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We all love a good storyline. It's why we root for our favorite teams and athletes, why we hatewatch our rivals hoping to see the moment of their downfall, and why we beg the heavens to let underdogs and perpetual losers to finally, finally get their big break. I don't know about you folks, but I have very little contact with Olympic sports in between Olympics, so the storylines that must be present in every one of these competitions goes completely over my head unless the announcers explicitly call it out or an enthusiast posts about it. Well, this is a thread for enthusiasts to post about it! Tell us who we should be rooting for or against, who the interesting up-and-comers are, the rivalries and returns to glory, all the good stuff that gets us invested in the storylines of your favorite events. Since I don't follow these events much between Olympics, the best I can do to start things off is some snippets, with hopes that other folks can elaborate. Gymnastics: Simone Biles Is Unstoppable One of the few names I recognize from the 2016 Olympics, Simone Biles is apparently the best gymnast on Earth, and possibly the best gymnast ever? Quadruple gold medalist in a single Olympics, good god. NPR's coverage described Women's Gymnastics as Simone Biles "essentially competing against herself at this point." Swimming: Katie Ledecky, the New God-Queen of the Water Michael Phelps is out, 24-year-old Katie Ledecky is in, and is expected to turn in her most dominating performance yet. "The question isn't whether she'll win," says CBS Olympics coverage, "it's whether she'll beat all her competitors by at least a pool-length." There's a new swimming event this year, the 1500 meter freestyle, and surprise! It's Ledecky's best event! This is going to be hilarious and I can't wait to watch it. American Team Sports Imploding I'm gonna say it: I don't care about basketball or soccer in the slightest. But I am interested in how the US apparently has dominant teams in both men's basketball and women's soccer, and yet both seem to be stumbling hard this year. Will they recover their stride, or fall face-first into ignominious defeat? Olympic Karate! Holy poo poo, the Olympics has karate now! Olympic fightsports have always been great, from taekwondo to fencing, and now we get even more. I have absolutely no idea what the personal storylines are here, but it's a brand-new event and that's worth noting. Olympic... Surfing??? I genuinely do not understand this one, and if we have a surfing fan itt, please explain Olympic surfing. When I first heard about this I thought they were going to use some kind of wave machine for consistency, but no, they're literally waiting for nature to provide good waves and then scrambling to hold the event as soon as that happens. This is another new event, and as a Californian I am legally obligated to watch it, but the concept seems  Young and Old Finally, we've got some interesting age distributions in our Olympians this year, with some of the oldest and youngest competitors ever. Oksana Chusovitina is appearing in Olympic gymnastics for the eighth and, she says, final time at age 46 and "the oldest woman ever to compete in Olympic gymnastics." I don't think anyone is expecting gymnasts in their 40s to be coming away with the gold, but this is a legendary degree of dedication, persistence, and passion, and I'm looking forward to seeing her give it her all one more time. Australia's 62-year-old Andrew Hoy is going to be the country's oldest male competitor when he tries for his fifth medal and fourth gold, after being passed over for the Australian team in 2008 and 2016. I usually give equestrian stuff a pass, but Meanwhile, skateboarding is now an Olympic sport, and apparently that field is just completely dominated by 12- and 13-year olds. There's an interesting rivalry here: Japan's youngest Olympian is 12-year-old skateboarder Kokona Hiraki (also the youngest person to win an X Games medal at age 10) is going up against multinational wunderkind Sky Brown, who was born in Japan, lives in California, and is representing Great Britain because their team was more chill about their child athletes. If either of them do well, they'll be the youngest medalist since 1936, and I think they're in contention for youngest gold medalist ever. The actual youngest athlete, Hend Zaza representing Syria in table tennis, would have been an 11-year-old Olympian if the games had taken place on schedule last year. This kid has grown up in a country that is absolutely hosed and has been training during a pandemic for a significant portion of her entire life. She'll probably get annihilated by the Chinese competitors like everyone else, but she'll be fun to root for at least, and given what's going on in Syria these days, it'd be nice for them to have a hometown hero. ================================ That's what I've got for now. Personally, I'd love to know what's up in the fields of fencing and the traditional Olympic games like long jump, wrestling, etc. Post your own, tell us what we should watch and why!
