Brown's Time To Deliver

What can Brown do for you?
Yeah, yeah, it's been said before (and not just in a UPS commercial). But about right now, Canada's swim team is asking Mike Brown — again — to save the day for them at the Beijing Olympics.
The Perth, Ont., native opened some eyes by winning the second semi-final of the men's 200-metre breaststroke tonight and with the second-fastest time (2:08.84), behind only world-record holder Kosuke Kitajima of Japan. And, for the second time at these Games, Brown broke the Canadian standard in his specialty.
Brown, you might recall, placed sixth in the same event four years in Athens, an Olympics that was mostly forgettable for Canadian swimmers. At the time, he vowed he'd be on the podium in Beijing — a statement he stood behind firmly in an Ottawa Sun interview a year later with your humble correspondent, a few weeks after winning a silver medal at the 2005 world aquatic championships in Montreal.
So here he is four years after Athens, standing as perhaps Canada's only real medal hope left in the pool at these Games (especially after the men's 4x200 freestyle relay team, which was considered our best shot going into Beijing, wound up fifth in tonight's final).
Can Brown fulfill that four-year-old promise or perhaps even shock the world and take down the great Kitajima?
"The fastest guy in the world is now 1.3 seconds faster than me," he told the CBC. "He's capable of going faster but I'm a great morning swimmer. I just want to break the Canadian record again. I can't control what those guys do."
And let the chips — and the medals — fall where they may.
*****
This one's a day old, but we had to mention this beauty of a question CBC's Elliotte Friedman dropped on Canadian swimmer Julia Wilkinson after her 200-metre individual medley semi-final Monday night (a race in which the Stratford, Ont., native finished second).
"Confirm or deny. Did you once throw up on a boyfriend before a race?"
For the record, Wilkinson said she didn't. But the young lad's towel wasn't so lucky.