• 27Aug 08

  The Olympics Are Over... (part IV)

  ...and I know anyone who may still be reading these probably wants them to be over by now, too. Well, rest easy, today's is the last one.

  Track and Field: The greatest Olympic misnomer (though it doesn't have much competition)... this could easily be 10-15 separate events. And probably should be. This, more than any other event/category of events, is the true Olympics. Well, except maybe race walking. I've recently read an article where it was compared to letting people who can't swim very well compete in the dog paddle, which was funny until I realized that the dog paddle is about the only style of swimming that isn't an Olympic competition (why? We should start a petition to the IOC to include it as soon as possible and correct this enormous oversight immediately!).

  Sadly, if you ask NBC, the "field" part of Track & Field doesn't exist, or at least isn't worth any more than a brief mention. Ask me who won the long jump this year, and I'll be clueless (well, I'd look up the results, but you get the point). The most they've shown of any field event is a 5-minute recap, complete with both of the important participants' performances (usually, the American and the winner... maybe a glimpse of the other medalists). Oh boy, how exciting. Quite sad, because the field events, while not as quickly-developing, as, say, the sprints, can be just as fun to watch.

  As for the "track", one cannot mention the 2008 competition without mentioning Usain Bolt, who, while not winningnearly as many medals as Michael Phelps in swimming, quickly put doubts even in NBC's minds about who the greatest athlete ever is (and thank goodness... the talk of Phelps as greatest athlete only lasted a couple of days, and I don't know how much more I could take of it). I mentioned before that Phelps won 3 golds "that matter" (to me, obviously not to Phelps or the American public) - one in an individual event, and 2 in relays. Bolt also won 3, and only 1 was in a relay... a more impressive performance by my count. Oh by the way, like Phelps, he won every event he entered, and unlike Phelps, he set a world record in every event he entered as well, a feat much more difficult in track & field than in swimming, where world records seem to fall every Olympics.

  But enough comparing the two... they're both great, that much is clear. All three of Bolt's records impressed me a lot... the 100m record, because he was slow to start and was celebrating 15m from the finish, and still set a world record (I shudder to think how fast he might've been); the 200m record, because the record he broke was one that many thought would stand for decades, and he broke it running into a slight headwind; and the 4x100m record... well, first it has to be said that it is not Bolt's, but rather Jamaica's, since it was a relay... this impressed me because they broke it by 0.3s, a huge gap in the world of short-distance running.

  I wish Bolt would have run the 400, and the 4x400... he was so dominant in the 200, I just can't see him dropping off so much over just 200 more meters that he wouldn't still win. Hopefully he'll run those in London in 4 years' time. Sadly, the speculation has already begun here that he may have been doping. Odd, no such speculation for Phelps, surely because Americans never dope (ahem... Tim Montgomery, Justin Gatlin, Marion Jones, anyone?). Anyway, I hope that no Olympians dope, but as that is not the case (several had already been disqualified for it), I at least hope Phelps and Bolt don't. Would be far too disgraceful for their respective sports otherwise.

  Now, I recognize there were other track and field events besides those run by Bolt... unfortunately, I can't cover everything (and couldn't cover the field events if I wanted to, for reasons already mentioned), and those were certainly the most memorable.

  Trampoline: Not sure why this is listed as a separate sport instead of being just one more apparatus in gymnastics. For what it's worth, its scoring system seemed better than that in gymnastics, so maybe it's not all bad. As for the competition itself, it was pretty interesting, although seemed to me to be quite dangerous... I wonder how many injuries happen in that sport.

  Triathlon: Endurance sports such as the triathlon and marathon are unlikely to ever be all that exciting for spectators, myself included. Still, any athlete who participates in them, even if they are slightly crazy, has my respect...