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Jul 22, 2021 21:26
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Kestral posted:Oksana Chusovitina is appearing in Olympic gymnastics for the eighth and, she says, final time at age 46 and "the oldest woman ever to compete in Olympic gymnastics." I don't think anyone is expecting gymnasts in their 40s to be coming away with the gold, but this is a legendary degree of dedication, persistence, and passion, and I'm looking forward to seeing her give it her all one more time. 
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Jul 22, 2021 21:53
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I don't have any stories to contribute, but I like this. Good thread op
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Jul 22, 2021 22:04
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The last day of weightlifting could be incredibly impressive and history breaking. Men's 109+kg starring probably the strongest (and most handsome) man in the world right now, Lasha Talakhadze. Ignore the very, very Youtube intro at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXJI61oarkk and have a peek He holds all three world records right now: 222kg snatch, 264kg clean & jerk & a combined total of 485kg (the snatch/total are from the same event, but he set the C&J record a year or two prior which is why they don't add up). If you didn't watch that video, he has hit training lifts very recently of 225kg snatch / 270kg C&J for a training total of 495kg! The hope is that for this Olympic games he'll break a longstanding and previously thought untouchable number, a 500kg total. The only drawback is that noone else in the program is expected to be within 30-40kg of him. This means no one to drive the competition forward but also, if I recall correctly from watching events past, it means that he gets less downtime between attempts because... well because noone is within 30-40kg of his lifts. So it'll be a pretty fun 10 days of lifting with that as the cap.
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Jul 22, 2021 22:07
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Kestral posted:Olympic... Surfing??? Surf comps tend to happen during times of the year where the break is pretty reliable at the location, generally. My understanding is that this is not the case for this particular break, which even at the best of times produces an inconsistent and bad wave.
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Jul 22, 2021 22:34
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thank u i needed some context thread like this to get hype
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Jul 22, 2021 22:57
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frankenfreak posted:She's still going? Yes. Also, Chellsie Memmel started a comeback this year and got pretty far, despite being in her thirties with two kids. Didn't make the team, but has showed some impressive stuff in training videos (piked Arabian and tucked Arabian with a half on beam, some neat stuff on bars) and is still gunning for Worlds. Hopefully it leads to some major changes in how people in the sport think about older gymnasts, but also the value of pushing young ones super hard through injuries based on a false idea of their window. Kestral posted:We all love a good storyline. It's why we root for our favorite teams and athletes, why we hatewatch our rivals hoping to see the moment of their downfall, and why we beg the heavens to let underdogs and perpetual losers to finally, finally get their big break. Yes, she is the best gymnast ever. If you go by Olympic + World medal count, if I recall correctly she is the single most-decorated gymnast of all time of either sex, beating out Kohei Uchimura who is an absolutely legend, but took something like 3 1/2 Olympic cycles to do something that Simone has done in like 1. She wasn't really a World level competitor prior to the year before Rio, that was pretty much her comeup year, and obvious Covid cut off a lot of the post-Rio seasons, plus she took some time off prior to starting back up for Tokyo. Her second eponymous skill on floor, the Biles II (back double somersault with three twists in the tucked position, aka a "triple double") is one that is challenging for elite men and isn't often seen outside of dudes who are legit floor specialists and medal contenders. In general, given the fairly big strength and power gap between the sexes, that's just nuts. To be honest, I don't think she even could do it if she wasn't so absolutely tiny, even compared to other gymnasts. Her power:mass ratio is batshit insane, and that's the reason why gymnasts are small in the first place. It's not that she's just super gifted genetically, she's developed immense control to go with it. I've followed her career starting in juniors, and back in the run-up to Rio, she basically only starting getting elite buzz when she changed coaches and started doing big skills, including the "Silivas", the double-twisting version of that skill (ie, significantly less difficult, although at the time absolutely on the highest end of what elite women were doing). There were meets I was legitimately terrified for her, because she landed so late in the skill and with her chest and head so low, there were times she was basically like six inches away from giving herself a concussion. Her technique is now so good that she usually finishes out the rotation like three feet in the air with eons of time to land it well. I've never seen anything like that in any kind of technique sport, like not just a gap from where she started but the absolute heights of how textbook flawless she's capable of doing it now, while doing a whole extra twist. She now usually ends her floor routines with the same double-twisting double tuck that used to look like she was going to split her head open. Her main problem these days is just keeping