Thursday, August 19

worst simile ever

It's difficult to describe sports in a fresh way, I imagine, since people have been playing essentially the same games for decades, or hundreds, or thousands of years. What's new to say about the competitions themselves? But in attempting to come up with a fresh phrase or image, reporters sometimes reach too far, like John Crumpacker in the SF Chronicle on Tuesday. Here's a line from his story about local swimmer Natalie Coughlin's gold medal-winning race; she started strong and then slowed tremendously in the last lap:

It was as if she had an anvil placed on her stomach for the return trip with a smith forging her medal as she swam.

It's hard enough to swim with an anvil on one's stomach, but when you've got a smith sitting on there too, and he's smashing his hammer down on the anvil to boot, that's really tough. Only Natalie could win under those conditions.

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