The Olympic Games Thread
 

Soooooooooo the Olympic Games are almost upon us again...

What can we expect?...

-The UK to excel in sports no one else bothers with (Cycling, Rowing, Boating, Tidily Winks, Ironing, Queuing, Complaining about the weather.. )
-Russian athletes to get banned for using performance enhancing drugs? (are they up to to 7 banned athletes already?!)
-America to fast track naturalization of foreigners with exceptional abilities at sport... so they can try and beat China's medal haul... (the US have 30 such individuals competing!!... one of them from the UK... traitor :))
-and an absolute barrage of protests everywhere about China's terrible record on human rights...

or am I being really cynical?

I am actually quite looking forward to it all...

Shall we take bets on how many Gold Medals our own country will win?.... I guess the UK will take 4 golds.

My guess is that Canada will win several medals, but not a gold.

casting your net wide eh Nova..!.. Canada usually have a good showing for medals...

thought this might be of interest to you all....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-tim...es_medal_count

I'm guessing that China will have made an all out effort for these games. Canada has a population of ~30M, China's is ~3G

yeh... the sheer number of the Chinese is staggering.. though to be fair... after my trip to Oxford for some shopping last weekend you could be forgiven for thinking the are were there.. :D

I expect they will be top of the medal table by the end of the next two weeks... performing on your home turf gives you an extra 10%

I think the UK needs to get F1, darts and drunk fighting entered as an olympic sport... then we would stand a better chance....

Perhaps you should start the Canadian Campaign for Tree felling, fishing and bear wrestling?! :eek:

Our weather assures some expertise in Winter sports :D, and our beer drinkers could probably give yours a good run for their money.

Correct order of magnitude, but still off by more than a factor of two:
http://www.google.com/search?q=china+population

well england have already lost one of their main medal hopes, the boxer guy who won the world amateur championships cuz "he couldnt make the weight" ie hes a lazy sod.

We do have that 14 year old diver though :), apparently hes the best thing since sliced bread.... we'll see about that though. Makes me think why im not in the olympics doing something haha....me and photek should tag team in some event :D

Well, Romania's not doing terribly bad.. Number 18 out of 123 :D
Though it's behind most of you guys' countries..

We better win a few gold medals to make up for getting our butts kicked in EURO 08 (*cough*kel's signature).

:D

i dont think im ever gonna remove that... unless england beat you lot... though looking at our team,, doesnt look likely

oh come on aim!

I'll just be happy if I don't hear about any doping scandals springing from these games. I'm sick of all the American athletes who get caught up in them (not that I hate that they're prosecuted, I hate that they are taking steroids.)

In fact, the prevalence of doping in so many sports, but particularly in the Olympics, has put me off the Olympics. That and the fact that network coverage always seems to converge on sports that I don't care much about to the exclusion of those that do interest me (as a high schooler I was on the gymnastics team (tried out for pole vault too but didn't make it -- I'm too short), in college I rowed bow in a lightweight 8, and for nearly 20 years I owned and raced a series of sailboats, and was always an avid skier). Here in Canada, at least, they tend to focus on those sports in which Canadians might do well -- not a complete spectrum.

Some nice pics from the opening ceremony.
http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/bei...mpics_open%3A1

Yeah, I was almost to the point that I was going to boycott any sport where there were allegations of performance enhancing drugs being used. Until I realized I wouldn't be able to watch sports anymore... Maybe not an all together bad idea though, eh?

I don't like olympic coverage much either. I don't know about Canada or the UK, but in the US they try to "Soap Opera" everything. Meaning, they spend a good half of every big event giving background in the cheesiest way possible. I wish they'd cut the soaps and cover move events. I mean, with over a hundred events going in such a short time, I'm sure they could find another event to cover, right?

I just wish that the networks would all agree to just cover different things, maybe that would help those of us who couldn't care less about the "main" events.

lol watch it on iplayer.... much less drama :D

I think you forget that I can't use iPlayer. I'm what you would call "out of market".

:( oh well do i what i do to watch hulu, use a proxy of some sort.. :)

How about raw live feed from all those cameras they have flying about at every angle. If you could just connect to them like a web cam that could be cool.

I'd pay good money for that, gotta be honest. Especially at F1 events. I never get to look at the car I want to...

yeh... what is with that...

