Olympic losers / Olympic winners
The Olympic Loser's Site got started back in 2004 covering the Summer Games. I was checking the Winter Olympics coverage last night when I suddenly got curious about something, and paged back through the summer coverage to see if I could find it.
One of the points that the keeper of the blog makes repeatedly is that the "loser" at the Olympics, most of the time, does a heck of a lot better than the overwhelming majority of really fine athletes could (and certainly better than 99.9% of the people reading the site could).
The loser of the men's 400 metre in 2004 was Abdulla Mohamed Hussein of Somalia. He had the slowest heat time, 51.52 seconds. The winner's final time was 44 seconds.
The loser of the men's 100 metre was Sultan Saeed of the Maldives, who finished in 11.72 seconds. The winner's time was 9.85 seconds.
At the first modern Olympic games, in 1896, an American runner named Tom Burke was the winner of both the 100m and 400m events. His time in the 100m was 12.0 seconds. His time in the 400 metres was 58.4 seconds in the preliminary heats, and 54.2 seconds in the final.
(And for those who are looking at Tom's last name and wondering if there's a family connection: why yes, in fact, which is why I know about him. I think Tom was Ed's grandfather's uncle, or something like that.)
Tom also acted as the starter for the first Boston Marathon. Apparently no one thought to bring a starter pistol, so Tom drew a line in the dirt with the heel of his boot, had the runners line up, and yelled "Bang!"