her passes in bounds. She doesn't really have a weak event. Even on the uneven bars, her "weakest" event, she's still potentially a medal contender, especially if some of the event specialists struggle with their mental game (not unusual for bars). Some of that is the Code of Points rewarding things I don't necessarily think it should be, bars has severely over-corrected from Beijing onwards in a way that I think rewards power too much for such a technique-driven apparatus, but it's still just insane to think about. Simone's just this perfect storm of phenomenal athleticism + phenomenal mind for the sport + phenomenal grit as a competitor. The sport as a whole has advanced so much in the past two Olympic cycles that it's absolutely mind-boggling, and yet most of the time it gets utterly overlooked because Simone is literally just that much better than people who are themselves so good that some of the medal-winning performances on vault, floor, and beam from Beijing or London would not even make those event finals. (Or the gold-winning beam routine from Rio, heh, but that's another case of politically fueled over-correction.) Her entire rationale for coming back is basically "people in the sport were still trying to sweep Larry Nasser and all that poo poo under the rug and just move on like nothing happened, and I feel personally called by God to come back in order to speak out and shame them and keep awareness of this going, for all the other victims who do not have my level of exposure". You can hear it in her voice when she talks about it, it's not grandstanding at all, you can tell she'd really rather be talking about anything else and is basically enduring retraumatizing herself out of pure moral conviction. Simone Biles is an amazing human being, period. I think the whole mythology of athletes as role models, let alone "heroes", is generally loving absurd, but there's basically no other way to talk about her accomplishments and the overall meaning of her career, in what has often been an incredibly lovely, cruel sport, that little girls are put in at like two or three years old and fall in love with before they're even in double-digits.
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Jul 23, 2021 00:32
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Will there be another Eddie the Eagle or Eric the Eel story this year where somebody qualifies for an event but isn't very good at it because of some regional requirement for competitors or whatever? I always love seeing somebody who sucks at something competing. Maybe a skater who can't kickflip and we can cheer him on trying to kickflip or something, because trying to kickflip and not being able to figure out how to do it is an experience we can all relate to
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Jul 23, 2021 00:45
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Kestral posted:Olympic Karate! They also have a kata competition which is basically a ritualized dance where you act like you are fighting a series of opponents. Imagine dance fighting but without any music and your sense of rhythm has been replaced with a murderous intensity. I think I'm still bitter about the lack of BJJ at Rio.
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Jul 23, 2021 01:35
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frankenfreak posted:She's still going? Right?! I hope she kills it out there. Omnikin posted:The only drawback is that noone else in the program is expected to be within 30-40kg of him. This means no one to drive the competition forward but also, if I recall correctly from watching events past, it means that he gets less downtime between attempts because... well because noone is within 30-40kg of his lifts. Oh yeah, this is what I'm talking about! That's a neat twist: we can watch other athletes for the competition angle, while Talakhadze is essentially putting on a really intense exhibition that only gets harder the better he does, and has the potential to be record-breaking. bvj191jgl7bBsqF5m posted:Surf comps tend to happen during times of the year where the break is pretty reliable at the location, generally. My understanding is that this is not the case for this particular break, which even at the best of times produces an inconsistent and bad wave. That is darkly funny: "everyone pray to Poseidon for good waves, tia." Is there anything the competitors can do make the situation easier on / better for themselves given the inconsistency of the site, or are they basically at the mercy of the gods? Grifter posted:This piqued my interest but from a quick read the rules seem kind of bad, particularly in that they really want it to be pointfighting, you will be penalized for hitting your opponent too hard. I'm usually down for all the fightsports but this one doesn't look very good. At least in TKD you see the occasional insane headkick KO. Hmm, that's too bad. I'll at least check some of it out to see what it's like, though it sounds like it won't replace my beloved TKD/judo. Is there a sort of undesirable behavior that a ruleset like this encourages? =================================== Separate section here because there's a few things I want to talk about re: gymnastics. HELLO LADIES posted:Yes. Also, Chellsie Memmel started a comeback this year and got pretty far, despite being in her thirties with two kids. Didn't make the team, but has showed some impressive stuff in training videos (piked Arabian and tucked Arabian with a half on beam, some neat stuff on bars) and is still gunning for Worlds. Hopefully it leads to some major changes in how people in the sport think about older gymnasts, but also the value of pushing young ones super hard through injuries based on a false idea of their window. This is great to hear. The spouse of a friend is an ex-gymnast-turned-kids-gymnastics-coach whose promising competitive career ended early due to repeated injury