Ain't over yet!

For years, I've been watching sports, and one thing that is uniquely American that bugs me is showboating. OK, athletes in other countries may do it as well, especially soccer players, but nobody touches the Americans when it comes self-aggrandizement.

Americans are so good at it that they often start patting themselves on the back before anything has actually been accomplished. This is especially true in football, where you rarely watch a game without at least one player starting to celebrate a touchdown well before he gets to the end zone. I've always thought it would be great if one of those guys dropped the ball or otherwise messed it up while they were busy patting themselves on the back.

There was one famous incident in the Super Bowl years ago when Dallas DL Leon Lett started strutting his way into the end zone at around the 10-yard-line, only to have a Buffalo player strip the ball before he got there. Unfortunately, Dallas won anyway.

In the Olympics today, someone finally got indigestion from putting too much mustard on her hot dog. Leslie Jacobellis had the Snowboard Cross gold medal sewn up. She had a huge lead thanks to crashes behind her, so on the second-to-last jump on the course, she grabbed her board to do some silly x-games-style trick, they called it a “backside method grab", which sounds more like a dance move than an athletic one, and she landed wrong and crashed on her backside. By the time she got up, the only other competitor still standing had passed her and took the gold medal.

I will give her a little credit for how she handled her mistake. Immediately after the race, she gave some weak excuse about grabbing the board to "stabilize", but later dropped that. She didn't duck the media and didn't treat it like the end of her world.

However, she has earned herself a measure of immortality. Now, instead of seeing some poor guy go head-over-heels off the end of a ski jump ramp, we'll be watching her showing us the proper "method" for turning gold into silver.