Keeping on the Olympics theme, Usain Bolt absolutely set the standard in the 100m final early on Sunday morning NZ time.

It shouldn’t be possible to dominate an event that lasts approximately 10 seconds, but Bolt did just that. I think this picture sums it up nicely:

When running an Olympic 100m final, you are not supposed to have the time to realise that you’ve won and start to celebrate 20 metres before the line, whilst still setting a new World Record of 9.69 seconds. Incredible.

I don’t know if this is entirely accurate, but the New York Post has published an article outlining American golden boy Michael Phelp’s diet, which apparently consists of 12,000 calories per day made up largely of foods that most people would consider to be “bad for you”. Here’s the breakdown according to The Post:

Breakfast: three fried-egg sandwiches loaded with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise; two cups of coffee; a five-egg omelet; a bowl of grits; three slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar; and three chocolate-chip pancakes.

Lunch: a pound of enriched pasta; two large ham and cheese sandwiches slathered with mayo on white bread; about 1,000 calories worth of energy drinks.

Dinner: a pound of pasta; an entire pizza; and another 1,000 calories worth of energy drinks.

According to Wikipedia, Phelps is 6′4″ and 90 kilograms, so clearly as a larger-than-average man who is also an elite athlete his calorie requirements are going to be very high. But 12,000 calories? Some loose math suggests that a semi-active man of Phelp’s size would only need around 3,000 calories per day to maintain his weight, so that’s some serious calorie expenditure to put down to training and muscle maintenance. It’s incredible to consider.

Regarding the choice of foods, it’s a given that if you’re going to consume 12,000 calories then a large portion of that is going to be made up of “bad” foods - (eating 12,000 calories of salad would be nigh impossible) - but still, foods like cheese, mayonnaise, extra sugar, chocolate-chip pancakes and pizza are hardly foods that you would normally associate with fitness freaks.

Whether the diet is quality or not, though, nobody is going to argue with Phelp’s recipe.

More on Phelps: The Age has some more interesting insight on Phelps’ genetic and mental conditions which may have contributed to his success.

Who says golf is boring? Tiger Woods’ U.S. Open win this week caused measurable traffic spikes in the U.S.A., with numerous ISPs apparently initially believing the spikes to be a denial of service attack.

You can read the full story here, but here’s the summary:

Starting around 9 am Pacific and peaking at 1:30 pm yesterday, many ISPs noticed an unusual increase in traffic. At first, a few security engineers worried they were under some type of new DDoS attack. But the flood of traffic did not appear directed at any individual customer — the gigabits of anomaly traffic surged to almost all customers from multi-national banks to the bakery down the street and home DSL / Cable users. For several ISPs, traffic into their network grew by 15-25%. In one provider, inbound traffic nearly doubled.

It turns out that the U.S. Open played at Torrey Pines yesterday generated one of the larger Internet-wide flash crowds this year. Traffic dipped and peaked corresponding to Tiger’s initial
misses and subsequent spectacular comeback as millions of office bound fans tuned in to the live NBC and ESPN coverage.

The Herald has a story today talking about the new proposed Public Health Bill and its plan to ban the advertising of “unhealthy” food on television in yet another effort to combat obesity.

What a lot of crap.

For starters, the focus (as usual) appears to be on children, and I don’t think I’ve ever met a kid who goes shopping for his or her own food. That’s right - once again someone is calling for a ban of something to benefit children, and once again the actual responsibility lies with parents.

I had written a long rant about sports nutrition and that teaching people about it would help to encourage better habits; but let’s forget that. I’d rather summerise by saying that we should stop banning everything and start encouraging some self responsibility FFS.

(Or, have I got it wrong… maybe Wii Fit is the real answer?)

Today the Miami Heat’s NBA season came to a dismal close with the worst winning percentage in the league at 15 wins and 67 losses. This gives them the worst record since Atlanta’s 13-69 in in 2004/05 and ties the franchise’s all-time worst season way back in 1988/89 - which also happened to be the team’s first year.

The reason this is interesting is that two years ago the Heat won the NBA Finals in convincing fashion and last year made the Playoffs and (in the Championship year) Dwayne Wade was playing better basketball than anyone has since Michael Jordan. Since then Wade has been plagued by injuries (playing not much over half of the time) and his supporting cast has all but disappeared - Shaq has gone to Phoenix, Alonzo Mourning’s career is over, Udonis Haslem is injured and Antoine Walker and Gary Payton are also gone.

Not much to say really except “ouch”. It’s rare to see the best become the worst so quickly; unless of course you’ve been following the Warriors over the last 10 years.