Tennis

Life :) - Poker - Romania - Tennis

Blunders and bikes

August 24, 2021 by 0 Comments

After my lessons on Saturday I met up with Mark, the teacher from the UK. He’s just starting as a music and ICT teacher at British School where his wife will be teaching English. He said that they’ve so far been wined and dined and given the red-carpet treatment. They’ll certainly be wanting something in return. I’m sure I would crumble under the weight of all that expectation, not least from the parents who are paying top dollar (or euro, or leu) to send their kids there. Mark and his wife are in a different financial league from me. On Saturday we drank in the beautiful Piața Unirii at places I wouldn’t dream of going to normally. He seemed impressed with my command of the local language as I ordered drinks. He’s also clearly impressed with Timișoara, and Romania in general, although he wasn’t a fan of Bucharest. He said (and I agree) that most Brits’ preconceived ideas of Romania are founded on nothing but ignorance.

On Saturday evening I played tennis for 90 minutes. Another geriatric player has joined the fray. This bloke, I later found out, once played for the Romanian national rugby team before emigrating to the US. He’s now 79 and back living in Romania. When he heard that I was British, he introduced himself to me as Simon and we had a bit of a chat in English. Now he plays senior tennis competitions. Yesterday he told me about a match he’d played that morning, which he lost in a third-set tie-break – a real third set, none of that ten-point shoot-out crap. I could tell he just felt good about being out their competing, win or lose.

When I got home from tennis I fired up some poker tournaments. At a very late hour I made a horrific blunder in a pot-limit badugi tournament. I was chip leader with 13 players remaining, but inexplicably got all my chips in the middle against the second-biggest stack with a marginal hand, and that left me nearly chipless. I was extremely lucky to finish sixth after that, but that was still a far cry from where I could and probably should have ended up. I made $24 from that tournament, taking my bankroll to an even $900, but I was still reeling from that awful decision, which was all the more frustrating given how well I felt I played in the rest of the tournament.

I dragged myself out of bed yesterday morning and staggered off to the market at Mehala to look at bikes. And guess what, I bought one. It’s a seven-speed racing bike, from the nineties I think, and it’s in very good nick. It’s bigger than my other one which was a tad too small, and it isn’t fitted with tyres that give me an allergic reaction. The make is Union; I still can’t tell if that’s German or Dutch. It cost me 400 lei (£70, NZ$140) and I’m happy so far with my purchase. It should make a big difference to my life. I just need to make sure it has a damn good lock.

Today I’ve struggled to stay awake in the hot weather – the temperature is now forecast to drop. Tomorrow I’ve got four lessons. After they finish at 9:30 I’ll play one of the $11 WCOOP (World Championship of Online Poker) tournaments, so it could be another late one. No lessons on Wednesday morning, thankfully, or I wouldn’t be playing it at all.

The Covid numbers in Romania are climbing again. This Delta variant is an altogether different beast, as even New Zealand is finding out.

Coronavirus - Poker - Tennis

Competition — an escape from all the bad news

August 21, 2021 by 0 Comments

Sunday and Monday were hellishly hot, to the point where I struggled to sleep at night even with the fan going full blast, but later in the week the temperature fell and the air took on that late-summer feel. I played singles tennis on Sunday against the super-fit guy nearly two decades my senior. We started at 7pm but the temperature was over 30. At 3-1 down in the first set, I decided to slow the game down in the hope of drawing errors from his racket. (I was the one employing old-man tactics.) I won some close games to lead 5-4, only to then play a shocking return game. I eked out games 11 and 12 for the set, but it didn’t feel like a win. I was taking giant gulps of water while he was as fresh as a daisy. In the second set I found myself in a much deeper hole at 5-2 down, but my opponent then started to tire ever so slightly. I fended off two set points in the tenth game to level at 5-5, then in the last two games I was able to tee up on my two-handed backhand, which naturally targeted his slightly weaker backhand wing, and I ran out a rather fortunate 7-5 7-5 winner. A remarkable stat from the match: he double-faulted only once, while I didn’t do so at all. (He did swat some of my weak second serves away for winners though.)

