Korea made that 10th end a lot more interesting than it ever should have been, but they hold off Canada and score a huge upset.
What a tremendous pairs figure skating competition. 0.5 points between gold and silver, and a world record set on free skate points.
This might change your mind.
I keep waiting for him whip out a puppet and hypnotize Lipinski.
Bode Miller is just horrible as a commentator. It’s either condescension or dismisive or about him and just monotone dull.
No excitement for other competitors or what is happening in front of us.
The compressed big mountain schedule makes the go position tactics important. For the courses there seams to be a fine line between ‘ski perfect but risk time and ’ go for it but risk error with minimal time to make it up’. It doesn’t seam to favour either side so I think that makes it a good course.
At least performance is not due to bad course management, for sure wind is a factor, but it always is.
For the skating I think the commentary has a good balance, they shut up when it needs it and provide the right level of input. For sure Tara and Johnny have the bling headsets and fashion statements to be made, it looks fun. They express excitement and a good level of compassion .
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Oh god yes, Bode needs to get outta there. The men’s free skate was great tonight, I thought Nathan redeemed himself nicely. Too bad it wasnt enough for a medal. Rippon, as much as I like him, doesn’t have the quads to be a medal threat. He has nothing to be ashamed of, though.
No. The curler has to pay attention to the ever changing condition of the ice. Big difference between the ice that has not had a stone go over it and ice that has had several. Then there is the right amount of spin to put on it and the communication with the sweepers. Curling is fascinating if you learn a bit about it.
1,000%. They have ruined it with these rules. If the 2002 scandals mean that they can’t weight subjective elements like artistry very high, I see another obvious solution: massively increase the penalties for falling or even for not landing jumps cleanly. The only time we should see skaters putting jumps in their routines that they have a high probability of messing up somehow, is when they are way behind in points and need to roll the dice to have a chance to catch up. But the medalists, especially the gold, should have no falls and very few mistakes, and smoothly executed, pleasingly choreographed routines.
No routine with a fall should score higher than Rippon’s, no matter how many quad jumps it contains. That’s a travesty.
You’d think so, but no.
Yes, there’s more to it than just the arm. That said, I did have a pretty good game this week.
The Canadian women are 0-3? I did not see that coming.
I’m sure it happens in other sports, but this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this in XC skiing:
(winners wait for everyone to finish race)
Brian
And now, in men’s hockey, the OAR is effectively interfering with team USA’s quest for Olympic gold; 2-0 in the second period.
Bode is a dunce.
Yay! Ski-jumping gold for the Pole on the big hill, after a somewhat disappointing result on the small hill. Unfortunately, nobody seemed to be showing here on any of the four or however many there are cable stations carrying the Olympics. Harumph. (I was able to watch the small hill live last week.) Had to watch the results come in as scores on the webpage.
I thought the trouble was that he kept spending the whole top portion of a run saying things that should be said about the skier before she even starts down the hill. Then, instead of giving us insight as to what is actually happening on the run, we’re left wondering why skiers were under time on the upper portion of the course, and over the total time at the finish line. Funny that a skier who was hell-bent-for-leather on the slopes is so monotonously calm in his commentary.
This misses an important point: what if what Mr. Rippon is trying is simply so simple, that it’s not worth rewarding?
In the free skate, Adam Rippon completed not one, but TWO double-axels. A double-axel is such a timid jump, it has no place in senior mens competition, unless you intend to follow it up with a combination jump like a difficult triple, or a simple quad. So it’s no shock that he landed each of them; he probably was landing them from a very early age. They are scored accordingly (they get about 4 points unfactored; by comparison, the triple axel gets about 10 points and a well-done quad jump between 13 and 15 points). Mr. Rippon’s planned free-skate had only four out of 13 elements where perfect execution would produce 10 or more points; by comparison, Nathan Chen’s program had eight such elements. In short, Mr. Rippon wasn’t even trying to win.
Oh, artistry. Let’s deal with that. There are five components on which the skaters are judged that make up what we might consider the “artistry” portion of the judging. These are Skating Skills, Transitions, Performance, Composition, and Interpretation of the Music. When you wonder about all that stuff the skater is doing in between the jumps, the spins, and the footwork sequence, it’s done to score high on these components. Each gets scored between 0 and 10. In the men’s free, those get totaled, and that total gets doubled, for a max of 100. This is what Adam Rippon theoretically excels at.
Adam Rippon last night got a total of about 86 points in Components. He scored between 8.5 and 8.8 on each. By comparison, Nathan Chen scored a point higher, despite the fact he’s supposed to be relatively unartistic by comparison. The competition winner, Yuzuru Hanyu, scored 96.62 on components, with each being 9.5 to 9.75!
In short, Mr. Rippon was neither particularly athletic, nor particularly artistic. He was simply America’s anointed “sweetheart”, for no discernible reason relating to his skating.
It’s bad enough they let Russians into the Olympics.
The fact that whole TEAMS are euphemistically called “Olympic Athletes from Russia” is fucking absurd. I can see that silly phrasing if it’s just Lioudmila from Volgograd who does cross country skiing. When it’s a whole team, it’s Russia. That was not the OAR team, it was Team Russia. Let’s call it for what it is.
