Updated Wednesday Usain Bolt did it again – running so fast the others in the 100 metres at Lausanne’s Athletissima tonight looked almost slow. But then a funny thing happened. He slowed down, noticeably, before the finish line. It made no difference to winning because he was well ahead. So why would a top athlete do that? Why cheat himself and the rest of us of that glorious moment of going flat out right to the finish line.

The bonus for breaking a world record isn’t quite as big as some others? There is no reason to suspect the Jamaican superstar of calculating his haul in gold bars while streaking down the track, but it’s happened before: that financially savvy pole vaulter Sergey Bubka became notoriously famous for winning by a fraction more each time until he accumulated a surprising amount of wealth. Some of us love to watch the beauty that is a human being going flat out in a sprint. Give us the end of the race, too, please.

For the record: Bolt matched the 2006 meeting record set by Xavier Carter, at 19.63, but fell well short of breaking his 19.30 world record set at the Beijing Olympics

Editor’s note: the 24 Heures sports page, Lausanne asks the same question today: and if Bolt had run hard right to the end?

Sports fans sometimes get a little carried away, something a lot of people in Geneva and Basel probably thought this weekend. But check out this one, in China. Seriously odd! (Ed. note: ChinaGold is a blog written by Liam Bates, who occasionally contributes to GenevaLunch.)

The day is getting long, the dishes aren’t done yet, the e-mails are not all answered -  and suddenly London’s Mail on Sunday offers the opportunity to sink into the black hole of learning more about the rich.

Photo (reproduced with permission, Rick Malman/Alinghi): Ernesto Bertarelli’s Alinghi is the current holder of the sailing world’s America’s Cup. Here, October 2007, he looks at models of "J hull" sailing vessels in the model room of the New York Yacht Club, the Cup’s original home.

While the Sunday Times in Britain churned out its number-heavy list of the country’s wealthiest people the Daily Mail, true to form, spewed curious bits of information about them. We learn that Kirsty Bertarelli nearly died of meningitis when she was young. Her mother is quoted as saying of the daughter’s marriage to a wealthy Swiss man, "You never know what will happen in life. Nobody knows how they are going to end up." I hope she managed a brighter toast than that at the wedding, if women were allowed to toast. No news here on why the Bertarellis are suddenly considered British, while Forbes and Swiss authorities seem to consider them Swiss residents. Spain, France and New York seem to be the places where Ernesto Bertarello spends most of his time these days.

We also learn that Prince Charles is not listed despite having a sizable fortune estimated at

[Update 6 April, text shortened] Geneva-Servette’s Hockey Club’s English fans have banded together and have reserved a large number of tickets for its members. The club’s site has pages in English.

A curious thing has just happened to the Bol d’Or sailing race. An essentially local dispute about the crew of one of the boats surfaced Monday and by midnight last night the Tribune de Geneve, true to its status of city newspaper, had interviewed two of the main characters and published a story. In the process, by grinding it down to a tit-for-tat argument among clicky boat owners on Lake Geneva, with the America’s Cup legal battle as the dramatic background, the newspaper has inadvertently made the event sound to non-locals like a small club feud. The newspaper’s English page, based on the French story, in fact refers only to a "local competition" for D35s and never mentions that it is part of the Bol d’Or.

The D35 catamaran races are just one in a group of Bol d’Or races, albeit one of the more glamorous bits. The Bol d’Or itself is Europe’s largest enclosed water regatta and a hugely popular European event.

The dispute over Russell Coutts and a BMW Oracle team appearing in the D35 race is indeed local. What a shame it would be if the colourful annual Bol d’Or was perceived, even locally, to be small and petty as a result.

Vacation weeks give us a great chance to discover the truly local side of Swiss life if we take time out to read our resort newspapers. Crans-Montana’s Sixieme Dimension (Sixth Dimension) is a treasure trove of interesting tidbits about six communes in the region. It also has an online version. After reading Graham Dunbar’s sports blog on GenevaLunch I took his advice and watched the Champs Open snowboarding competition online, great reporting and quality TV. I am staying about 5 minutes from the slopes where this went on, but like so many sports you can see them so much better on television. One thing that struck me, and our snowboarding son abroad to whom I sent the link, was the impressive snow park built for the event. Turns out it was designed by an Australian chef and the paper has a great interview with him about snow parks. I also learned that an English woman took over a Crans bar in December and has six wifi hookups and she’s made the bar non-smoking, a brave move in a resort loved by Italians. Must check it out.

