18 Days in August, an Olympic Blog

Yiannis has written his post about our latest visit to the Olympic stadium at 3am, I admire his stamina!
Well I am going to be a little bit more detailed about the athletics events we saw last night.
The stadium was packed although again there were sporadic empty seats in the stands allocated to the international ticket distributors (more on how badly JetSet and Sportsworld have messed up these games at later time).
The day started with loads of qualification rounds, for womens 100m, womens pole vault, were I think the biggest upset was that Stacy Dragila failed to qualify for the final!
Womens triple jump saw 2/3 Greek ladies qualify was very good jumps.
There were loads of qualification heats for mens 100 meters, some of them pretty close.
The crowd grew with anticipation as the womens discus final approached since three Greek ladies competed in that. Every time a Greek thrower was getting ready to throw the crowd cheered her up. When it was Kelesidou's time the announcer said that it is good to cheer for our country, but some athletes prefer silence in order to concentrate, he then said that Kelesidou was such an athlete (he only said this in Greek!). So people stopped, although there were still some idiots continuing to cheer (what is wrong with these people).
The first two discus throws were not that good from the Greek side. The top four ladies had thrown more than 66m, 2-3 meters more than the Greek girls.

Then on the third attempt Kelesidou threw 66.68m. We were watching the throw which was fairly low and did not seem much initially, however the discus went on and on and on, landing after the 65m mark. It was pretty clear that it was BIG throw. The crowd errupted in applause which only became larger when it was confirmed that Kelesidou was now in gold medal position.

Unfortunately the other two throwers did not perform at all leaving them low in the overall scoring.
On the 5th throw Sadova from Russia did a really huge throw and overtook Kelesidou by 34cm... Oh well she deserved it because she consistently threw very well througout the final.
Kelesidou was silver medalist andYatchenko from Bielarus was third.
There was a surprising absence of "western" women from the final... why is this? I really do not know. What I do know is that big fat Greek women have a long tradition in "throwing" athletics sports, whether that is javelin or discus.

The evening finished with the womens 100m final, were Jamaica had 3 women present, which was very impressive. With the gold and silver medalists from Sydney absent, the race was open and Nesterenko from Bielarus won this race.