the Conservatives' secret weapon". That they have failed to use this weapon says much more about the Tory high command and its dismal lack of judgement and confidence than it does about her. Mehdi Hasan is a contributing writer for the New Statesman and the co-author of Ed: The Milibands and the Making of a Labour Leader. He was the New Statesman's senior editor (politics) from 2009-12. Subscribe £1 per month This article first appeared in the 09 April 2012 issue of the New Statesman, Spring Double Issue SUBSCRIBE More


text:
Do a search for "VH-MDX" in Google and you'll find all sorts of things. Unfortunately, what you won't find (yet) is the location of this missing Cessna aircraft, that disappeared over Barrington Tops National Park, north-west of Sydney in August 1981. It truly is Australia's greatest aviation mystery and one that has confounded everyone from search & rescue and aviation experts, locals, … [Read more...]
Volunteering in the Outdoors
One thing that I'm convinced about in this crazy life, is that we're not just put here on this amazing planet for our own benefit. Something as simple as giving someone a smile or a random act of kindness, has the ability to give light to someone's life. I consider myself so incredibly blessed in many ways, that when faced with the opportunity to help out, I find myself saying, 'How can I not … [Read more...]


text: Building their first recreational trailers in 1983, Bonair offered a wide range of small to medium-sized products. Featuring travel trailers, camping trailers, fifth wheel trailers and park model units, the Bonair line-up are catered to various levels of comfortable vacation living. Bonair concluded production of recreational vehicles after the 1999 model year.


