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Forget the economy, the war in Iraq, health care and all that other stuff. President-Elect Obama needs to focus on bringing the Olympics back to the United States.

Okay, that isn't the most important item on Barack Obama's honey-do list. However, Obama's victory over John McCain on Tuesday should have a positive effect on the games returning to America in 2016.

Chicago, the city Obama calls his hometown, is one of the frontrunners to win the bid to host the 2016 games. The Windy City is up against Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro and Madrid. Obama has already pitched Chicago to the International Olympic Committee and may do so again.

Obama's victory was met with a positive response from nearly every corner of the globe. Like I said, the Olympics aren't the most pressing need right now but being able to win the bid and showcase the U.S. in this manner is huge. We have an image problem as both a player on the world stage and in the eyes of the IOC.

The world's fastest man, Jamaican gold medalist Usain Bolt, visited David Letterman last night, and Letterman asked Bolt why he didn't run hard through the finish line instead of slowing down at the end of the 100-meter dash:

"Before the finish line you're dancing and whirling around and flapping your arms in celebration," Letterman said. "Now that's not technique. That's something different from running technique, isn't it?"

Bolt tried to make a joke that he wanted to fly, but Letterman wouldn't let it go.

While authorities still check to see if Tatum Bell has taken a job with the TSA, one Olympian sits waiting for his gold medal to be returned after it was snagged from his backpack.

Brendan Hansen, member of the the 4x100 medley relay with Michael Phelps, had his gold medal in his backpack in Philadelphia but after arriving in Austin, Texas, couldn't locate it.

Hansen told authorities that he knows the medal at Philadelphia International Airport, when a TSA official checked his backpack.

It's not clear whether the medal went missing in Philadelphia, Nashville or Austin. Police said they are trying to determine whether Hansen took the medal out on the plane or whether it might have been stolen.

See, this is exactly why I insist that athletes always wear the medal around their necks, like Phil Mickelson did with his first green jacket in 2004. No matter the situation, a gold medal goes with anything, even this.

Update: Looks like they found the medal. Convenient.

Carl Lewis won nine gold medals in four Olympic Games and is considered by many to be the greatest track and field athlete of all time.And while Lewis is impressed with Usain Bolt, the Jamaican sprinter who won three gold medals and set three world records in Beijing, he's also skeptical that Bolt is doing it without the benefit of performance-enhancing drugs.

Steroid Nation passes along this quote from the London Times, which apparently began with a Sports Illustrated interview Lewis conducted:

"When people ask me about Bolt I say he could be the greatest athlete of all time. But for someone to run 10.03 one year and 9.69 the next, if you don't question that in a sport that has the reputation it has right now, you're a fool. Period."

It's a shame that athletes like Ben Johnson, Marion Jones and the entire East German athletic program of the 1970s and 1980s make us feel this way, but Lewis is right: There's no proof that Bolt used steroids, but you're a fool if you don't at least acknowledge that it's possible.

On tonight's episode of Hard Knocks, the HBO show that chronicles the Dallas Cowboys, the cameras followed wide receiver Terrell Owens and a few others when they went out to dinner, and Owens was telling his fellow diners about his speed.

Owens first claimed that if he were in the Olympic 100-meter dash, he wouldn't come in last, which everyone at the table (and in the viewing audience) realized was patently ridiculous. Owens is fast, but he couldn't come close to out-running an Olympic sprinter.

But then he made a more interesting claim, saying that he could beat Usain Bolt -- if he got a 20-yard head start.

So could he? Bolt can run 100 meters in 9.69 seconds. Can Owens run 80 meters (actually about 82 meters, since Owens expressed his head start in yards) in less than 9.69 seconds?

I think he can. Owens can run 40 yards in about 4.6 seconds, and based on my back-of-the-envelope calculations, I figure he ought to be able to run 82 meters in somewhere between 9.0 and 9.5 seconds. So yes, he'd beat Usain Bolt in the 100 meters. As long as he got a 20-yard head start.

Where was this Asafa Powell in the Olympic 100 meter finals?