at an early age, and her stories about how young gymnasts are often treated were always so, so sad. Question to clarify: are we now coming to an understanding that those early injuries are recoverable, and that "losing time" to properly recover is actually okay in terms of performance? Or is this something that Memmel is going to be the test case for? quote:Simone's just this perfect storm of phenomenal athleticism + phenomenal mind for the sport + phenomenal grit as a competitor. The sport as a whole has advanced so much in the past two Olympic cycles that it's absolutely mind-boggling, and yet most of the time it gets utterly overlooked because Simone is literally just that much better than people who are themselves so good that some of the medal-winning performances on vault, floor, and beam from Beijing or London would not even make those event finals. (Or the gold-winning beam routine from Rio, heh, but that's another case of politically fueled over-correction.) I had no idea gymnastics was in the middle of that sort of renaissance. What's fueling it? Did we just luck in to having Perfect Humans like Biles getting the right coaching, or is there something systemic happening too? And if you're up for talking about it, what's the deal with the Rio gold routine? quote:Her entire rationale for coming back is basically "people in the sport were still trying to sweep Larry Nasser and all that poo poo under the rug and just move on like nothing happened, and I feel personally called by God to come back in order to speak out and shame them and keep awareness of this going, for all the other victims who do not have my level of exposure". You can hear it in her voice when she talks about it, it's not grandstanding at all, you can tell she'd really rather be talking about anything else and is basically enduring retraumatizing herself out of pure moral conviction. Simone Biles is an amazing human being, period. I'm ashamed to admit that I, too, forgot about Nassar, and now I'm angry again. Biles is doing Good Work by using her platform to drag that poo poo back into the light.
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Jul 23, 2021 04:19
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Kestral posted:Swimming: Katie Ledecky, the New God-Queen of the Water 
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Jul 23, 2021 07:32
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bvj191jgl7bBsqF5m posted:Will there be another Eddie the Eagle or Eric the Eel story this year where somebody qualifies for an event but isn't very good at it because of some regional requirement for competitors or whatever? I always love seeing somebody who sucks at something competing. Maybe a skater who can't kickflip and we can cheer him on trying to kickflip or something, because trying to kickflip and not being able to figure out how to do it is an experience we can all relate to Yes, that happens all the time. In Track & Field, a nation that doesn't have qualifying athletes in any individual discipline, can send one man and one woman to a discipline of their choosing without meeting the entry standard. Usually it's not very entertaining because it's just a dude in the 800m run (or whatever) who's slower than everyone else.
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Jul 23, 2021 10:53
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Very important to know who the oldest athlete is so I can tell myself theres still time for me to make it
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Jul 23, 2021 17:38
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the sex ghost posted:Very important to know who the oldest athlete is so I can tell myself theres still time for me to make it
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Jul 23, 2021 17:40
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How hard can it be. I know how to drive a car and a horse is basically just a car with feet instead of wheels
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Jul 23, 2021 17:42
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And a mortal terror of ants.
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Jul 23, 2021 19:10
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Cessna gave me permission to crosspost this from the excellent A/T Fencing megathread, since it is extremely relevant to this thread. TL;DR, fencing is going to be awesome and there's some cool people, storylines, and stylistic approaches to watch out for.Cessna posted:I know little or nothing about their personal lives. Also, this is all men's sabre, I know very little about foil and absolutely nothing about epee. I'm also talking individuals, not teams. And I am not an expert; I'm relatively new to sabre - most of this info is from my coaches telling me who to watch and why.
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Jul 23, 2021 19:12
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Omnikin posted:The last day of weightlifting could be incredibly impressive and history breaking. Men's 109+kg starring probably the strongest (and most handsome) man in the world right now, Lasha Talakhadze. Ignore the very, very Youtube intro at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXJI61oarkk and have a peek He's probably used to following himself enough by now that it just does not affect him. It's still tough to reset yourself physically and mentally with a 2 miunte+bar loading fuckery clock. His team does a great job with competitions too. If I remember right, he rarely misses in a meet and that's about planning the warmups and what to hit each attempt. Personally, I find lifting with 1-2 other people the best. By myself kind of sucks and any more than that also sucks with inconsistent rest. I'm at the weightlifting level where I do it because I would like to stay a former fat guy, however. Going for a 'repeat' state championship this fall though!