  Volleyball: I'm rather surprised by the success the US men enjoyed, considering volleyball is pretty much classified as a "girls' sport" here... with the US women also making the final, it offered plenty of opportunities for TV coverage, which is a good thing, because I found this along with badminton to be the most exciting of the actual sporting events (as opposed to pure athletic competitions like swimming and track & field) to watch. Congrats to the US for the excellent performances, though as with most sports, I wanted the US to lose (what can I say, the media's "patriotism" has the opposite effect on me than on the American public).

  Water Polo: This is something I look forward to every time the Olympics roll around, and every time it disappoints. Why I look forward to it is beyond me, as odd as that may sound. Not a terribly boring sport, but there were better, perhaps made worse by my high expectations.

  Weightlifting: Never ceases to amaze me how much those guys (and gals) can lift. Perhaps oddly, this was one of the most exciting sports for me, and the TV coverage was pretty good too, leaving me quite happy with it. Saw one competitor get hurt pretty badly, though... a shame, but this event is inherently dangerous, too.

  Wrestling: The Greco-Roman variation didn't impress me too much... I said before that there is no Olympic competition for wrestling with one hand behind your back, but this is pretty close in terms of restricting the athletes and artificial rules. The freestyle, on the other hand, was much more fun to watch. The coverage wasn't too extensive in either variation, though. From what I did see, the scoring controversies that plagued the sport (according to what I read online) were nonexistent, fortunately, although there was one rather famous one during these games (I did not see the match that caused it, not even in replay), where a Swedish wrestler thought he was robbed of a victory in a semifinal, won the bronze in his next match, but declared he was not satisfied with anything less than gold, and during the medal ceremony, accepted the bronze medal, then promptly took it off his neck, placed it on the mat, and walked out of the ceremony in protest, for which he had that medal taken away by the IOC.

  (Yes, that was one long sentence... I need to catch my breath after that one)

  I guess I've seen worse ways to protest (see Taekwondo), and at least based on the few matches I've seen, the scoring was at least mostly accurate. Then again, I don't know too much about wrestling, so perhaps it's just that I don't know errors when I see them.

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  Well, that wraps it up. Overall, a good and enjoyable competition; let's hope future Olympics find ways to improve on it (although they're adding more events, I've heard... not a good start). In the meantime, bring on Vancouver 2010!

  • Posted Aug 27, 2008 6:57 pm PT
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• 26Aug 08

  The Olympics Are Over... (part III)

  Not much time for writing today, but will knock out what I can... continuing from yesterday:

  Swimming: This may as well have been called "The Michael Phelps Show." 8 gold medals in 8 events, what more needs saying? I will say, though, that I still think he lost to Cavic in the 100m butterfly... every replay I've seen, including the still photos that supposedly prove Phelps won seem to prove the exact opposite to me. But in spite of that, Phelps is clearly the greatest Olympic swimmer, now and ever. As for greatest athlete ever? Well, I don't think he is, though he can't really do anything more to convince me I'm wrong, short of transferring to track and field and beating everyone there too.

  At the least, I don't think it's fair to call Phelps the greatest based on his medal count. Swimming is one of the few competitions that I think are what the Olympics are really about, but it also horribly skews the medal counts. In no other sport that I can think of can you win a gold medal for doing things less efficiently than you can. There is no such Olympic competition, for instance, as running backwards, or wrestling with one hand behind your back. Nor did the organizers create a high jump competition for each of the various styles that were used in the old days before the now-dominant Fosbury Flop was invented. No, if you can jump higher than anyone else in the world using the straddle technique, more power to you, but if not, you'd better learn the Fosbury Flop or not compete at all, because you certainly won't be winning any medals for being the best straddle jumper in the world.

  Why, then, does swimming have competitions in the backstoke, butterfly, and especially breaststroke, when those are clearly slower than the freestyle? And then you have the individual medleys and medley relays, too... Phelps won only 3 all-freestyle events, and two of those were relays (although granted, those were the only 3 he entered), but was able to pad his medal count nicely with the "slower" style events.

  All in all, good sport, good coverage... couldn't have asked for more from an Olympic competition.

