XXXth Olympiad - London

[PlainSimpleJoel]

Did anyone else see that rowing race ... where the poms finally won a gold medal. Great race, as with 500 metres to go, Australia was fourth and Australia came home to nap the silver from the New Zealand and USA. Bronze goes to the Kiwis. Great race.

Now showing Archery at Lord's.

 

[Starkers]

Two Golds and another Bronze so far today for Team GB as Wiggins has won

 

[Dorian Thompson]

Congratulations to the American womens gymnastics team on their gold medal. They blew away the field. Now if Ms. Raisman can take the gold in the AA and hopefully Gabby will medal, too, all will be good.

 

[Angel4576]

Wiggins - awesome!

Yellow jersey and Olympic champion inside a couple of weeks.

He just destroyed the field today, and well done Froomie, well deserved bronze.

The Velodrome opens tomorrow doesn't it? Nice, more medals on the way then......hopefully!

 

[Lonemagpie]

Oh, I was wrong. Serves me right for skimming google.

Elsewhere, scientists have pointed out that the main cause of sudden spurts of abilities in athletes such as Chinese swimmers is being a teenager (according to the BBC's "In depth" feature on digital teletext - there doesn't seem to be a web version)

And I see GB has finally got a gold. Whoop-de-fucking-do.

 

[Shaytan]

Of course, doping is nothing new, but it doesn't make cheating acceptable or legal in any way.

It's a big hypocrisy. In some sports, doping is an institution. I'd eat a rat if the federations don't know.

The only thing that bothers me with doping is the health issue. Other than that, allow it, control it, do it in a way that no one will put his health in danger to achieve better results. It's already part of the game and I don't see doping disapearing in the future

Back to sport : another gold. I should take a screenshot of the medal table now because there is no way it's going to stay like that !

 

[Relayer1]

Nice to see 'Team GB' continue to underachieve, negating even the tenuous 'the results will make all the Olympic expenditure good value' argument.

Meanwhile, pubs, clubs, restaurants, theaters and other emporiums in London report that trade is actually DOWN by up to a third !

Seven years of effort and more money than I can possibly imagine wasted...

I don't know, I can imagine quite a bit...

Jeez and I used to think I was a bit negative about the games before hand!

'A bit negative' ? You're an amateur - I thought wasting money on even bidding for the games was shameful. The disgusting waste of resources and money actually staging them appalls me. I'm not just anti public money for sport - I'd cut all funding to the arts too.

On a related topic, well done to Bradley Wiggins, Helen Glover and Heather Stanning.

 

[Holdfast]

Laser-guided archery and cheetah girls, eh?

Now that would be awesome. Especially the cheetah girls.

Yellow jersey and Olympic champion inside a couple of weeks.

Pretty amazing; don't know how his body stands up to such massive exertions in close proximity to each other.

I don't really measure the success of these games purely in terms of GB medals; as hosts, we have the luxury of having TWO possible ways of having a successful games: one in medals, but the other in the actual hosting itself.

Having said that, it's still very nice to see that we won a good handful today. I was out and about most of the day so only just caught up fully on the results.

 

[eastman23]

What's everyone's take on the badminton match fixing? For those who don't know what I'm talking about, it was during a couple women's doubles matches in which both teams were trying to lose the game in order to get more favourable match-ups in the quarter and semi finals.

It apparently started with a Chinese trying to lose their game against a South Korean team so they wouldn't face another Chinese team in the semi-finals. That prompted the South Koreans to try and lose a subsequent game. The thing is, they weren't even trying to hide what they were doing. I'm sure you can find the video on your national broadcaster of choice. It's pretty obvious you're trying to lose when you "somehow" send the serve into the net 5 times in a row.

It ended up with 4 teams being disqualified - 1 Chinese, 2 South Korean, and 1 Indonesian. They were disqualified for "not using one's best efforts to win a match" and "conducting oneself in a manner that is clearly abusive or detrimental to the sport".

CTV article.

I think the officials made the right decision here. And I'm not just saying that because it allowed Canada to advance to the quarters (and now semis after beating Australia which also was advanced). If you're not going to compete, then move aside so someone else can. Maybe the officials need to review how the brackets are set up so this doesn't happen in the future, but that's still no excuse for what those "athletes" did. It was the right call.

