They absolutely stop to pee.
http://www.sbs.com.au/cyclingcentral/news/34389/riders-warned-about-nature-breaks
If you want to win a bike race you need to hydrate properly and if you do that there will be excess fluid in the system.
The lights signify that something happened. It’s still up to the referee to judge who had right of way, if the touch was valid, etc.
I vaguely remember at some Olympics in the past one team member said she was hurt and could not compete in the individual all-around. The presumption was that this was to benefit her teammate who was overall better, but fucked something up in the team competition and would not qualify unless someone else on her team pulled out.
It is also important to mention that this is probably driven and trained by the coaches. If there is a perceived psychological advantage that can be manipulated into better winning chances, then the coaches will exploit it. I think it is annoying as all hell, personally.
I had a tennis coach that expect us to complain and argue with line judges over line calls, because it was so prevalent at the time (e.g. John Mcenroe) and thought it would coerce favorable calls over time. I hated that we were being forced to be bratty temper-tantrum players, poor sportsmanship IMO. Excessive exuberance is just the flip side of excessive complaint.
More questions:
Where do the referees from Olympic sports like soccer, tennis, and basketball come from? I’m sure they don’t just have those guys in cryo storage and thaw them out every 4 years. They’d have to come from existing leagues right? But I don’t ever see an NBA ref in the Olympics, which is weird considering that the NBA is the most competitive basketball league.
How much control does a host city get with things like the Opening and Closing Ceremonies and event stadiums? Britain this year chose 7 “final” torchbearers, did they have to get clearance for that first? What if they wanted to change the marathon and make it all uphill, could they pick a path like that? Or if they wanted to do basketball outdoors? Its not unprecedented, I remember decades ago the 10 meter platform diving was held outdoors so it doesn’t seem like there’s a rule against it
The host city has complete control over all that, except that there are some items the IOC requires. They require certain things to be part of the ceremonies, such as the raising of the Olympic flag and the playing of the Olympic Hymn; the lighting of the torch, and things like that. How the torch is lit, and who does it, is totally up to the host city.
The IOC also requires the host city to abide by the rules set by the individual sports. Each sport has its own rules about how it is to be contested, which may include things like what kind of stadium or arena it needs, or what kind of course it must be run on (in the case of the marathon). In most cases there is a lot of leeway for the host city.
How do referees/officials communicate with the athletes? Odds are they come from different countries with different languages. Is everyone expected to know English or some other common language?
Each sport is governed by an international organization (for example, FIBA for basketball), which, among other things, maintains a list of qualified officials for international competitions. They decide who the officials and judges are at major events like the Olympics. This is why, for example, all volleyball officials wear shirts that say “FIVB”.
Where do you think officials in soccer’s World Cup come from?
The events themselves are overseen by the aforementioned international organizations for each sport. The IOC Constitution probably has some rules about how the opening and closing ceremonies are to be conducted, but after that, the organizers are allowed to do pretty much whatever they want.
For example, at the closing ceremony, once the torch is out and the IOC President declares the games “officially” closed, technically it’s no longer the Olympics any more.
I can think of two things; they might be checking for illegal starts, and they could also be holding the lap counter signs for the longer races.
There are also two judges on one side of the pool; usually, one stands at the 15m “hash mark” and the other closer to the end of the pool. then they start walking towards the other end with the second judge stopping at the other 15m line. They are watching for illegal strokes and to make sure that the swimmers do not travel more than 15m underwater in most of the events.
Yes, unless the athlete is injured, and yes, there has been at least one instance where a gymnast “suddenly became injured” so an otherwise-eliminated gymnast from that country would now be eligible to continue.
In most sports there’s not a lot of communication that needs to happen between the officials and the athletes. Standard things that are part of the normal play of the game, like whether a ball was “in” or “out”, are usually handled by hand signals, whistles, or other non-verbal devices.
In the rare case that there has to be a real conversation it is usually in English but there are interpretors available if needed.
Olympic soccer refs are FIFA refs.
I too am curious what language a Egyptian ref uses when talking to a German and Polish player.
Hijack
Can we use this thread for random (and silly) Olympic Questions?
Watching the Mens Gymnastics, why do they wear pants for some events and shorts for others (Floor and Vault).
I am no expert, but I would think shorts would be preferred garb in the Parallel Bars and, Pommel Horse. Rings and Horizontal Bar, I don’t think it would make much difference.
It’s supposed to be the rule but it has been “broken” several times in at least onenotable case. with a fake injury.
As far as the men’s outfits go, I always assumed that they wore the long pants because it created a longer straighter line for those events that are judged mainly on how well you keep your legs straight and together and shorts only for the ones that require significant running where they need to move more freely.
