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

wotsthat

I was disappointed when we won the games. It wasn't the money - I just didn't think anything would be built on time, everything would be badly organised and the weather would be crap.

Apart from some mixed weather it's been great. It's peed off the media - they must be dying to get back into bad news as normal mode. I saw the first signs today - traffic chaos expected at Heathrow as the visitors leave.

Sapphire

wotsthat wrote: »

I was disappointed when we won the games. It wasn't the money - I just didn't think anything would be built on time, everything would be badly organised and the weather would be crap.

Apart from some mixed weather it's been great. It's peed off the media - they must be dying to get back into bad news as normal mode. I saw the first signs today - traffic chaos expected at Heathrow as the visitors leave.

Well, they're well and truly back to it on Channel 4 News, for example – must be the most negative, dreary news programme one can watch, but I don't have time to watch any other news programmes. Thing I'll forego watching it in future.

I too can't believe we've managed to deliver something so extraordinary in every way. :T

The only thing I didn't particularly fall for was the closing ceremony: very good lighting and fireworks, extinguishing of the torch, one or two decent peformances, e.g. Queen and Take That, but otherwise poor-quality music and confusion in the arena, with all the athletes penned into allocated spaces.

The opening ceremony, on the other hand, was a surprise. I didn't like all of it, but there were some wonderful moments.

The best thing about the games for me was the athletes themselves, delivering such gripping, compulsively watchable performances so many times. :T:T:T

Thrugelmir

homelessskilledworker wrote: »

Ok, we now have the football season just about to start, but the distaste for the mordern day game has made me feel how much am I really looking foward to it, or not.

Given that Paris St Germain are now the richest club in Europe. Is the English era of dominance of European football finally at an end........

Although neither my team or adopted town team are in the Championship this season. Looks like a real league with little to separate many teams.

Generali

wotsthat wrote: »

I was disappointed when we won the games. It wasn't the money - I just didn't think anything would be built on time, everything would be badly organised and the weather would be crap.

Apart from some mixed weather it's been great. It's peed off the media - they must be dying to get back into bad news as normal mode. I saw the first signs today - traffic chaos expected at Heathrow as the visitors leave.

According to a thing I was listening to on the World Service yesterday, at least one of the papers had an 'Olympics Chaos Correspondent' all ready to go prior to the games. Seems like he wasn't needed.

If you want to know how it has gone down in Aus, the below is yesterday's front page from the Sydney Morning Herald:

http://www.smh.com.au/olympics/news-london-2012/the-verdict-its-been-a-right-bangup-job-20120812-242we.html

London, you didn't half do a decent job. These Olympics had Sydney's vibrancy, Athens's panache, Beijing's efficiency, and added British know-how and drollery. With apologies to Sydney, they might just represent a new PB for the Olympics.


They were superbly organised. The Olympic Park's setting, in one of Britain's poorest boroughs, proved inspired. London consists of layers, new cities built on top of fallen or demolished old. Now another has been added. Some Olympic sites become wasteland after the Games. This one began as wasteland and is now full of possibilities. Derelict bits of old Stratford still poke through, without ruining the effect. It is a measure of Britain's maturity that it went to less effort to disguise its warts-and-all self for the Games than most Olympic cities do......


......The Games were preceded by the usual fatalistic anticipation of a !!!!-up. It proved groundless. Moving masses of people around a mazy city was expected to be a nightmare but London made it look effortless. Security was plentiful but low key. The army, called in to meet a shortfall, proved to be Britain's finest ambassadors.

Bear in mind, the Aussie newspapers were hoping that the organisation of the games would be a disaster before it started. They were hoping for headlines like, "Aussie Battler Wins Gold Despite Final Starting 3 Hours Late". They didn't get them

zagubov

chewmylegoff wrote: »

The media exaggeration around the subject of gene doping is a bit silly really. We are nowhere near growing designer athletes.

