Post your Olympic gripes here.

[Meleemancer]

@Eats_Crayons

I would find it quite helpful if on the internet charts of the medal standings, you could click on the number of medals to see in which sports they’d been won.

ESPN.com’s medals table does just that, and even has individual athlete links on the country medals pages pretty often.

[antechinus]

@zamboniracer

It also seems stupid to me the way the medal count works. I know, the powers that be at the Olympics frown on official medal counts, but every newspaper has them, and IMHO they’re all wrong. They all equate a bronze with a silver with a gold, and they all equate multi person events with individual events. It seems obvious to me that winning a gold should count for more than winning a silver, and winning a silver should count for more than a bronze. It also seems silly that team event medals count the same as single person events. For instance, a 4 person relay event should count for 4 golds, 4 silvers and 4 bronzes, because that’s how many medals get handed out. Similarly, a sport like basketball, which has 12 players on a team (I think) should count for 12 of each type in the medal count.

But that’s just me. I just have to ride out one more week of this nonsense.

I didnt know what you were talking about until I saw Mind Gamers link. That is a strange way of showing the tally, sorrted by total (g+s+b) medals won.

The way it should be done is by sort gold. If tied on gold then sort secondly by silver. And so on with bronze.

As seen in this tally, which is the way I have always know it to be determined.

This shows the USA and China would be tied for first place with 23 golds each, except USA is in front on silvers. If China won one more gold then they would be in first place.

Russia are actually in 11th place, and so they should be with a lot of half-arsed bronze performances.

Makes sense to me.

[Rubystreak]

Something is very wrong with the men’s gymnastics scoring. The commentator basically threw his hands up and said, “I have no idea what they’re doing here-- they’re so screwed up that I cannot predict how they will score any given routine.” This erratic and inconsistent judging was rife in the men’s individuals, which I just finished watching. Prime example was Alexei Nemov’s routine, which seemed to me and the commentator to be fantastic except for one step on the landing, but he got a 9.7. The crowd booed for so long that the competition could not proceed. As a result, the judges rescored it up a bit, but not high enough to medal. When a crowd of spectators knows better than these judges, you’ve got a problem.

I think Paul Hamm was relieved to get only a silver because this would have been his second gold medal tainted by controversy. It’s amazing that he even got a silver, considering he couldn’t even do his routine until Alexei Nemov went out there, accepted a round of applause and asked the crowd to please stop booing. It makes the judges look like they’re favoring certain gymnasts over others (read: Americans). I’m sure Svetlana Khorkina would agree. :rolleyes:

The next gripe I have is, what happened to giving 10s? How perfect does a person have to be? I didn’t see any in diving or gymnastics. Are they no longer given? Is there some standard that no one is reaching anymore? Please someone, fight my ignorance here and tell me why no one got that Comenci/Retton-esque 10 this year.

[sturmhauke]

My gripe is having to wade through doubles table tennis to get to something I want to see. I mean, ping pong is fun and all, but who thought it would be a good idea to charge people to see four guys crammed against a little table hitting a little plastic ball around?