It used to be that Australian Olympians were proper freaks. People like Ian Thorpe; prodigious, superhuman. Thorpe's proportions have more in common with a dolphin than a human and he swam like it. They were fantastically disciplined, of course, but they also were physically set up in a way that made capable of more than normal people.
This time it's different. One of our marathon cyclists competed with a collapsed lung, our Olympic silver medalist short track cyclist broke her neck, several limbs and took the skin off one side of her body a couple of months out from Beijing, and our Olympic Gold medalist 10 metre platform diver suffers from vertigo.
The extent to which each of these incapacities is taylored specifically to disadvantage the athelete in their chosen event strikes me as highly suspicious. I mean, it's a bit pathological, isn't it?
The thing that seems to make these people champions is the extremely relaxed nature of their grip on reality. The cyclist didn't, for example, think 'a broken neck probably takes me out of contention.' Surely, theoretically at least anyone who hadn't broken their necks just before the Olympics would be in an better position to win a medal than our girl. And is it really the case that there's no one on the planet that can dive better than a man with no head for heights?
But more importantly, is "pathological" really the best direction for sport to be going in?
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