I don’t mean to keep coming back to the Olympics when the football season is getting near, but there just keeps being interesting topics to consider. I promise I won’t talk about it anymore by next week. Anyway, I want to take a few minutes to talk about the sprints.

The Americans have mostly been the kings and queens of the sprint. Other countries have won from time to time (like my beloved Canada in 1996), but for the most part the Americans have been reliably the best there is. Not this year. There were six different sprint events – the 100m and 200m for men and women, and the 4x100m sprints. That’s six gold medals. The Americans won none. Tyson Gay was the world champion in the 100m and the 200m. He didn’t even qualify for the 200m coming out of the American trials, and he didn’t make the finals in the 100m. Ugly. The Americans were world champs in the relay too. At the Olympics they dropped the baton and were eliminated in the preliminaries. The women fared better, but only a little. They were completely shut out in the 100m. Alyson Felix was the world champ in the 200m. She won an Olympic medal, but only a silver one. The relay team was also world champs, and they also failed to get out of the preliminaries thanks to a dropped baton.

I’m not saying all of this to make fun of the American. Many of you readers are American, and I like you. Really. My interest is just to think about what kind of price you could have got if you had bet on the American shut out. It would have been massive. Gay was the favorite in the 100m coming into the game, the Americans were favored in both relays, and Felix was heavily favored in the 200m. The women’s 100m and the men’s 200m weren’t as favorable for the Americans, but their top runners still would have been at a good price.

Just think about the possibilities. You could have made a winning bet that ruled out four of six favorites. That’s a bettors wet dream. I obviously didn’t do it, and I doubt anyone else did, either, but considering the possibilities is one of those things that keeps people betting. Dare to dream.