Just how good are modern athletes?

This video at the New York Times web site looks at the speed difference between men today swimming the 100 m. freestyle...compared with all Olympians in the modern era.

While speeds have amped up amazingly (really amazingly) I think the swimmer with the most amazing. Chops was the first: he swam it in the Adriatic Sea, with hollowed-out pumpkins for lane markers.

Tres cool.

How can you win an Olympic event and not know?

Well, if you were American golfer Margaret Abbott, you were the first American woman to do so...in an Olympic games so poorly organized (Paris, 1900) that you didn't even know that your golf tournament was part of the Games.

Abbott died 55 years later, and still didn't know she had been an Olympic champion.

Oh - and her mother also played in the tournament, placing 7th...the first and only time that a mother and daughter competed against each other in an Olympic event.

(I love watching the Olympics in an Internet era. I learn so much cool stuff.)