There is enough pressure on Canada as it is! Those stakes are simply too high.
And…that’s it!
Stephen Harper’s going to have a lot of extra beer.
It was the officials fault.
Always the same, but based on the specific sport. Olympic rules are actually set by the specific sport federation (there is no “Olympic” rules committee per se for each sport), so if the sport federation changed rules between 2010 and now, it would be different
In general, of the events that have multiple runs, it appears that ones that are judged based on speed combine scores, while ones that are judged use the best of two method.
There is snowboard slalom, which went a couple days ago. Men’s gold went to an American actually competing for Russia because there’s just not much backing in the US for the sport.
Snowboard seems to generally appeal more to the “let’s do some cool tricks” crowd than the “let’s get down the hill fast” crowd.
I’ll have to leave this one for any experts, but I’d guess that the start seems to be the most important–getting the ball rolling, so to speak. Almost any steering is bad. Aerodynamics at the Olympic level seem both important and no so important, in that pretty much all of the top teams are going to be almost identical, but it would make a huge difference compared to whatever I’d slap together in my backyard.
I have a vague recollection that one guy one year may have attempted one, but I think the quads have still mostly been the toe loops and other, easier, jumps.
Blaming the officials is a good rationalization but we all know what this is really about America. Deep, deep down you just want an excuse to keep Bieber.
Perhaps this is a topic for another thread…but officiating bias is a topic that I find fascinating. It always exists, and it doesn’t need to be explicit or intentional to affect games.
Officials in all sports routinely substitute their own “morality” for the actual facts of the game. Most officials try not to affect the outcome of a game, but by adopting that stance they do in fact affect the outcome of the game. In baseball, it’s why borderline pitches are more like to be called strikes when the count is 3-0 than when it’s 0-2. There are many analogous situations in other sports. The goal awarded to Canadian women in their prelim game against the U.S. seems to fit this scenario nicely.
There was a very interesting book that came out a few years ago called Scorecasting. The authors make a very convincing argument that officiating bias is the primary cause of home field advantage in all sports. Check out a summary here if you’re interested. Or pick up the book. It’s a great read for any sports fan.
International games certainly add a different wrinkle to the concept of officiating bias, but it’s still going to be there. When you add in the incompetence on display in yesterday’s women’s game, crazy things will happen.
Tough week for US mens and womens hockey. The Canada/Sweden game will be a great one.
This Olympics is rolling by so fast. It’s been a lot of fun.
That was pretty rude of the Canadian Men to score a goal and not let us score one. And all I ever heard was how polite they are. Bah!
Gotta love the beer fridge at Sochi’s Canada Olympic House - you need to bar-code-swipe a Canadian passport to open it.
Technical marvel. Shame it’s full of Molson Canadian.
I remember NBC describing the scoring numbers before the performances. Would it have been possible for Kim to change her degree of difficulty before or during the routine? Could she have added another jump or changed a double into a triple? If not, was she not aware of the higher potential scores of her rivals; i.e. was NBC privy to that info for the broadcast. In short, why didn’t Kim perform something more difficult?
I remember the commentator saying the German Ice Dancing pair deciding to go for a bigger element, in order to make up for a mistake earlier on. They failed the difficult trick. Also, if you don’t ‘make’ a planned triple, you just get points for a double (if landing and all are ok off course). So yeah, I guess you can change all you want (in the free program at least).
What happened to Slalom events that I remember when I was kid.
Where there was two parallel courses (skiers went down in pairs) and the gates were really close together.
Do they not do that anymore? Or does it go by another name and I have missed it completely in these olympics.
While the skaters have their routines known in advance, they are allowed to change them on the fly. (The official Sochi site lists the “expected” and “actual” jumps done by each skater.) Keep in mind there is a limit as to how many (and what kind) of jumps, jump combinations, and spins you are allowed to do in a routine.
Also, it’s not really worth replacing a jump with one that’s worth 1 point more if you’re going to fall and lose 3 or 4 points because of it.
They seem to be changing the skiing/snowboard events every other Olympic games. I can’t remember when I last saw parallel skiing for slalom, but new this year (competition is today just for you) there is parallel snowboard slalom for men and women.
I think those were professional events, and the Olympics were for amateurs. The rules on amateurism and the Olympics have changed, but the traditional skiing events still derive from those same disciplines, downhill, giant slalom, and slalom, all raced against the clock.
They’re adding more snowboarding and “freestyle skiing” events each year. I have a feeling the IOC is being, er, “asked” by NBC to do this because they figure that the way to get more people in the USA (where a large chunk of the TV money comes from) to watch is to turn it into the “X-Lympics”.
I am not a fan of parallel skiing/snowboarding events - especially if they enforce a maximum time difference for the first run in a pairing but not the second (i.e. if boarder X wins the first race by 1.7 seconds but boarder Y was 1.6 seconds faster in the second race, boarder Y wins because the first difference was reduced to 1.5). The first time snowboard giant slalom was in the Olympics, it was run the way the skiing version was run. There might be a valid reason for the change (maybe the snowboard course wears out more as the day goes on than a similar skiing course), but I haven’t heard an official one.
Just about the reverse: The IOC asked snowboarders if they wanted to be included in the Olympics because they felt the program of the Winter Games is a little thin. The main controversy was over which sports regulatory body would oversee them (e.g. set the rules). They have the opposite problem in the Summer Games where they are thinking about eliminating sports because it’s getting too big.