The not-exactly decorated UK Olympic squad returns home tomorrow after just one athlete received a medal. Amy Williams, pictured above, who’s as cute as she is, I’m assuming, goddam crazy got the gold in skeleton.

In an article in the Guardian today, the Team UK brass is pleading that they need more funding if they’re going to do better in 2014. The team fell short of their lofty overall goal to win three medals – sigh, could have beaten Latvia (two silvers in the men’s skeleton and doubles luge).

Read more about the internal strife that is the British Olympic Association: UK Sport sticking to no compromise policy over Winter Games funding

Photo via The Guardian

Photo via Times Online

I wonder if the people behind the Garmisch Ski Resort’s bid to be part of the 2018 Olympic site have heard of Allianz, the German insurance firm who made a bid for the naming rights of the new Giants/Jets stadium who were nixed after it was discovered that they had ties to the Nazis? The Garmisch must not have, if they actually believe that their Olympic bid is going to work.

Times Online (UK) reports that the Bavarian ski resort, which lies in a town that in the 1930s was “rabidly anti-semitic,” and had to undergo “a comprehensive clean-up to present the sunny face of Nazi Germany” (????) before the 1936 Summer games in Germany,  will be part of the proposal that the German delegation will bring forth next month in Vancouver as part of a bid for Munich to be the 2018 host of the Olympics.

On the surface, Garmisch resembles a typical picture postcard Alpine community, with wooden chalets, flower tubs and the ice-clad Zugspitze mountain looming over the valley, and it is still proud of the last time that it was the site of a Winter Olympics -1936.

In the 1930s, though, the town was rabidly anti-Semitic, so much so that worried sports managers ordered a cover-up lest bad publicity jeopardise the success of the Summer Olympics in Berlin which Hitler wanted to be a showpiece of Aryan superiority.

The organiser of the summer Olympics, Carl Diem, visited Garmisch in 1935 and did not like what he saw. Nazi party rallies were stirring up hatred against Jews, he said, and the anti-Semitic newspaper “Der Stuermer” was on sale everywhere.

Definitely the best plan I’ve heard since I heard about the All-American Basketball Alliance yesterday.

And interestingly enough, the key player in this bid is Willy Bogner, who’s father delivered the Olympic oath in the presence of Adolf Hitler.

If this works out, it’s not going to make Oprah’s unsuccessful stumping for Chicago look that good.

Designaddict.com reveals, the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games have unveiled the London Olympic pictograms which will be used during the Olympic Games in 2012. All 38 sports of competition are represented. Check out the dynamic and silhouette versions of each, as well as a pic of the London Underground map – the inspiration for the design.

Karate rules, rhythmic gymnastics is a personal favorite.

In 2012, these will be used on signage, merch, etc. at the games. In the meantime, I think one of these will probably serve well as my new Twitter avatar – it’s either going to be rhythmic gymnastics, badminton, or the dead lift.

(H/T @asilentflute)

Posted via email from mike hayes’s posterous

Screenshot via Olympic.org, which is streaming the vote live. It’s real riveting stuff over there – they open the vote, they close the vote. There’s a lot of deafening silence in between.

UPDATE: Tokyo, you are out! It’s down to Madrid and Rio, the election is over.

Thankfully, Bode Miller has become a caricature of his former self. This is great, because his former self was really – to put it lightly – dickish?

Somebody, maybe it was Bode himself (once an attention whore…), decided to make the Bode: Life After the U.S. Ski team webisode (He quit way the hell back in 2007, by the way). This video makes me long for more Life After videos with other marginally successful athletes who have seen the tipping point of that marginal success come and go, and are now declining steeper than a giant slalom course in the Swiss Alps.

Watch this, and think about who else is ripe for a pummel by an old man (comes at about the 1:00 minute mark; the headlines on this site do not lie).

More bode-miller Ski >>

(That was pretty darn comedic, I’ll say.)

Bode quits U.S. ski team, but may still compete (NBC Sports)

Good Magazine has a spread of prospective logos from candidate cities for the 2016 Olympics.

I guess ridiculously early contests like this are ways of telling places like Doha, ya still got a shot!

The Chi is going with a ninja star (kudos), and Tokyo has adopted the aerial view of the feared Rainbow Road course from Mario Kart 64.

Still, these all trump the London 2012 logo, in my opinion – which looks like Stewie Griffin’s crayola rendition of Pangeae. (what the deuce is that thing?!)

Take note of how the trademark stamp is even in Comic Sans font. Edgy.