American wrestler Jordan Burroughs defeated Iran's Sadegh Goudarszi in freestyle wrestling to win gold. After the match and medal ceremony, Burroughs tweeted this photo.

Source: @alliseeisgold

Tilt-Shift photography uses a special lens to create a shallow depth of field, and make the subjects of a photo look like toy miniatures. Here are some striking examples from the Olympics.

Image by Alex Livesey / Getty Images

Image by Phil Walter / Getty Images

Image by Cameron Spencer / Getty Images

Image by Cameron Spencer / Getty Images

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These are so cool.

Taekwondo

Image by KIM KYUNG-HOON / Reuters

Judo

Image by Paul Sancya / AP

Fencing

Image by TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA / Getty Images

Image by TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA / Getty Images

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LeBron danced, James Harden stole the mascot, and even Coach K got excited.

Of course, the celebration starts with a group hug.

Pau Gasol single-handedly kept Spain in the game in the third quarter. Coach K and Gasol share a touching moment.

And then Kobe and the rest of Pau's NBA counterparts come over.

How many other players will Kobe's hug last? This is two...

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GOLD'S WHAT MAKES YOU BEAUTIFUL.

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Here are the charismatic impish fellows performing their hit, "What Makes You Beautiful." The sound in the arena isn't very good, but you can make it out.

They did “Wannabe” and “Spice Up Your Life” while standing atop sparkly black cabs.

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Holy Boris Johnson, this thing was weird .

1. They did that strange, epilepsy-courting London-scenery countdown again.

2. Winston Churchill popped out of the top of Big Ben and recited passages from Shakespeare's "The Tempest."

I, for one, feel great about the fact that Timothy Spall can play both Winston Churchill...

...and Peter Pettigrew in "Harry Potter."

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As if the world needed another reason to love Sesame Street.

LINK: Via McKaylaIsNotImpressed.tumblr.com

Third place is a third wheel.

Image by Streeter Lecka / Getty Images

Why does the bronze medal exist?

That’s not just a rhetorical question. I’ve been asking a lot of people who you’d think would know. Tony Bijkerk didn’t, and he’s the Secretary General of the International Society of Olympic Historians in the Netherlands. (The ISOH is headquartered in the village of Fochteloo in the municipality of Ooststellingwerf, FYI.) Jim Greensfelder of Sharonville, Ohio didn’t know, and he wrote the Olympic Medals Reference Guide AND a history of the 1904 St. Louis Olympics. That’s relevant because St. Louis’ Games, we do know, are the first at which bronze medals were awarded to third-place finishers. (The prizes in 1896 and 1900 — generally, as these things weren’t totally formalized yet — were silver for first and bronze for second.) But even St. Louisians don’t seem to recall why they decided to do the third-place thing. The Missouri Museum didn’t know, and neither did anyone from the St. Louis Public Library. The International Olympic Committee’s own Olympic Studies Centre sent me a polite e-mail informing me that “based on the documentation we have available to us…we are unable to answer your question of 'why' the Organizing Committee for the 1904 Olympic Games decided to give medals for first, second and third place.”

It’s not surprising that no one can remember a good reason to give out a third-place medal: there isn’t one. For starters, they’re ineffective as commemoration. There are no famous or infamous bronze medalists. Do you remember Phillip Edwards or Adrianus de Jong? Edwards, a Canadian sprinter, and de Jong, a Dutch fencer (from The Hague, which is 219 km from Ooststellingwerf municipality), are the athletes who’ve won the most bronze medals without a silver or gold. But there’s no cachet, even tragic Buffalo Bills cachet, in being a perennial second runner-up. Not making it over the last hill might be indicative of greatness thwarted by a dramatic flaw, but not making it over the second-to-last hill is just indicative of needing to spend more time on hill training.

Silver medals at least make intuitive sense. There’s an honor in being the last, toughest obstacle to a victory, implicit in the way we remember the winners who had fearsome competitors (Pete Sampras/Andre Agassi, for example) with a respect surpassing that which we have for those who defeated relatively anonymous fields (Ivan Lendl). A worthy silver medalist is essential for the most memorable golds. Usain Bolt’s most blazingly mind-bending (and only world-record setting) run of the London Games came in the 4x100 relay, when a brilliant American performance forced Bolt to run his anchor leg with as much desperation as Usain Bolt is ever forced to run with, just to win the race. (The United States’ time in the relay tied the previous world record.) Michael Phelps’s most famous race is his photo finish against Milorad Cavic of Serbia in Beijing’s 100m butterfly. Put another way, the spirit of the silver medal is the spirit of Rocky. The spirit of the bronze medal is the spirit of Brad, which is a movie that doesn’t exist about a guy, Brad Jenkins, who Rocky beat before he fought Apollo Creed.

