Joel Retornaz and curling (Forza Joel!)

In the last few days, I have read a great article on the Washington Post about Curling.
Funny enough, my country, Italy, discovered a new discipline with the Winter Olympics. During the competition, Raidue, the Italian TV, usually shows the Italian curling team once a day.
Three weeks ago, nobody could have forecasted this!

Thanks to the Italian most famous curler, Joel Retornaz (by the way, he was indeed born in Switzerland), who has been defined by the WP "a celebrity built in less than a week", almost 5 million people watched the winning game with Canada.
Before the event, there was less than 500 people playing curling in Italy....
By the way, Italy had never before qualified for an Olympic curling tournament; we were at Torino only because Italy was the host country.

The last Medals

Stefano Baldini got the Gold Medal at the Marathon but it is very sad that an unidentified man ran onto the race course about 5km short of the finish line and pushed the previous leader, Vanderlei de Lima, into the roadside crowd. "If that spectator didn't jump in front of me in the middle of the race, who knows what would have happened? Maybe I would have won. It disturbed me a lot," De Lima told reporters. To be honest, before the aggression, he was ahead 28 seconds at the 35th km, and he was losing 7 seconds per Km....

It is very sad that the Olympics Games are already over. I wish that in Beijin 2008 the OG will last for 2 or 3 months.

Sport comparison

I made a quick comparison of three of the most popular sports in the world, Basketball (blue), Soccer (green) and Baseball (yellow).

As a tool, I used BlogPulse which compares 3 keywords across all blogs. The result is stunning: Soccer got more hits than Basketball and Baseball. Strange, isn't it?