The easy Olympic highlight and horror for me has been the men's and women's road races. The first couple of hours of both were gigantic bores, and I'd like to throttle whoever put the cyclists lives at risk with that course design. At one point one of the commentators started to say, "Of course the race organizers have done a lot to make the course safe." On both sides of the road were foot high, jagged stone curbs. A few feet farther were iron poles about every ten feet, with what looked like crepe paper strung in between. The announcer also saw the picture and trailed off. But the end of the race: up a big hill to get the climbers out in front. Down a big hill then through a flat, to make the climbers with the lead risk their necks on the descent to try to hold off the sprinters on the flat. Sure enough, one of the lead climbers in both races crashed, the Dutch woman lucky not to be paralyzed. But the drama was intense as the sprinters caught the surviving climbers in both races, in the women's race with only 200 m to go. As the crash victim's compatriot pulled past the line, she burst into tears. It amounted to human blood sport, and I would never have wanted it to happen, but I couldn't look away.