I didn’t think our side was disappointing. Far from it; from the first week’s results I expected them to finish at best a distant third. It’s even better when you consider the problems Shaun White had with the quality of the venue (I could tell it really bothered him a lot more than it should have) and a couple mercenaries we let slip through our fingers (hey, it happens). I knew Vancouver was a fluke. In the post-Cold War order, we’re up there but not quite the best. This time was no exception. Status quo.
Speaking of which, I don’t care how unofficial or scoffed at it is, we GOTTA have a point system to determine who did the best in the medal count. Hey, we’re not going to stop talking about it, so we may as will gin up something. The old Epyx model of 5 points for gold, 3 for silver, 1 for bronze is adequate, but a little too clumsy for my tastes. 3-2-1 is just a bit too NASCAR. 4-2-1 sounds the best; reward victory but don’t make it the be-all and end-all.
I’ve seen an Olympiad held in a peaceful, prosperous, quiet, mostly cheerful democracy (Canada), and I’ve seen one held in a joyless, oppressive, hopeless, trouble-ridden autocracy (China), and you know what, the further to the former you go, the better. I’m flat-out tired of terrorism scares and polluted skies and half-finished venues and sectarian violence three blocks over and frightened girls shoved onstage with guns at their backs and endless sucking up to tinpot dictators (the Vladimir Putin interview was easily the most disgusting thing I saw the entire Olympiad, and and given the roughly 400,000 “text your chant” spots, that’s saying a lot).
I’ll just lay it out right now for all time: I don’t mind Jamaica being in the Winter Olympics. They’re not trying to screw with the system, they’re giving an honest effort, and they don’t expect any favoritism. They’re legit. Just one question: Why does it have to be an outdoor sport? THAT’S what I can’t wrap my mind around. I don’t think hockey in Phoenix makes any sense either, but at least they don’t have to travel hundreds of miles just to practice. They should just drop the pretense and focus on an indoor sport where they can use their grace and athleticism, not punkish defiance. I’d totally get behind a Jamaican figure skating or curling team.
Speaking of which, I’ve watched parts of curling matches, and…it’s okay. I mean, not riveting like the NBA finals or senshuraku in a sumo tournament or anything, but it’s nice, low-key entertainment. The commentators do a great job explaining what’s happening, and yeah, it’s kinda cute that a housecleaning skill is vital to victory. Still, this is one of those things that’s only good in small doses; I’d be bored to death if I had to watch an entire tournament. Not utterly stupid and pointless, but once every four years is plenty enough for me.
Looks like we had a rare moment when women’s figure skating had a genuine controversial moment, as opposed to the usual definition of controversial re. the Olympics, which is “horrifically, nightmarishly wrong, if not outright evil”. Look…I have no idea if the cute Korean deserved it. And that’s the point. There was wiggle room. Gray area. A call that could’ve gone either way. In other words, well within the parameters of figure skating. You know what, at this point I’m out of sympathy. If you make the decision to become a figure skater, you have to accept the fact that you could get royally screwed for no good reason, and if you do, there will NEVER be the slightest recourse. End of story, period, full stop, game over, pau hana and drive safely. Getting into figure skating is a colossal, colossal gamble, and only the most naive fool would believe otherwise. So just do your best and accept whatever happens…because you have no choice. And there wasn’t even a massive screwjob this time! So she didn’t win back-to-back golds…and what, Korea’s going to fall into the ocean or something? She was great then, and she was great now, but this time around someone from the host country happened to win. This is NORMAL. Get over it.
Has there ever been a past Winter Olympiad with a tie for gold and a tie for bronze? That’s pretty wild. I was hoping it’d make more noise.
A Jamaican curling team wouldn’t necessarily train at home, either. It would cost a few bucks to build and maintain a curling facility in Jamaica, and I don’t think too many other people would be using it. China has put a national emphasis, and government support, on winning Olympic medals, including curling. Their women’s team trains in Leduc, Alberta.
As bizarre as it might sound, hockey is gaining a toehold in Jamaica. They’ve qualified for IIHF, which could have them attempting to qualify a Jamaican Olympic ice hockey team as soon as Pyongchang. They already have 20 players, a rink, and a coach, so who knows?
There is one: each gold is worth “N x N”, each silver is worth N, and each bronze is worth 1, where N is the total number of events + 1. In other words, 1 gold and 0 other medals > 0 golds and all of the silvers and bronzes.