I really don’t think it’s unrelated to his skaring. Maybe when you look at it so technically, it doesn’t impress (and I mean to say that even the “Components” strike me as overly reductionist). But I’m reminded of studies which show that in trained orchestra players, the left side of the brain (the more analytical side) is more active when they hear classical music, whereas classical music fans who don’t play an instrument, but simply enjoy going to listen to a concert or play one at home on the stereo, are more active on the right side. Are the trained musicians actually enjoying the music more? I strongly suspect not.
But set that all aside. Let’s take your word for it that Rippon just doesn’t have what it takes to compete for a medal. I still say you should get a much, much larger deduction for falls and stumbles. Right now the main event on TV is skiing. If a skier wipes out halfway down the hill, they are going to finish with a worse time than anyone who does not fall. I mean anyone, no matter how poor their technique or how cautious their approach to each turn. Same goes for a sprinter in the Summer Games. If Usain Bolt falls, even the lumbering white guy from Latvia is going to cross the finish line before Bolt does. So make the penalty for falling fatal to yout medal chances, and the same for more than one stumble, and then let’s see what happens. Maybe it would be the same skaters medaling,but their performances would be smoother and more pleasing for audiences to watch.
I heard Johnny W. say if you have great quad and you get all the revolutions and then land on your ass, you only get deducted 1 point, and keep the difficult quad in your score. That seems kinda stupid. If the point is to be as close to perfection as you can be. A perfect Rippon skate looked better to me than someone popping off quads and not landing them.
Ah, well, they never call me for advice when the Olympic committee makes new rules. For shame!
But they (or at least NBC, who is paying much of the tab) will regret it if viewers like us lose interest.
All right, I’ve been patient enough and it’s a long weekend. Block 'o opinions time.
That “Olympic Athletes From Russia” thingy - I find the whole thing downright remarkable. Here you have this truly evil empire that for decades flat-out owned the IOC. Read up on the 60’s all the way up to '92 and you’ll find an absolutely mind-blowing level of corruption. And then it ended. It was a gradual process, of course, but however it happened (the cynic in me says that the IOC was full of Communist sympathizers who felt betrayed when the USSR fell apart), the free ride came to a halt, and from here on out Russia would have to play by the same rules as everyone else. And that’s why I have to applaud the Russians who showed up. None of their results or medals will be counted toward their nation’s stats. They’ve lost a good chunk of Rio and now all of Pyeongchang, meaning that Russia’s place on top of any all-time lists is done (and of course any requests to the IOC to combine the USSR’s totals with post-USSR Russia will be met with bitter laughs, at best). These athletes are doing it for themselves. They’re following the post-Cold War ideal of the people being the focus, not the colors. I can’t not get behind that.
Figure skating - I’ve made my position clear multiple times (i.e. don’t mind it being in but should not get the same type of award as the legitimate sports), and…honestly, now that it’s no longer a hideously corrupt nightmare, I’m cool with it. The trash has been taken out, the house has been cleaned, the broken system has been fixed. Some of you are quibbling over the scoring, but I really don’t give a damn. I’ll take a little turbulence over continuously crashing into a mountain. Figure skaters are some of the most beautiful competitive athletes in existence, and I’m glad that I now can just sit back and enjoy this beauty. Lord knows I could use some of it in my life.
Curling - It’s a weird, dumb, nitpicky, thoroughly unathletic little novelty with the pacing of a damn poker tournament and…y’know what, as long as I only have to see it once every four years, that’s perfectly fine. I think the real reason it’s so hard for traditional sports fans to get into is that it’s so intensely strategic. Attack or go for points? Where and when to put up a guard? How hard to curl? How are the ice conditions? And they have to readjust on the fly almost constantly. I’ll admit, it’s interesting to watch these mind games in real time. Won’t ever be a favorite of mine, but as Olympic sports go, I find this vastly more watchable than racewalking or Greco-Roman wrestling.
NBC’s coverage - I remember being one of the most vehement critics when they took over from CBS, squandering countless time on “human interest” crap and delaying some events by as much as an entire day. Much like the IOC, they learned. Aside from the endlessly tiresome gold obsession and one or two dimwitted hosts, I haven’t found anything to complain about, and I can’t name any discipline that’s been unfairly snubbed. (Would like to see a little more snowboarding, but that’s just me.)
Commercials - Did Visa really film one commercial for the entire fricking Olympiad?? And were they trying to find the most irritating song possible?? Ugh. Other than that, not especially irksome.
Shaun White - I seriously don’t understand why he doesn’t just come clean (if guilty) or issue a point-blank denial (if innocent). Does he really think stonewalling and playing the who-cares-about-women-anyway card is going to fly in 2018? Has he paid any attention to the news for the past year or so? The sad part is I think this really is a case of a poor dumb kid who can improve and deserves a shot at redemption, and if continues blundering like this he’s never going to get that shot.
ESPN.com coverage - Mixed bag. Nice variety of articles, but still too much homerism. “Team USA on pace for a disappointing Olympics” definitely qualifies as one of the weirdest headlines I’ve seen on that site.
Did CBS ever broadcast the Olympics in the U.S.? When I was a kid they were always on ABC, hosted by the great Jim McKay. I remember NBC making a big deal of hosting the Summer Games from Seoul in '88, and I think they’ve had all of them since then.