Olympic Updates

Well I'm back. I had a great trip to Mexico which I'll tell you all about later...but for these next two weeks its all Olympics all the time at the Grove home. I had 13 hours of coverage to catch up on Sunday when I got home and I still haven't watched the opening ceremonies yet. Ahhhhh! But never fear I'll get to them eventually.

In case you aren't a sporty person and haven't been following the games you may want to tune in just for the stories. It's reality tv and soap operas all rolled in to one.

Take for example the story of French swimmer Laure Manaudou. She met and fell in love with hunky Italian swimmer, Marin, who she met at a meet (no pun intended). Fed up with her coach's brutal training tactics she went to Italy to train with her boyfriend. While there she became great friends with another female Italian swimmer, Federica Pelligrini. Italy didn't like the idea of her training with their swimmers so they forced her back to France and a new coach. Then she had a bad and public break up with Marin who is now dating her "former" friend Pelligrini. Weeks later some not very nice photos of her appeared all over the internet and most people believe that Marin and Pelligrini put them there. To top it all off Manaudou's old French coach moved over to coach the Italians and Manaudou and Pellegrini raced head to head at the Olympics. Poor Laure came in 7th out of 8 swimmers. Wow, you can't make this stuff up.

Maybe you've heard by now of swimmer Dara Torres who is 41 years old and the mother of a 2 year old and competing at her 5th Olympics. But did you know there is another mother competing in gymnastics? Yes, gymnastics. Oksana Chusovitina is a 33 year old mother of a 6 year old boy. A Russian gymnast she put her career on hold when she found out that her son had leukemia. Knowing that Russia did not offer the oncology specialists that could save her son she called on an old friend...the German Women's Gymastics coach. Working together they moved Oksana and her son Alisher to Germany where he successfully completed chemotherapy and Oksana began training with the German team. So now she competes in her 5th Olympics as the oldest woman ever in gymnastics competition at the olympic level.

One more story to pull at your heartstrings is that of US Swimmer Eric Shanteau. One week before the US Olympic Trials in Omaha he found out that he has testicular cancer. He didn't tell anyone on the team until after the trials and got permission from his doctor to go ahead and compete in Beijing. He will undergo surgery as soon as he returns to the states after the games. Watch for him in the finals tonight.