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<p>If only drinking were an Olympic sport, I think I know a few students who would be medal contenders.</p>
<p>Jamaicans swept the 200!</p>
<p>I am a Georgian judo player. Who would have imagined…</p>
<p>As if she had been reading our thread, this from the WSJ’s twitter feed:</p>
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<p>So the swimmers are the fun ones!</p>
<p>“If you think Missy Franklin hasn’t had media coaching, Santa, the Tooth Fairy and I want to talk to you about a great investment opportunity involving the Brooklyn Bridge.”</p>
<p>I don’t believe she has and I’m not interested in that investment. ;)</p>
<p>Yikes! I accidentally put my weight in stones rather than pounds and was somewhat shocked to find that I was a large weight lifter.</p>
<p>Of course Missy has had extensive media coaching! That’s part of the program.</p>
<p>Okay, I know that what they do is incredible and very difficult, but how is rhythmic gymnastics a sport? Let’s add ballet or competitive cheerleading. The one thing that makes me happy about rhythmic gymnastics is that I tell myself that the best ones can probably make a good living with Cirque du Soleil.</p>
<p>^ What is your definition of “sport”?</p>
<p>Mine involves objective ways to decide who wins, which leaves out events like gymnastics, diving, synchronized anything, etc.</p>
<p>There’s no denying the participants are incredible athletes, and the events are fun to watch, but IMO they are competitions, not sports.</p>
<p>Not arguing your thoughts, but this would also eliminate several events from the winter games such as ice skating, snowboarding half-pipe, ski jumping, etc.</p>
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<p>Yes, plus she has a smile that has been clinically proven to sell breakfast cereal. I’m going to go out on a limb and predict good things ahead for her.</p>
<p>I know the “judged events are not sports” argument has been around for quite a while and I’m not ready to kick them out of the Olympics. But rhythmic gymnastics just has *so much *dance in it.</p>
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<p>I just really want them all to be happy. It’s kind of like some HS quarterbacks or prom queens, only amplified…it would be terrible to think you have peaked in life at 17, that your best days were in your teens. </p>
<p>So far, the only person with whom I’ve heard an interview that seemed tomented is Lolo Jones, but of course, they aren’t interviewing many non-medal winners. I hope that all the folks who made the team but not only didn’t get a medal, but didn’t even make finals or semis, can look back at the experience with fondness, but not let the rest of their lives be “downhill.”</p>
<p>We watched a few minutes of… I don’t even know what to call it… Rhythmic Team Dancing With Balls? </p>
<p>We all couldn’t stop laughing. It looked like a Saturday Night Live skit.</p>
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<p>She was killed at the Drum Tower, which I’ve toured myself. It’s not a temple; it’s more of a centuries-old way of keeping and announcing the time, like the tolling of the bell in a western-style clock tower… It’s a very popular tourist attraction, featured on most tours of the city.</p>
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<p>Or you could just whole hog the other way and make dance itself an Olympic sport. Every judged Olympic sport needs a set of biased, incompetent judges. And dance already has a set - just import the judges from Dancing With The Stars.</p>
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<p>The other runners were congratulating him because they all know they just had the honor to compete against the best ever on the world’s biggest stage… He has totally ruled the men’s 800m for at least the last three years - incredible times and almost completely unbeatable. And he is still in his early 20s. There is more to come.</p>
<p>Rudisha’s performance was great on several levels:
- Gold medal and big world record
- First and only man to ever finish in under 1:41.
- Incredibly bold race tactics - he ran aggressively from the front the whole way, which is usually a recipe for getting beat. But he’s so much better than the others he just powered away from them. And there was nothing they could do except watch him pull away.
- He’s a very graceful runner and more importantly a great guy.
- He’s a Kenyan, but he’s a Masai not a Kalenjin.</p>
<p>Nearly all the great Kenyan runners come from the Kalenjin tribe, which makes up only about 10% of the population of Kenya. The other 90%, as a group, have no particular running talent. So in that sense for a Masai to come out there and beat the other Kenyans and the rest of the world in a middle distance race is similar to if a white guy had gone out and done it. Plus, being a Masai makes him something of an outcast within the Kenyan running community and power structure. </p>
<p>David Rudisha. Simply amazing.</p>
<p>I really enjoyed the rhythmic gymnastics this year - especially the ball routines! They fall into the same rubric as ice dancing vs ice skating I think. Pushing the envelope. I’m surprised they don’t show more of them at night since they are extremely easy to watch. I guess we need to have a US medal winner before they’ll show it in prime time. I think regular gymnastics has gotten much less fun to watch. There’s so much wobbling on the beam, back in the old days the best gymnasts made their routines look easy, but now they are all on the edge of falling apart. I appreciate that they are much harder, but they aren’t as pretty.</p>
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<p>That’s a good analogy. And although we are glued to the figure skating coverage, we rarely watch ice dancing.</p>
<p>I miss the good old days when we could mock the East German judge, no matter what they did. :D</p>