I used to fret about medal counts as well (including things like “If a country wins 2 gold medals in an event because of a tie - case in point: the USA in the Men’s 50m Freestyle swimming in 2000 - does it count as 1 gold, 1 gold and 1 silver, or 2 gold?”, and “Should the population of the country play any part?”), until it got to the point where too many athletes were switching countries fairly arbitrarily (Russia’s two gold medalists in Sochi include one from South Korea and one from the USA who left because their own countries didn’t support them).
The only medal counts I think matter now are along the lines of Burton vs. Kessler (i.e. by snowboard brand), or Nike vs Reebok vs Adidas.
At least it beats the old days (up through 1980), where you couldn’t possibly know who was ahead (well, except maybe in pairs) until pretty much everybody was done, as each judge ranked the skaters based on their combined scores from the free skate, the short program, and the compulsory figures, so you had to know how each judge scored each skater in each round (and it was hard enough getting TV coverage to show judges’ marks for the free skate; forget about the figures).
Given the vast number of people in Toronto who are of Jamaican descent and quite often are Jamaican citizens, it would not at all surprise me if Jamaica could put out a decently skilled hockey team just by pulling players from southern Ontario.
With sufficiently loose citizenship requirements countries of all sorts could put OK teams on the ice; there’s thousands of Sri Lankan kids lacing up their skates this weekend in Canada. As a Canadian I think we should be encouraging this.
I think it would be cool. Instead of just a handful of 2 minute bobsled runs, Jamaica could have a couple of full length hockey games to televise. Very watchable stuff if you have someone to root for.
I bet it wouldn’t take very long before it’s pulling in a comparable viewership to the Usain Bolt show, or, as we call it, the Summer Olympics.
Line everybody with a medal up. Sort them into 3 groups - gold, silver and bronze. Count off. That is how many of each medal we happen to have. It is not rocket science. :smack:
What he’s describing is a way of relative weighting between gold, silver, and bronze - and in fact, the way that most media outlets use. A single gold is worth more than any number of silver, and a single silver is worth more than any number of bronze. So nations are ranked in the medal count by number of gold won, with ties broken by number of silvers, and remaining ties broken by number of bronze.
I really enjoyed Pleshenko’s performance. It sucks that injury prevented him competing in the Men’s program. He kicked ass all over the team competition, gave a clinic on skating. I loved it, one interview the interviewer asked him “So what do you say to all your critics that didn’t think you could come and be competitive, you are too old and injured?” His reply: “Thank you.”
The commentators were discussing this, and talking about “worker’s ice” and “glider’s ice”. Apparently some ice you go a long way, and some ice you don’t go a far. I guess it comes down to air thickness? That was never explained what made worker’s ice vs glider’s ice. But it was clear watching the skaters that the Americans were relying more on gliding, with slow stroke tempos. Even in the second week of long track, with the old suits. They didn’t make an adaptation for the ice not being glider’s ice, which is where they trained and excelled. You could see it watching the racers and their stroke tempo.
I guess it’s all about how you condition and train and it’s difficult to change your stroke tempo. I could see how it affects your endurance and stamina.
I don’t recall seeing any judging problems with ice dance scoring. The commentators were pretty good and describing why teams were getting judged lower or higher.
dzeiger explained it pretty well: they make up a routine for a season based upon the guidelines for that season (this will be a Waltz, with a footwork sequence like this) and then they practice and drill their program, and then compete that program the whole season. So by the time the Olympics rolled around, they had been competing the same programs for months, and it’s pretty clear how people are going to do based upon past performance and general skill. The competition comes down to who is executing better and more consistently.
Asada had an uncharacteristic short program that surprisingly took her out of medal contention. That was a disaster. She showed great grace coming back to the long program and skating that well. She was awesome in that performance. At least she can end her career with a positive note, even on the heels of a disaster at the Olympics. Note she jumped 10 places from short program to long program.
What cheating? The numbers have been dissected pretty well, the NBC folks went over it prior to the long skate. Yuna Kim had a program that was about 5 points weaker than Adelina Sotnikova’s. She lost by about 5 points. Basically, it the difference was the technical i.e. level of difficulty of the program score.
