Austria's Alessandro Haemmerle wins gold "by a cat's whisker" after a dramatic photo finish in the men's snowboard cross final.

“This is a woman who is waiting on unemployment benefits, she has a 5-month-old kid, and she did everything she was supposed to do and she only escaped eviction by a cat’s whisker,” he said later.

However the following day he told her she had "escaped immediate custody by a cat's whisker".

As president, he kept the number “118,573” tucked in his suit pocket, to remind him of the cat’s whisker margin of his popular-vote victory and the need to keep his campaign promise.

Shouldn’t we expect all our elected representatives to be so conversant with the scientific issues of the day that explanations of quantum computing by any one of them should barely twitch a cat’s whisker?