You misspelled Michelle Kwan. ;)
Wait! [Why would you want to leave that out?
](Las Vegas News | Breaking News & Headlines | Las Vegas Review-Journal)
I love living here!
That.
Sounds.
AWESOME!
The last Winter Games was watched by almost 200 million Americans, about 45% of whom were male. That’s at least 85-90 million men; by comparison the most watched Super Bowl of all time drew 109 million U.S. viewers of all genders.
On top of that, more men than women watch the Summer Games. Your claims here are kind of silly, really.
No sillier than comparing a 3 hour event to an event that goes on for weeks.
Maybe I’m being petty (wouldn’t be the first time), but let’s look at the highest rated TV programs in US history.
You’ll notice there are a LOT of Super Bowls in there. And the Olympics? Exactly TWO Olympic telecasts are in the top 50, and neither had much to do with sport per se. The two highest rated Olympic broadcasts were the ones involving Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding!
Ice skating AND a soap opera! Quintessential women’s programming!
100 million Americans watch every Super Bowl. 200 million Americans, including 90 million American males, watch at least SOME part of the Olympics. Heck, I’m one of them. But there are a mere handful of Olympic events most male sports fans pay attention to.
So do female viewers, by comparison, watch a great many different Olympics events?
I saw a pickup ad with a guy transporting a bull to do its studly duty to a rather nice looking cow. What could be more macho than a guy and his pickup playing wingman to a horny bull?
Okay, that one may have been an exception, but it sure was funny.
I don’t think it’s quite as gender-skewed as some of you are making out, by the way, but what’s wrong with an athletic competition geared more for a female audience? I dislike the maudlin stuff, but I watch more sports during the Olympics than the rest of the in-between time added up. What’s wrong with that?
I’m very surprised to hear short-track characterized as clutter. Could you explain your reasoning?
I just love the short track speed skating. The potential for a serious crash always makes it worthwhile watching.
The long track is sort of dull watching by comparison.
Sure, I’ll take you up on that. The Americans will win, and the Canadians will take silver. One of the Russian teams will probably take bronze though (although the French have a shot at it, as do the Italians, the 2nd Canadian team and the second Russian team).
The Americans- Davis and White have won just about every competition they’ve entered over the past couple of years, and the ones they haven’t have been won by the Canadians-Virtue and Moir. The Russians have been improving lately- they have a shot at the podium.
No defense? Not a sport.
But oh so hypnotic.
My personal definition, held for many years;
Any competition whose outcome is determined by objective fact, such as downhill skiing (determined by the final time as calculated by a clock) or weight-lifting (who lifts the most weight cleanly) is a sport.
Any competition whose outcome is determined by subjective judging (floor exercises, figure skating, diving) is not a sport.
I think it’s a silly discussion. They’re all sports as long as physical skill and competition are key aspects – and they are. For so many people, what it boils down to is that they don’t like judged sports, so they want to find some way to exclude them. Well, there are plenty of sports that I don’t particularly like either, but I still admit that they are sports.
Totally not true. In my house, I’m the Olympics fan, been watching them for over 40 years. My wife can take it or leave it.
By that definition, most boxing matches are not sports.
Speaking of which, unless they change the rules again before then, boxing at the 2016 Olympics will be judged the way professional fights are judged - with a 10-point must system that is pretty much left up to each judge to decide who won and by how much. (There was a time when Olympic boxing used a 20-point must, but they were “supposed to” be scored strictly based on how many punches landed; whoever landed the most got the 20, and you subtracted 1/3 of the difference (rounded off) from 20 to get the other boxer’s score for the round. Of course, that’s not what happened, so they switched to “punch count” systems in 1992.)
So boxing isn’t a sport.
Yup. Anything whose outcome is judged, not measured, is not a sport.
From the Sochi results
Adelina Sotnikova, 17
Kim Yuna*, 23
Carolina Kostner, 27
Gracie Gold, 18
Yulia Lipnitskaya, 15
Mao Asada, 23
Ashley Wagner, 22
Akiko Suzuki, 28
Polina Edmunds, 15
Maé-Bérénice Méité, 19
Top ten women’s skaters, 3 under 18, 7 over 18, 5 over 20. Average age, 20.7.
Even for the three Americans, only one is 15; one is 18 and the third is 22.
*Her ISU name is registered as “Yuna Kim”, and that’s how the Olympics labeled her. As a Korean, her family name is normally listed first, so that is Kim, with her given name being Yuna.
Good. Now could you tell the media to stop listing the results of the Westminster Dog Show in the sports pages?
By the way, not everything whose outcome has an objective measure is a sport (i.e. chess).