Two reasons contributed. First, Yuna has typically been much further ahead at the end of the short program, so she likely didn’t feel she needed the extra jump in the long program. Second, she’s on the tail end of her career, and herself said she’s not the skater she was in Vancouver. So she backed off her technical score one notch and expected to have a solid lead and great execution, but ended up with essentially a dead even score from short program. That left her with a 5 point deficit in pre-score difficulty to overcome.
The other thing is Sotnikova’s performance to date hasn’t been that good. To win Gold, she beat her prior best score by 18 points! She basically had the two best skates of her life and delivered them when it counted. She didn’t quite have the grace and fluidity that Yuna Kim did, but the way programs are currently scored there is a lot more on technicality than measuring grace and fluidity. Grace and fluidity are artistic and subjective means of measuring, so they have been pushed down in terms of a more objective measuring system that relies on big jumps and rating the difficulty level of the elements.
Sotnikova earned the Gold, and it was as fair as skating can be. South Korea may be disappointed, but that’s the way the programs stacked up.
In theory, Kim could have added a jump or changed a jump or element to be more difficult. However, they are constrained by tight rules on how many of one type of jump they can do and how they get graded, etc. Plus, they spend lots of hours memorizing and practicing their routines to pull them off without flaws, including timing to synchronize with the music and end on time. They have an action packed 4 minutes and no dead time, so changing a jump means swapping one out, there’s not really room to insert something without deleting something else. Also, so much goes into consistency of performance, changing something up can actually throw off a routine and make you flub something else, and lose all the points you just gained.
Plus, realize that Sotnikova had the skate of her life. As I mentioned, she topped her prior best performance by 18 points. I think it was a strong gamble that she wasn’t going to pull it off that flawlessly. All it would have taken is one bobble or slip and Kim would have beat her.
As mentioned, this is set by the individual sport competition association on how they want to do rules. Consider that there are two basic types of events and thus reasons for having two runs. Precision events (i.e. timed events) are looking for consistency of performance, so they use two runs and combine the totals to show the skiier/boarder is really the fastest and bestest. Style events (i.e. judged events) are looking at risk vs. execution, so they have two runs to give two independent possibilities, in case you mess up one run.
Largely snowboard culture is the artistic and stunt sports, so they dominate.
I was paying attention trying to learn all I could about these. Technology does play a role, and that’s why the form factors have become what they have. All three sliding sports start with a traditional snow sled. They include slats to sit on and runners for the snow/ice. Take the sled and lie on your back feet first, it’s luge. Lie on it head first and it’s skeleton. Sit on it with some friends and it’s bobsled. The forms of these have adapted over time to accomodate the individual sports. Luge probably looks closest in form to that precursor sled. Skeleton is very low and the runners look different now. Bobsleds are now enclosed in an aerodynamic shell. These adaptations are pretty standard across the sports, though, so there’s not a lot of variability at competition level.
But it can make a difference. One of the commercials for this olympics was BMW pimping that they made the official 2 man bobsled designs for the US team to replace the old design that sucked.
The German sleds made weird noises when sliding, no one knows why (well, the Germans probably know, but aren’t saying).
Starts are important, because they are when you are at your slowest, before building up any momentum, so any errors or skids there eat up time. In sports where timing is measured in hundredths of a second, that matters.
I was trying to learn about steering, but those segments when athletes explained things were maddening. They never delivered what they promised.
“Tony is going to tell us how to drive a sled.”
Tony: “So this is how we start our race.”
WTF? I wanted to learn about steering, starting is pretty obvious. Anyway, the key to steering is to try to keep the runners aimed down the track and direct the sled, but don’t get off kilter and skid sideways on the runners. Also, you need to direct the line of the sled so it follows the banks and flows just right. Go to high in the bank and you don’t flow smoothly out of the turn, or in pushes you back out of the turn too far the other direction and you hit a wall. Etc.
It seems to me from what I could see, a great start gets you going and a lousy start can’t be made up, but a decent start that is not perfect can be compensated for by very clean lines/steering. The key is to keep the runners on the ice and flowing in the correct direction, not off kilter. Then speed builds up.
Realize that Solnikova’s past performance history has not quite matched her performance in this competition. In addition to limited substitutions, Yulia Lipnitskaya had been skating phenomenally. It was a huge surprise that she flubbed the women’s competition, and a huge surprise that Solnikova got a medal, nevermind gold.