London Olympics Panic! - Britain's Useless Athletes Unable to Win Gold

mystic_trev

Kennyboy66 wrote: »

As you seem to know a bit about Athletics, do you know how the stadium capacity will change for the World Athletics in 2017 ?

Funnily enough some of us were asking this very question. It would seem stupid to reduce the Stadium size before then, but who knows?

JonnyBravo

Well the table tennis team final was great.
Packed with Chinese supporters and a predictable result.
China 3 Korea 0

The second match was absolutely fabulous though. Zhang Jike (attacking player and Olympic champion) vs Joo Saehyuk (defensive player), and whilst the score may seem like an easy 3-1 for Zhang the total points for the match were 38-34 and some of the rallies were quite simply astounding.
A fabulous match.
The only disappointment was the doubles where the Chinese just steam rollered the Koreans.
Worthy champions.

RenovationMan

Kennyboy66 wrote: »

As you seem to know a bit about Athletics, do you know how the stadium capacity will change for the World Athletics in 2017 ?

Thanks for posting this. I thought the conversion of the Olympic stadium to a football stadium was a done deal. After reading your post I did a bit of googling and it seems that this isn't the case anymore. Brilliant.

Out,_Vile_Jelly

Jennifer_Jane wrote: »

I've been watching quite a bit of the dressage and am upset by the idea of someone 'giving a horse a bloody mouth'. Just don't know how that could happen with the virtually invisible signals given to the horse during dressage. (Or what kind of bit would be used).

Not sure where you heard this. I'm sure it must have been an accident/injury of some kind; although some bits are deliberately more severe by design, a horse can't concentrate on anything, let alone dressage, with a painful mouth. Sore mouths and bad backs are the first thing you should check with badly behaved horses (badly fitting tack usually).

I was at the dressage last Friday and it was awesome- raucous crowd reaction to the top Brit girl (whose horse had the most beautiful soft mouth).

RenovationMan

Does anyone else think that elitist sports like dressage,horse jumping, etc. have no place in the Olympics? The horses cost millions, so only the richer countries can afford to participate and the winner is simply the person with the better horse (perhaps the horse should get the medal, not the rider?)

chewmylegoff

kabayiri wrote: »

I get what you are saying but is it beyond imagination to conceive a system where people queue up for last minute "any seat going slots?". If IOC family seats are not taken up, they lose the allocation, tough luck, etc.

There have been thousands of people just turning up at the park, I'm sure many of these would queue up for last minute seats.

well i think they have more or less sorted it now, at least there aren't really a lot of empty seats visible on TV (or at the one event that i attended). releasing the tickets on line is a bit fairer really as making them available only to the people inside the park just makes it more difficult for people with no tickets to go. mind you, it's very difficult to get the tickets on line and you have to be really lucky to get them.

i think they were selling last minute tickets to people inside the park last week, although they may have stopped doing that now, and having been i can see why as there are so many people in there that the huge queue that would arise would cause havoc.

Maybe I'm odd but I think making the Olympics accessible to the large numbers of taxpayers who paid for the thing is more important than pandering to a bunch of IOC !!!!!!!!!!s.

[edit: apparently nomoneyloader is censored!]

of course, but if you want the games you have to pander to the IOC otherwise they won't let you have the games in the first place. pretty sure they just have to contractually agree to assign X amount of tickets to the 'olympic family' (i.e. some corrupt officials and their families), it was something ludicrous like 2 million tickets or something like that.

chewmylegoff

RenovationMan wrote: »

Does anyone else think that elitist sports like dressage,horse jumping, etc. have no place in the Olympics? The horses cost millions, so only the richer countries can afford to participate and the winner is simply the person with the better horse (perhaps the horse should get the medal, not the rider?)

you could say that about pretty much anything. britain spends £millions on rowing and cycling, which is why we win more medals than other countries in those disciplines. the chinese basically scour the country for young children with the right physical attributes to compete in certain sports and then take them away from their families and put them through 15 years of intensive training in order to win events - how are you supposed to compete with that? should we ban them as well? personally i think that is a lot more 'anti-competitive' than buying an expensive horse.

Out,_Vile_Jelly

RenovationMan wrote: »

Does anyone else think that elitist sports like dressage,horse jumping, etc. have no place in the Olympics? The horses cost millions, so only the richer countries can afford to participate and the winner is simply the person with the better horse (perhaps the horse should get the medal, not the rider?)

Leslie Law (our eventing gold medalist in Athens) grew up in a council estate. Mary King had to do all sorts of odd jobs to support her early career. So not all riders come from wealthy backgrounds.

Also, the horses often don't belong to the rider and can be sold on at any time. The great dressage horse Totilas used to be ridden by Dutchman Edward Gal, but was sold by his owners to be ridden by a German. He has not done well with his new rider, so it is not a case of simply owning the most expensive horse.

RenovationMan

chewmylegoff wrote: »

you could say that about pretty much anything. britain spends £millions on rowing and cycling, which is why we win more medals than other countries in those disciplines. the chinese basically scour the country for young children with the right physical attributes to compete in certain sports and then take them away from their families and put them through 15 years of intensive training in order to win events - how are you supposed to compete with that? should we ban them as well? personally i think that is a lot more 'anti-competitive' than buying an expensive horse.

The bikes that the GB team use are for sale and can be bought for £20k, which is a lot less than the millions of ££'s to buy a horse and the tens of £££'s for transportation and upkeep.

Many of the African athletes go to US universities and get top class training there. The payback is that the university wins sports events.

RenovationMan

Out,_Vile_Jelly wrote: »

Leslie Law (our eventing gold medalist in Athens) grew up in a council estate. Mary King had to do all sorts of odd jobs to support her early career. So not all riders come from wealthy backgrounds.

Also, the horses often don't belong to the rider and can be sold on at any time. The great dressage horse Totilas used to be ridden by Dutchman Edward Gal, but was sold by his owners to be ridden by a German. He has not done well with his new rider, so it is not a case of simply owning the most expensive horse.

I didn't say that the riders come from wealthy backgrounds, or that they own the horses. I did say that the winner is the one on the best horse (not necessarily the most expensive).

I saw an interview where the old bloke who got a clean round to win the GB a Gold medal was thanking his horse's owners for not selling his horse before the Olympics to a rival team because 'they would then be the ones picking up the Gold medals'.

He went on to thank his owners for training the horse so well. I mean, these Gold medal winning horses are not even trained by the riders. Makes you wonder why the humans get a medal for just managing not to fall of a horse while it jumps over some stuff or prances about.

Where does it stop? Perhaps we should also have Olympic crufts where dogs run around an obstacle course and the person running next to it gets a Gold medal for his trouble.