The first wave of gene doping will be manipulating genes which control/relate to muscle mass. When gene therapy has been successfully used to treat genetic diseases then that will be the time to start worrying about it. Some way off yet. Also muscle mass manipulation through genetics would require untargeted gene therapy to all parts of the body and would be hugely expensive and logistically difficult with current technology. (trials have been successful at increasing muscle mass in adult mice using gene therapy, but a human weighs 3,000 times more than a mouse and amount of vector you need to achieve a result, as i understand it, increases broadly expontentially with the size of the animal, so the dose would need to be 9,000,000 times what you give to a mouse which would probably just kill you).

.

Just been reading "mutants" - it described myostatin-resistent mice who are slabs of muscle. Intriguingly it doesn't relate whether humans with this mutation exist. It raises the suggestion such people might already be here but their condition isn't recognised as a problem.

I'm a mutant myself but only in the sense I've got a lock of white hair (and therefore have a tyrosinase -deficient patch of my scalp) so that doesn't exactly make me X-men material.

Kennyboy66

wotsthat wrote: »

I've been saying pretty much the same thing.

I've gone from a having a real interest in football to not giving a monkey's. I hate players doing the dying fly when an opponent blows them a kiss - it's just cheating and it's looking increasingly camp when you see how other sportsmen and women deal with problems. I'm thinking of the rugby player (Euan Thomas?) who managed to leave the field without a stretcher with one of his feet on backwards, the cyclist who got a 6" piece of wooden track through his calf, finished his ride and still made it to the olympics. I think one of the 400m runners in this years games broke his leg during his heat and still got to the end.

Another amazing story was the Judo guy from Mongolia who tore his anterior cruciate ligament in the semi final - yet still fought in the final.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/aug/06/olympic-judo-mongolian-final-injury

or how about this one from 1976

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/aug/07/olympics20082

Shun Fujimoto competed with a broken kneecap.

"As Fujimoto finished the final tumble of his floor routine, he broke his kneecap. Understandably in agony, he however decided not to tell his coach or his team-mates about his injury. "The competition was so close [Japan were battling USSR for the gold] and I didn't want the team to lose concentration worrying about me."

He took part in the pommel and rings before further damaging his knee (dislocated and torn ligaments).

I'd like it if match of the day had a "agony of the day" feature where every week they focused on 1 player rolling about then getting up again - then just had 30 secs of the 400m runner with the broken leg or the other 2 guys.

Generali

Kennyboy66 wrote: »

Another amazing story was the Judo guy from Mongolia who tore his anterior cruciate ligament in the semi final - yet still fought in the final.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/aug/06/olympic-judo-mongolian-final-injury

or how about this one from 1976

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/aug/07/olympics20082

Shun Fujimoto competed with a broken kneecap.

"As Fujimoto finished the final tumble of his floor routine, he broke his kneecap. Understandably in agony, he however decided not to tell his coach or his team-mates about his injury. "The competition was so close [Japan were battling USSR for the gold] and I didn't want the team to lose concentration worrying about me."

He took part in the pommel and rings before further damaging his knee (dislocated and torn ligaments).

That shows the difference between you and me and Them.

Eddie Merkx came 2nd in the Tour de France having been badly beaten by spectators in 1975 and also fallen from his bike and broken his cheekbone.

Trautmann(sp?) played out an FA Cup Final with a broken bone in his neck.

IIRC, Naseem Hamed(sp?) fought many times with broken bones and ligament damage to his hands.

Fast bowlers often break toes, a shin or fracture a bone in their spinal column. Then of course there was Brian Close (who to be fair got exactly what he asked for):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXsfEdJ_G5w

Younger viewers should remember that in those days the only padding a batsman wore was gloves, a box and pads. His body was protected by a shirt, his head was protected by his skull.

mystic_trev

Looks like London gets praise from everybody except the French!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19249953

Sour grapes?

20400keith

mystic_trev wrote: »

Looks like London gets praise from everybody except the French!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19249953

Sour grapes?

Would that be the same French who won 11 gold medals (34 medals in total) compared to Team GB's 29 (65 in total)?

...and remind me of the nationality of the winner of the Tour de France?

...and which nation has a Head of State who parachutes with James Bond? Cool Brittania is alive and well!

(...and I still love the image of a Monty Pythoner singing whilst surrounding by roller skating nuns in Union Jack knickers! Perfect!).