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Jul 23, 2021 19:25
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Kestral posted:Meanwhile, skateboarding is now an Olympic sport, and apparently that field is just completely dominated by 12- and 13-year olds. There's an interesting rivalry here: Japan's youngest Olympian is 12-year-old skateboarder Kokona Hiraki (also the youngest person to win an X Games medal at age 10) is going up against multinational wunderkind Sky Brown, who was born in Japan, lives in California, and is representing Great Britain because their team was more chill about their child athletes. If either of them do well, they'll be the youngest medalist since 1936, and I think they're in contention for youngest gold medalist ever. Both female categories are slightly dominated by children but the Men's comp will be handled by dudes in their 20's. More skate stuff: Axel Cruysberghs(Men's street) representing Belgium is married to Lizzie Armanto(rep'ing Finland). They both live in California, Lizzie was able to get hooked up cuz she had some Finnish blood or something but she had a BRUTAL slam last year and almost died(youtube if you wanna see a broken femur). Very lucky she is competing this year. Rayssa Leal age 13 from Brazil will blow everyone's collective minds. I was combing the athlete list last night trying to see if there were any grifters like that Women's snowboarder from 2018 but I don't think there are any. The 2 girls on the Chinese team will be interesting to watch, along with the South African team.
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Jul 23, 2021 21:52
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Kestral posted:This is great to hear. The spouse of a friend is an ex-gymnast-turned-kids-gymnastics-coach whose promising competitive career ended early due to repeated injury at an early age, and her stories about how young gymnasts are often treated were always so, so sad. Question to clarify: are we now coming to an understanding that those early injuries are recoverable, and that "losing time" to properly recover is actually okay in terms of performance? Or is this something that Memmel is going to be the test case for? Six of one, half dozen of the other. It's both that much older athletes with mature bodies can be viable, even in an age where the tricks are harder than ever, and also that pushing kids with injuries and making them rely on technique that's only going to work until they hit puberty or forcing them to do skills they're not yet ready for can backfire terribly. It's not just Memmel, bc there have always been older-than-usual atletes who were successful and often led teams (Ponor of Romania, Khorkina of Russia, Sacramone and Raisman of the US, etc). What she really represents is the idea that Chuso isn't so extreme she needs to be entirely discounted as irrelevant to everyone else's timeline, and also that older athletes can get back what's genuinely elite level skills and form. I love Chuso, but her gymnastics has not been really elite in the normal sense (execution-wise) since she was on the Soviet team. Chellsie needs to get her mental game back, but the actual stuff she is doing on video in practice is truly top tier. Chuso's amazing and I'm in awe of her, but she gets by on basically chucking out high difficulty vaults with form that wouldn't otherwise cut it, and she's had to change nations multiple times now, downgrading in competiveness every time. If Chellsie gets her poo poo together mentally, she absolutely could compete with the non-Simone AAers and the whole rest of the world on beam, and actually earn a place on the US team, which is literally a harder thing to make than the Olympics itself as a solo competitor. That's what's unprecedented; if she wanted to change her nationality she'd have a much easier path. There's also cases like Larisa Iordache, who was a phenomenon when she emerged (as a very tiny teenager). Everyone thought she was basically done after all her injuries and the meltdown around the Rio Olympics and Ponor competing in her place, but she's back, she's leading the Romanians and she looks good. An example of "maybe stop being so dumb about rushing people to peak at the right time" is Aliya Mustafina of Russia. She was unquestionably the best gymnast of the London cycle, and could have been an all-time great, but pushing so hard on the Amanar vault (which, it turned out, was never going to help get Russia the team gold) and the injury she suffered definitely lowered her ceiling, and is probably a factor in why she retired. Hopefully if she chooses to come back later, she'll be able to, but she was never quite on the same level after that one injury, and it's a huge and stupid loss for the entire sport. There are also cases like Morgan Hurd and Rebecca Bross, although in those cases the fact that the USA has such a stacked field of competitors also played a big role in effectively shutting down their careers, although with Morgan we'll see. quote:I had no idea gymnastics was in the middle of that sort of renaissance. What's fueling it? Did we just luck in to having Perfect Humans like Biles getting the right coaching, or is there something systemic happening too? It was happening before her, she's just a level of apotheosis of the current trend that no one was expecting. More scientific/analytic coaching and training, in the US and to some degree everywhere else better nutrition and a lot of cheap protein, for a while the Code was balanced in a way that different approaches to the sport were viable so there was a lot more international competition than there had been since the height of the Cold War, which brings me to: quote:And if you're up for talking about it, what's the deal with the Rio gold routine? An instance where a lot of people think they went too far in the direction of balancing the code of points to reward execution over difficulty and revive "old school balletic gymnastics". I'm not really in agreement, because these issues are hard to balance and execution has an enormous impact on safety, plus I also miss that style. For