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Greece played a great game against the US Olympic basketball team but in the end they lost 77-71.
The US won a great swimming 4x200 freestyle relay victory when Keller held off a prolonged attack by Ian Thorpe of Australia in the last 200 meters.
Romania won the gold medal in the women's gymnastics team event, with the favorite US team taking silver and Russia bronze. Nadia Comanenci's legacy still lives on, 28 years later.
The Bad...
Kenteris and Thanou left the hospital yesterday morning and are scheduled to appear before the Executive Committee of the IOC this morning. On her way out, Thanou had the nerve to declare that she will "fight to the end to prove the truth" and that she would "fight for Greece, the country she loved so much". Shamelessly.
And the Weird...
Greece won another gold medal today, with judoka Ilias Iliadis, in the 81 kg category. What's weird about it? The 18-year old kid, a great athlete, does not speak Greek. The son of a family of ethnic Greeks from Georgia (the Russian, not the US, version) who returned to the country a few years ago, he is shy about practising his deficient Greek, especially in front of the cameras. So, we got his reaction in Russian instead.
nyloo's daily Olympic Diary
The match between Greek tennis champion Lena Daniilidou and Bulgarian Magdalena Maleeva was definitely the highlight of the day, and not just for the Greeks.
Daniilidou, ranked 36th in the professional circuit, injured her thigh pretty badly when she was ahead 2-6, 6-4, 4-3. She collapsed on the ground and screamed with pain. The crowd of about five thousand were stunned at the sight as were millions around Greece who were watching live on television.
Daniilidou got up, asked to have her thigh bandaged and took position behind the line. The camera zoomed in to her face as tears trickled down from the agony of pain.
Still, she kept throwing those backhands and slicing those lobs, until, just before the last game, she collapsed again, screaming even louder, her face twitching in agony. Somehow she got up, served her way to 40-15 and then drove a winner for the matchpoint.
This was an Olympic moment that brought back to memory the finish of the women's marathon race at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, when Swiss Gabrielle Andersen-Scheiss, exhausted and dehydrated, stumbled the last few hundred meters to the finish line and thus defined what sports and competition should be about.
Daniilidou did it again last night, 20 years later.
Otherwise, some of the international media's mind numbing reporting from Athens continued yesterday, although some others found humour in the complete absence of newsworthy items, i.e. bad news, to report back home.
A case in point was a German television crew that, apparently throwing in the towel, turned the tables and resorted to self sarcasm. In their report they acknowledge that the Greeks started the construction projects at a snail's pace but they managed to surprise everybody in the end.
"Still", the reporter continued, "not everything is as good as it seems. On my way to the bus stop this morning there was mud on the street, and the railings along the side of the Press building were full of dust. Then, of course, there is the problem with equipment. The pens that we received at the Press Center tend to malfunction often".
Great fun, right? Wrong! One of the top Greek television channels, last night, reported on the German television story as proof that the foreign media continue to besmirch Greece's good name. How about that for a sense of humour?
