Olympic Diary: Ryan Lochte’s image will be going down the toilet

 
US swimmer Ryan Lochte competes in the men's 400m individual medley heats swimming event at the London 2012 Olympic Games on July 28, 2012 in London.
Getty
6 August 2012

With the swimming races in the Aquatic Centre having finished on Saturday night, let’s hope they changed the water before the synchronised swimming began yesterday.

Ryan Lochte (pictured) told an American radio show that he, like many other swimmers, regularly makes his toilet in the pool. We’re talking number ones here, but still. Don’t most people grow out of that before they’re, you know, 27-years-old? “I think there’s just something about getting into chlorine water that you just automatically go,” Lochte said, adding that he doesn’t go mid-race. Just during – and I suppose there is a pun intended here – the warm-up.

A touchy subject . . .

Is anyone else mildly obsessed by the trackside manner of the BBC’s roving athletics interviewer Phil Jones?

He seems like a nice man, albeit one who’s following the BBC’s prescribed interview technique of “utter a sentimental platitude statement like, ‘Gold medal, 80,000 fans, it’s amazing,’ before shoving the microphone under the subject’s nose for them to elaborate.”

But he has a very distracting tendency to do this while patting, fondling and massaging the foreshoulder of everyone he interviews. Is he trying to keep hold of them in case they run away midway through the conversation?

Do the Mobot for Mo

Anyone still wondering what Mo Farah’s scalp-patting celebratory pose was all about following his victory in the 10,000m final on Saturday night: it’s the M out of the YMCA, which morphs into an O shape and it is known as ‘The Mobot’.

The next chance to see it live is on Saturday, when Farah will aim to take another medal, in the 5,000m final.

Between now and then, however, it is becoming something of an internet meme.

That means it is now a matter of patriotic duty to take a grainy smartphone pic of yourself ‘doing the Mobot’ and post in on Twitter. Do it. Go on. Do it now.

At least Trott delivers

The Royal Mail has been so overwhelmed by Great Britain’s success at the Games that it is running low on paint for the postboxes being turned gold in the home town of every one of our Olympic champions.

So, you’d think that it would be trying not to waste it. Or maybe not. A pillar box was painted

gold in Harlow, Essex, to celebrate Laura Trott’s part in the women’s team pursuit victory at the Velodrome on Saturday, before Trott herself pointed out that her home town is, in fact, Cheshunt in Hertfordshire.

The Royal Mail says it is correcting its mistake and is suitably red- (or should that be gold-?) faced.

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