example, spins were worth more, connection values were I believe both increased and definitely judged more strictly than they had been (which can often mean that making an iffy connection between a hard skill and a moderate skill could be much more risky than two moderate skills or hard/easy, so there's a chilling effect), the dance requirements on floor and beam were changed around. There was a degree of racist and anti-American sentiment behind some of it, although it wasn't just that. Sanne Wevers had a really great, beautiful routine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNVk_SOaLFI But the difficulty apart from that mount would be laughable even in NCAA, which specifically keeps the old "perfect 10" scoring system and is designed specifically to reward great execution and create more of a level playing field. It wasn't just the massive drop in difficulty, it's also things like how strictly other athletes in that same mode were judged even though they were doing much harder difficulty. Fan Yilin made some huge mistakes but also got screwed when you look at how they seemed to have judged everyone else not named Sanne, in my opinion. Sanne was perfect, but her routine was something that it's very easy to be perfect on. That would not have pushed the needle of the sport as far back the 80s. For comparison, here's the entire Rio beam final: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSqKXdzOphE And the previous two gold-winning routines, Shawn Johnson in Beijing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRtcybVQcKo Deng Linlin in London: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C36D0NjaP8Y To some extent it would have been moot if Simone had just stayed on the beam, but a lot of the talk about "oh no her difficulty is so high she could fall twice and beat everyone else with her huge difficulty", as well as the situation in London where basically every American competitor did the Amanar vault, was basically just sour grapes that unfortunately got a lot of traction and led to a lovely overreaction. In general, the idea of anti-Americanism is kind of laughable in most international contexts, but that's really a lot of what drove it, and it only kicked into overdrive when our team figurehead was not just a black woman, but specifically a black woman with a body type like Simone's with her historical levels of power. Gabby Douglas was powerful, but also balletic and very classical in her gymnastics. Take every single horrible take you've ever heard about the Williams sisters, especially about Serena as compared to Venus, and that's pretty much verbatim the kind of crap that got leveled at Simone and really the US program in general, and then it was insitutionalized into what amounted to scoring welfare for mediocre Europeans. You had something similar going on at the Beijing Olympics, where a lot of that code was tailor made to reward the sorts of things the Chinese program has always been great at, and they absolutely ran with it and had great success, but in that case it wasn't as much "execution over difficulty" but "let's reward different kinds of difficulty than raw power", things like pirouette moves on the bar(s) for both men and women, strict 90 degree angle in handstands judged way more closely than it ever has been before or since, which IMO is a much less contrived thing than "you have to actually dance into your tumbling passes and do arm choreo on beam, we'll shower points on you if you can connect two spins, and if you so much as dare come one degree short of 180 in your split leap it's deductionville for you!!!". I honestly feel really bad knocking on Wevers because that routine really rocked and she personally did nothing wrong, but like, Olessia Dudnik's 89 Euros routine would like a word: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcnNa-69qtQ For my money, that's still the best beam routine in the entire history of the sport. I understand the people who miss "old school Iron Curtain gymnastics", but people forget just how high their difficulty was. People making those kind of comparisons on behalf of the likes of Carlotta Ferlito's racist, mediocre rear end are just laughable. To be clear, this does not seem like it's going to be as much of an issue in Tokyo. There are still some contentious issues, like how they're valuing Simone's beam dismount and her newer vault, but while I don't blame her or the American commentators for being twitchy about it, unlike with the more fussy execution stuff there are legitimate safety concerns. She herself was once asked why she doesn't try doing the Produnova vault and she said "because I don't want to die", and yet we still see athletes esp. from developing or underrepresented nations chucking it in the hopes of making an event final. Not everyone who raised the issue about the American team in '12 all having Amanars and other nations feeling forced to try them to compete was concern trolling, like I said that basically changed the course of Mustafina's career. On the whole it mostly seems to me like they're striking a good balance. HELLO LADIES fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Jul 24, 2021 |
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Jul 23, 2021 22:32
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Kestral posted:
The format for the first 3 rounds of the surfing competition will be 4-person heats ( I think they're 30 minutes each), so even if the waves are crummy during a heat, they're equally crummy for all the competitors, so everybody has an equal chance to advance. That said, a big part of winning in surfing competitions is ocean knowledge / wave selection / reading the break (and luck!!!) so it's not unusual for this kind of thing. After the first 3 rounds, the quarter / semi / finals will be 1-on-1 heats, winner advances, so it's even more 'fair' Surfline has a pretty good breakdown of the format, and a forecast: https://www.surfline.com/surf-news/olympic-surfing-101-everything-need-know/126427 Looks like there will be some possible cyclone action in the run-up so maybe some big but unruly waves for the contest.