 

[PlainSimpleJoel]

^ I agree with the decision. I wrote something on twitter about it. I think the round robin system should be ruled out for next time.

Looking for more cycling at the velodrome, as there could be more medals for Australia there. Well some events.

 

[Angel4576]

I really don't know what was worse - that they were doing it, or that they were doing it so blatantly.

In the end, the officials made the right call.

 

[Gryffindorian]

Two more golds for the U.S. swim team - the Bay Area's own Nathan Adrian won in the 100m freestyle while the women dominated in 4x200 freestyle relay!

Edit:

Some random thoughts on the male gymnasts:

That Japanese guy Uchimura doesn't look right to me. Feminine-looking face, androgynous hairstyle, wads of armpit hairs ... If I were to look only at his face, I'd say he was a woman.

Danell - congrats to him for getting a bronze tonight! I really enjoy watching his performances. I especially love that ”self suck routine” he does on the floor. I was like ”Woohoo! Yeah!!!”

 

[Dorian Thompson]

Danell Leyva is a joy to look at no matter what he's doing. Damn, that boy is fine. He hit his chin on the high bar during last year's worlds and damn near broke his jaw. It's on youtube. Can you say painful? Gods.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

Two more golds for the U.S. swim team - the Bay Area's own Nathan Adrian won in the 100m freestyle while the women dominated in 4x200 freestyle relay!

Edit:

Some random thoughts on the male gymnasts:

That Japanese guy Uchimura doesn't look right to me. Feminine-looking face, androgynous hairstyle, wads of armpit hairs ... If I were to look only at his face, I'd say he was a woman.

Danell - congrats to him for getting a bronze tonight! I really enjoy watching his performances. I especially love that ”self suck routine” he does on the floor. I was like ”Woohoo! Yeah!!!”

I think that Japanese guy has makeup over his eyes or something as well. He does look "off" somehow.

I want Danell's towel, it looks snazzy, Douglas Adams would be proud.


I've always had kind of a thing for Kerry Walsh but besides being married she'd tower over me.

 

[tomalak301]

I appreciate the fact that Karri Walsh is from San Jose for a multitude of reasons.

Pretty good All Around today. I Saw Layva on High Bar during the trials, and man talk about high flying. He's really fun to watch when he's right. It was great to see him duplicate it at the olympics.

Really looking forward to the Woman's all around final. Hope both Douglas and Riesman do well and maybe both get on the medal stand. After learning more about the rule and watching her last night, I really wish Jordyn Wieber was in this. Screw the whole 2 team per country rule. It should be the 24 best gymnasts based on qualifying (That's why you have it to begin with). I wish they hadn't changed that rule from past years, especially since if all 3 were in, they had a chance to sweep the medal stand.

 

[Starkers]

Laser-guided archery and cheetah girls, eh?

Now that would be awesome. Especially the cheetah girls.

Yellow jersey and Olympic champion inside a couple of weeks.

Pretty amazing; don't know how his body stands up to such massive exertions in close proximity to each other.

I don't really measure the success of these games purely in terms of GB medals; as hosts, we have the luxury of having TWO possible ways of having a successful games: one in medals, but the other in the actual hosting itself.

Having said that, it's still very nice to see that we won a good handful today. I was out and about most of the day so only just caught up fully on the results.

Well I guess yesterday probably felt easy after the Tour!

It is nice to see us pick up quite a few medals yesterday, like you say there's two ways it can be a success.

Relayer1, we got some infrastructure and development out of it at least!

 

[Roger Wilco]

Wiggins - awesome!

Yellow jersey and Olympic champion inside a couple of weeks.

He just destroyed the field today, and well done Froomie, well deserved bronze.

The Velodrome opens tomorrow doesn't it? Nice, more medals on the way then......hopefully!

+ winning Paris-Nice, Romandie and Dauphine, which are probably not on the radar of most "casual" British cycling fans, but are big races regardless, especially the two French races.

Huge, huge accomplishment, even if the competition wasn't necessarily the best in the Tour and Olympic TT for a number of reasons.

If he doesn't get busted for doping soon, he probably has that knighthood locked down, despite having kind of a foul mouth.

eta: and he'll be #1 favourite for the World Championships TT in september also...

