AS I WRITE, the American swimmer Michael Phelps is still on target to win eight gold medals at the Beijing Olympics, despite the best efforts of the French freestyle relay team, which came within a hair's breadth of spoiling it all earlier in the week.
Phelps's may be a fantastic feat of human achievement, but isn't eight gold medals, for basically the same sport, a bit of a swizz? He may be competing in butterfly and crawl and performing backstroke and breaststroke in the medleys but, actually,
it is all just swimming.
He's by far the best in the world at simultaneously kicking his legs and staying afloat, but by my reckoning, that should at best entitle him at most to three golds, including the relay, not eight.
There should be only two disciplines: backstroke and frontstroke. Then let's see if anyone chooses breast-stroke, invented by grannies who didn't want to get their hair wet, or the ridiculously awkward butterfly, which, no matter how good you are at it, isn't what you would choose to shake off a pursuing shark. If the Olympic motto is Citius, Altius, Fortius meaning "Swifter, Higher, Stronger", butterfly would only qualify if you added in "Sillier".
A swimming race should be just that: a swim to see who is the fastest, using whatever method they choose, with the only variable being distance. In fact, perhaps giving them backstroke is pushing it: no-one is asking for a backwards 100m track sprint to be introduced.
While swimming is the worst for spawning variations and treating them as separate disciplines, other branches of sport have slipped the odd one in too. I give you the walking race (why not run?) and the triple jump, which appears to be just a long jump for cheats. I can see that the equestrian sports of showjumping and cross-country are suitably different, but diving is surely just diving, whether or not you can do it at exactly the same time as someone else?
If Phelps were to win eight golds including javelin, 110m high hurdles, maybe the marathon, a spot of show jumping, air pistol, badminton, swimming and rowing as part of a coxless pair, then I'd be impressed. But even decathletes only get one medal each, despite throwing, jumping and running all over the place.
Maybe the reason the Olympic authorities decided to introduce so many disciplines within the same sport was part of the very modern habit of making sure everyone goes home with a medal so that no one feels a loser at sports day.
In which case, Phelps winning everything is just impolite.
A silver lining to this bad newsYOU have to feel terribly, terribly sorry for Laurence Ball, the Shetland man whose lung was removed by doctors after he was wrongly diagnosed with cancer.
Ball described his reaction when he was told by surgeons in Aberdeen that there had been no cancer in the first place. "For the next few days I was really traumatised and in deep shock."
He is now reported to be planning to sue the local health authority, as well he might, because living the rest of his life with only one lung will be seriously debilitating.
But, aside from speculating how the surgeons actually broke the news to him – "Do you want the good news or the bad news?"– I think this story could seriously divide the country into glass half-full/half-empty types. Doesn't being told that you haven't got one of the deadliest forms of cancer after all make it a good day, in the end?
• IT IS terrible to learn that the little girl who sang at the opening of the Olympics was miming to the voice of another child because the seven-year-old singer wasn't "flawless" enough.
I can't have been the only person to think that, in a culture that historically doesn't value female children, the choice of a girl to be central in the opening ceremony was significant.
Whoever made the decision to replace the original singer with a prettier child has sent a message to the world: girls are important, but only if they are good-looking.