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Jul 23, 2021 23:50
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Is it like gymnastics type judging where they judge on technique and stuff like that? Point system?
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Jul 24, 2021 00:06
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Pennywise the Frown posted:Is it like gymnastics type judging where they judge on technique and stuff like that? Point system? Yeah, judged by a panel of judges. Waves scored from 0.1 to 10 points. The sum of your best two waves count for your final score. Higher scores for higher difficulty manuevers, big scoring penalty to the overall score for falling off. I.e: a big cool move that you fall on scores way less than an average move that you complete.
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Jul 24, 2021 00:14
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Kestral posted:Hmm, that's too bad. I'll at least check some of it out to see what it's like, though it sounds like it won't replace my beloved TKD/judo. Is there a sort of undesirable behavior that a ruleset like this encourages? Having said all that, this assumes that the point of fight sports is to learn how to fight, or emulate fighting to some degree. There's nothing wrong with non-fighting competition, even in sports that nominally have something to do with fighting (like Karate, or other non-alive martial arts like Aikido). People still get positive things from these disciplines and other people enjoy watching them. It's just not what I'm into.
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Jul 24, 2021 01:20
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bvj191jgl7bBsqF5m posted:Will there be another Eddie the Eagle or Eric the Eel story this year where somebody qualifies for an event but isn't very good at it because of some regional requirement for competitors or whatever? I always love seeing somebody who sucks at something competing. Maybe a skater who can't kickflip and we can cheer him on trying to kickflip or something, because trying to kickflip and not being able to figure out how to do it is an experience we can all relate to I watched some of the rowing repecharges(?) earlier and there was a Sudanese woman who finished well back, just making it there was an accomplishment. Also since there's no rowing thread imma just say here how I'm gutted for the man from motherfuckin' VANUATU who was holding 2nd in his repecharge until the end, which would've gotten him into the quarterfinals. 
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Jul 24, 2021 02:14
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Laurel Hubbard is a weightlifter for New Zealand and the first trans athlete to compete at the Olympics so expect a whole load of lovely thinkpieces being written about her if she wins and for everyone to suddenly pretend she doesn't exist if she loses One of Britain's most locked on gold medals is Adam Peaty in the 100m breaststroke. He's the world record, the defending champion, undefeated in 7 years and holds the 16 fastest times in history. His closest rival set a new national record in the heats and he's still 0.25 seconds off the pace
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Jul 24, 2021 16:29
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https://twitter.com/sashasuzuki/status/1419038172642648065
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Jul 24, 2021 23:10
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For all you narrative junkies, you need to watch at least the first game of Table Tennis Men's Round 2, Table 1. Incredible game with a fun story behind it that the excellent commentary lays out well.
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Jul 25, 2021 07:05
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Kestral posted:For all you narrative junkies, you need to watch at least the first game of Table Tennis Men's Round 2, Table 1. Incredible game with a fun story behind it that the excellent commentary lays out well. Is it like balls of fury?
