Don’t tell these guys (links to olympic aerial and big air ski jumping - for some reason I can’t embed the link right now):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPArSV8kPOk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FaLDJaNSf4
I was prepared to roll my eyes at it, but was surprised at how GOOD these young athletes were! Especially compared to my memories of kids spinning on cardboard.
I said “Looks like gymnastics just got more fun.”
And it certainly comes under the heading of Why I Watch Olympics: I want to watch someone do something I never could, and make me say "Whoa, how did they do THAT?"
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Burned out on swimming, diving and floor gymnastics. It was the perfect time for us (oldsters) to sit back and enjoy something FUN!
Yes–that! I couldn’t figure out what to search for, but that’s the kind of stuff I was thinking of.
There is a difference between judging and subjectivity. Of course there’s a human factor in officiating, but interference rules in track are pretty clearly defined. You and I could argue over the most subtle of judgments but we are not “judging” the runners on genuinely subjective things like grace or how well they incorporated music into their approach.
As Troutman points out, if anything the subjective sports have made a pretty substantive effort to becomes more objective. Gymnastics, in most events, is damned close to objective at this point.
The biggest sticking point in what sports are in or out is just room. They can only have so many sports; the number has expanded over the years but they’re reaching a limit now and are fairly parsimonious about this now. If you decide to include billiards in Brisbane in 2032 - which is no less worthy by any honest standard than ping-pong - you will almost certainly have to remove something else. There isn’t even room for every objective sport there is.
Ultimately the issue with breaking is not whether it by itself is worthy of inclusion. The issue is whether it is more worthy of inclusion than the other sports one could include. It was in the Olympics when cricket, baseball, squash, billiards, bowling, racquetball, jai-alai, extreme distance running, flag football and ultimate frisbee were not. Is that a good idea? Should squash be in instead?
I dunno what kind of break dancing some of you guys have seen that didn’t seem athletic, but every kind of breakdancing I’ve seen from the beginning onwards has seemed athletic as all hell, even the stuff on cardboard boxes. Even in my most athletic days (and I used to run track), there is no way I would be able to manage it.
I will cite the people who are really keyed into the streets, the people with their finger on the pulse of the hip hop community, the folks over at Merriam-Webster.
to dance in a hip-hop style by performing a series of acrobatic moves that often involve touching various parts of the body (such as the back or head) to the ground
They specifically call out “acrobatic moves” as one of the defining traits.
Or those sick b-boys and b-girls over at the Oxford English Dictionary.
An energetic style of solo street dancing, typically performed to hip-hop music, and characterized by stylized footwork and acrobatic movements such as head and body spinning.
Yep. I love watching that in Winter Games. Flying through the air + spinning upside-down = appointment TV.
My wife said breaking was the result of someone saying, “What would make rhythmic gymnastics cool?”
So far as I know, there’s no serious push to make ultramarathoning an Olympic event. Which is understandable, if a shame for fans like me. It would have been especially appropriate for the Paris Games, as one of the centers of international trailrunning is the French Alpine town of Chamonix, which hosts every August a series of races that culminate in the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc (UTMB), a 100+ mile trail race that is the sport’s equivalent of Wimbledon or the Grand Prix de Monaco. Ultramarathoning is very widely International - Kuenzing Lhamo, the Bhutanese runner who went viral for refusing to quit the Olympic women’s marathon, despite being dead last - is an ultrarunner. There are elite runners from all over the world, including two Americans who are among the very best ever, Jim Walmsley and Courtney Dauwalter (I might have mentioned Courtney a few times on the board previously…)
However, ultramarathoning doesn’t have an international governing body, like FIFA or World Athletics or the International Gymnastics Federation, and that’s a prerequisite for inclusion in the Games. More damningly, trail ultras are very TV-unfriendly - even for the elites, a 14 to 20 hour race is typical. And it’s unusual to get more than one runner in a shot at a time, save in the early miles. Typically, ultras are covered by reporting on runners coming in or leaving aide stations, with occasional short shots of steadicam operators following runners a few hundred meters down a trail. It’s not a sport that lends itself to spectators or televisible drama, which is most likely why we’ll never see it in the Olympics.
Yeah… I’m gonna go ahead and cancel those tickets for Hammer Toss and Weightlifting, Umkay?
I thought that sentence was going to a different place.
Well, as a curler who’s always said it’s one of the worst spectator sports ever made, I was amazed at the Olympic coverage.
I can’t tell you how many times during the winter of '22 I walked into a bar to see the locals cheering, with the TVs full of a top-down “drone shot” of 47-lb rocks crashing into each other.
So I keep thinking “Maybe they can make cricket or lacrosse or squash fascinating…”
The Olympics needs to get back to it’s roots: competition on neutral ground in the Aegean, and the contestants naked, as the gods intended.
It’s not though. It actually works really well on TV. (Much, much better than live.) On TV you get the overhead shot. It’s relatively easy for a newbie to begin to grasp the strategy of it and see it unfold.
I’ve suggested earlier in the thread that we have an Artistic Olympics.
I relish watching sport - but not events where we have no idea who has won until a panel of judges award e.g. style marks.
But we already have unstyled events where we have to wait for instant reply and computer analysis to determine the winner. To some degree, the pause increases the excitement and audience involvement. It’s fun to chat about who we each thought won the event, using our own eyes to judge the results.
I don’t see a problem with anybody happening to prefer watching any particular style(s) of sporting event rather than any other.
I do think there’s a bit of a problem with people using arbitrary criteria to try to gatekeep which events get to be called “sport”. There is no such definition that can really be applied consistently and unambiguously across the whole universe of “sport” activities.
I move that we just fall back on calling all of them, from NFL games to ice dancing, “athletic entertainment performances”. All the participants are demonstrating athletic talent and training in the performance of physically challenging maneuvers, in accordance with some event-specific ruleset, for the entertainment of an audience.
Whether the genre is a form of adversarial teamwork improv with no predetermined outcome, like a football game, or a precisely choreographed and rehearsed solo routine, like ice dancing, it’s all athletic entertainment performance.
I was disturbed that I had watched enough diving events in this Olympics that it started to make sense.
“Ooh, that guy splashed too much, that’s going to cost him.”
I don’t want that knowledge.
Actually, I appreciated the explanations of how the various events, like diving, were judged so I could see for myself what a gold-medal performance looked like compared to a losing one.
Curling likely does very well in countries that already watch sports like Lawn Bowls and Snooker.
“Oh, Reginald? I DISAGREE!”
We’ve watched the diving events for many Olympics. I can usually beat the commentator with “that dive was over” or “she was way under.” If you watch enough, you develop an eye.