Diane Pucin

Diane Pucin covered her first Olympics in Barcelona in 1992. But her favorite is the Winter Games in Lillehammer in 1994, where she covered figure skating and the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan saga all day, every day.

Comments

[Deane Bailey]

I love Diane Pucin's reporting and comments. Easy to read and informative.
Mr. Deane Bailey
Las Cruces,NM

[Lisa]

Looking forward to your blog comments Diane - I enjoyed your Tour de France blog two years ago (funny and thought provoking) and I'm sure this one is going to be interesting. Although, after your article about Chinese gymnast's faking their ages, I just hope your blog comments aren't censored by the Chinese altogether...Good Luck!

[Jason Wermuth]

I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, because everybody hates those guys. But last night (August 14, 2008) around 10:30 pm EST, my wife and I were looking online for information about the USA Women's Olympic gymnastics team, because as many of you probably are, we are glued to our TV's hoping to see that one more Olympic gold before we lay our heads down to sleep. The Olympics have become our ritual for the past week and so, naturally, we wanted to know who the gymnasts were for the womens gymnastic all-around.

In our search, we happened upon a Wikipedia article about the USA Womens gymnastics team. This article talked all about the team and even had charts of who had won the Olympics previously. As we expected, Mary Lou Retton, Nadia Comaneci and all of the Olympic greats of history were on this list. Interestingly, this Wikipedia article also had the results for the 2008 womens all-around individual competition citing Nastia Liukin (Gold), Shawn Johnson (Silver), and Yang Yilin (Bronze) as the victors of this worldwide competition, the one that started in approximately an hour after we were reading this at 11:30am in China or 11:30pm EST. It goes without saying that we were shocked that the medalists were already named on Wikipedia, hours before the competition would supposedly end.

So, my wife and I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning waiting to see if this prophetic Wikipedia article was true. Without flaw, Nastia Liukin took the gold, Shawn Johnson the silver and Yang Yilin won the bronze. These results beg the question, what the heck? How could a "live" olympic event be predicted at least two hours prior to the event beginning? Furthermore, this morning when I woke up I had every intention of writing the newspaper and sending them the link to the Wikipedia article with the edit stamp to prove that something fishy was going on, but oddly, that article talking about the USA Womens Olympic gymnastics team throughout history was GONE! Erased! And replaced with a smaller article listing only the charts from the previous article. This is what now exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_medalists_in_gymnastics_(women). I wanted to kick myself that I did not take a screen shot of the article last night, but alas, I promise you it was there.

So was this some conspiracy to cover up the fact that the "live" olympic events on NBC are actually not really live at all? I have no idea. Was some Wiki-editor in cyber space just a prophetic olympic oracle? I don't know. What I do know is that someone, somewhere wrote the results of the 2008 USA women's olympic all-around hours before it was shown "live" on NBC. You decide what you think really happened. (P.S. If I end up getting kidnapped soon, call CNN).

[Robert McArthur]

I was outraged last night when NBC's gymnastics commentator Elfie Schlegel said that, on the balance beam final, "Nastia Liukin decided to 'let' Shawn Johnson win a gold medal."

This was an inexcusable slight to Johnson and the years of hard work she has dedicated to her sport. It is also highly offensive to the American Team overall.

I now understand why NBC has no feedback option on it's Olympics web site ... it wants to protect it's "expert" commentators from criticism by outraged viewers.

At MINIMUM Schlegel owes Shawn Johnson an on-air apology.