I also learned that one woman in a fur coat bopped another with a baguette for getting ahead of her in line. Things happen, locally. Read all about it: pick up your local rag.

[correction!] Tennis player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga was a sensation on the courts last week, working his way up from the lower ranks to defeating Rafael Nadal Roger Federer, which is a sure way to get into the news, and then playing in the final of the Australian Open.

He was making news of another sort at the same time, in Switzerland: naming himself as La Rippe‘s newest French resident. The small Vaudois village, above Nyon and on the border with France, was as surprised as anyone else when first Reuters announced the news, then Eurosport: Reuters officially listed Tsonga’s residence as La Rippe in their factbox. Eurosport announced it on air during the match with Federer.

Read more…

Euro08 football seems to be on everyone’s mind. I’ve been invited to a brainstorming meeting Thursday for international people in Geneva who would like to create mini-events to go with the big event in June 2008. Meanwhile, a long-faced note from Graham Dunbar, who has begun to cover sports for GenevaLunch after moving from the UK. He’s written for The Times and worked in broadcasting, mainly in England , but his heart is in Scotland. He delivered part of the weekend sports roundup with this note: "’I've read every Scottish Sunday newspaper and it seems we still lost. Unbelievable. Yours, sadly, Graham." Ever the professional, he managed to rise above the heartbreaking news and write about sports – check it out Monday morning on our main news (home) page.

And Kathy Epp at the International School of Geneva sent a note suggesting that I might want to share this saga of taking a streetcar named chaos, in Geneva, written on the MissKate blog by a librarian at the Nations campus of the school. Friday was a bad day for taking at least one of the trams in the city and MissKate wonders if Geneva is really ready for Euro08 (like her ending!). GenevaLunch now has one more great blog to add to our growing list of resources.

While talking about blogs, I recently tripped over a fan of my Whistlestop Caboose blog, which has been on hold since March. He asked me why and I explained that the main reason was in protest against Google, which refused to let me see my Blogger menu in English rather than German, which I don’t read. I’ve decided to pick it up again, probably next week, but publish it on Vox, which is what MissKate and a few other bloggers I know now use. Whistlestop Caboose is my writer’s persona equivalent of slow food. It’s all about the things you notice when you slow down, take a little more time: it’s the view from the back of the train. I’m looking forward to starting it up again.

EDITOR’S NOTEPAD / Three times in the past two weeks I’ve found myself defining "news" for people as something that has  happened, versus information, which is generally more static. GenevaLunch offers news and information, but we are primarily a news service, the Lake Geneva region’s only daily "newspaper" in English. Our information side is getting a boost with the publication today of the first in a series of excellent guides to life in the Lake Geneva region.

People tend to agree that major disasters, wars and interest rate changes are news, but the confusion sets in when we talk about what journalists call soft news. Sometimes we mean background reports and sometimes we mean that what just happened is not of earth-shaking importance.

Important or not, these are often the news stories that catch our eye and give us something to share with friends and neighbours.

Skimming over the headlines from the rss feed for Swissinfo which we carry on the main page of GenevaLunch my eye was certainly caught by "Swiss sex appeal to attract more tourists," which was a far cry from a headline earlier in the day from the federal government, "Swiss tourism doing very well." The second one talked about the healthy state of tourism, noting that ski lift revenue should go up by nearly 7% this year. Good news – even hot news for one of Switzerland’s largest industries.

But the real news for a lot of people will be the chance to win some ski lessons and if they are really lucky a week in a resort with a package of private lessons, part of the Swiss tourism office’s big new promotion.

So if you’re a news snob and think that there’s no room in the news for cute ski guys alongside headlines  about Madrid’s terrorism trial and the US presidential election debates, be honest about which of the two links above you checked out first.

I went for the ski guys. There’s one for every taste, in case you’re interested.

Here is something I wrote early this morning and didn’t have time to post. Since then, the news has come out that Michael Rasmussen, Tour leader, has been given the boot.

The Tour de France, closely followed by the Swiss, is trembling today but it has nothing to do with sheer roadside drops in the Pyrenees, where the last mountain stretch of the race took place Wednesday. Far more frightening is the note of suspicion that is coloring cycling