after watching several olympics, i have taken note of several team sports that struck me as baffling yet oddly exciting. one of them is water polo, which — outside of the olympics — i have yet to see being played first hand.

the first time i saw it on TV, i immediately thought “whoahh, it’s a lot like basketball… in the pool.” then, after catching sight of the goal area being guarded by the goalkeeper, i corrected myself, “uhh wait, it’s more like soccer…”

although it lacked the exhilaration of watching guys running, shoving and jumping while grappling with a ball, there was a certain hypnotic rhythm to it. and the players were doing a lot things (mainly keeping afloat) while trying to score by lobbing the ball on the opposing team’s goal area. from a certain vantage point, it looked like a fun game.

i got more curious about this game when swimming star matt biondi, after being asked about his future plans, said that he might take up water polo. knowing that he had been summarily crowned as one the stars of the Seoul Olympics (5 gold & 2 bronze medals), i began to feel more positive about the sport.

earlier today, while i was scanning for the latest water polo results in the Beijing Olympics, i came across this byline from pat forde (of ESPN). in a matter of minutes, all my initial ideas about the sport came crashing down. i knew water polo wasn’t for exactly the faint-hearted but after reading about the reactions of certain players i just roared in laughter.

so much for my first impression.

it would be nice, i think, if they could install more high-powered cameras below. at least, we’d be able to watch all sorts of interesting rough-housing down there. i’ll bet that’ll clean up the sport pretty fast. heheheh

Olympic update: the Dutch women’s water polo team just captured the gold in beijing by beating the US team 9-8; the australian women took the bronze. on the men’ side, four teams have qualified in the semi-finals: serbia, US, hungary annd montenegro. stay tuned.

i was all set to write a finale on michael phelps‘ splendid performance in beijing — extolling his unprecedented feat of winning the highest number of gold medals in a single olympics, among other things — but after reading countless of articles and posts from reporters, bloggers, sports writers, etc., i decided to hold off.

it’s not that i find it overwhelming (i could go on for hours gabbing away about his pool exploits), mind you. it’s just that after reading so many things about him, i realized i didn’t have anything new to add. i don’t think i’d need to, anyway. it’s all there: the TV, newspapers, magazines, the Internet, on people’s lips.

so i’m just going to focus on a couple of things.

first of all, i want to say thank you, michael (and all the people who have contributed to your success) for an amazing weeklong show. and for giving us a compelling reason to watch the Olympics.

and good luck to whatever it is you plan to do next. until 2012 in london then. or maybe even long before that.

and so michael phelps won his 7th gold in this XXIXth Olympics — with an imperceptible win (50.58) over milorad cavic of serbia (50.59) in 100m butterfly — and seems poised to win his eighth tomorrow in the 4×100m medley. that sounds rather detached and clinical compared to what has been happening this past week in Beijing’s National Aquatics Center.

among michael phelps’ wins, i must say that my favorites are the events that almost derailed his quest of winning 8 gold medals in a single Olympics: the 4×100m relay and the 100m butterfly.

why? because those memorable moments will be forever etched in my mind as the time when he was most vulnerable (and eventually triumphed). somehow, they made the baltimore bullet more endearingly ‘human’ and accessible to us who can only marvel and gawk at his feats. in a way, it made us appreciate his achievements more, because it gave us a glimpse of just how easily things could go wrong.

so much has been written about michael. he’s probably THE most recognizable global brand/name right now. in the last few days i must have read/heard/watched a whole lot of articles/features about him — ranging from slightly disparaging to openly fawning — but there’s a couple of articles that i really like.

one of them is filed by a Times Online reporter who made a courageous, if a bit foolhardy, attempt to down the amount of food (roughly 12,000 calories) that the swimmer normally consumes in one day. i don’t think he was successful, which would have been nothing short of amazing, but he writes an amusing and game commentary about his experience.

the other article is penned by a texan columnist who takes a humorous stab at imagining what michael phelps’ daily schedule must be like in the athletes’ quarters over at beijing.

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UPDATE (men’s basketball): the US ‘redeem’ team just hammered Spain 119-82. judging from live commentaries, the yanks just about stomped on the spanish squad pretty good, forcing them to commit a lot of turnovers and other mistakes. hmmm…

if my rough calculations are correct, the US gymnasts finally got their due by grabbing first and second places in the all-round competition.

nastia liukin, 18, scored a total of 63.324 for the gold and teammate shawn johnson, 16, amassed 62.725 points for silver. china’s Yilin Yang settled for bronze for her score of 62.650.

the see-sawing scores made for an unpredictable skirmish. ksenia smenenova (russia) and steliana nistor (romania) took fourth and fifth places, respectively.

whew.