USA! USA!

I was walking to lunch yesterday in the media center basement and got a very pleasant and foretelling surprise. It was about an hour before Anna went out to race for gold, and they were rehearsing our National Anthem for the audio system. Wearing my USA shirt, I marched into the lunchroom with my right hand over my heart. We Americans are few and far between in the media center, so it's fun to stick a little USA pride out there.

An hour later Anna won the gold. The race was insane and I now have absolutely no voice. By the time they played the anthem for real I knew that was a special moment down there in the lunchroom. By the way, the United States National Anthem is truly gorgeous. After years of hearing it it's easy to become desensitized, and of course I'm biased, but that's one motivating tune.

My Georgetown coach Mike Callahan used to joke that I had a crush on Anna, and I kind of did. She played fair and smart and was a pleasure to compete against. Even before the trials I just thought to myself that if anyone deserved a gold, she did.

Local journalism quality update:

After receiving great questions from the BBC and everybody else, the only local journalist in the mixed zone who could get a word in edgewise made this inspired observation: "Anna! You look like Sarah Jessica Parker!" Needless to say the real journalists were shocked/not at all shocked after having seen this for weeks and the interview session was killed.

I'm reminded of this Ben Ainslie press conference question: "Ben, do you consider yourself to be Superman or some kind of ET Extra Terrestrial?"

Wasn't Confucius from here?