What the World is Reading about…

The nine seconds and a nudge of the 100m dash are as short as the wait for it is not. Jamaica, with two contenders in the...

The Jamaica Observer

The nine seconds and a nudge of the 100m dash are as short as the wait for it is not. Jamaica, with two contenders in the three-man race head this time, can’t stop talking. The Jamaica Observer gives its vote to Asafa Powell. But it’s the inimitable Caribbean attitude and humour to the most competitive event that is refreshing: “First there were only two protagonists… They only had eyes for each other. Asafa Powell and Tyson Gay held the races and their results between them… However, the emergence of Usain Bolt has put a cat amongst the mice. Psychologically, everyone is running scared!”

Inside Sport

There are 302 gold medals on offer, and Australian sports magazine Inside Sport has a delightful feature on 10 of the back-bencher events on the popularity charts, including epee team, handball and water polo. This on men’s 110 kg weightlifting: “…there’s still something thrilling and timeless about the sheer athletic simplicity of weightlifting that renders it so watchable. Man sees weight. Man picks up weight. Man picks up heaviest weight. Man wins gold!”

The Irish Times

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Sportsmanship may need to be amended, not only because of cheating in sport. The Irish Times’ “Tragic tales of girls on the cusp of manhood” discusses cases of hormonal incongruities in past Olympics, in the backdrop of a gender testing lab being set up in Beijing. “…an athlete can be subjected to a battery of invasive and, one assumes, humiliating tests simply because someone dislikes the look of her.” The story analyses “hormonal conditioning” tales from the Soviet era to that of India’s Santhi Soundarajan, who lost her 800m silver medal from the Doha Asian Games after she failed one such test.

The Daily Telegraph

The world is coming, and the Beijing authorities are worried about the teenage son’s smelly socks. And The Daily Telegraph explains they couldn’t be more literal: “Men… get more basic advice, including not sporting pyjamas in public, not going out with a bare chest and not rolling up their trouser legs”. There are fashion tips for women and dos and don’ts of right etiquette, but that’s not all. Instruction, imparted by the Capital Spiritual Civilisation Construction Commission, as the newspaper says, are a little, well, instructive. “Rules are also already in place to try to control taxi drivers’ bad breath. They have been ordered to cut down on their garlic consumption and watch what they eat for breakfast.”

Sydney Morning Herald

The Australian daily latches on to the latest fad among Chinese internet users. “When a Chinese blogger says ‘I’m just doing push-ups’, it’s actually a roundabout about way of attacking the regime,” we’re told. The term came up after the recent controversy surrounding the alleged rape and murder of a teenaged girl by relatives of communist party officials. The unproved allegations have given the people “… euphemisms to evade the cyber spies and skirt the automated keyword blocking tools which the Chinese authorities use to keep tabs on the online world.”