That was Powell blowing away the field -- a field that did not include fellow Jamaican Usain Bolt -- with a 9.72-second sprint at the IAAF Super Grand Prix event.

If Powell had run that well in Beijing, he might have forced Bolt to run a little harder in the 100-meter dash finals and shave a little more time off his world record. As it happened, Bolt coasted to the finish line in 9.69 seconds, while Powell finished fifth in 9.95.

Powell's 9.72-second 100 is the second-fastest time in history, but it's a sad fact of life as a sprinter that if you run the second-fastest time in history at any meet other than the Olympics, no one notices.

Two members of Jamaica's Olympic track team received performance-enhancing drugs they ordered over the Internet, Sports Illustrated is reporting.

According to SI, documents show that hurdler Delloreen Ennis-London received two shipments of Human Growth Hormone and one shipment of Estrogen in late 2006 and early 2007. Ennis-London finished fifth in the 100-meter hurdles in Beijing.

SI also reports that a shipment containing Testosterone, Testosterone Aqueous, and the oral steroid Oxandrolone were sent to another Jamaican hurdler, Adrian Findlay, who was an alternate in Beijing.

Although neither Ennis-London nor Findlay won medal in Beijing, this will become a huge story because of the tremendous success the Jamaican track team as a whole had at the Summer Olympics. And SI is already asking whether this story taints Jamaica's biggest star, Usain Bolt.

Based on what we know now, it strikes me as an enormous leap to think that just because two other Jamaicans are tied to steroids, that somehow means Bolt is as well. But whether it's fair or not, these questions will haunt Bolt. I hope he has good answers.

Usain Bolt set a new world record of 9.69 seconds in the 100-meter dash in Beijing. But he started celebrating his victory after about 80 meters, and had slowed considerably before he crossed the finish line.

So how much time did Bolt cost himself? His coach, Glen Mills, estimates that it was at least .17 seconds, which means Bolt could have run an other-worldly time of 9.52.

"If he had continued, the slowest he would have run would have been 9.52," Mills told reporters ahead of Friday's Weltklasse athletics meeting in Zurich, where Bolt is due to run the 100.

"This is his first year of running the 100 meters," Mills said. "In two more years he should be peaking at this distance and by then I am certain he will be down to there."

The very idea of a 9.52-second 100-meter dash is hard for me to wrap my head around -- I remember when people thought no one would ever match the steroid-fueled 9.79 that Ben Johnson ran in 1988 -- but I think Mills is right. And at age 21, Bolt will have many more opportunities to shave time off that record. I just hope he doesn't celebrate until the race is run.

The CBC has a list of the most noteworthy quotes from the Olympic Games, and it's basically what you'd expect: Some describe the thrill of victory, some describe the agony of defeat.

And then there's this one:

"It's like I imagine being a man. It's like being kicked in the nuts repeatedly, that's how bad it feels. You feel like you want to curl up and die." - Sherraine Schalm, Canadian fencer, describing how she felt after losing her round of 16 bout to a rival Hungarian opponent.

Congratulations, Sherraine Schalm. You may not have brought home a medal in fencing, but you win the gold when it comes to horrible metaphors.

Via Fark.

One year and one month from now, the IOC will get their suits together to sit down and discuss who they want to host their 2016 Olympic Games. London hosts the 2012 Games ... and we don't know squat after that.

The candidates are very esteemed. Chicago, USA ... Tokyo, Japan ... Madrid, Spain ... Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

I think you know who I'm rooting for: Rio.

I know! I'm a bad, bad American. I do want Chicago to win because it is my country! Also, it will be the second time in 20 years that I lived just five hours away from the Games (I live in Cincinnati now; I lived in Charlotte during the 1996 Atlanta games).

That may be why it just isn't right. Chicago deserves it. Beautiful city that is one of the most underrated in this country. It is centralized to this nation with many mid-major cities fairly close nearby. Plus it looked cool in The Dark Knight.

However, I need some diversity in these games ... and that's where Rio comes in.