One official is wearing a belt, the other official is not. The official who is not wearing a belt has a white spot on his left thigh, large enough to be noticed on TV. Is that a logo? A rip?

More than halfway through the first quarter and US still can't shoot.

Anybody see the play wiht about 3 minutes left in the 1st? US player on the line. Greek player clearly in the lane early, followed by a US player. FT misses. Trail official calls the lane violation, but the Lead calls a foul (on Duncan, I think).

Since there was an obvious violation, and it was called by one official, why not ignore the non-flagrant, non-intentional contact? I didn't like the way they handled that one.

Wow. Duncan's gone with about 3:45 left in the game. His 5th foul didn't look like much. Didn't look like he extended the arms to push off.

I believe the little white spot is the logo for Champion, the official uniform supplier for FIBA officials.

How about the 4th foul on Duncan. He had a clean block.

The officials were not impressive. Late in the 3rd, Greece had two fouls to give. They fouled once and tried to foul a second time but the official did not call anything and it cost the US a turnover.

Is their any websites indicating who the refs are for each game - Womens and Men's.

We have a couple from Canada and would like to see what games they are doing.

"Kinda took out the dude's formarm"? Even if I agreed with that, the lead official had no way of having a clear look at that play. That was a far worse call than Duncan's fifth. Chuck is right that there was no extension, but even with the acting job, there was at least a clear advantage gained. That said, the best decision on both plays would have been to suck, not blow.

Really, though, it's a shame, the way FIBA puts so many obstacles to success in front of the men and women who work these games. Two-whistle crews at this level, in this day and time, are absolutely farcical. And what about communication problems? I don't think I'm assumig too much to guess that the Serbian in that crew doesn't speak fluent Spanish, and the Spaniard doesn't speak fluent Serbio-Croatian. Even conceding greater language breadth of the average European relative to Americans, chances diminish greatly when you're looking at connecting the dots between an Eastern and a Western European. The best bet would be English, but it certainly didn't look like the USA team was having an easy time communicating with either official.

Hey RefSouthAlb,

Check out: http://www.athens2004.com/en/results...?rsc=BK0000000

If you click on the results of each game you can see which officials worked that game.

Mike Homsy did the Women's Spain-Czech game and Men's Spain-Argentina, while Nancy Ethier has done Women's Russia-Australia and Greece-Nigeria.

Looking at the number of Greek referees in this competition, it looks like Fiba cannot afford to have more international referees in the Olympics seeing as they have only doing 2 man games. where have all the top referees gone? The only name I can recognise is the Russian M. Davidov and he is getting on in years now.