COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:

It’s all my fault.

Last week, after I failed to mention some of the other Newport-Mesa Olympians who will shake their booties really hard in Beijing over the next two weeks, I received letters, calls, e-mails and a small package wrapped in brown paper I’m pretty sure was ticking before I plunged it into a sink full of water.

We are of course desperately proud of all our local Olympians, and any oversight was clearly unintentional and the direct result of ignorance and mild dementia, and those are my good points.

That takes care of the mea culpas. Let’s get to the good stuff.

Here are some more Newport-Mesa all-world overachievers for you. This is the second Olympics for kayaker Rami Zur, who paddles like a windmill in a hurricane and lives in Costa Mesa, obviously a hotbed of kayaking.

Rami, who was born in Israel, planned to retire after the 2004 Athens games. But his career received took a strange turn just days after the 2004 games were over, when he dove into a shallow pool and fractured his spine.

After months of physical therapy that included some paddling, he realized that he wasn’t quite ready to hang up his paddle, and four years later, Rami is slicing up the waters for Team USA once again.

Then there is the extreme high jumper Sharon Day, a Costa Mesa High School alumna who graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo just this year with a boatload of school, national and world high jump records.

Ever seen the high jump in person? Incredible event. Take a look at the nearest doorway. That’s what “8 feet tall” means.

World-class high jumpers get a running start of a few steps, then hurl themselves over a bar at about that height, backward.

If anyone understands how that is possible, please contact me at your earliest convenience. You’ll see Day in action in Beijing and you will be amazed.

Simply superb swimmer Aaron Piersol is, like Misty May, a Newport Harbor High School graduate who is an old hand at the Olympics and is slated to make a huge splash in Beijing. These are the third Olympic Games for Peirsol, who said see ya to Athens in 2004 with three Big Gold Things.

Piersol swims backward really fast and was the youngest American to break two minutes in the 200-meter backstroke at the ripe old age of 15 — an incredible coincidence when you consider I was the youngest American to break 300 pounds at age 15.

Michael Phelps, the Incredible Swimming Boy, and heart-stopper Dara Torres, the Incredible Swimming Girl — and yes, she is 41 — will be the rock stars in the Beijing Water Cube, but Peirsol will be nipping at their media-hyped heels.

According to the Dallas Morning News, “Everyone will talk about Michael Phelps and his attempt to win eight gold medals at the Olympics. But three-time Olympians Ian Crocker and Aaron Peirsol … will be captivating storylines as well.”

Speaking of captivating storylines, do you know who that was carrying the flag for these United States in the opening ceremonies?

Neither did I, but his name is Lopez Lomong, and his story is captivating-plus. In 2001, Lomong was a 16-year old “Lost Boy of Sudan,” living in a refugee camp in Kenya.

His family had fled the fighting in Sudan when was Lomong was 6, and 10 years later were still living, sort of, in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in northern Kenya.

Lomong was a bright, inquisitive kid who had learned to read and write by tracing letters in the sand.

In 2001, an American charity offered to find homes for 3,500 Lost Boys in the United States.

The selection process, incredibly enough, was an essay contest on why they wanted to go to America.

For two days and two nights, Lomong labored to find just the right words.

“I just sat down, the whole of my mind emptied onto the paper,” Lopez told the Associated Press. “I wrote some of it in Swahili, I wasn’t even aware of it.”

A month later, Lomong’s essay was chosen and so was he.

Today, he is a 22-year-old sophomore at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, one of the top distance runners in the world, and on Friday evening, his teammates’ choice to carry the flag and lead them in the parade of nations.

I’ve heard of turning the lemons in your life into lemonade, but Lomong is the new lemonade king.

So there you have it. Kayaking in Costa Mesa and local heroes who can swim and run so fast and jump so high it would make your head spin.

Do you feel the burn? I try hard not to.

I gotta go.

PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs Sundays. He may be reached at ptrb4@aol.com.