The underdogs roared at the Olympics in Athens on Sunday with basketball minnows Puerto Rico pulling off one of the biggest upsets in the 108-year history of the Games with victory over the United States ”Dream Team”.
The Puerto Ricans’ stunning 92-73 win over the American team of pampered NBA millionaires resounded across the games like a lightning bolt hurled by Zeus, completing an extraordinary day that saw the form book left in tatters.
After 25 gold medals awarded over the weekend, China head the medal rankings with five gold, two silver and one bronze, leading from Australia (four gold, one silver, three bronze).
In the swimming pool, an expected duel between the powerful Australian and United States contingents went out the window as South Africa, France and Japan snatched three out of the four golds on offer.
The performance of the night came from South Africa’s 4x100m men’s freestyle relay team of Roland Schoeman, Lyndon Ferns, Darian Townsend and Ryk Neethling, who took gold with a new world record of one minute and 13,17 seconds.
South Africa’s quartet powered home ahead of The Netherlands in second and Australia third, with the Americans — spearheaded by teen prodigy Michael Phelps — a distant fourth.
The South African victory sunk Phelps’s dream of winning a record eight gold medals at these Olympics, and sent shockwaves rippling through Athens.
But it was nothing compared to Puerto Rico’s incredible victory in the basketball, the first time the US has been beaten since they began sending professionals from the NBA to compete in the Olympics in 1992.
In a further upset, Argentina defeated world champions Serbia and Montenegro with a last-gasp 83-82 victory on the buzzer.
Yet the shocks weren’t just confined to basketball and swimming.
In badminton, world number one Lin Dan of China, regarded as the game’s most exciting talent for years, was outshone by unseeded Ronald Susilo of Singapore, losing 15-12, 15-10.
In the football tournament, war-weary Iraq’s fairy-tale campaign continued as they secured their place in the quarterfinals with a 2-0 win over Costa Rica.
The only blemish on a memorable day was the fact that many events were played out in front of empty stadia as concerns over sluggish ticket sales deepened.
Tennis stars Venus Williams and Andy Roddick, used to playing to packed courts, both recorded straight sets victories in their opening Olympic matches against a backdrop of vacant seats.
But US Open champion Roddick was not bothered by the no-shows.
”People see tennis a lot. It was perhaps a choice between tennis and swimming but I wasn’t too concerned, I was just concentrating on winning the match,” he said.
Organising officals tried to play down the poor attendances, saying that they knew at the beginning of the Games some events would be badly attended because they are not popular sports in Greece.
”As we move on it will be much, much higher,” said spokesperson Michalis Zacharatos. ”We are very pleased with our ticket sales.”
So far 2,9-million tickets have been sold out of a total of just more than five million. At the last Olympics in Sydney, most of the 9,5-million tickets on sale were snapped up.
Sporting controversies rumbled on as Greece digested the suspensions of local sprint heroes Kostadinos Kenteris and Ekaterini Thanou pending the outcome of a drugs probe.
The International Olympic Committee will on Monday hear the athletes’ explanations for failing to attend a doping test before deciding whether to throw them out of the Olympics.
Reports from Bratislava, meanwhile, said Slovak shot-putter Milan Haborak has been kicked out of the Games after failing a test.
And a botched disqualification at the table tennis destroyed a Honduran battler’s Olympic debut.
Izzwa Medina, ranked a lowly 342 in the world, thrashed Jordanian junior Zeina Shaban 4-0 in their first-round match on Saturday but was disqualified when officials ruled the rubber on her racket was illegal.
After Medina appealed, tournament organisers decided to allow her to replay the match against Shaban on Sunday — and she lost in the seventh and decisive set.
”I’m just so sad because yesterday I won my match,” a sobbing Medina said.
In the judo tournament, Iranian two-time world champion Arash Miresmaeili failed to make the weight for a contest against an Israeli fighter he had previously vowed to boycott.
”He came to the weigh-in but he was overweight. He is not competing,” said Michel Brousse, the spokesperson for the International Judo Federation.
Miresmaeili, who was bidding to become the first Iranian to win an Olympic judo medal, had told the Iranian media he would refuse to fight an Israeli as a gesture of support for the Palestinian cause.
A controversy also erupted in the gymnastics tournament, where American star Blaine Wilson accused top officials of cheating over a late change to the scoring system.
The biggest smile of the day belonged to pint-sized Thai weightlifter Udomporn Polsak, who became the kingdom’s first-ever female Olympic champion with victory in the 53kg category. — Sapa-AFP