If its not Hamilton... its Massa... yawwnnn...

I am a die hard F1 fan... but over the past 5 years it has been getting worse and worse... dont get me wrong... I am still up at 4am to watch the Aussie GP live... but its getting more and more like a 200mph traffic jam..

I promised myself I would turn off when Jenson won his first race.... but a few years later I am still waiting for his second!... but driving for Honda.... he might as well drive a scooter! :D

NBC is getting me annoyed, as I can't watch videos because:
1. This feature requires Microsoft Silverlight (?!)
2. Your television service provider does not participate as a NBC Olympic sponsor. (?!)

I installed Silverlight, then was confronted with a dialog requiring me to enter my postal code and TV service provider. I was honest about it, but then got another dialog saying my provider wasn't a sponsor (?!). So then I lied and said I had another provider, but got another dialog saying "That provider does not service your area, You have exceeded the number of attempts allowed to access Olympic video and will be blocked for 24 hours."

WTF?

Are you implying that Honda has picked up it's pace? :D

I'm just hoping they can get more teams interested in racing, this 10 team field is a bit stale. Oh well, I'll watch it anyway...

Oh, and, uh...go USA, with the Olympics and stuff, yeah... Don't want to hijack the thread eh?

There is one unofficial contest at each Olympics that's more important than all the official contests combined.... it's the "doping without getting caught" event. Apparently, doping (performance enhancing substances of any kind) is here to stay. My guess is steroids and such have become widespread throughout sports everywhere. If they aren't drugged while competing, they took them years earlier to build muscle mass, then quit just in time to pass the drug tests at the Olympics. Build a tougher drug screen, and someone will build a tougher drug to detect.

In my totally uninformed, humble opinion the cause is money being inserted into the mix. We now let professional athletes compete (hasn't always been that way). Lucrative product endorsements often await the winners. Again in my humble opinion, we went over the top when nations started paying athletes for medals won.

For the record, if there were an event for beer drinking and drunken fighting, my money would be on the US. If you've ever seen a Saturday night at a red neck bubba honkey tonk, then you know what I'm saying.

Absolutely right on! Aside from the spectacular opening ceremony (where China certainly put on a show to remember), my wife's view kinda summarizes it: "The Olympics are past their best-by date", a view that started with several of Canada's olympians being defrocked of their medals, continued with the judging collusion scandals in the Winter Olympics, and left us totally uninterested in the events this summer.

I can't watch specific events on the web either. CBC does not have streaming video of events because their license for coverage doesn't permit broadcasting anywhere but in Canada, and they can't control that easily on the internet.

So, what on earth are London going to do to beat that spectacular opening ceremony?

I watched it all through and there were some absolutely amazing parts (movable type, the drummers, etc.)...although the commentators did seem to get bored and running out of things to say, such as...'Tai-che can be seen practiced by old people and also young people :-)!!!!

I struggle to imagine...

lets hope the Olympic village goes smoother than the Wembley Stadium fiasco :D

yeah, especially when I saw a report this morning that the deal is being done with an Australian developer (the same as Wembley!)

ps. before I get slated, I have nothing against Australians, I'm only commenting on the coincidence

just have gordon brown fight a kangaroo..that'll be fun enough :)

Here's the Olympic medal score so far, if anyone's interested :p
http://results.beijing2008.cn/WRM/EN...L0000000.shtml
China seems to be in the lead so far.

UK Diving Medal ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UBLnDXiFRM

:D

loool thats a classic

Opening Ceremonies BSOD

In other news, China Olympics IT has a job opening today...

hahahahahaha... Bill Gates must be so proud!

the opening ceremony was insane... i like watching phelps swimming. I would watch basketball... but it's boring when it's still prelims.

On the news yesterday they were saying how a lot of the fireworks were cg. And you know that little girl they had singing, she was lipsyncing right? But not even too her own voice, she was doing it another 7 year old, who was deemed to "not be the right image to represent China" ie she wasnt as flawless as the girl who did "sing"

My skepticism about the games was substantially enhanced watching the "womens" gymnastics last night where all of the competitors are supposed to be over 16. The winning Chinese team didn't, in my view, have a single competitor who had reached that age -- they were all little girls, not young women. An American color commentator said "Well, China gives them their birth certificates and passports, right?; how can you test for that?"

