According to the great, in-depth research that I do before writing any post, the Rue Saint-Denis is a really old street in Paris, France and it’s full of hookers. With that said, I will now accept my professorship of European history at Harvard, thankyouverymuch. But while they put together that offer, I’ve been running my typical routine of ignoring the work that I’m supposed to do in favor of scouring the Internet for fun pictures, and last night I was delighted to find this picture of some street art in Rue Saint-Denis. Yes, that is Muhammad Ali standing over Street Fighter’s Ryu and it is spectacular.

Obviously, I have a problem with the fact that Ryu still has half of his energy, so he’s probably going to get up and keep fighting. I’m also curious to know how Ali can withstand Ryu’s Hadouken attacks. Unfortunately, I won’t know the answer to that query unless I can actually speak to the artist, known as Combo (The Culture Kidnapper), who also has a few other awesome sports-related works.

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16-year old U.S. gymnast McKayla Maroney is a vault boss who was supposed to destroy everyone in the world at the thing she was born to do. Unfortunately for her, things didn’t work out like that.

“I can’t blame it on anything except I screwed up,” Maroney told Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports.

Though the vault champion could not hold back her tears, she sustained her professional posture.

“I’m happy to be the Olympic silver medalist,” Maroney said. “I really am.” (via Fashion And Style)

As happy as she claimed to be, the photo at the top of his post is now her legacy. Some have called her a “mean girl” for being the Most Pissed Off Person About Vaulting Ever, but some have taken a more constructive approach: cropping her out of that photo and pasting her onto images of exciting things. Enter: McKayla Is Not Impressed, my new favorite Tumblr until Burnsy updates the one about stuff coming out of Miley Cyrus’ vagina.

Here are a few of our favorites, with a generous hat tip to Jen Haley.

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I may not know much about the celebrity game, but I do know that if Mickey Rourke wants to tell you a crazy story, you take that phone call every damn time. That’s why the man of the hour is Yahoo! Olympics writer Martin Rogers who posted a pretty standard Rourke story late last night, regarding how the famously batsh*t actor told him that he beat the world’s fastest man, Usain Bolt, in a street race in London earlier this year.

And you don’t have to ask, because yes, Rourke was drunk. I just assume that’s a given in any Rourke story.

“We were outside the Wellington in Central London and it was four in the morning,” Rourke said. “It was just that time of the night, you know, when anything can happen. So I went up to him and I said, ‘Come on, you are the world’s fastest man, let’s go.’ ”

“There was a space in the street of about 30 meters,” Rourke said. “I got him to back up about four paces, we set off and I got him by a few inches.”

Right there, that’s a great Rourke tale. He was hanging out, minding his own business, when Usain Bolt walks into the Wellington – which is a club for ridiculously wealthy people, yet Rourke has a suite there because they love how crazy he is – and Rourke is all, “Someone hold my parrot and this Civil War rifle, I’m gonna race this guy real quick.”

But no, it gets even better. Because it has to.

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Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt has two great talents: being the fastest person in the world and steamrolling blondes.

By way of Fourth-Place Medal comes this clip of Bolt hitting 9.79 in the 100 meters at the international Diamond League meet, running into a flower girl who’d wandered onto the track and dragging her along with him as he tries to stop running. When asked what they thought of the clip, Yahoo! users said “FIRE CHRIS CHASE” and “HOW IS THIS NEWS”, adding “fire chris chase bleargh”.

Oddly enough, the video reminded me of this:

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If Fourth Place Medal‘s headline had been the end of the story (“Usain Bolt dumped his girlfriend to focus on London Olympics”) I would’ve disagreed with his decision, but I would’ve understood.

News reports suggest Bolt’s break up with Lubica Slovak, 28, was because of his desire to repeat his double gold/world record Olympic performance in London. The Jamaican swept the sprint events in 2008 and set the world marks in each race.

A source close to Bolt told the Sun, “He will have plenty of time for relationships. At the moment he’s concentrating on his running career and doesn’t want anything to distract from that.”

Being a peak Olympic athlete is an every-second-of-your-life dedication that requires unimaginable sacrifice, no matter how much faster you are than everyone already and no matter how foxy the Slovakian fashion designer you’ve been dating for six months is. An athlete’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets, or whatever. “Sorry, I can’t love you, I HAVE TO RUN A LOT.”

Sadly, that doesn’t appear to be the end of the story. Some sources are saying that the Olympics had nothing to do with Usain calling it quits and that he broke up with Lubica because she’s white, he has a “white woman complex” and couldn’t deal with the backlash from a picture of them kissing. Because if a black guy and a white lady are dating for six months that’s fine, but if they kiss … that’s just too far.

Here’s the pic in question:

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The Usain Bolt documentary The Fastest is set to be released in 2012, but thanks to a clip posted on Runnerspace.com we’ve already learned three important things:

1. Usain Bolt has the most fun looking training regimen of all time and it isn’t much different from mine, except that mine involves floaties.

2. Usain Bolt’s coach is hilarious, and gets funnier and funnier the longer you listen to him talk.

3. “Runnerspace.com” makes me want to shrink a bunch of marathon guys and have them pilot a spaceship into my body.

… but numbers one and two are the most important. Listening to the guy go OH MY GAD IT’S USAIN BOLT CAN YOU SAY MORE KETCHUP, HE IS SO FAST, OH CHRIST is the best, and I’ve gone back and watched it a couple of times, both to laugh and to commit his commentary to memory, should I need motivation the next time I’m marathonning it at the bottom of my swimming pool. The longer he goes, the closer he gets to being Jessie Eisenberg in Adventureland calling the amusement park horse race. And Usain Bolt’s out of the gate, taking an early lead! But look out! Here comes Green, issuing a challenge from the outside lane. Green runs well on a muddy track, folks, so today’s conditions give him a slight edge.

If this documentary turns out to be an hour and a half of Bolt doing handstands in a pool and two minutes of him murdering white people at running, I’ll buy a ticket. I’d like to think his speed has nothing to do with training, and he could just sit and play Madden all year and still destroy my entire country at his sport. This video proves that even when he’s underwater he’s faster than me, but then again I’ve always been a mustard kind of guy.