Olympic Spillage

Is Chris Hoy's latest gold in jeopardy? The best gymnastic skill so far came from an NBA star and taking your medal on the Tube, all in today's Spillage.

Hoy there, we’ll just pass over that one, shall we?

Yesterday Chris Hoy joined Steve Redgrave in becoming the Briton with the most Olympics gold medals, joining the rower on five gold medals.

Hoy and teammates Philip Hindes and Jason Kenny won the three-man, three-lap team sprint in a world record time by beating Britain’s old enemy the French.

Job done you’d think? Home crowds pleased, happy days. Not so fast. What has Hoy’s young 19-year old team Hindes been saying after the race?

Hindes when asked about his crash at the start of the race which caused a restart said, "We were saying if we have a bad start we need to crash to get a restart. I just crashed; I did it on purpose to get a restart, just to have the fastest ride. I did it. So it was all planned, really."

Does that mean we have Badminton-style scandal on our hands featuring the team of Britain’s most revered current Olympian Hoy? Not quite.

Despite the fairly black-and white nature of the quotes, it’s being claimed that due to the fact that Hindes is German and qualifies for Britain via his British father his words were lost in translation.

The International Cycling Union has also said that the French team had accepted the result and that it is not in question. Funny one, eh?

Ouch, that hurts United States versus Nigeria

The United States basketball side has had a lot of pressure on it to perform at the Olympics.

LeBron, Kobe, Durant, Dwayne Wade and the crew have to bear comparisons with the great Olympic Dream team of ’92 which featured Michael Jordan, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson.

While it’s still in doubt whether the current crop of NBA youngsters will be remembered as fondly as the ’92 vintage as yet, last night they entered the records book beating the Brazilian basketballers 1988 record for most points scored in a match of 138.

In fact the United States lads shattered it, beating Nigeria by 156 to 73.

If all the Nigerian players were hurting, they can take solace from the fact they’re probably not hurting as bad as the United States’ James Harden of the Oklahoma City Thunder who was made do the splits after a crossover by Tony Skinn.

At the same time maybe Harden should consider the gymnastics for Rio in 2016.

Hey look what I got...

You can’t really blame the new Venezuelan fencing champion, 26-year-old, Olympic first timer Ruben Limardo.

He won is country’s first gold medal in 44 years in the men’s individual epee on Wednesday and decided to show off a bit.

The student was making his way to London city centre, more than likely to celebrate the victory and took the Tube in his Venezuelan tracksuit with the gold medal draped around his neck.

Limardo took the medal out for onlookers to have a look at and take pictures of.

The highest praise for Limardo though came from a fellow passenger on the Tube as reported by The Evening Standard newspaper.

An NHS worker called Mr. Scanlan from Highgate said  “I’ve never seen someone so happy in my life...The atmosphere was amazing - it was like West Ham beating Tottenham.”

Yes, that’s exactly what it was like Mr. Scanlan.