Wow, you don’t see that very often in the Olympics, do you?

Here’s a video (sorry it’s not in English, but YouTube pulls all the NBC stuff— you’ll get the idea, though):

If you’d like to watch Nastia Liukin perform before tonight, I’m including her floor routine below.

If he can win 7 more golds during the Beijing Olympics, he’ll beat Mark Spitz’s record of 7 gold medals in one Olympics, which was set in 1972. He only needs three more gold medals to hold the record for most gold medals by an Olympian.

Here’s the video of his gold medal swim, in case you missed it.

Here’s an interview with Lopez from the track and field Olympic Trials:

Joey Cheek was set to head to Beijing this week. He had previously been granted a visa, but now that has been revoked. I understand that a country has the right to grant or deny visas to anyone for basically no reason. The U.S. has repeatedly denied visas for certain performers because they can’t seem to obey the law. But I don’t understand why the Chinese government initially approved Cheek’s visa, only to turn around and revoke it. Presumably, they knew of his involvement with Team Darfur when they approved it to begin with. AND Team Darfur has been a strong opponent of an Olympic boycott. I don’t think their focus on Darfur would be any less if the Olympics were being held somewhere else— after all, Joey Cheek first began his campaign to help Darfur when he won a gold medal in Turino. This is yet another example of China’s complete unwillingness to allow anything that might possibly be construed as criticism.

So, since Joey won’t be able to speak out at the Olympics, here are a couple of You Tube videos. You can also visit Team Darfur’s website and Save Darfur to learn more.

The US did manage to win the game 87-76, but they played like it didn’t matter (and it didn’t really). Dwayne Wade said that they were playing “lazy” basketball. My guess is that they are tired of the exhibition games and just want to start the “real” olympic games.

Anyway, if you missed last night’s game here are some video highlights I found on youtube:

People who like Legos must love the Olympics because I also found these tributes to the Olympics on YouTube.

And here’s my own Lego maniacs’ contribution to the Lego Olympic mania:

Olympic trampoline athletes are scored on difficulty and execution by eight judges. A 16 is considered very difficult for the men, a 14 for the women. Points are deducted from a maximum score of 10 for execution, which is judged by five judges (separate from the judges who determine the difficulty score). The highest and lowest scores are dropped, leaving a maximum execution score of thirty. The overall score is the sum of the difficulty score and the execution score.

Women from Russia, China, Canada, Germany, Belarus, Great Britain, Japan, Uzbekistan, Portugal, Ukraine, Georgia, United States, and the Czech Republic will be competing at the Beijing Olympics. They will be joined by men from China, Japan, Russia, Germany, Italy, Ukraine, Canada, Denmark, Belarus, France, Portugal, Australia, and the United States.

In the United States, trampoline athletes fall under the umbrella of USA Gymnastics. You can visit their site to learn more about the state of trampoline in the United States. It’s actually quite an interesting site.

The finals for trampoline for the Beijing Olympics will be held August 18 and 19. I’m not sure yet whether you’ll be able to watch on television. In the meantime, here’s some video from the USA Gymnastics Winter Classic 2008. (Like snowboarding, it may not sound like a sport, but it looks pretty impressive.)