The men were playing best of three sets - “The event will be best of three sets, except for the final which will be best of five sets.”
The volleyball player with the off-color shirt is called the libero. I just wiki’d it this weekend – apparently the position was created in the international game in '99, and they don’t have to conform to the rotation plan for substitutions. I don’t know the exact rules.
–Cliffy
I was surprised by how chunky the women’s water polo members were. Most were built like offensive linemen. Not what I would expect from a sport where they have to swim all the time.
The olympics have taught me that running, flipping and throwing things is important. We have sports that combine running and flipping, and running and throwing. Why do we not have sports that combine flipping and throwing?
They are a defensive-only position (back row). As you mention, they are “free” substitutions (there is a limit to how many other subs can be done per set), in practice, they take the place of the middle blocker when they rotate into the back court, as they are traditionally the worst defenders.
They do not serve*. They can set, however, if they are in front of the 3-meter line, they cannot set with their hands, they have to bump-set (where you clasp your hands together and bump it up with your arms).
Essentially it is a specialized defender designed to increase the chances of the receiving team being able to keep the ball in play. I believe they reduced the number of allowed team substitutions around the same time, as teams were just subbing in dedicated defensive specialists in for the middle blockers anyway.
*NCAA Women’s Volleyball rules are an exception, they do allow the libero to serve
Part of that is because when heats are seeded by time, the slowest qualifiers get lanes 1 and 8/9.
Yuck. Over-specialization strikes again.
Since when are volleyball players allowed to kick the ball? I just saw a replay of a set off of a kick.
As far as I know it’s always been allowed. You just don’t see it very often because it’s rarely advantageous.
Here’s the relevant rule:
Lane 1 exists for when you want to have nine runners in a race. At least one of the 100m heats had nine runners.
As to why they don’t use it for most events, it’s probably because most tracks only have eight lanes, so they set up the events so the finals that are run at least partly in lanes (i.e. every race of 800m or less, plus all of the relays) have eight competitors. Lane 1 is the hardest to run in as it has the tightest turns, which is the most likely reason why they don’t use it.
(No, that doesn’t answer why they use 2-9 instead of 1-8 in the 100 meters, now does it?)
Not trying to start an argument, but… why yuck? Presumably the people in charge of volleyball thought it made the game better to have slightly different rules for one of the players on the field, just as there are in (for instance) Soccer and Football. And it means that a player who is very very skilled but short has a better chance of being able to compete at a high level, which seems like a good thing to me.
I was in a volleyball summer league about 20 years ago. We definitely weren’t allowed to touch the ball below the waist. I just googled it and there appear to be different rules. Of course when I played, we could also only score points on our own team’s serve.
Men’s cycling sprint is really odd. Before the event starts, the guys’ are perched on a bike like some kind of vulture while another man stands uncomfortably close to him. Why doesn’t the guy just stand next to his bike and get on when the race starts?
Same sports: what’s the deal with the slow as hell first lap? Why aren’t they sprinting right at the start?
Wiki explains the tactics of sprinting in a velodrome.
The guy standing behind each bike is holding it and the rider who is clipped into both pedal. Makes for a faster and more stable start. Track bikes are fixed gear(single speed) and geared to hit as high as 50 mph. Really rough and unstable to jump on and clip in on a steeply banked surface.
Why did the British cyclist have to beat the French one twice to win the gold? It was not described (on NBC) as best-of-three; it seemed to be two races and the Brit had to win both.
And in the first race the French guy went off first, and in the second the Brit did. Is that how it had to be, or did it just happen that way?
I didn’t see that race, but in other events NBC has been incredibly lax in laying out the sporting context as events are taking place; what score a gymnast needs, how many advance from a heat to the next round, that sort of thing. We’ll know the athlete’s hometown and see his family and coach in the stands, but if it was best-of-three I wouldn’t necessarily expect NBC to mention something so trivial.
That event is best-of-three. After drawing lots, they alternate who leads off each time.
You know, I sometimes wonder if I’m watching some completely different NBC than many other people. They did indeed say that it was best-of-three races, every track race I’ve seen they’ve mentioned “top three automatically qualify” or whatever, swimming has no automatic qualifiers, it’s all on time so they don’t know who qualifies until the final heat, but they generally gave what times they thought would be needed and if they thought a US swimmer was on the “bubble.”
A gymnastics question:
Gabby Douglas screwed up on the women’s uneven bars. She went into a handstand and was supposed to fall one way, but didn’t have momentum and went the other way. She switched hands and pretty much completed the routine. The NBC commentator said that most people wouldn’t get that but in every Olympics I’ve seen, if a gymnast misses a routine, does it out of order, or whatever, everybody knows. How? Do the judges have a sheet of paper telling them what move is coming up next? Or maybe the gymnasts do the routine so much they have it down prior to the games, but then wouldn’t that make it impossible to change on the fly? Aren’t they allowed to improvise on the spot if they want to? There must be some coordination between the gymnasts because on TV they show the max score for the routine so they seem like they already know what it is
I don’t think it’s necessarily NBC’s fault. In general, the captioning provided by OBS (the company that produces all the footage) has been a little sparse. Whether it’s sports you are familiar with, in which case there isn’t all the information that you’re used to seeing, or unfamiliar sports, in which case it can be hard to work out what the state of play is. I’m guessing that the commentators are getting less information than they would if it were their own company doing the production.
The BBC commentators have had the same problem on occasion, notably in some of the road cycle races, but in other cases too - I was watching show jumping events and sailing events other day, and there were far too few updates about the teams’ standings. It was difficult to know if you were watching a competitor who was vying for the overall lead, or a complete outsider.