This all goes to explain the sinking feeling one gets when coming across a third-place game or match. (That and the essential un-covetability of bronze. A “golden age” is a time of peak greatness. The Bronze Age is when people learned how to make, like, spears. Spears — can they even get wifi?)

"Can you hear me now?" "No."

Source: cf.mp-cdn.net

"But Ben," you might be saying, "the Olympics aren’t just about the viewers at home, demanding entertainment while we lie on the floor, eating pretzels with cheese pre-baked inside them. The Olympics are also about the athletes themselves." I’ll say to you, yes, and those pretzels are delicious, especially when you melt a bowl of Velveeta so you can cover the outside in cheese as well. And then I’ll say that it turns out that the bronze actually does have adverse effects on athletes — specifically silver-medal winners. A 1995 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology examined the relative mental states of silver and bronze winners and found that bronze recipients seemed both happier and more generally optimistic after their competitions than silver recipients. In one facet of the study, college students who weren’t sports fans — and didn’t have any information about who finished where — were shown videos of athletes who’d just finished their races/matches; the students were asked to simply rate how happy each athlete seemed. Silver winners averaged a 5 on a 1 to 10 scale and bronze winners 6.7. (The study’s authors used pre-Olympics Sports Illustrated medal predictions to make sure that they weren't just stumbling on a random group of bronze winners who’d way outperformed expectations; in fact, it turned out, the silver winners in the study had done better than expected and bronze winners hadn’t.)

What the hell kind of prize makes people feel better for doing worse? Simply qualifying for the Olympics is a great achievement, and “Olympic athlete” a title of great prestige; I think that’s enough for third-place finishers, like it is for everyone who finishes fourth and thereafter.

While I was finishing up this piece, I got an e-mail from Tony Bijkerk (the “pride of Ooststellingwerf”). I’d sent a follow-up to his original response to my questions about bronze, worried maybe that I’d worded my query imprecisely or in an idiomatic way that his (highly-functional, of course) command of English didn’t quite recognize. In the follow-up I put it directly: “Do we have any idea why bronze was added?” Reads his reply: “No Sir, we have not!” Indeed, Mr. Bijkerk — indeed, world — we have not!

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The most decorated Olympian stretches his post-swimming wings with a new ad campaign shot by Annie Leibovitz.

Via: justjared.com

(H/T JustJared)

Via: chicncheapliving.com

A strong showing for the out Olympians. 2 of 3 openly gay men medaled!

Gold

Seimone Augustus — Basketball — United States

Image by MARK RALSTON / Getty Images

Carl Hester — Team Dressage — Great Britain

Image by Alex Livesey / Getty Images

Marilyn Agliotti — Field Hockey — Netherlands

Image by Daniel Berehulak / Getty Images

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Because it's Monday, and looking at pretty things is a great way to start your week.

Image by JOHN STILLWELL / Getty Images

Image by JOHN STILLWELL / Getty Images

Image by ADRIAN DENNIS / Getty Images

Image by ADRIAN DENNIS / Getty Images

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The US may have beat the world in medal count, but the Brits always dominate in music … even lip syncs.

For every triumph, there's a badminton player throwing a match. These are the moments we'll want to forget.

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Giant Foam Hand is BuzzFeed Sports' weekly cartoon series.

J. O. Applegate likes drawing about sports even more than he likes dancing about architecture. He writes and draws the webcomic Bouncex3. Follow him on Twitter why don't you?

It's a Southern-culture thing.

Image by Tom Pennington / Getty Images

Just like June's NASCAR road course race in Sonoma, this weekend's road course event in Watkins Glen, New York generated the kind of striking images that seem made to catch the eye of sports fans who don't follow NASCAR — the ones who get bored watching drivers turn left 2,000 times.

Meanwhile, drivers are effusive when asked about trading the usual ovals for squiggly road courses. "It's exciting and fun to be able to attack the corner into the braking zones while you're down-shifting, to have to throw the car left and right and over the curves," Jeff Gordon told a reporter about the Sonoma course. NASCAR teams once brought in “ringers” for the twice-a-year road races, but the regular drivers have gotten better at handling road courses in recent years, learning to manhandle their bigger cars around tracks built for smaller, more nimble sports cars. And NASCAR fans enjoy the chance that Watkins Glen and Sonoma provide to watch their favorite racers scrum in tight turns and bump and grind through twisty corners and chutes.

So if road races are a hoot for drivers and fans alike — and aren't subject to the most common objection that NASCAR skeptics have about the sport — why are only two of NASCAR's 36 Sprint Cup contests held at road courses, while the rest are boring old ovoid races? There are a few answers, with a common theme.

