Is anyone outside of Toronto even interested in these games?
For that matter, is anyone in Toronto interested?
Call me an old curmudgeon but the only thing these games represent to me is worse traffic congestion than usual (and that is saying a lot). Of course, it goes without saying that their $2.5 billion cost is a joke.
Some believe that the main purpose in having Toronto host the Pan Am Games was to demonstrate to the International Olympic Committee that the city could also be a good site for a future Olympic Games. Gawd forbid!
Yes, I was pleasantly surprised that the traffic wasn’t any worse than usual yesterday.
I thought about watching some events, but I never got around to buying any tickets. I was a bit reluctant to buy a ticket to watch volleyball (say) and then finding out that it was Peru vs. Dominica (no offense to Peruvian and Dominican volleyball teams).
I’m only 4 hours from Toronto and put me in the group that thought the Pan Am games no longer occurred. I watched them on TV in the late 80’s or early 90’s, but I thought they had died.
Wasting billions of dollars to host a useless event in Toronto? That’s a first! Now for nostalgia’s sake let’s blockade a bunch of streets and arrest a few thousand people.
Seriously though… if it weren’t for this guy I never would have even known it was happening.
Seriously? Is that even enforceable (especially if the site doing the linking is outside of Canada)? Regardless, it sounds like a good way to prevent free publicity (not to mention that it’s quite assholish).
I have a feeling the IOC does the same thing with the Rio 2016 site. It’s not aimed at the casual fans posting Facebook links; it’s aimed at companies with sponsors of products that are not official PAG sponsors linking from their websites.
Meanwhile, while USA’s Olympics and World Championships rosters are filled with NBA players, the only NBA player on the PAG roster is Ryan Hollins, who played 46 games (9 as a starter) for the Kings last season, although there’s talk that the Clippers want him back.
Yes, I think you are right about that. But, if that’s the case, then what should be banned is not the presence of a simple link. After all, that’s just equivalent to saying, ‘look [HERE](http://Pan Am site) if you want to visit the Pan Am site’.
No, what should be prohibited is a site saying something along the lines of, ‘Hey, check out [the Pan Am site](http://Pan Am site) and see how many athletes are using our track shoes’.
The Pan Am people took the lazy way and banned all links.
In any case, can it ever be a tort simply to link to a publicly available web site? (Maybe I’ll ask in GQ).
I had no idea that they were on until I was watching the start of the Pirates game tonight and saw that the USA had gotten a gold medal in dressage and qualification to Rio. Not to be dismissive of the athletes, but does this event even matter?
I’d say that qualifying for Rio in anything definitely matters - especially to the athletes.
As for the event itself, if it was up to me, I’d get rid of it as a separate discipline and just have it in eventing (which I would limit to dressage and stadium jumping - cross-country is just too dangerous for the horses and the riders).
Also, it appears that our women’s gymnastics program sent a “B” team like it always does (the oldest girl - and I mean “girl” - is 17). I remember a time when it pretty much had to, as the Pan-American Games used a different, easier, set of compulsory routines, and the top gymnasts didn’t want to disrupt their training having to learn a separate set of routines they would use once, but compulsories no longer exist.
Were professional-grade still cameras banned? The list I saw said that professional-grade video cameras were banned, but didn’t mention still cameras. However, it did say “professional-grade lenses” without making it clear if those applied to still cameras as well as video cameras, and I am under the impression that the lens is pretty much what makes a still camera “professional-grade.”
Totally agree. Frankly I’m getting a little jaded by the Olympics, too, sick of Toronto’s pretentiousness, and really and truly sick of its traffic. So you can just imagine. Fortunately I hardly ever go there except for the occasional fling of superbly pretentious shopping or dining out.
There’s not much distinction between “still” and “video” when you consider that many professional-grade SLRs are capable of high quality HD video. In fact to the point that some Canon professional SLRs (and possibly other makes, too) have been equipped with special mounts and used in theatrical cinematography.
It’s possible that the thinking is along the lines of, “North America hasn’t hosted a summer Olympics since 1996, so unless you want them in Africa, it’s North America’s ‘turn’ in 2024, so the choices are:
(a) “Oh, dear God, don’t tell me we have to give it to the USA”
(b) Taking a chance with, say, Mexico or Cuba;
(c) Canada.”
There’s no significant difference between the two. Ever see the commercials that pop up during, or right before, summer Olympics, where non-official companies (e.g. American Express, Converse) show athletes in Olympic events and mention the host city and things like “gold medals,” but just don’t use the 8-letter O-word?
UPDATE: The ban on links has been removed - now it is just a ban on “the use of, or embedding of, content” from the website.
As you might imagine, I took it as professional grade still camera’s after I seen the part about the lens, so not so much joy in bringing the 5D with the fifty mil lens on it, and the 600 mil lens in the bag.
I would have been fine with restricted access to the athletes pavillions , but no way spectators should not have been allowed to photograph anything on the field, unless someone sold exclusive rights away to some third party.
Sides, all I really wanted to watch were the equestrian events, dont really get a lot of venues that do English style horsey stuff around here.
Anybody else watching the ESPN2 daily coverage? Can it be any more painfully obvious that the main commentator, when he’s doing the “minor events” recap at the end, is just watching the video and trying to ad lib from it? Is it that hard to prepare something for the teleprompter?
And if you think he’s bad, then you should listen to the wrestling commentator (although he might be from CBC or whoever is covering the event in Canada); either he has little idea as to what’s happening, or he’s a former wrestler himself who has little business being in front of a camera.
However, I will give credit to the ESPN2 coverage for one thing; for the first time that I can remember, a USA commentator pointed out that pretty much every country outside of the USA “ranks” countries by gold medals and not total medals. I might start believing that silver and bronze medals count the same as golds when people stop complaining about what happened to the 1972 USA men’s basketball team, Roy Jones Jr., and Evander Holyfield.
