Olympic Sidelights: Heroes, zeroes

LONDON – The Main Press Center has a medical clinic that cannot even dress a wound. A Filipino reporter’s finger got pricked by a fine wire and was infected overnight. The nurse tried hard to press it open so that puss would pop out but it wouldn’t. They don’t have such things like agua oxigenada to soften the skin and let the creamy stuff out. Their prescription: Buy penicillin from the MPC pharmacy, which actually only sells health care products. So he called up Phl team for help. Easy. Done in 30 minutes. An Olympic clinic at the Mall also dressed the wound in record time – 10 minutes.

With a swollen finger, the reporter could hardly pound the keyboard properly.

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Coaches and players from China and Indonesia endorsed the unprecedented ruling disqualifying the eight doubles players – two pairs from China and one each from South Korea and Indonesia – for intentionally losing their group matches to secure favorable matchups in the knockout stages.

“The behavior of (the world No. 1 tandem of) Yu Yang and Wang Xiaoli violated fair play spirit of the Olympics and will be punished,” a Chinese statement said.

Yu Yang promptly announced her retirement.

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Bradley Wiggins, the Tour de France winner who is the time trials Olympic gold medalist, is being endorsed by his British fans for knighthood, the highest honor accorded to a commoner.

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Chinese diver Wu Minxia, who won her third Olympic gold medal, has now only been told that her grandparents died a year ago and her mother has suffered from breast cancer for eight years – just so she could focus on winning her event.

Wu, 26, has been cut off from the outside world for 10 years, diving for eight hours a day at a facility run by Project 119, the gold medal-seeking athletics scheme introduced by China after it won the Beijing Asian Games.

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Judo is the shortest competition in the Games. Regulation time is five minutes and the bout usually finishes in two minutes with a throw, pin, arm lock or strangle.