The Logistics: Stock-car racing was born in the South, and the earliest races were held on oval fairgrounds tracks and horse tracks. Many early stock car racing promoters were farmers, who found that a tractor and some chicken fencing could turn a cow pasture into a race track in no time. Putting together a road course would have been a lot more difficult — as would watching a race at one.

The Economics: Related: road races and sports cars were traditionally a wealthy man's sport. NASCAR traces its roots to the post-Depression era of southern moonshining, when bootleggers made cash delivering illegal whiskey while racing their whiskey cars on Sundays. They weren't going to conduct their criminal activities in a preposterously expensive Ferrari calibrated for hairpin turns.

The Culture: Sports cars and road races were simply considered a northern thing. Meanwhile, Southerners had no big-time sports to call their own. The Braves didn’t settle in Atlanta until 1965, and the Falcons came a year later. But if you were lucky enough to have a nearby fairgrounds or an enterprising farmer who'd turned his barren field into a race track, you could stand beside a chicken-wire fence and watch jacked-up Ford V-8s — many of them whiskey cars — tearing around the oval, symbols of power for the powerless.

Oval stock car racing, then, was a convenient and low-cost way of establishing a sporting culture in a place that needed one of its own. In the 1950s, co-founder Bill France did consider the potential for road races and thought about trying to lure fans to races featuring foreign cars and Indy-style “open wheel” cars. “Apparently, it never fully came to fruition,” says Eddie Samples, a racing historian with GeorgiaRacingHistory.com, whose father, Ed, was a NASCAR champ in the 1940s. I'm not surprised — as a kid growing up in New Jersey, I remember my dad taking my brother and I to Watkins Glen. We’d see a flash of cars for a few seconds, then they’d disappear in the backstretch. The cars would spread out after a while and it’d be impossible to tell who was winning. My brother and I would lose interest and start wresting or eating too many grilled hotdogs. The atmosphere was one of leisurely novelty — not the rowdy communal experience that marks stock-car races. Years later, while researching the moonshine-fueled early history of NASCAR, I learned that most Southern racers and fans also disdained the northern style of sports car road racing. By God, stock cars were meant to drive in circles, son. It seems that only in recent years have the grudges begun to evaporate to the point where it doesn’t seem so disloyal for a true-blue NASCAR fan or driver to accept that arcing left around an oval isn’t the only way to drive a stock car.

Neal Thompson is the author of three books, including Driving with the Devil: Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth of NASCAR.

“The Glen” hosted a number of races — including a NASCAR Sprint Cup event — this weekend as drivers navigated the rare non-oval track. Here are some of the visual highlights.

Image by John Harrelson / Getty Images

Image by Todd Warshaw / Getty Images

Image by Tom Pennington / Getty Images

Image by Tom Pennington / Getty Images

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These are the moments from the 2012 Olympics that you'll still be hearing about at the 2064 Olympics.

Shin A Lam Refuses To Leave The Piste

After a controversial ruling led to her defeat in the women's individual épée fencing semifinal, South Korea's Shin A Lam refused to leave the floor as the ruling was being appealed. She stayed on the piste for the better part of an hour, and when a judge came to tell her that her appeal had been declined and to take her away, she walked away from him and stood defiant on the piste. She would eventually win a silver medal in the team épée fencing competition.

Learn more about this moment here.

Liu Xiang Fights Through His Hurt Achilles, Hops To The Finish Line

Liu Xiang won gold in the 110m hurdles at the 2004 Olympics. Since then, he has battled Achilles injuries that made him a last-minute scratch from the 2008 Games. London was supposed to be his return to form, but on the very first hurdle he crashed. After writhing in pain, Xiang hopped off the track and down the tunnel, before stopping and deciding to return to the track. He hopped the rest of the race, stopping only to kiss the final hurdle. Upon crossing the finish line he was embraced and helped to a wheelchair by his opponents.

Learn more about this moment here.

Image by Anja Niedringhaus / AP

Oscar Pistorius Becomes The First Double Amputee To Sprint In The Olympics

Oscar Pistorius (aka "The Fastest Man On No Legs" aka "Blade Runner") not only became the first double amputee to run in the Olympics — he actually advanced a round, coming in second in his first heat in the 400m.

Image by DAVID GRAY / Reuters

Andy Murray Gets Wimbledon Redemption

One month ago, the UK's own Andy Murray heartbreakingly lost to Roger Federer in the Wimbledon final. Three weeks later, Murray and Federer met again on the exact same court in the gold medal match, where Andy Murray annihilated the defending Wimbledon champ. British tennis fans have been waiting since the 1930s to see one of their own win on that court, and at the 2012 Olympics, Murray gave it to them.