text:
Jeter to be joined by Tanaka, Betances at All-Star Game
Derek Jeter is bowing out, sticking to his decision to celebrate 2014 as his final season wearing pinstripes. That exit comes just as Masahiro Tanaka and Dellin Betances are on the rise, standing as some of the best that the American League has to offer.
Those storylines will come together as the trio of Yankees standouts make their trips to the All-Star Game, with Jeter, Tanaka and Betances having been selected to represent the Junior Circuit at the July 15 Midsummer Classic, to be played at Minnesota's Target Field.
Derek Jeter is bowing out, sticking to his decision to celebrate 2014 as his final season wearing pinstripes. That exit comes just as Masahiro Tanaka and Dellin Betances are on the rise, standing as some of the best that the American League has to offer.
Those storylines will come together as the trio of Yankees standouts make their trips to the All-Star Game, with Jeter, Tanaka and Betances having been selected to represent the Junior Circuit at the July 15 Midsummer Classic, to be played at Minnesota's Target Field.
It is the 14th All-Star selection for Jeter, a fitting venue for the 40-year-old shortstop to be honored near the midpoint of his farewell campaign.
"It feels good. All-Star games are fun," Jeter said after Sunday's 9-7 win in Minnesota. "I'm happy I get the opportunity to come back here. It would be special for me. It's the last one for me, so I'm glad I have the opportunity to go, but I'm extremely happy for Tanaka and Dellin, too. Those guys deserved it as much as anyone."
The Yankees' all-time franchise leader in hits, games, stolen bases, at-bats, singles and hit-by-pitches, Jeter is also tied with Lou Gehrig for the all-time lead in doubles after missing all but 17 games last season due to injury.
"After last year, just playing means a little bit more," Jeter said. "It's never a situation where I expect to go to the All-Star Game. I've never taken it for granted at all in my career any time that I've gone, and I've enjoyed each and every one of them. So I'm looking forward to this."
The only Yankee to play for the team before his 21st birthday and after his 40th, Jeter has returned strong for one last season. The selection snaps a tie with Joe DiMaggio and Mariano Rivera, both of whom were selected as All-Stars 13 times. Mickey Mantle was a 20-time All-Star.
The Yanks tried to keep expectations low for Tanaka as he made the jump from Japan to the Majors this offseason, with general manager Brian Cashman opining that -- for a price of $155 million, plus a $20 million posting fee -- the team might have acquired a potential solid No. 3 starter.
Fortunately for Tanaka and the Yankees, the right-hander has proved to be so much more. Wielding an arsenal highlighted by a world-class splitter that has been his dominant strikeout pitch in the first half, Tanaka has been the most reliable piece of the Yanks' rotation, with the team feeling like they will win every time he takes the mound.
Tanaka leads the Majors in both wins (12) and complete games (three) while ranking among the league leaders in several other categories. Because he is scheduled to pitch on Sunday for the Yankees at Baltimore, Tanaka will be replaced on the active roster and won't pitch in the All-Star Game, though he does plan to attend.
"It's obviously an event that not everybody can be a part of," Tanaka said through an interpreter. "I'm very excited to get this opportunity."
After being demoted to Double-A Trenton as recently as 2012 to work on his command issues, the odds were stacked against Betances flourishing at the big league level, but the Yanks have finally hit the jackpot after moving the 6-foot-8 right-hander to the bullpen.
"I was emotional earlier, because it's been hard work," Betances said. "It's been a long journey from all the years in the Minor Leagues -- all the ups and downs, just to have such a good first half and for the players to vote for me, I'm truly humbled. It's a crazy feeling for me right now. I'm enjoying each and every day here. I'm blessed to be a Yankee."
A product of New York City, Betances has figured out how to harness his high-90s fastball and a nasty slurve/slider, turning them into strikeout weapons. Betances' first-half performance has drawn comparisons to the dominance that Rivera enjoyed in 1996, setting up for John Wetteland on a Yankees club that went on to win the World Series.
"I'm extremely happy for all of them," manager Joe Girardi said. "I think they're all deserving, obviously. To have two rookies going, that's pretty special."
Dellin Betances, RHP
Prior ASGs: None
ASG stats: N/A
How he made 2014 AL team: Selected by players
Why he's an All-Star: Of Betances' last 119 outs, 62 have come via strikeout. His 13.95 strikeouts per nine innings, spanning 37 relief outings, represents the highest such mark in the Majors this season (min. 40 innings).
DYK?: Betances was born in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York, then moved to the Lower East Side before starring at Brooklyn's Grand Street Campus High School. A Yankees fan growing up, he was in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium for David Wells' 1998 perfect game.
Quotable: "It's so hard, especially for middle relievers, to make the All-Star team. I didn't know what to expect. Guys kept telling me, 'You have a good chance of being there.' It's a crazy feeling." -- Betances
Derek Jeter, SS
Prior ASGs: 1998-2002, '04, '06-12
ASG stats: 11-for-25 (.440), five runs scored, one double, one homer, three RBIs, one walk, one hit-by-pitch
How he made 2014 AL team: Elected by fans
Why he's an All-Star: Fueled by terrific fan support, Jeter led at every checkpoint of All-Star balloting this year, holding off his top challenger, Alexei Ramirez of the White Sox. Jeter's performance isn't where it was in 2012, when he led the Majors with 216 hits, but he has continued to hit at the top of the order for the Yanks while playing almost every day.
DYK?: Jeter was the All-Star Game MVP in the 2000 contest played at Turner Field, going 3-for-3 with two RBIs and a run scored in the AL's 6-3 victory.
Quotable: "I think it'll be great, and I think it's great for the fans. I think it's great for baseball, and I'm sure they have something special planned." -- Girardi
Masahiro Tanaka, RHP
Prior ASGs: None in Majors (seven in Japan)
ASG stats: N/A
How he made 2014 AL team: Selected by players
Why he's an All-Star: The Yankees are 13-4 in Tanaka's 17 starts, and he has recorded a quality start in all but one of those outings. He's the first Yanks rookie to throw three complete games in a season since Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez in 1998.
DYK?: Tanaka began playing baseball in first grade as a catcher, and he did not begin pitching until junior high school. He became a national icon in Japan after excelling in the Summer Koshien Tournament, striking out 458 batters over his high school career to shatter Daisuke Matsuzaka's previous national high school record of 423.
Quotable: "Obviously, I'm looking forward to it. To be part of it and to be able to meet with some of the best pitchers in the Major Leagues, that's going to be a great experience for me. If there's a chance, I'd definitely like to be able to talk with some of them and maybe pick their brains." -- Tanaka
Immediately following the announcement of the AL and National League All-Star rosters on Sunday, fans began voting to select the final player for each league's 34-man roster via the 2014 All-Star Game MLB.com Final Vote Sponsored by Experian. Fans can cast their votes from a list of five players from each league until the winners are announced after the voting concludes on Thursday at 4 p.m. ET.
The final phase of All-Star Game voting will again have fans help choose the Ted Williams All-Star Game Most Valuable Player Award presented by Chevrolet. During the Midsummer Classic, fans will vote exclusively online at MLB.com and via Twitter in the 2014 All-Star Game MLB.com MVP Vote Sponsored by Pepsi, and their collective voice will represent 20 percent of the overall vote that determines the recipient of the Arch Ward Trophy.
MLB.TV Premium subscribers, for the first time, will be able to live stream the All-Star Game via MLB.TV through FOX's participating video providers. Access will be available across more than 400 platforms that support MLB.TV, including the award-winning MLB.com At Bat app. MLB.com will provide extensive online coverage of the All-Star Week festivities.
The 85th All-Star Game will be televised nationally by FOX, in Canada by Rogers Sportsnet and RDS, and worldwide by partners in more than 200 countries via MLB International's independent feed. ESPN Radio and ESPN Radio Deportes will provide national radio coverage of the All-Star Game. MLB Network and SiriusXM will also provide comprehensive All-Star Week coverage. For more information, please visit allstargame.com.
Bryan Hoch is a reporter for MLB.com. Follow him on Twitter @bryanhoch and read his MLBlog, Bombers Beat.