Edit: A link to follow

Yeah, we were talking about that as well. As I recall the commentator (who use to be the couch of the US womens team) said that half the team had not reached the official age. But he also mentioned that they were the best in the world anyway, so why shouldn't they win in the olympics? An interesting thought...

Anyway, we had a very long and exciting discussion about the age of olympic gymnasts. We all agree that it's a bit of a tragedy that so many children lose their life to gymnastics and I'm not talking about any specific country, most olympic gymnasts start at three no matter what nation they hail from. And if it's not the government making you do it, it's your parents... No matter how you look at it, they don't have a choice.

I don't know that having the "you must be 16" rule really helps with stopping this problem. Sure they can't compete on the international level until 16, but they can still start very young and completely destroy their bodies as a result (they mentioned that one of the girls had already had two leg surgeries.:( ) I wish they would come up with a minimum age for these girls to do events, period. Meaning, you can't start training until 5, and you can't do anything too strenuous until at least 10 (though I should note, my numbers are arbitrary). It won't get the government/parents off these gymnasts backs, but at least it will help preserve their bodies...

Anyway, I don't want to start a debate on this thread (I think according to international policy we are not allowed to have any conflicts during the olympic period, right? :D). I'm just passing along some of the thoughts we were having last night, just so you can chew on them.

I agree, Z, but there's another point prevalent in this thread: Cheating. Now that the Olympics are so heavily monetized, cheating by contestants with millions in endorsements riding on their performances, cheating and collusion by judges for geopolitical reasons, and cheating by national olympic committees to collect sponsorships at home and medals at the games is rampant in my view.

There seems to be a disconnect here between the US and other countries broadcasts. In the US, NBC did point out that the sky shots of the "footsteps" fireworks sequence was prerecorded CGI due to the difficulty of covering it by helicopter given the weather conditions (haze) and sheer distance covered in a short time. I remember hearing them say that. But my understanding is that the fireworks themselves actually did go off.

Other countries' broadcasters did not necessarily make this notice and so citizens of non-US areas have felt more betrayed because they never got the disclosure.

so what your saying is, you cant handle the truth? :p

I agree with that, actually. But I do see doping as a separate issue from age restrictions. Even if the Chinese team was underage, they were not doped. And since the spirit of the Olympics is the competition between humans (not pharmaceutical companies), I don't see people who are underage as going against the olympic spirit. But honestly, that's just my opinion. And I will admit, if there are established rules and guidelines, they should be followed. My post was really more a thought piece than a suggestion for new policies.

But, as far as doping is concerned... I deplore it. I've mentioned to my sister before (who I'm watching the games with), that if I find out M. Phelps is being doped a few months from now, I might try to initiate physical violence towards him (I said something else actually, but I don't want anyone here to misunderstand my sarcasm :).) Point being, I have no tolerance for doping. I was a huge fan of Mark McGwire in 1998 (he was my biggest hero that summer), and I'm still smarting from baseballs doping scandal as a result. And, for some reason, just as I was getting over that I was getting into bike racing, then Landis happened! I can't stand it anymore! If I hear about another doping scandal, trust me, I'll be the first one there with the tar and feathers!

Here's a piece on doping in the Olympics -- a chronic problem: "Drugs and Sport"

Well, I've stopped watching before winners were announced in the women's gymnastics and will not watch any more of the Olympics. Several years ago, I gave up on figure skating and pairs skating, and now gymnastics. I can't watch.

Two Chinese girls who made mistakes obvious to me (I was a gymnast 50+ years ago) got scores oblivious to their mistakes, while several other nationalities lost points for flaws I couldn't detect, i.e. in near perfect performances. Yet another set of political scores; just like figure skating. I'm done. It just frustrates me to watch -- it's no pleasure in it to watch bias at work, to see obvious merit not rewarded and obvious mistakes ignored. My sense of fairness is outraged. I should point out that I'm not biased in this -- there are no Canadians in contention. The Olympics really are a sham. I won't stay up to watch any Olympic events again; my wife gave up in the last Winter Olympics for the same reasons, and she was right.

[EDIT] I see this morning that the final order was correct in my view. Maybe it was just the balance beam judges. Glad to see the correct order.