Ha! Nice. Hard to argue against the iconic Agony of Defeat video. But, come on, look how super slow he was moving! It looks to me like he’s fine, and google does confirm he “wasn’t seriously injured.” I think I’ve crashed almost that hard a few times, though my biggest crashes were thankfully into thick powder, not on ice like it appears in the video.
The sheer speed of the downhill is what makes it impressive, plus the stamina to go the whole way. Here’s a run with an impressive recovery; compare the speed of his mistake with the speed of the Agony of Defeat guy.
Looks to me like he might be okay because of the remarkable recovery, but in my imagination the worst possible downhill crash would be way worse than the worst possible ski jump crash.
Get in your car and drive 12 mph. Doesn’t seem all that fast, does it?
Now get out and run a mile at that speed; that will take you, assuming you’re able to, 5 minutes.
Now do it again. Twenty-five more times.
You ran it in 2:11:00! Congratulatons! You’re only two minutes slower than Olympic marathon trials winner Galen Rupp!
I know intellectually that other Olympians are equally proficient at their sports. But I’ve run marathons, and I know how grindingly hard they are, even at my 4+ hour pace. I can’t imagine running 26 miles at a pace twice as fast as the hardest sprint I’ve ever managed.
Ski flying is on a 120m hill, and it’s not an Olympic event. Olympic jumps are at 70m and 90m; normal and large in the vernacular of the sport.
Actually, you couldn’t. It’s really steep and really hard snow. I’m a pretty good skier and I’ve been on a few downhill courses. Beginners are going to fall and hurt themselves on those steep pitches. I was pretty uncomfortable but managed to ski them under control, and conditions were nothing like they would be for a real downhill race. The snow needs to be super firm for the skiers to stay in control at those speeds.
I still don’t understand how the high jumpers can jump higher than their heads. For sheer insanity, though, I nominate aerial skiing. At least the ski jumpers stay upright. These athletes can get up to 45-50 feet in the air off a ramp, do three flips with 5 twists and are supposed to land on their skis and not die.
The men’s cycling road race this morning was one of the hardest I can remember seeing in a long time - format is a little different with small teams that vary between five riders and one, depending on the country’s strength in cycling. No race radio.
Monster course at 234km with 5k climbing, in punishing heat and humidity. Pain and suffering is nothing new in a bike race but My Gosh the lead group were on their hands and knees by the end. The principal selection blew the peloton to pieces as so many riders were on the limit.
No spoilers if you’re in the US and wanting to catch up on the highlights later but it was a superb race.
Most Impressive: Decathlon. Speed, Strength, Endurance, Flexibility, Eye-hand, all of it. Ten times.
But…not necessarily the one that I want to WATCH the most.
I think we need a new category, at the risk of OD’ing on Olympic categories: “What do you want to watch the most (vs. what little will be televised)”
My nominee: Pole Vaulting…
‘So here’'s the thing JCC…pick up that long pole, run as fast as you can while carrying that pole, then at precisely the right time stick it in that little spot in the ground and then the pole will bend and whipsaw you up and then you have to push yourself over that 20 foot high bar…oh, and don’t think about falling backwards, because there is no padding there."
So we will get about the usual 30 seconds of coverage.
I also have a feeling that men’s gymnastics will get shorted this time since spoiler.
There was no padding in the earlier days when they landed in sawdust. The poles then were unbending metal and vaulters came nowhere near 20’.
It was much more of a brute strength event rather than the gymnastic one it is today.
I’m a little surprised at some of these responses. Not that anyone is wrong or anything, obviously. But to me there’s a big distinction between events where I could do the thing, but just not nearly as well, and where people are doing things I wouldn’t have even imagined someone could do.
So if we imagine that I’m still in high school when I was at least somewhat fit and athletic. And then I trained for a week on hurdles. And then you said “ok, guess what the world record for hurdles is”. Well, I don’t know if I would get it right (obviously it would be much much much faster than me). But even if I guessed wrong, and you told me the answer, my response would just be “huh”.
If, on the other hand, you had me spend a week learning to do cartwheels, and then maybe starting to work on learning to do a handstand or a forward flip, and then you said “OK, what types of things do you think a world champion gymnast can do on the floor exercise” (assume I’d never actually seen high level gymnastics), I would just be utterly and totally floored by the things they can actually do. Track and field, marathon, weightlifting, etc, are all just faster/stronger/etc. Maybe I’d be surprised at how MUCH better they are, but obviously someone in the world can jump a lot further than me. That doesn’t blow my mind.
Someone doing the insane things they do in gymnastics, however… it’s like they’re a different species from me.
People that have played a sport are often more impressed by the superficially incremental improvements. There’s a David Foster Wallace article about tennis players. Yeah, pros are “just” faster, springer, more accurate, etc. But what that means from a “% of people could do this if they trained their entire lives” standpoint is enormous.
But by the same token, you can go to any reasonably sized high school football/basketball game and many of the cheerleaders can do cartwheels, backflips, etc. I never could (at all) but you can at least see “normal” people that are in the same ballpark. It’s a huge f’n ballpark but a ballpark nonetheless.
Diving. Especially the 10m platform diving. I mean, many other sports, like the marathon, are done by average, recreational runners all the time. But jumping off a perfectly good 3-storey building into the water, leaving only a small “rip”, and sometimes they do a handstand to start-off!?!? No effing way most people are going to do that, even if they are a good diver/swimmer. The cost of even a minor mistake seems pretty painful. Very impressive!
For the winter games, I will go with the ski-jumping/flying. I know they are not that high off the snow, but still, looking down that ramp, and that the skis are locked into skids, there is no way to bail out once you start, and they are going, what 50 mph? And the skis are attached only at the toe. Again, no effing way and decent skier is even going to try that. Also very impressive!
I mean, this is a pretty silly thing to really be debating, but… there’s still a big difference. If you take a video of the 100 meter dash at a high school track meet, then a 100 meter dash at the olympics, they basically look exactly like each other. The same people, doing the same things. If you screw with the timing a little bit and remove the background/outfits and stuff, you’ll basically end up with two fairly identical videos.
But every step from “random person who can do a cartwheel” to “cheerleaders doing some flips” to “high school gymnast” to “college gymnast” to “olympic gymnast” is just a dramatic, hit-you-over-the-head difference. (And I suspect that for each case, if I was someone who had just never heard of tumbling/gymnastics at all, I would say “wow, it’s amazing that people can do that… that must be the absolute peak that a human is capable of, it’s so amazing!”)
While I appreciate your point, some of the “just faster” or whatever gets to mind-blowing proportions.
For example, while it’s not an Olympic event, in bicycle road racing there’s something called the hour record. At a velodrome, on a legal TT racing bike, go as far as you can in 1 hour.
Now, how fast can you ride a bicycle on a flat road with no tailwind? In an all-out sprint, I mean. Can you get up to 50km/h? Maybe, for a few seconds. If you’re a fit, enthusiastic amateur cyclist, maybe for a few minutes.
Well, Victor Campenaerts can hold 55.089km/h for an hour. Carbon fiber this, aero that, altitude whatever. That is just mind-bending. It’s like if a marathon winner ran the whole race as fast as you can sprint.
They’re definitely all incredible. In my much younger days, my high school chess team won the state championship but if you were to pit me against anyone near the grandmaster level, I probably just would have pissed in my pants and resigned before the first move.
(Not really. But by the 10th move, it would have been a lost cause.)
