Oddball Olympics

The Olympic Games are almost upon us again and their time-honoured credo of 'Citius, Altius, Fortius' - Faster, Higher, Stronger - could perhaps do with a little revision. With so many millionaires in action, with champion thirty and fortysomethings defying the ageing process and with drug-related issues more intrusive than ever, how about "Richer, Older, Dopier" now? Happily, though, some things never change at the Games, not least the fact that there will be special people striving to and succeeding in reaching Olympian heights. Here is chief sports correspondent

THE BUSIEST

When Mark Spitz set his unmatched and unmatchable Munich landmark of seven swimming golds, it took him 13 races to do so. Michael Phelps will need a minimum of 17 races in his bid to win eight so he'll probably only get one morning off in eight exhausting days and have to swim in all but one of the 15 sessions at the pool. The 19-year-old US phenomenon is fancied to equal Soviet gymnast Aleksandr Dityatin's single Games record of eight medals of any colour but the smart money says there is no way seven of them will be gold. Best bet of all? The kid will end up more knackered than Spitz ever did.

THE RICHEST

Ever since standing behind a grumbling Andre Agassi in the queue to pick up Olympic accreditation in Atlanta in 1996, I've always enjoyed seeing which multi-millionaire belongs least at each Games. It's usually a US basketball Dream Teamer so, in the absence of Shaq and other bored-with-the-Games NBA megastars, this year's highest-earning misfit should be LeBron James, the 19-year-old NBA phenomenon whose earning power makes Wayne Rooney seem as if he does a paper round. He's pulled in an estimated £ 11.6million in his rookie year with the Cleveland Cavaliers. By the time he's 25, financial experts reckon he'll have earned more than £110m from playing and endorsements. He needs Olympic gold like Roman Abramovich needs a cash injection.

THE STRONGEST

Hossein Rezazadeh is Iran's Rooney, Wilko and Henman rolled into one. A national sporting deity and reigning Olympic super-heavyweight champion whose weightlifting feats enable a nation to declare proudly that they have the world's strongest man. Earlier this month he actually broke his own world record in training, hoisting 265kg in the clean and jerk, which is apparently the equivalent of holding three standard-sized fridges above your head before chucking them to the ground.

THE OLDEST

No one can beat Australia's 56-year-old pistol-packing gran, Annette Woodward. This mum-of-six once neither had the time nor inclination to bother with a sport which, frankly, scared her. Then two decades ago, she watched on television another fifty-something, Patricia Dench, win a bronze medal for Australia in Los Angeles and decided that it wasn't too late for her to be an Olympian too. She proved a natural, made it to the 1996 Games in Atlanta and won three Commonwealth Games golds but after quitting to nurse her husband, who was dying of cancer, she was too grief stricken to restart her career when he passed away. Eventually, she decided on a comeback, much to the delight of Australian headline writers who have inevitably trumpeted her remarkable odyssey as "Granny get your gun".

THE YOUNGEST

Bryan Nickson Lomas, a schoolboy who turned 14 just over a month ago and looks even younger, got a belated call from diving's international governing body the other week to compete in the 10m platform event in Athens after gaining the qualifying standard. Malaysian sport is so proud of the lad that they've already given him the honour of being their flag-bearer at the opening ceremony. Lugging that around for several hours on a sweltering Athenean evening may prove young Bryan's most substantial challenge of all considering he weighs just over five stone even when dripping wet.

THE EVEREST

Move over Yao, here comes Yi. Yao Ming, the basketball giant from Shanghai who has made such an impact in the NBA with the Houston Rockets, will once again, at 7ft 5in and 296lb, be the biggest thing at these Games just as he was at Sydney. Yet now in Athens "the Great Tall of China" will have a towering accomplice too, a 7ft tall youngster called Yi Jianlian who's supposed to be 16 even if no one can quite believe it. After running into these twin peaks in a practice game at the weekend, Serbian coach Igor Kokoskov said: "He's unbelievable, and if he's 16 really unbelievable. I thought he was 21."