- Michael Phelps hasn't had the best Olympics so far this year, but after Tuesday night, he'll have his place in history secured. Now officially the world's greatest Olympic champion, Phelps cruised through the anchor leg of the 4x200-meter freestyle relay to earn his record 19th career Olympic medal and 15th gold on Tuesday night. He almost had another gold but was outreached at the very end in an earlier event by South African Chad Le Clos.
- Phelps still has 3 more events to go to put the record even further out of reach. He says that 2012 will be his final Olympics.
- The previous record belonged to a Soviet gymnast from the 1960's, Larisa Latynina.
US Women Gymnastics win first Gold since 1996
- The US Women’s Gymnastics team won the gold medal in the all-around team contest on Tuesday in London. This was the team’s first gold in the event since 1996 in Atlanta. The 5-point destruction over the mistake-plagued Russian team left many comparing this team to the 1996 Dominique Moceanu/Shannon Miller team whose performance was capped by this timeless moment.
- With this year's team, led by Jordan Wieber, Gabby Douglas and McKayla Maroney on the vault, the US took an early lead. The Russian team nearly evened the score on the uneven bars, when Aliya Mustafina and Viktoria Komova put on magificent performances to close the US lead to 0.4 points.
- However, near the end of the competition, Team USA was aided by major mistakes by Mustafina (who almost fell off the balance beam) and Anastasia Grishina (who didn’t land a tumble in the floor routine) and coasted through their final couple routines to easily win Gold.
- The Men's Gymnastics team competition was much more hotly contested. Early favorite China, who stumbled in qualifying, recovered to take the gold. Upstart Great Britain and Ukraine were originally given silver and bronze after Japanese star Kohei Uchimura was ruled to have fallen off the pommel horse without doing a handstand. But after a lengthy review, Uchimara's score was raised, giving Japan the silver, Great Britain the bronze and Ukraine off the podium.
Overall Olympic Update
- Once again, the two biggest winners at the Olympics are China and the US who are tied with 23 medals each. China leads the gold medal count with 13, to the US’ 9.
- On Wednesday, 25 more medal events will culminate, with an additional 25 being awarded on Thursday.
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