In my only other competitive pursuit, I snapped a run of three winless months in poker tournaments to win two on a single day. I made $93 on Tuesday to take my bankroll to $877. My wins were in no-limit single draw and pot-limit badugi, and both times as we got heads-up I was what you might call in the zone. For such small-stakes tournaments I don’t think I’ve ever been so intensely focused. (I’m fully aware that it was luck rather than focus or skill that played the biggest part in my victories.) I’m still trying to get better at Omaha hi-lo, which is a fiendishly complex game.

The book. The finish line is coming into view; yesterday I hit the V section. (Nobody in Romania can say vegetable or vehicle.) The book might never see the light of day, but having already come this far… Putting aside a set number of hours each week has really helped.

Afghanistan. My brother has been following it much more closely than me. After all, he’s been there twice. Some of the scenes have been upsetting almost beyond belief. I recently started A Thousand Splendid Suns, by the same author who wrote the brillant Kite Runner. But this story is so harrowing that I wonder if I should even continue.

New Zealand is now under lockdown. The cluster of Delta cases has now spread to Wellington. What a bugger. I’m just glad they’ve gone fast and hard, and hopefully they can avoid the current Australian situation. Here in Romania, cases have risen tenfold in six weeks or so, and with our embarrassingly low vaccination rate, the near future is bleak. I can hear those ambulances in my head now. Soon I expect I’ll hear them for real every other minute.

I was going to write the next chapter about my trip, but I’ve gone on long enough already. That’ll have to be next time.

Coronavirus - Tennis - Travel: Romania

Romania trip report — Part 3 (Gura Humorului)

August 16, 2021 by 0 Comments

Last weekend at tennis, there were seven of us and it was my turn to sit out, along with the two old geezers. Domnul Ionescu, the old one (as opposed to Domnul Sfâra, the really old one) is always complaining about modern-day Romania and how it has gone to the dogs. This time he was talking about Romania’s vaccination rate. “We’re last in Europe in everything. Why do we even have to be last in this? Vaccination rates are a measure of a country’s civilisation, or in our case, lack of it.” Domnul Sfâra agreed, and so did I, of course. The English couple who came to visit me in Romania four years ago have now had their jabs. The husband was very reluctant to do so, and in the end he succumbed to social pressure. Telling, I thought, because how and why people get vaccinated hardly matters. If it’s only social pressure that does it, who cares? The fact is that in the UK that pressure exists. If he’d been in Alabama there’s no way he’d have got the jab, and in large swathes of Romania the social pressure, if anything, goes the other way.

Today I might be playing singles. It’s another scorcher here.

More on my trip. On Saturday the 24th – a sunny day – I left Iași, taking the train to Gura Humorului, passing through Suceava where I was able to have a quick look around the station. The journey took 2¾ hours. I met a nice lady on the train who pointed out my stop for me, because it wasn’t all that obvious. My guest house was on a main road about a mile from the station, and when arrived around 3pm, nobody was there. I just had enough battery on my phone to call the owner who said she’d come over. All the time on this trip I was battling a rapidly depleting battery. The owner, whose name was Simona, took down all my details and complimented me on my Romanian. From that perspective it was a good trip for me. I didn’t do much else that day except read my book – All the Light We Cannot See – and grab a basic dinner in town. Gura means mouth; the town isn’t exactly at the mouth of any river (there’s no sea!) but it’s at the confluence of two rivers, the Humor and the Moldova.

Back in the guest house, I felt a mini-earthquake every time a truck went past. I slept well though, and early the next morning I visited the museum of local customs, where I was given a one-on-one tour. He said he could speak some English but I asked him to explain everything in Romanian. The traditions of the region – farming, cooking, religious festivals with all their superstitions – are still alive in large part today. They used – and still use – oxen to plough the fields, while most of the country uses horses. It’s all a century away from the likes of Fonterra. After the museum I trekked 6 or 7 km up to the monastery at Voroneț, which was built in the late 15th century in under four months. I couldn’t take any pictures inside without stumping up extra cash, but you can see the very colourful exterior painting. I wandered back to the town where I booked my train ticket for the next day and then slumped on a bench. Just like in Timișoara, men crowd around tables to play and watch various games, and there seemed to be a form of extreme backgammon in full swing. My dinner that evening was very chicken-heavy.

The following morning I had time to visit yet another monastery, simply called Humorului Monastery. This was a more interesting experience than Voroneț, because of the tower you could climb with claustrophobically narrow steps, and the view from the top which was breathtaking. I took a taxi to the monastery and while walking back (that’s where I took the picture of the cranes perched atop a lamp-post) a minivan pulled over, and the rather grumpy driver gave me a lift back for 3 lei.