Image by Julian Finney / Getty Images

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The best/funniest/weirdest moments from London in nice, little, animated packages.

Liu Xiang Hops To Finish His Race And Kisses The Final Hurdle

China's Liu Xiang had won gold in the 110m hurdles in Athens, but since then had fought Achilles issues. At the first hurdle in London, he crashed and fell to the ground gripping the back of his foot. He began to hop off the track and down the tunnel before stopping, and turning back. He hopped the rest of the race, stopping only to kiss the final hurdle.

Learn more here.

Shin A Lam Stands Defiant After Being Screwed Out Of A Chance For Gold

When a controversial ruling cost Korea's Shin A Lam a chance at gold in the women's individual épée fencing, she refused to leave the floor as that would be taken as a sign she accepted the ruling. So she filed an appeal and stayed on the piste for 45 minutes. When a judge came to tell her that her appeal had been denied, rather than go with him, she climbed back onto the platform and stood, defiant.

Learn more here.

McKayla Maroney's Jaw Dropping Vault

No Really, The Judge's Jaw Dropped

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Senior fullback Marc Panu has spent four years as a walk-on at Vanderbilt. For his teammates going to practice meant a free college education, for Marc it just meant doing something he loved. This week all that effort paid off.

Source: youtube.com

And other revelations about having a son or daughter competing in the London Games.

The Grevers family

Image by Jamie Squire / Getty Images

For the parents of an Olympic contender, the Games involve some of the same mysticism and drama and thrilling excitement that the rest of us see. And then there's a lot of logistics.

"I was watching six months out, and all of a sudden, Delta came out with this great deal," Cathy Vollmer told BuzzFeed. Cathy's daughter is Dana Vollmer, an American swimmer who dominated the Olympics, winning three golds and setting a world record in the 100m butterfly, where she became the first woman to ever break 56 seconds. But the United States Olympic Committee does not pay for or arrange the transportation of athletes' families no matter how fast their progeny swim, so Cathy was watching deals for flights.

"People assume that if you're the parent of an Olympian, they're paying your way, they're taking care of everything, that you have these tickets up front, but that's not true at all," Cathy said. With Olympic trials positioned so close to the Olympics themselves, the decision to wait until your kid qualified could mean astronomically expensive overseas airfare — or not getting tickets at all. On the other side of the equation, some parents whose sons and daughters didn't qualify found themselves in possession of tickets they had no desire to use.

Then there are the events themselves, tickets for which were famously hard to acquire this time around. Anja Grevers' son Matt won two golds swimming for the U.S., and his individual 100m backstroke performance set an Olympic record. Getting to see him do so was a challenge.

USA Swimming, Anja wrote in an email, gives parents two tickets and allows them to purchase one more. If you're worrying about more people than three — in the Grevers' case, nine — things become more difficult. "The tickets were a nightmare, and I was almost as nervous about getting them as I was about Matt's races," Anja said. Fortunately, the swimming parents had received each others' email addresses from U.S. swimming officials and were able to help each other out, pooling and trading tickets.

The trouble didn't end there. After ensuring that her whole party was spoken for with Matt's preliminary heats and finals, Anja arrived at the pool to find that the tickets were less than ideal.

"The U.S.A. tickets were in the nose-bleed section, and I am petrified of heights," Anja said. "After almost breaking down and hyperventilating, I settled and watched all the races. I will never understand why the U.S. has such horrible seats." Before the final of the backstroke, Matt's eventual Olympic-record race, the Grevers saw a man holding a placard with their name outside of the stadium. Turned out he was an employee of the BBC — the network provided the Grevers with better tickets that allowed them to be closer for the race and awards ceremony, a service they repeated for the 4x100 medley final (the network wanted to curry favor with Matt, a fan favorite).

Outside of the events, the Vollmers and the Grevers said they had pleasant London-sightseer experiences. Both credited USA Swimming for helping them with information about London and ways to support their kids, including flags and signs. Proctor and Gamble provided refreshments for families of American Olympians and ran an ad campaign thanking Olympic moms. And, of course, watching your children not only medal but set records makes up for plenty of frustration. Cathy Vollmer called her daughter's race "better than I could have ever imagined."

One of the remarkable things about the Olympics is that athletes are simultaneously one-in-a-million achievers and, in the Olympic village and venues, a dime a dozen. Parents of even the most accomplished winners are similarly anonymous. After Grevers medaled, it took his parents hours to get into the studios where he was being interviewed, fighting through crowds and officials who had no idea who they were.

"Being a parent at the trials, you're someone special," Anja said. "But being a parent at the Olympics, you're just another spectator."