The Olympics Where Everyone Stopped Trying: World's Athletes Munching on Pot Brownies, Walking Off Racetracks
From the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics—which featured as one of its star attractions, a large-but-not-even-that-large Cruella DeVille balloon—it's been clear that these Games would be one in which people felt it was okay to go ahead and phone some things in.
Michael Phelps started pulling in bronzes.
Eight badminton players were disqualified for trying to throw games.
A drunk guy allegedly hurled a bottle at Usain Bolt and missed him by a mile.
People just aren't giving it their all.
But no day has been as slacker-friendly as Day 10 of the games.
First, word got out that 24-year-old Algerian middle-distance runner Taoufik Makhloufi had been thrown out of the Olympics for "failure to compete honestly with bona fide effort," after apparently giving up one lap in to his 800m heat. (Nevermind the fact that "middle-distance" sounds so halfhearted in the first place. That's a branding issue.)
Before a crowd of thousands, Makhloufi completed his first lap, then abruptly stopped running. Rumors swirled that he was saving his energy for the next day's 1,500m final, in which he was considered a likely medal contender.
After Makhloufi was disqualified from the Games, the Algerian federation protested, arguing that he had stopped running because of a knee injury.
An independent medical officer ruled that the concern over the injury seemed genuine, and Makhloufi was subsequently re-instated.
In way chiller news, Judo fighter Nick Delpopolo, a 23-year-old kid from New Jersey, was disqualified from the Olympics after testing positive for a banned substance: cannabis.
Delpopolo released a statement of apology, blaming the test results on an "inadvertent consumption of food that I did not realize had been baked with marijuana," that occurred before he left for the Olympics.
He's talking about space cakes. Little Debbies: DJ Michael Phelps Remix. Green brownies. Li'l Marijuana Squares.
Because no one in this Olympics is in a big rush to do anything, Delpopolo's disqualification came a week after he'd already competed in his event, on July 30th.
He finished in seventh place.