Tennis - Travel: Romania

Romania trip report — Part 1 (15 hours on the train)

August 9, 2021 by 0 Comments

Yesterday – another scorcher – I met up with the English couple from the doctor’s surgery. We had some drinks in the centre of town, in the square and down by the river. They already seem to be fans of Timișoara – much more so than Bucharest where they spent a year. She’ll be working full-time at the €8000-a-year British School which opened in 2019. Soon after that I played tennis. The 86-year-old bloke, who by now shuffles on and off the court, never ceases to amaze me.

My trip. I made an early start on Tuesday 20th July, the day after Britain declared freedom from Covid restrictions. I had a very long train journey in store. Romanian trains are notorious for their delays, so who knew how long. When I left home, the binmen – and women – were out in force. It started to spit with rain, and the rain intensified as we left the station at 6:50. Everyone, as far as I could see, was complying the the mask requirement. We had allocated seats, which considering the train was barely half-full, were more of a pain than anything. Look, the row behind is empty. I know your ticket says seat 64, but you don’t have to sit next to me. Maybe that’s my Britishness coming out, but mainly I had a heavy bag and I didn’t want to be cramped. You’ve got to be fully equipped on these long trips, as if you’re hiking, because they don’t provide anything. It’s madness really. You’re just about gagging for a beer after a while.

The CFR, the state-run railway, had clearly been the pride of Romania in communist times and before, but investment since then has been minimal. I saw rusting hulks of carriages, some carrying passengers, and I could make out dates on the engines, mostly from the early seventies. Many of the stations were decaying. The journey was roughly 800 km, about the distance from Wellington to Whangarei. I tried to figure out the train’s top speed. Most railways have mile or kilometre posts, and this line was no exception. When we were racing along, comparatively speaking, I timed how long it took to get from one white post to the next. Thirty-eight seconds; we were doing 95 km/h. (A few days later, on an even slower train, a younger guy wanted to know how fast we were going, and he just brought up an app on his phone. Bob’s your uncle.)

Despite the wet weather, I got to see a large cross-section of Romania on that train. The communist blocks. The abandonment, seemingly everywhere. Oradea, the thriving city I visited when I arrived in the country. The beautiful Vadu Crișului, not far from Oradea, in the middle of a forest and with a stunning waterfall. I had the trip mapped out, with a list of stations, before I went, so I could track our progress. I could see the car number plates change as we passed from one județ (county) to the next. Occasionally I needed to relieve myself. A numărul unu is doable on these trains, just. A numărul doi really isn’t. At about 8pm we stopped in Suceava and they briefly cut the engine. For a couple of minutes it was blissfully quiet. To my surprise, I reached Iași, my destination and the 40th stop on the line, bang on time, shortly before ten.

My guest house wasn’t far from the station. After checking in and having a relaxing bath for the first time in five years, hopping into bed felt so good. It had been a long day. When I got up, it was time for breakfast. This took place at a hotel just around the corner, which had a couple more stars than the place I was staying at. Breakfast was, if I’m honest, one of the highlights of Iași for me. They had the whole shebang. Bacon, eggs, sausages, beans, cold cuts, fried vegetables, yoghurt, pastries, even slices of cake. That did me for almost the whole day.

Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

Time to make something happen

July 13, 2021 by 0 Comments

I ended yesterday’s post saying I hoped England’s first major final in 55 years wouldn’t go to penalties. It damn well did. The game started with a hiss and a roar. We had the rousing Italian national anthem (the less said the better about England’s dirge) and then within two minutes of kick-off, Luke Shaw (or as the Romanian commentator said, Luke Show) had scored. England didn’t really ever look like adding to their lead, and Italy dominated the second half. England looked buggered in extra time. Thirty minutes of that, then here we go again. As soon as I saw six-foot-five Donnarumma (awesome name) square up against Pickford, I thought, this looks ominous. I had no idea how massive the Italian keeper was, and what’s more, he’s only 22. The fall-out from the match has already been nasty and insular, as it would have been had England won. Race-based idiocy and irrelevant bollocks about Brexit. Mum will be happy – her mate Novak won Wimbledon to make the grand slam tally between the Big Three 20-20-20, and England didn’t win. So that’s my fleeting interest in Big Sport over with for a while.

