Erki Nool failed to retain his Olympic decathlon crown on Tuesday. That was expected. He did, however, go one better than Sydney in having two discus throws judged legal instead of just one. The Erki Nool fan website doesn't appear to have been updated since April 2003 in Estonian, or September 2001 in English. Decathlon2000 covers the Estonian and world decathlon scene quite well however, and is up to date.

Congratulations to the Czech Republic's Roman ? ebrle, who won the gold medal with 8893 points. Bryan Clay (no, not him) was second with 8820, and Dmitriy Karpov of Kazakhstan third with 8725.

Kenya did the trifecta in the 3000 steeplechase with Ezekiel Kemboi taking the gold. Here is how the East African Standard reported the race.

An extraordinary men's handball quarter-final saw Germany beat Spain 32-30 in a penalty shootout after the teams were tied at 30-30 with two periods of extra time. Here is Frankfurter Rundschau's report of the match (in German), and El Mundo's report (in Spanish). Here are the match stats. The semi-final match-ups on Friday: Croatia v Hungary and Germany v Russia. Current markets with Centrebet: Croatia 2.15, Germany 3.25, Russia 4.00, Hungary 10.00.

Comparing Serbia and Montenegro to Yugoslavia is like comparing Russia to the USSR, but that hasn't stopped the "worst ever" tag being applied to the current SCG (to give their ISO3166-1 Alpha-3 code) men's basketball team. They finished 11th of 12 in the Olympic tournament with two wins and four losses, pushing Angola in last spot with an 85-62 win in their classification game.

Greece rolled defending champions Australia in the semi-final of the women's water polo 6-2. And weren't they happy. Here's the Sydney Morning Herald report.

And surprise surprise, the US softball team claimed NBC's Kleenex Moment of the Day for day ten. (And a belated congratulations to Mardy Fish for winning the day seven NBCKMOTD.)

Baseball, beach volleyball and hockey covered separately, but finally, Iraq lost to Paraguay 2-1 in the men's soccer semi-final and will meet Italy for bronze on Friday. And who better to tell an Iraq good-news story than the Fox "News" Channel?