A side spin on Nadal’s dirty laundry
The U.S. Open begins today and if Rafael Nadal’s outfits appear a bit strange, British cycling double gold-medal winner Bradley Wiggins knows why.
Wiggins ran into the Spanish tennis star at the Beijing Olympics.
“I was in the laundry and standing right next to Nadal,” he told BBC Sport. “I didn’t bother him, but he was shoving all his colors and whites in together.
“I really wanted to say, ‘Dude, you’re going to have a nightmare with that. You can’t just put the whole bag in -- there are reds in with whites.’ But what can you do?”
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Trivia time
When Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt broke the world 200-meter record in Beijing, how fast was he running?
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Driving partner
Two-time Daytona 500 winner Michael Waltrip’s bleak season got slightly better at Michigan, thanks to some simian help.
“In all the years I’ve been racing, I’ve never taken anything to my car like a good luck charm,” Waltrip said.
But when a woman at the track handed him a toy monkey, Waltrip figured it couldn’t hurt. “I carried it with me, and I think we got it done,” he said. “He just rolled around in my car and behaved. We ended up finishing in the top 20. We had a solid run.”
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Send in the . . .
Rocky Mountain News columnist Bernie Lincicome came away unimpressed after seeing the Green Bay Packers, without Brett Favre, play the Denver Broncos.
“It was as if the circus had come to town without lions or clowns, both of which, after all, were Favre,” he said.
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Woe is us
When England played the Czech Republic in a soccer friendly in London, the Guardian’s online minute-by-minute report on the match started out this way:
“Great Britain has won Olympic golds in the swimming, the cycling, the rowing, the athletics, and the gadding about in daddy’s yacht. It’s a wonderful achievement, if a strangely disconcerting one; we’re simply not used to all this success. It feels odd.
“What the country really needs is a gaggle of inept jokers to hove into view and reacquaint everyone with the comforting feeling of incredulous misery.”
England obliged. It barely managed a 2-2 tie.
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Trivia answer
23 mph.
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And finally
Greg Cote of the Miami Herald, on Olympic sensation Bolt: “He is the fastest thing out of Jamaica since bales of marijuana in speedboats.”
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Go beyond the scoreboard
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