I’ve been reading back over the early days of this blog. I was buzzing, wasn’t I? These days I’m on a pretty even keel, and that’s way better than where I’ve been in the past, but I wouldn’t mind getting late 2015 back, or even late 2016 when I washed up in Romania. So how can I do that? First, I’ve gotta gotta gotta move away from this flat, as fantastic as the location is. I need a place of my own, with an office just for teaching. Some comfortable furniture. A record player. A car, so I can push off from time to time and see more of this beautiful country. It’s time I established something. Made something happen. I’ve also got to get back to this damn dictionary. More about that next time.

Getting away will help me plan at least some of this. I’ve booked my train journey from Timișoara to Iași (15 hours – travelling by train makes Romania seem massive) and four nights in the city that almost borders the Republic of Moldova. I leave early next Tuesday morning. Then I’ll explore the surrounding villages, though I haven’t booked that part of the trip yet. We’ve got more scorching weather this week: 38 tomorrow and a ridiculous 40 on Wednesday.

Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

Slow-motion setting finally switched off

July 12, 2021 by 0 Comments

I might be back in business, finally. Lately I’ve been mooching around my flat, just about getting by, but then the moment I step outside, ugh. Heavy going. Putting one foot in front of the other has been a major effort. I’ve felt frozen by the hot, beating sun, if that makes any sense. Now my cold is still there, but this morning I found myself walking at just about my normal pace and managing with the sun. That’s a relief; feeling close to normal means I now feel safe booking trains and accommodation.

This morning I got a surprise call from my aunt; I spoke to her last weekend following her husband’s passing. She’d called me by accident – she meant to call her only son, who lives in Perth (she has four daughters). Soon after that I had a lesson with the young couple. The river of classes has slowed to a trickle, so a bonus lesson on a Sunday was welcome. It was one of my better sessions; we went over the present simple verb forms – positive, negative, question, to be and not to be – before moving on to food. They said they were rooting for Italy in tonight’s Euro final against England. I expect most Romanians, if they’re following it at all, will do the same.

It’s finals weekend at Wimbledon. Ashleigh Barty made all the running in the final against Karolina Plíšková – she won the opening 14 points as Plíšková seemed anaesthetised, as a Romanian commentator put it – but it oh so nearly slipped away from her. When she finally held on in the third set, you could see how much it meant. Wimbledon was the one. Then the women’s doubles final managed to be even more dramatic. The all-Russian team of Vesnina and Kudermetova led 6-3 5-3, had two match points, and could only have been millimetres away from wrapping up a comfortable win. Fate somehow conspired against them, and Elise Mertens and Hsieh Su-wei dragged the match into a third set, which extended into overtime. The last time such a match had reached 6-6 in the third was in 1998, when Hingis and Novotna beat Davenport and Zvereva 8-6; back then, top women’s singles players were serious about doubles too. The Russians served for the match again, at 7-6 in the decider, but Mertens and Hsieh broke back and won the following two games for victory. Both teams won the same number of points, 112, but the contrast in emotions at the end could hardly have been starker.

The men’s final is just a few minutes away. Matteo Berrettini has been very impressive and his raw power could cause Djoković some problems. I expect Djoković to win yet again, but we’ll see. Then a bit later Berrettini’s countrymen will take on England at Wembley. Dreams will be made and shattered. Twelve men will be immortalised, or not, largely due to events out of their control. One or two might even be villainised – think David Beckham in ’98 or Gareth Southgate himself after missing that penalty in ’96. Heaven forbid it goes to spot kicks.

Family - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

The park

July 9, 2021 by 0 Comments

I’m on day twelve, at least, of feeling like rubbish. Going to the park this morning was the most exciting thing I’ll do all day. I brought a flask of coffee and read a couple of chapters of my book. It was already 30-odd degrees, but at least there was a breeze. I FaceTimed my parents, expecting my battery to die at any moment, but just like me, it ran on fumes. They were fine. They’ve now had both doses of Pfizer, with no side effects to speak of, and the sale of their house will go unconditional any day now. We discussed the tennis, and briefly the football. Dad thought England had already won the competition, when in fact the final against Italy takes place on Sunday night.

