The Unofficial 2008 Beijing Olympics Blog

One more gold, and Michael Phelps won’t have to share the “Athlete with most gold medals in a single Olympics” title with compatriot Mark Spitz, who did this 36 years ago in the Munich Games.

But this time, Phelps’s own efforts will not be enough to achieve this Olympic immortality. He will have to rely on his relay teammates. As the defending Olympic champions, world record holders and fastest final qualifiers, they will not let him down.

Standing in their way are the teams from Australia and Japan, who qualified second and third fastest, only 0.01 and 0.06 seconds behind them.

In the Women’s 4 x 100m Medley Relay, however, defending champions Australia may see less competition, qualifying over a second faster than Great Britain and the United States, who came in second and third.

In the Women’s 50m Freestyle final, 41-year-old Dara Torres from the United States will be under the spotlight. She had showed her competitors that her age is no issue in the pool by clocking the fastest time into the final. However, she is sure to meet the close competition from world record holder Lisbeth Trickett of Australia and Friday’s 100m Freestyle gold medalist Britta Steffen of Germany.

The Men’s 1500m Freestyle will be the last chance for Grant Hackett of Australia to bring something home from Beijing. And if he wins gold, it will be a history-making third straight 1500m title

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A three minute silence was observed yesterday at 2.28pm Beijing Time (6.28 GMT), one week after the terrible earthquake in Sichuan. The unanimous silence was the followed by a growling three minute long of noise by car drivers ships, trains and anything that had a horn or something.

According to the Associated Press:

China stood still and sirens wailed Monday to mourn the country’s tens of thousands of earthquake victims, as the search for survivors increasingly became a search for bodies. Construction workers, shopkeepers and bureaucrats across the bustling nation of 1.3 billion people paused for three minutes at 2:28 p.m. - exactly one week after the magnitude 7.9 quake hit central China. Air-raid sirens and the horns of cars and buses sounded in memory of the estimated 50,000 dead.

Bellow you can watch a CCTV report which includes coverage of the three minutes from across China:

China’s central television stations, CCTV1 through CCTV9, ran earthquake coverage all day. Beijing’s television stations followed suit. For the most part, programming consisted of: live updates from the relief effort in Sichuan, compassionate messages from viewers, graphic rescue montages set to music, interviews with survivors and heroes, and scenes from today’s three-minute observance.

Three Minutes to Remember (CCTV News)

An emotional Tiananmen Square (CCTV News)

In other news, the Chinese has reserved a lot of presure lately from various communities, mostly online, from within the country, to scale down the Olympics torch relay for three days. Their voice has been heard and a decision has been reached to pause the Olympic torch relay for three days. The torch is currently in Hangzhou, where it will wait until Wednesday for its next stop: Shanghai.