That makes sense. Regular football is too brutal for a compressed schedule; players need time to recover from a game. Flag football is much less demanding, so games can be played on subsequent days.
?
What European nations are those?
Team GB finishes with one more medal than in Tokyo, but much less Gold - 14 this time, Tokyo saw us get 22. This drops us down to 7th in the table, our worst showing for a while.
On total medal count, we finished third.
USA managed to beat China into second on both ways of counting, which should cheer up the TV pundits.
Did you think the French would let the British get a lot of gold medals to take back across the Channel?
As I heard it, the U.S. and China tied in gold medals, with the U.S. getting quite a few more total medals. That number may be adjusted by one once the Jordan Chiles situation gets resolved.
Painting a picture, eh?
Here’s Barshim on the subject:
https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1144886/shared-olympic-gold-will-not-repeat
“That moment, we’ll never share that again. It was a one-time thing. Coming back from injuries and a dark place, I wanted to do something different, something with a different meaning … I’m glad it touched so many people’s hearts, but we’re sportspeople, we’re professionals, we always want to be the best, we have that fire, ‘I want to beat you, you want to beat me,’” he explained.
I’ve often wondered if the US took those pool events where artistry routine is scored by judges as seriously as swimming being a race they’d pull away from China. As it would surely be easier to do in a smaller field of nations that kind of event than for China to become competitive to the US in track and field anytime soon.
As for cricket the main issue would be the logistics. Hockey is a ball game that takes up most of the two weeks to play out and they use artificial turf to play matches in a single venue back to back. Cricket is a sport played on grass. Pitches getting rugged through wear and tear is part of what makes the sport. A single match in its shortest form can take three hours and unless the Carribbean islands decide to play under the united West Indies flag as they do in regular cricket, how many teams are going to participate?
And this is a prime example of why I find soccer out of place in the Olympics. I love the sport. But it’s a U23 event in the Olympics, not the best in the world all showing up. The best in the world just played their own competitions this summer and preparing for the new season about to begin with their clubs.
And a silver medal feels like it losing the League Cup Final - no one cares, you lost, you failed. Whereas other events a silver and bronze too are big achievements and like climbing Mount Everest.
If an olympic podium isn’t the pinnacle of your sport I don’t think it should be there.
American football is quite popular in Brazil, apparently since they got cable TV.
Just so they don’t get left out:
Cape Verde
Ivory Coast
Peru
Qatar
Singapore
Slovakia
Zambia
Refugee Olympic Team
All finished with 1 Bronze medal. But they got on the tally board, and need to be congratulated for their showing.
Need to get Darts in the games. Fat guys holding a beer need representation.
See you in LA 2028!!
You kid, but head over to the UK and catch professional darts competitions on TV some time. They go crazy for it.
The difference being, both the figure skating and gymnastics incidents have specified time limits in which something needs to be done. In figure skating, as it is a drug testing issue, it is ten years (remember, the 2004 men’s shot put result wasn’t reversed until 2011); in gymnastics, a challenge to the execution value of a routine must be presented within 60 seconds. This is what the Romanians challenged, and the CAS agreed; the USA coaches involved took too long.
If you want to remove the time limit, then make it retroactive, in which case, Mary Lou Retton’s all-around score will be reduced by 1 point for her coach being on the competing surface during her final routine, resulting in her losing that gold medal (seriously, an official noticed this at the time, but Karoyli knew full well that they weren’t going to change the result over something like that - supposedly, this played a part in the same official successfully getting a penalty called against the USA women’s gymnastics team in 1988, costing it a team bronze medal).
Olympic/“amateur” boxing has always had one very large problem: how do you score it? If you try scoring it “professionally,” politics gets involved (tell Roy Jones Jr., or any number of boxers that lost to Americans in 1984, anything else - did you know that only one American boxer lost by decision that year, and it was to Lennox Lewis?), and if you try using devices to count punches, you get judges that have no idea what they are doing costing boxers fights (case in point: Eric Griffin in 1992).
However, MMA is just asking to make this sort of thing worse. Both wrestling and judo figured out ways around the “let the judges choose a winner” problem - well, sort of, with wrestling, as if nobody scores after two minutes in freestyle, the three officials decide arbitrarily who was the “most passive,” and that wrestler has to score within 30 seconds or the opponent gets a point; once somebody has a point, it is easy to apply point-based tiebreakers.
I heard a report that was a little more detailed than that. According to that, every gymnast must file a challenge before the following gymnast’s routine is complete, and their score is posted. It’s different for the last gymnast in the competition, which Chiles was, who has only one minute. It ws suggested that this controversy may lead to that rule being changed.
Also, the U.S. team are appealing the reversal, and claiming they have video showing that they submitted their challenge within the one-minute window.
At least, that’s the last I heard on the subject. There may have been more news since then.
Apropos of nothing, if you scroll down to 39-42 on the Medals Chart, you will encounter a rare flag palindrome.
Before the Opening Ceremony of the 1936 Summer Olympics, Haiti and Liechtenstein discovered they had the same flag.
Is that like two women showing up at a party in the same dress?
And now I’m wondering about the logistics of ensuring that the flags of all of the competitor nations are at any event where there might need to be a medal ceremony, and provisions made to play the national anthems. I read someplace that in preparation for the 2012 Games in London, the London Philharmonic Orchestra recorded the anthems for over 200 countries.
And then you need to make sure you don’t mix up similar flags, like those of Indonesia and Poland. As it was, during the opening ceremonies, the Olympic flag was flown upside down.
I did a trip on a sailing ship about 20 years ago, and have kept in touch with them ever since. They were coming to Boston, and a few days before they arrived said they needed a new flag of the Cook Islands. I checked, but couldn’t find anyplace to get one on such short notice.
It’s quite possible that the organizing committee of the Olympic Games has access to better resources than I do.
The obvious suggestion is for the organizing committee to simply ask or require each country’s delegation to provide a certain number of flags of set size.
Apparently, I owe Steve Kerr an apology, because it’s now being reported that Tyrese Haliburton was nursing a secret injury during the Olympics. (Presumably the same one that ended his Eastern Conference Finals early?)