Philadelphia-- You cannot make this up. Sarah Palin, the best-known hockey mom in the United States, gets booed Saturday at the Philadelphia Flyers hockey game. And the game is played, of all places, at the Wachovia Center. It's all over YouTube: failing candidate, failed bank as corporate sponsor, the kind of anger that cannot be scripted.

From the story of the boxer Jack Johnson, a black man who beat white men with regularity and without regret (and incurred the wrath of the legal system for his efforts), to the heroic pose of 1968 Olympians Tommie Smith and John Carlos, sports in the US is in large part the story of black men and women overcoming athletic competitors and societal racism.

Liu Qi called the Olympics "a grand celebration of sport, of peace and friendship." Not quite. Instead it was a powerful demonstration of the way the elephants of the east and west can link trunks and happily trample the suffering grass. England, you're next. And you thought the blitzkrieg was rough.