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

chewmylegoff

RenovationMan wrote: »

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.

it's not just the equipment though - it's the fact that the athletes can train full time and have a massive coaching, technical and medical/physio team to assist them, and world class facilities to train in.

there is a reason we have gone from winning no cycling medals to completely dominating the sport for two olympics in a row and it's because we are spending so much money on it. more than we spent on equestrian disciplines (although personally i would have preferred for the £13 million splurged on that to be spent on cycling as well).

http://www.uksport.gov.uk/sport/summer/

http://www.uksport.gov.uk/pages/historical-funding-figures-olympic/

RenovationMan

chewmylegoff wrote: »

it's not just the equipment though - it's the fact that the athletes can train full time and have a massive coaching, technical and medical/physio team to assist them, and world class facilities to train in.

there is a reason we have gone from winning no cycling medals to completely dominating the sport for two olympics in a row and it's because we are spending so much money on it. more than we spent on equestrian disciplines (although personally i would have preferred for the £13 million splurged on that to be spent on cycling as well).

http://www.uksport.gov.uk/sport/summer/

So if we are ruling out the equipment then we are left with the athletes and their training. At least the result is then based on human endeavour rather than an animal's endeavour.

Plus you can still get this: http://www.kyivpost.com/content/sport/cyclist-without-a-team-in-spotlight-at-velodrome-311079.html

chewmylegoff

RenovationMan wrote: »

So if we are ruling out the equipment then we are left with the athletes and their training. At least the result is then based on human endeavour rather than an animal's endeavour.

true, but then your problem is really with the horse rather than the elitism. personally if we're going to allow competitive horse riding to be carried on as a sport, i don't see why it can't be in the olympics. i found it better to watch than women's 10m air pistol shooting, judo or greco roman wrestling.

Plus you can still get this: http://www.kyivpost.com/content/sport/cyclist-without-a-team-in-spotlight-at-velodrome-311079.html

yeah, he came 4th. we'll never know where the british track cyclists would have been if they had had the same resources at their disposal, but i doubt we would have swept the board as we did.

RenovationMan

chewmylegoff wrote: »

true, but then your problem is really with the horse rather than the elitism. personally if we're going to allow competitive horse riding to be carried on as a sport, i don't see why it can't be in the olympics. i found it better to watch than women's 10m air pistol shooting, judo or greco roman wrestling.

Nope, the issue is that the horse is the one doing the winning and the horse costs millions which means the sport is elitist. They go hand in hand.

I'd also prefer to watch horses rather than pistol shooting, wrestling and judo. I also like watching those police dogs run over obstacle courses and dolphins jump through hoops and killer whales carry people on their backs, but I don't think these animals should be in the Olympics either. Though a triathlon consisting of riding 2k down the Thames on the backs of killer whales, a 5k elephant ride followed by a £10k ostirch ride would be pretty damned spectacular!

chewmylegoff

RenovationMan wrote: »

Nope, the issue is that the horse is the one doing the winning and the horse costs millions which means the sport is elitist. They go hand in hand.

well if to win a sport you need to spend a few million on a horse, why is that more elitist than needing to build a velodrome and hire a team of people to play with stuff in a windtunnel all day. you're just spending the money in a different way in order to obtain a competitive advantage over everyone else. you might as well say that swimming is elitist because there are many countries who cannot afford to build a 50m olympic swimming pool. if we ban everything that is potentially elitist then you are left with running different distances on a dirt track (perhap jumping over logs) and possibly throwing rocks and sticks.

plus i don't think it's quite as simple as just climbing on the best horse and letting it ride you to victory. presumably you need to be pretty good at it, and to train hard, otherwise jordan would have succeeded in her bid to compete on the olympics equestrian team as i expect she has more money than nick skelton.

i am happy to see police dogs and killer whales in the olympics, especially if it means they drop golf from the next olympics.

Jennifer_Jane

RenovationMan wrote: »

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.

Haha. So you think that if I get on one of those shiny horses I could win a gold medal at the Olympics. More like, the horse would say 'Not today thank you and have bucked me off in 2 seconds' and be back in his stable before I got up - and actually I can do figures of eight changing the horse's lead leg. But there's no way I would know how to start doing piaffes, etc, let alone have sufficient rapport with it.

(PS Nick Skelton is 54, he is NOT old!)

RenovationMan

Jennifer_Jane wrote: »

Haha. So you think that if I get on one of those shiny horses I could win a gold medal at the Olympics. More like, the horse would say 'Not today thank you and have bucked me off in 2 seconds' and be back in his stable before I got up - and actually I can do figures of eight changing the horse's lead leg. But there's no way I would know how to start doing piaffes, etc, let alone have sufficient rapport with it.

(PS Nick Skelton is 54, he is NOT old!)

Er, no. Nick Skelton said that one of his rivals could have got on one of those shiny horses and won a Gold medal. He didn't mention you in his interview, so I'm assuming he didn't view you as one of his rivals.

RenovationMan

chewmylegoff wrote: »

i am happy to see police dogs and killer whales in the olympics, especially if it means they drop golf from the next olympics.

Same here. As well as not believing that animals should be in the Olympics I also don't believe that sports such as Football, Tennis and Golf which already have their own major worldwide tournaments need to be on there either.

The olympics should be the ultimate tournament for a particular sport, how many people would rather that their country won the Olympics rather than the World cup (or even the European Championships)?

RenovationMan

LOL. The BBC just introduced this afternoons Olympic events. "Coming up we have some kicking in taekwon-do, some crashes in BMX and some dancing horses".

Says it all really. :rotfl:

ruggedtoast

How about they just have a pool of horses and everyone is assigned a random horse?