text:
Please use this search engine in order to find informationa about the mayors and the town councils of any town in Abruzzo.
The * character means "any".
Search engine: mayors and town councils in Abruzzo
The Reti e Sistemi S.r.l. founded in 2000 by a group of professionals with decades of experience in Information Technology to be able to meet the most diverse computing needs of its valued customers.
Copyright © 2000 - 2019 Reti e Sistemi, Corso Piersanti Mattarella n. 12 Trapani - VAT N. 01961150818.


text:
Welcome and thank you for visiting our website! White Horse RV Center, New Jersey's largest RV dealer, offers a wide selection of both new and used RVs, and is family owned and operated since 1973! We now regularly serve customers in NJ, PA, DE, NY and MD, many of them having been referred or returning to see us again!
As the leading RV dealer in the region, we're proud to carry the top brands in the industry including:
Our Williamstown dealership is located right in the heart of South Jersey on Route 42 in Williamstown, NJ, convenient to the PA bridges, most of NJ, DE and beyond. In addition to approximately 250 RVs in stock to choose from, youll find an extensive selection of RV parts, and an award winning RV Service Department.
In December of 2014, our Galloway "Store at the Shore" moved down the street to a new, larger, state-of-the-art facility, which includes TWO indoor showrooms, and now has approximately 125 RVs in stock to choose from! You will also find expanded Service and Parts Departments. The Galloway dealership is right on Route 30 in Egg Harbor City, NJ, in close proximity to the Garden State Parkway and Atlantic City Expressway, convenient to the entire New Jersey coast, northern NJ, NY and beyond.
No matter which store you visit, you'll find a friendly and knowledgeable staff, and will be free to browse the our huge selection of in-stock RVs with no high pressure sales tactics. Our goal is to make you a customer for life by treating you right, and offering discount pricing all year around on all of our in-stock new RVs and used RVs, including:
We typically have over 350 New RVs and Used RVs in stock, so feel free to stop by our Williamstown, NJ Dealership or our Galloway, NJ Dealership, or visit online often as our inventory of motorhomes (Class A and Class C), travel trailers, expandable trailers, fifth wheels, and toy haulers changes on a daily basis. We look forward to seeing you!
|Sign Up for our Email List


text:
Jim Harbaugh has shown during his brief NFL coaching career that he's not afraid to make a gutsy call. He reportedly just made one of his biggest.
Jim Trotter of SI.com reported Wednesday that Harbaugh told Alex Smith that Colin Kaepernick will start at quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers in Sunday's game against the New Orleans Saints. Trotter reported that Smith, who missed a game with a concussion, was informed it wasn't a health-based decision.
"I'm going with Kaepernick. Alex, I'm sorry," Harbaugh told Smith, according to Trotter.
Smith later told ESPN on the record that Kaepernick will take all the first-team reps at practice this week. While the ESPN report tried to leave some room open that Smith still could start, Harbaugh clearly declared his intentions with the practice reps.
Harbaugh probably isn't too thrilled about the news coming out when he intended to keep the matter a mystery this week. All signs pointed toward Kaepernick following the second-year pro's effort against the Chicago Bears.
Kaepernick was absolutely electric in his first NFL start Monday night, completing 16 of 23 passes for 243 yards and two touchdowns without having to leave the pocket much. That came against perhaps the NFL's best defense. Kaepernick will face one of the league's worst Sunday at the Superdome.
The intense race for the playoffs is in full gear. Check out the latest situation in the postseason chase. More ...
It's a remarkable moment in this season for the 49ers because they remain one of the Super Bowl favorites and Smith was enjoying the best season of his eight-year NFL career. Smith leads the NFL in completion percentage and yards per attempt. But he struggled in losses to the Minnesota Vikings and New York Giants. Smith doesn't excel at the vertical game, and Kaepernick has a higher ceiling long-term because of athleticism and arm strength.
Harbaugh always can go back to Smith. We don't believe Smith's confidence will be shot -- he has been through much worse. Quarterback changes have occurred on plenty of successful teams on their way to the promised land, and this 49ers franchise is about so much more than the quarterback.
The 49ers are after a championship. Harbaugh wants to see if Kaepernick can lead them there.Follow Gregg Rosenthal on Twitter @greggrosenthal.