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Jul 25, 2021 07:47
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Kestral posted:For all you narrative junkies, you need to watch at least the first game of Table Tennis Men's Round 2, Table 1. Incredible game with a fun story behind it that the excellent commentary lays out well. Was that the India - HK game? Tense as hell. I didnt notice anything very special about the commentary though, maybe we had the wrong commentator on our local channel 
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Jul 25, 2021 08:16
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Beefeater1980 posted:Was that the India - HK game? Tense as hell. I didnt notice anything very special about the commentary though, maybe we had the wrong commentator on our local channel This was the one, yeah. I'll quote someone from the post when something cool is starting thread because they summed it up perfectly: Lid posted:dont know how to link internationally but theres currently mens single table tennis, but the more important thing is the commentator appears to be on a cocaine bender and is SO loving AMPED to be talking about table tennis It's magical, and if this guy is doing all the table tennis, then I am watching all the table tennis.
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Jul 25, 2021 09:06
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A lady celebrating her win on the Bike Road Race! But she is the silver medal. Someone else finished first  
SLICK GOKU BABY fucked around with this message at 09:31 on Jul 25, 2021 |
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Jul 25, 2021 09:27
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I think I'd be pretty happy with myself if I got a silver medal against some of the best athletes in the world.
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Jul 25, 2021 11:07
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the winner was a mathematician who nobody expected to win https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/jul/25/anna-kiesenhofer-claims-shock-road-race-glory-as-van-vleuten-mistakes-silver-for-gold-olympics quote:Anna Kiesenhofer took a shock solo win for Austria in the womens Olympic cycling road race as the peloton got their sums wrong in chasing down the mathematician.
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Jul 25, 2021 11:40
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Oh poo poo she THOUGHT she won the gold? lol ok that's funny.
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Jul 25, 2021 11:44
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A brother and sister duo just won gold for Japan in judo on the same day - their respective weight classes had the tournaments today, so it was alternating between them all day. Unsurprisingly this will be incredibly popular here.
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Jul 25, 2021 11:55
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with her weightlifting gold hidilyn diaz won the first ever gold medal for the philippines
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Jul 26, 2021 15:00
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to put that in more context, to beat the Chinese favorite she needed to break her personal best by 7kg, which is a ridiculous jump in weight for a 55kg woman. Liao Qiuyun went for a 126kg clean and jerk, calculating that Diaz would not have a 127kg lift in the tank. Liao is the first Chinese weightlifter these olympics not to win a gold medal, all other athletes to have shown up so far outlifting the competition with ease: Hou Zhihui just outlifted everyone easily Li Fabin did this in his C&J opener, which would be enough for gold (he lifted more afterwards):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-pEb9Pe69A and Chen Lijun was in a precarious position and needed to outlift his opponent in the clean and jerk by 5 kilograms. Last olympic games, he flew too close to the sun and bombed out without a valid attempt in the snatch. This time, he gambled even the silver and bronze medal to have two attempts at the weight, a 12kg jump from his opener, and absolutely smoked it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QTVA9Zb_U0 In short, the Chinese weightlifting team are the best in the world by a mile. Diaz beating one of their elite with a huge PR during her fourth olympics is an incredible achievement, and it was a great session to boot. e; also, I can recommend Li Fabin's instagram. Half his posts - including his 'gold olympic medal' post - are captioned with 'my balls are ok,' referencing the fact that he appears to always hit himself in the nuts with the bar during the clean. dex_sda fucked around with this message at 15:16 on Jul 26, 2021 |
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Jul 26, 2021 15:10
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Kestral posted:Cessna gave me permission to crosspost this from the excellent A/T Fencing megathread, since it is extremely relevant to this thread. TL;DR, fencing is going to be awesome and there's some cool people, storylines, and stylistic approaches to watch out for. Turns out, Szilagyi won gold - that's an unprecedented third gold in sabre. Oh was knocked out in quarterfinals - I don't have the full details, but it looks like he was done in by an ankle injury. Homer was taken out in table of 32, sadly.
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Jul 26, 2021 15:34
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 12:17 |
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Handball with some impressive games & upsets so far, but Norway-Spain just pushed through a whole range of emotions. Norway spanked em early & Spain closed the first half with a good run to even it out. Back and forth in the second half until Spain got a few in front; Norway proceeded to whittle away the lead in the final minutes and with 30 seconds to go forced a penalty shot to tie the game up! Spain took a timeout, discussed it for a solid 30 seconds, and then went for broke, forcing a Norwegian defender to tackle the Spanish attacker while shooting as time expired. The refs correctly awarded a penalty to Spain with no time on the clock which they converted, earning crucial points in the group qualifying stage.
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Jul 26, 2021 18:46
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