The only thing that bothers me with doping is the health issue. Other than that, allow it, control it, do it in a way that no one will put his health in danger to achieve better results. It's already part of the game and I don't see doping disapearing in the future

Yes, that, and the second thing that bothers me, is that it dilutes the competition. Doping makes natural talent meaningless to a certain degree, and the argument "but if everyone does it, it evens out" simply isn't correct, because different drugs are more or less effective in different people. EPO for example seems to favour people with a certain physique, and of course especially people with naturally low levels of hematocrits, since there's a limit of how many red blood cells can be in your body before it gets unhealthy or even dangerous.

Doping favours bad athletes, and disadvantages talented ones.

 

[Dorian Thompson]

Really looking forward to the Woman's all around final. Hope both Douglas and Riesman do well and maybe both get on the medal stand. After learning more about the rule and watching her last night, I really wish Jordyn Wieber was in this. Screw the whole 2 team per country rule. It should be the 24 best gymnasts based on qualifying (That's why you have it to begin with). I wish they hadn't changed that rule from past years, especially since if all 3 were in, they had a chance to sweep the medal stand.

At Worlds 2011 last October, Wieber and Russia's Victoria Komova had a hell of a battle in the AA. Wieber came out on top by about a hundredth of a point. Very exciting. Great gymnastics. Raisman was right there, too, until she faltered on bars.

Wieber's great, but her coach decided to add more "connections" to her balance beam routine to "push her over the top" for the Olympics, connections that she really didn't need after Worlds last October. Jordyn had enough difficulty already and performed brilliantly on beam there.

The new routine and the added pressure is why Marta took her off beam in team finals now after seeing her uncharactersitic wobbles in qualifying. Those wobbles are what cost her; Marta didn't like the change. A lot of folks disagreed with the coach adding to her routine. It made her nervous for the first time. I agree with them.

The way Raisman is performing, I think she and Gabby will both medal if they don't get nervous and freak out. Their only legit competition is Victoria Komova of Russia, one of the little Chinese girls named Yao Jinnan, and Larissa Iordache of Romania. Sigh--it would have been so exciting, our three American gymnasts, Jordyn, Aly, and Gabby, against Victoria, Yao, and Larissa. Six gymnasts, three medals. Let the chips fall where they may.

 

[SmoothieX]

What's everyone's take on the badminton match fixing? For those who don't know what I'm talking about, it was during a couple women's doubles matches in which both teams were trying to lose the game in order to get more favourable match-ups in the quarter and semi finals.

It apparently started with a Chinese trying to lose their game against a South Korean team so they wouldn't face another Chinese team in the semi-finals. That prompted the South Koreans to try and lose a subsequent game. The thing is, they weren't even trying to hide what they were doing. I'm sure you can find the video on your national broadcaster of choice. It's pretty obvious you're trying to lose when you "somehow" send the serve into the net 5 times in a row.

It ended up with 4 teams being disqualified - 1 Chinese, 2 South Korean, and 1 Indonesian. They were disqualified for "not using one's best efforts to win a match" and "conducting oneself in a manner that is clearly abusive or detrimental to the sport".

CTV article.

I think the officials made the right decision here. And I'm not just saying that because it allowed Canada to advance to the quarters (and now semis after beating Australia which also was advanced). If you're not going to compete, then move aside so someone else can. Maybe the officials need to review how the brackets are set up so this doesn't happen in the future, but that's still no excuse for what those "athletes" did. It was the right call.

1. I think it would have been a bigger story if it weren't a fringe sport.

2. If they were fixing matches because they were on the take from some shady gambler, I'd say get out in a heartbeat. But this is a grayer area somewhere in between cheating and strategy. In the States, we have teams that routinely tank it to get a higher draft spot or avoid a certain team to start the playoffs. It's done under the guise of 'resting our starters' or 'seeing what our prospects could do against big league pitching' and no one gets in trouble for that.

 

[Shaytan]

Doping favours bad athletes, and disadvantages talented ones.

Nah, it favours both. Good athletes aren't flowless and they still use drugs to improve whatever they think they need to improve.
It standardizes some athletic parameters.