When we hung up, two men in their sixties, one grossly overweight, sat down on the bench next to mine. They talked about the football, then switched to politics. After some time, a friend of theirs showed up on his bike. He wore a Germany football shirt that he’d almost certainly bought at a second-hand shop, and on his left forearm he sported a faded blue heart-and-arrow tattoo with an illegible name underneath. He talked extraordinarily loudly, his sentences punctuated by laughter and filler words like ba and păi. Then a fourth man arrived, also on his bike. His name was Ghiță, a diminutive of Gheorghe. He wore a red-and-white striped shirt, with just a single button done up in the middle. The tattooed bloke had a conversation with him, mostly one-way, cutting across where I was sitting. I find people talking across me unbearable in any language and at any volume, let alone the combination I faced then, so at that point I upped and left.

The lady from tennis, Magda, also phoned me when I was in the park. For the second week running I had to say I wouldn’t be playing.

I hadn’t watched any of the Euro matches, but did stay up to watch England’s nerve-jangling extra-time win against Denmark. They’ve got a very good team and a fantastic manager, and now they stand on the brink of history. Staying up until after half-twelve was no issue; my body clock is way out of whack. I had no work the next morning either; my hours have suddenly dropped through the floor.

Wimbledon has had its moments. I haven’t followed it as closely as in previous years. Ashleigh Barty’s win over Angelique Kerber yesterday was one of the more enjoyable two-setters I’ve seen. Barty will be a very popular winner if she beats Karolina Plíšková in tomorrow’s final.

I’ve been planning my trip. My idea is to take the train to Iași in ten days’ time (I hope I’m up to it by then), and then visit some towns and villages in the middle of nowhere, before taking a trip on the mocăniță (narrow-gauge train) from Vișeu de Sus, and eventually coming back home.

Coronavirus - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

A dizzyingly hot week in store

June 21, 2021 by 0 Comments

It’s hot, and in the coming week we’re forecast to hit dizzying, hellish 37s, 38s and 39s. If you deal in Fahrenheit, that means we’ll be heading into triple digits. In California and Nevada they know all about triple digits at the moment. It sounds horrendous there. (When I lived in the UK it was common to talk in Fahrenheit when things got a bit balmy. Eighty-something just sounded hot. I don’t know if they still do that.) Here are some of the two dozen pungent lime trees outside my block of flats.

My aunt called me yesterday. It was the first time we’d spoken in a while: she’d been through a depressive spell of not picking up the phone. We chatted for half an hour; I have more in common with her than I realised. Her world has continued to shrink, sadly. I later spoke to my brother who said she never ventures beyond Earith and St Ives these days, not even to Cambridge which is 12 miles away. (She used to go there regularly, to shop until she dropped.) She was amazed to learn that the majority of Romanians are, and are likely to remain, unjabbed.

I had more anti-vax crap yesterday. I don’t mention vaccines anymore, but my student did, saying that they’re basically useless but his work had pretty much forced him to have them. He seemed a sensible guy.

Tennis was a bit awkward last night. I waited for my near-neighbour to appear, so we could walk to the courts, but he never did. When I got there alone, there were only the staunch anti-vax guy and his daughter. We played a set of two-on-one, then he made me play a set of singles with his daughter so he could spend the whole time on his phone. I then played singles with him, and was up 6-1 5-1 when we ran out of time. He had paid for the courts, and at the end I realised I didn’t have enough money to pay him back (because there were unexpectedly only three of us, I had to pay more), so I gave him what I had, promising to give him the remaining few lei tonight. He then went into a spiel: “we’re just here to enjoy ourselves”, as if I’d done something to prevent that. Something to do with the money? I’m guessing it was that. Or maybe it was our one-sided game? It wasn’t the first time he’d said that to me, but this time his daughter also joined in. Sometimes I don’t get people.

Some Romanians, like the woman who stopped lessons with me three weeks ago, are straight out of the series of books I read about Naples. Everything is about their emotions, how this or that utterance makes a person feel, and everyone is entangled in a cruel and exhausting game where they’re trying to outwit each other with their feelings. Practical considerations, like whether to protect yourself and others against a deadly virus, go out the window in that world.

No luck at the poker tables today. Not much skill either, perhaps. I made a particularly bad fold this morning in a single draw tournament against a maniacal player; I didn’t realise quite how maniacal. That game is extremely player-dependent. My bankroll sits at $737.

