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Swapping old Jewish swim records for new ones

By Alison Klayman · August 11, 2008

Jewish-American swimmers Garret Weber-Gale and Jason Lezak, along with Cullen Jones and the unstoppable Olympic champion Michael Phelps, made history in the pool on Monday, August 11. The US relay team won the Men’s 4 x 100m Freestyle Relay and smashed the world record by nearly four seconds on their way to the gold.

In a strange Jewish sports irony, the gold for this half-Jewish team may come at a price to the legacy of an iconic Jewish sports figure. Phelps needed this gold medal to help him on his quest to break legendary Jewish swimmer Mark Spitz’s 36- year-old record of seven gold medals in one Olympics. With the relay gold under his cap, Phelps is on his way to eight in ‘08.

But at least a new Jewish name can be added to the annals of Olympic swim glory, for the sports world will be talking about Lezak’s outstanding anchor leg to edge out Alain Bernard and the French team for a long time.

“Going out in the first 50 (meters), I was breathing on my right side,” Lezak said after the race. “I saw him (competitor Bernard) a little bit. I knew where he was. I knew I had to swim my mind out. I had more adrenaline going than I ever had in my life.”

As JTA’s Marc Brodsky reported in a feature about Lezak, the 32-year-old is competing in his third Olympics and has garnered four medals on relay teams, including a gold in the 4x100 medley in ‘04.

A third Jewish-American swimmer actually took home a gold for this team, even though he wasn’t in the pool for the historic win. Ben Wildman-Tobriner, the other member of the self-described “hyphenated Jew crew,” is among the seven swimmers on the 4x100 relay team who received a gold medal.

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Jews in the Water Cube

By Alison Klayman · August 10, 2008

Jewish-American swimmer Dara Torres won a silver medal in the Women’s 4x100m Freestyle Relay on Sunday, August 10. This is her 10th Olympic medal, and makes her the oldest medalist in Olympic Swimming.

Since it’s been 24 years since she won her first medal, she has tied the all-time record for medal-winning timespan for female athletes (held by Birgit Fischer of Germany).

She is also the first swimmer in Olympic history to win a medal at five different Olympic Games.

Torres’ father was Jewish, but she also converted before marrying Israeli surgeon Itzhak Sasha.  She was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 2005.

“There are a lot of middle-aged women and men who tell me that I am an inspiration to them,” Torres said, “and that they are doing things that they never thought they would do.”

Unfortunately, not all news from the Water Cube on day two of the Olympics was so inspiring. An Iranian swimmer pulled out of his 100m breatstroke heat today, minutes before competing with Israeli Tom Beeri, despite earlier reassurances from the Iranian NOC that he would participate.

The water doesn’t know your age, but it seems to care if you’re Israeli.
At least Beeri went on to set a national record and a personal best.

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Olympic day 1 Jewish highlights

By Alison Klayman · August 9, 2008

Today I believe the first Jewish medalist of the Beijing 2008 Games was American fencer Sada Jacobson, who won the silver medal in the Women’s Individual Saber event.

She was defeated 15-8 by defending Olympic champion, fellow American Mariel Zagunis, while another American Rebecca Ward won the bronze. It was an All-American podium, and the women hope to find themselves up there again when they compete together in the team event.

Jacobson was the bronze medalist at the Athens Games, and has fencing in her family background.  She was honored by the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame with the Marty Glickman Award in 2002 and 2005.

Also today, Israeli Gymnast Alexander Shatilov qualified for the Men’s Floor Exercise final on August 17.

The 21-year-old finished with a rank of 29th out of 98 individual competitors in the Men’s Artistic Gymnastics qualification round, falling just short of qualification for the All-Around Individual final but putting at the top of the reserve list.

In his Olympic debut, Shatilov’s biggest strength was his floor exercise, where he earned a score of 15.600 and came in eighth overall, making him the last qualifier for the Floor Exercise final.

“I really love Floor Exercise and I didn’t do too bad of a floor routine today,” he says.

Shatilov made the Apparatus finals on floor at the past two World Championships. Click here to watch some videos of his previous competition routines.  Shatilov was born in Uzbekistan and moved to Israel six years ago.

Also today, Israeli Gal Yekutiel came close to a bronze medal in Men’s 60kg Judo, but he lost to Ruben Houkes of the Netherlands for an overall fifth place finish in the weight class.

“I have had a long and difficult day, but I made progress in my fights,” says Yekutiel. “I beat World Champions, European champions and Olympic Games champions from Athens, and I am proud of my achievements.”

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Boycotting the Olympics

By Uriel Heilman · August 8, 2008

As the 2008 Olympic Games begin in Beijing, several authors consider the subject of Olympic boycotts.

• The N.J. Jewish Standard remembers a basketball team that stood up for the Jews in 1936.
• NPR also has a story from “Hitler’s Olympics,” about a San Diego reporter who discovered her Jewish grandfather won a gold medal for the United States in Berlin.
• Saul Newman, whose grandfather helped lead the movement to boycott the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany, imagines in Ha’aretz that if his grandfather were alive today he’d be boycotting the Games in Beijing, too.

