Day:225, Words:225

After a night of swimming, movies and Olympic excitement, it was a struggle to emerge from the caravans ahead of the final day of the tournament. It was a big night for the Norwegian Olympic hopes with the defending champion in the javelin, Andreas Thorkildsen, followed by the handball girls in the gold medal match. The Javelin flopped short for Andreas and Norway, but the girls won a thriller and a well deserved second gold for the land of the fjords.

It was the last effort at the Alta tournament. The group of dusty, dirty and mostly unshowered players pushed through the exhaustion barrier to give their all until the final whistle. While the majority of young players showed good sportsmanship in both victory and defeat, one particular group of boys disgusted and saddened me. In two separate games, these boys dived and flung themselves all over the place, screamed like tortured banshees and employed ridiculous time wasting techniques to ruin a perfectly good game. Of course, after the game they were smiling smugly, proud of their cunning ploys. The coach appeared to be proud of his boys, not for good football, but for deceiving the referee and dragging the game into disrepute. If this group of under 10s is representative of the future of the sport, I will start to watch the sailing instead!

 

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