Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner

Entries Tagged as 'Olympics'

Bobby Lee Hunter, Cont’d

August 21st, 2012 · 4 Comments

One of the great joys of this whole Microkhan endeavor is reaching folks who might not otherwise have occasion to check out our work. And some of those good correspondents are not only interested observers, but also characters in the various yarns we unspool. Our recent post about the rise and fall of incarcerated pugilist […]

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The Curious Case of Bobby Lee Hunter

August 6th, 2012 · 10 Comments

Per the usual, the Olympic boxing tournament has been something of a farce, with scoring scandals predictably aplenty. Every four years, such controversy reminds me of the tale of Bobby Lee Hunter, a once-celebrated boxer I have been trying to locate for the better part of a decade. Hunter was a world-beating American flyweight who […]

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Reality Check

July 26th, 2012 · 4 Comments

Compared to the Games of the late Cold War, when steroids were integral to athletic success, this year’s Olympics will be remarkably clean. Yet we also know that drug use has not vanished—how could it, give the rewards at stake at the ultra-competitive nature of those tempted to use? The big question is what percentage […]

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Talk About Missing the Point

December 29th, 2011 · 3 Comments

Wladyslaw Kozakiewicz has long resided high atop my list of all-time athletic badasses, and not just because he mastered the most technically difficult event in all of track-and-field. When the Polish Kozakiewicz took gold in the pole vault at the 1980 Olympics, he did so in front of a hostile Moscow crowd that was pulling […]

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Dolph on a Mission

January 8th, 2010 · 2 Comments

We here at Microkhan headquarters have been been shy about expressing our love for modern pentathlon, by far the most underrated sport in the Summer Olympics. And so we were recently overjoyed to discover that none other than Dolph Lundgren, one of the finest actors of the past half century, shares our affinity for the […]

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When Frisians Soar

September 16th, 2009 · Comments Off on When Frisians Soar

We’ve always had a shaky handle on the definition of “feedback loop,” but we think this might qualify as a case in point. Yesterday, we noticed a fair bit of traffic coming Microkhan’s way thanks to a fantastic Ask MetaFilter thread slugged “Who are the best athletes nobody has heard of?” We were honored that […]

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Kids Do Love Lasers

September 15th, 2009 · 8 Comments

Modern pentathlon is by far our favorite Summer Olympics sport, topping even our beloved hammer throw. There’s just something inestimably cool about an event that’s modeled after a 19th-century military mission. Plus you have to dig the fact that the fifth place finisher at the 1912 games was a 28-year-old U.S. Army lieutenant named George […]

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An Advantage in the Air?

August 21st, 2009 · 2 Comments

In response to our post on athletic gender testing earlier this week, one of our most treasured commenters posed this stumper: Are there no sports where being a woman might be a competitive advantage over being a man? Equestrian events maybe, or long distance swimming? Tough one! We’ve long been familiar with some research vouching […]

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Another Kabaddi Legend

August 20th, 2009 · 5 Comments

The rest of our day is all about the Now the Hell Will Start screenplay, so we’ll outro with yet another clip of kabaddi mastery. Today’s legend is the late, great Harjit Brar Bajakhana, perhaps the best Indian raider to every play the game. Keep in mind that he performed at such a high level […]

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“The Requirements to Compete as a Woman”

August 19th, 2009 · 4 Comments

In reading this quickie AP bit about a female runner whose gender is in question, we were left wondering about the shades of sexual grey that the International Association of Athletic Federations must contend with in the age of hormones. A quick peek in the pants, alas, is no longer sufficient to determine whether a […]

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