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Brush up on stroke order for the opening ceremony

By Alison Klayman · August 8, 2008

I just returned from watching the Olympics’ opening ceremony on two big screens along with thousands of Chinese and foreigners in Beijing’s Ditan park, and I sure was glad I brushed up on my stroke counts.

That’s because the Olympic delegations marched not in alphabetical order, but rather in order of stroke count (except for Greece, which traditionally marches first, and China, which as the host country went last).

Where does that put Israel? No. 22, right behind the island of Vanuatu (????) and before Japan (??). The United States ("Mei guo"/??) came in at number 140 in the procession. The Simplified Chinese character spelling of Israel is ??? (Yi-se-lie) , and that first character “Yi” is written in four strokes.

Zhang Yimou brought to the event his unique ability to orchestrate epic performances, directing 15,000 performers and 29,000 rounds of fireworks. Of course, I couldn’t help but wonder what would have been different if Steven Spielberg had advised the program.

I clapped extra hard for Sudan and was trying to explain to my Chinese friend the significance of the United States’ choice of former “Lost Boy of Sudan” Lopez Lomong as flag-bearer, but because the Chinese media does not fully cover the news of the genocide in Darfur, my friend knew very little about the situation in Sudan.

An especially loud cheer went up for Iraq. The delegations from Taiwan and Hong Kong also got a warm reception from the Ditan Park crowd.

(By the way, in reference to my last post, the Beijing Olympics’ theme song turned out to be a surprise choice of “You and Me” instead of the song titled “One World, One Dream,” after the 2008 Olympics motto. The lyrics of the theme song still convey the same message that the world is “one family.")

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One world, one more security check

By Alison Klayman · August 7, 2008

Security checks no longer just for airports in Beijing

Olympic security is no easy task. It’s not just about the sports venues – attention must be paid to the entire city’s infrastructure, hot spots and transportation systems.

One of the transitions that I think Beijing residents have done with few complaints is adjust to bag x-ray security checks at the entrance of every subway station.  This measure was added at the end of June as part of a three-month campaign to secure the city for the Olympics and Paralympics, yet even now, there are still a few stray stations where a guard manually looks in your bag for lack of a scanning machine.

Want to ride the subway? Let’s see what you’re packing.

This is the kind of treatment one might be used to in Israel, but not in freewheeling China.

When I ate at Dini’s kosher restaurant two nights before the Opening Ceremony, I was greeted by a 20-year-old Chinese guard in a reflective security vest with the Hebrew word “Bitachon” (security) on the front and a scanner wand in hand.  My Israeli security check flashbacks returned – although I never spoke in Mandarin to the guys who checked my bag at the entrance to Jerusalem bars.

Guard outside Beijing’s kosher restaurant

I don’t think China has quite reached the “chefetz chashud,” or suspicious object, level of alertness that one might find in Israel (and lately in the United States as well), where seeing an abandoned bag or anything out of the ordinary would merit a call to the authorities.

Maybe they are more vigilant out in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, where Muslim separatist sentiment is strong and there have been both thwarted and actualized attacks in recent months. This story shows how the Chinese decided to rely on a low-tech approach to sounding the alarm – with a whistle.

All jokes about whistles aside, many Chinese people I have talked to in Beijing have insisted how Chinese terrorists, usually referring to Xinjiang or sometimes Tibetans, are “really fierce.” I wonder whether this is based on fear-mongering by the domestic media or not. On the one hand, 16 officers were killed and another 16 were injured in the western capital Kashgar this week when two men rammed a dump truck and hurled explosives at a group of jogging policemen. But of course, this kind of incident is used to crack down on individual freedoms and the rights of the press, who are not being afforded all the openness that was promised for the duration of the Olympics as evidenced by the recent beating of two Japanese journalists suffered while covering the most recent Xinjiang incident

The Israeli Embassy will have an event on Monday, Aug. 18 to commemorate the most fatal breach of Olympic security, the 1972 Munich Games where 11 Israeli athletes were killed after a terrorist infiltration of their Olympic Village accommodations.  This tragedy was commemorated even earlier this year in Beijing, at the Chabad Purim party, which was Olympics-themed but included several placards and handouts about the athletes who died in ‘72.

With such a sobering legacy of Israeli Olympic participation, you would think that security would be more intense for the Jewish state’s athletes as compared to other delegations in the village. Yet Ephraim Zinger, the secretary-general of the Israeli Olympic Committee and chief of misson, says the Israelis are on the list of countries with the most sensitive security issues, but “we aren’t the only ones, and we aren’t at the top of the list either.”

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The Chinese take on the Jews

By Uriel Heilman · August 7, 2008

JTA’s Alison Klayman reports from Beijing on what the Chinese think of the Jews.

For more of JTA’s coverage of the 2008 Games, visit our Olympics section.

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