A couple questions after last night:
Seriously, IOC? You couldn’t come up with a better system for gymnastics ruling challenges than wads of cash? That article captures the silliness of such a system, so I’m wondering if its a gymnastics-only blunder or if other sports have similarly weird challenges.
And speaking of that nonsense, everyone, I mean EVERYONE could see that the Japanese guy pretty much fell off the pommel horse. How can they award him points for that??
I’m just going to ask this next question straight up. I think that the general consensus is that men’s and women’s gymnastics events are different due to differences in upper body strength. No rings and parallel bars for women, for instance. But the balance beam, is it not a men’s event because of balls? As in, “oh crap that guy just landed on his balls omg there’s blood everywhere”?
Ok, real question now. Why do women volleyball players wear shin guards and men’s don’t? And why do the women even wear shin guards in the first place? I’ve watched a lot of volleyball and their shins don’t ever seem to be in much danger
Well, the article mentions a sum of money needing to be exchanged for an appeal in boxing, and I read this morning about an appeal in women’s epee fencing that involved a wad of cash, too. So it seems to be an Olympic rule, for some reason.
I think the gymnastics scoring system is better in that there’s less subjectivity…but now it’s almost all tumbling. The trickier your moves are, the higher the score. The more flips you put into a 90 second floor routine, the higher the score. It’s not as graceful and could end up being more dangerous to the gymnasts. But the idea is also to not penalize people for doing more difficult stunts.
As far as the balance beam goes…I think it’s just because it’s also considered more of a ‘female’ sport. If gymnastics were all about risk of injury, girls wouldn’t be doing backflips on balance beams. You could break your neck. While having balls may make your technique different (think of straddling the beam, I guess), it’s not impossible. I’d wager it’s easier to wreck the family jewels on the pommel horse!
Still, when I see girls on the balance beam all I can think of is their poor little vaginas in harm’s way. That’s the exercise that gets me peeking from behind my fingers! That’s a 10cm wide block of ouch for you to be landing on.
The boys at the gym down the street where my son is attending do the balance beam, but they’re boys. They don’t have huge upper body mass like men do. I think it’s also why women don’t do the pommel bars. They’re built differently and build muscle differently.
Traditionally, women’s gymnastics was more ‘grace’ and ‘dance’ and men’s was more ‘tumbling’ and ‘strength’. Not so much now. I’m glad that women are doing death-defying backflips on balance beams and all that, but the floor routines are awkward.
So what the hey happened last night during the mens gymnastic team competition? NBC quit using graphics towards the end and we could hear nothing over the cheering of the crowd. We were never shown the score of the last British competitor nor were we show the overall final score.
My (limited) understanding from the highlights is that the Chinese were well ahead in first place, but it was very close for the next three positions between Japan, GB, and Ukraine. Japan had a slender lead, which they lost when one of their team messed up his dismount from the pommel horse. This left GB in 2nd, Ukraine 3rd, and Japan 4th, after all the scores were in - hence all the cheering in the stadium, GB had not won a team gymnastics medal of any kind in the Olympics since 1912, and since the Chinese were known to be basically unbeatable, silver was a great achievement. Then the Japanese team appealed that their pommel horse competitor had been marked down unfairly. The gist I got from the commentator was that there was no way he should be awarded the points for difficulty (since he stuffed it up), but he should have been awarded points for a dismount as he did at least land on his feet - or something like that. Japan were duly (re-)awarded sufficient points to give them silver, leaving GB with bronze and poor Ukraine out of the medals.
What did I miss?
GB hadn’t won a medal in men’s gymnastics as a team in a 100 years. They typically suck in individuals as well. 
My understanding of the dismount call was that there was argument if what the guy did during the dismount counted as a handstand or not.
I’m making up numbers here because I don’t know the exact values, but gymnastics takes the value of the difficulty of the routine as the starting point, and then subtracts points for mistakes.
So, let’s say that there’s a .2 deduction on the dismount because he stumbled. That’s there regardless. But let’s say a handstand adds .5 to the overall difficulty of the routine. And maybe it’s a .3 deduction for messing up a handstand.
So going into the dismount he’s at maybe 14 points. We know he stumbled at the end, so 13.8. If he is judged to have done a handstand and had a problem, that adds .5 - .3 which is .2, so he ends up with a 14. But if he is judged to have messed up the handstand so badly that it doesn’t even count as a handstand, he stays at a 13.8.
I assume that the money is there to attempt to stop frivolous challenges. I can’t recall hearing that there was such a problem, but that’s the usual rationale for such things (it was mentioned that the teams get the money back if they appeal is accepted–my impression was that they meant it’s refunded regardless of the final result of the appeal, it just has to be deemed worthy of the judges taking another look)