Family - Life :) - Other sports - Poker - Tennis

Birthday, culture shock, and some games

June 14, 2021 by 0 Comments

It’s Mum’s 72nd birthday. If we used base 12, which we probably would if we had extra fingers and toes, a 72nd birthday would be a milestone, like a 50th birthday is for us in base-10 world. (As a kid, I would sometimes accompany my grandmother as she visited the record office to do family history. One time she looked through a book of baptisms from 1850-odd, and two babies were recorded – prominently – as having an extra finger, or perhaps two, on each hand. I found this hilarious.) Sometimes I’ve been critical of Mum, even on this blog, but these days we get on very well. The pandemic has helped, funnily enough. We’re in total agreement on just about everything Covid-related. Mum is a young 72. She’s managed to keep remarkably fit and healthy.

Yesterday morning I had a discussion with my student about our university experiences, hers rather more recent than mine. I said that I felt a bigger culture shock when I started uni than I did on my arrival in Romania. In truth it was way bigger. Constantly being surrounded by the same people, never being able to hide or escape, it’s a wonder I survived that first year.

A thrilling finish to the French Open. Djoković (boo!) came from two sets down to beat Tsitsipas in the final. I only saw the first three sets before I played tennis myself. I wanted Tsitsipas, who had played so well, to win. He also has a badass name. Tsitsipas, swarming the net like a tsunami of tsetse flies. (The French sometimes say tagada tsoin-tsoin and I don’t really know what it means, if indeed it means anything.) I wonder if Djoković is the first player ever to win a grand slam coming from two sets down in two separate matches. And by the way, the third set of his semi-final against Nadal was mad mad mad stuff for 95 minutes. Way out there, off the planet, it was that good. As for the women, Krejcikova won a tense final against Pavlyuchenkova, then topped it off by winning the doubles too, partnering Siniakova. The men’s doubles final was a cracker, with the local lads (Mahut of stupidly-long-match fame, alongside Herbert) making an improbable fightback to win.

Euro 2020, or 2021, has started. Last night one of the Danish players had a heart attack in the middle of a match with Finland and was resuscitated on the pitch. It must have been nightmarish for everybody. I was amazed that they later restarted the game. The incident reminded me of Fabrice Muamba, who played for Birmingham for a time, then suffered (and survived) a heart attack during a game.

Poker. I had a go at a bounty PLO8 tournament last night and went pretty far but only made a tiny profit. This morning I tried a non-bounty PLO8 but didn’t make the money. Then in the single draw I made a deep run, getting pretty lucky when my opponent made 65432 for a straight against my pat nine, and eventually finishing fourth. I also made the final table in the pot-limit badugi, and my luck quickly ran out when my seven ran into a better seven; I was out in eighth place, but not before scoring some nice bounties. My bankroll is up to $735.

Poker - Tennis

A match to get excited about

June 11, 2021 by 0 Comments

Tonight I played my usual Thursday night fixed-limit badugi tournament. These are a question of how and when, not if, I fail to make the money. Tonight I got pretty damn close – 22nd place, with the top 20 paying – but the eventual result was the same as it always is. Please excuse the cynicism.

Then I sat back and watched the semi-final between Krejcikova and Sakkari which I’d had one eye on during the poker. As the match entered the deciding set, Sakkari, all muscles, looked the stronger player and more likely winner. She had a match point at 5-3. When Krejcikova hung on to her serve, and then broke in the next game, the drama dial turned way up. Krejcikova then had three match points of her own, but Sakkari swatted them all aside, somehow, and it was 7-7. In the 16th game, after 3¼ hours, Krejcikova was the victim of a brutal, incorrect overrule on her fourth match point, but regrouped impressively to stagger over the line into the final where she’ll meet Pavlyuchenkova. Just imagine if she hadn’t. They really need Hawk-Eye.

Marion Bartoli, one of my favourite players, interviewed Krejcikova on court. The attitude of the eventual winner, who I knew next to nothing about, was excellent; I warmed to her greatly. I also learned that she’d been helped in her development by Jana Novotna, another of my favourites, who died very young of cancer a few years ago.

For me, it made a change to get excited about tennis, or any sport, again. Bugger the Olympics, by the way.