  Synchronized Swimming: That over there is swimming. This is synchronized swimming. No relation. Pretty much everything I wrote about rhythmic gymnastics yesterday applies here, including the part about Russia winning 2 of 2 in I-don't-know-what.

  Table Tennis: Not quite as fun to watch as badminton, but pretty fun. Was quite predictable, though... the Chinese team won even over all the Chinese players other nations "borrowed" for this competition, as expected. I wish it could've been more competitive, but with 1.2 billion people playing it as a national pasttime, like Americans playing baseball, it's unlikely that much will change anytime soon.

  Taekwondo: Haven't seen any of this either, except for a replay of one fighter kicking the referee in the face after being disqualified. I hope that wasn't the highlight of the competition, because I heard the scoring was similar to boxing in its atrociousness.

  Tennis: Like football, this just isn't that popular at the Olympic level. Still, the top 3 men's players in the world showed up, and two of them got medals, a big improvement from earlier Olympics. And Russia swept the women's medals, why wouldn't I be happy?

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  Time's up... Track & Field and the rest of the events to conclude this series tomorrow.

  • Posted Aug 26, 2008 5:02 pm PT
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• 25Aug 08

  The Olympics Are Over... (part II)

  The Olympics may be over, but my rant is far from it. Continuing with the events where I left off yesterday...

  Gymnastics: Another judged event, and sadly it seems this is the most popular of the Olympic events, at least here in the US. Well, it got lots of coverage, which at least leaves me with plenty to write about.

  The Americans and Chinese were expected to compete for gold in pretty much every event, and it seems that everyone got the memo, including NBC and their commentators, as well as the judges. NBC showed practically exclusively the US and Chinese gymnasts, but that wasn't my main problem with them. My main problem is that they couldn't have assembled a more biased group of commentators and studio "experts." Now, I'm not questioning their knowledge of gymnastics; they undoubtedly know more than I do, but saying something to the effect of "wow, what an incredible routine" after every US gymnast's routine that didn't contain major errors, and brushing off equally (or more) impressive routines by the gymnasts from other countries as merely "pretty good" (and at times nit-picking at the smallest details to give the impression that those gymnasts didn't do as well as the Americans) isn't my idea of expert commentary. Bela Karolyi the studio expert wasn't any better, I'm afraid. My favorite line from the experts to come a bit later.

  The judges got the memo too, about which countries are expected to win. It almost seemed as the results, barring major errors on the part of the gymnasts, were predetermined before a single preliminary event took place (and the judges even managed to erase a couple of those major mistakes). I'll give the NBC experts credit, they were right on one count: China was enormously favored by the judges. What they refused to see, though, was that the US was, at least on the women's side, also enormously favored over every other nation that competed (perhaps not quite as much as China, but close). There is a reason China got 14 gymnastics medals and the US 10, while nations such as Romania, Russia, and Japan, traditionally pretty strong in gymnastics themselves, didn't get more than 2, and it had little to do with the quality of their gymnastics. In fact, no country save China and the US got more than 2 medals, and Russia didn't get any. But no, the Americans, in their very American way, would much rather complain about getting silver instead of gold, when it could easily have been no medal at all.

  Take two of the most outrageous decisions by the judges, at least if you agree with NBC. On the one hand, you have Alicia Sacramone being edged out by China's Cheng Fei for bronze in the women's vault competition after the latter landed on her knees on her second vault. On the other, you have Nastia Liukin being scored the same as China's He Kexin for gold in the women's uneven bars competition, the tiebreaker giving He the gold. I'm going to discount the tiebreaker here, the rules were established long before the competition began and the gymnasts and experts should have known what the rule was. But the commentators also complained that Liukin received too low a score to begin with, and thus was "robbed" of gold.

  Oh, how quickly they forget... in fairness, I agree with the Americans on the first controversy. But one absolutely can not complain about both at once. Yes, landing on one's knees in any gymnastics event should never, IMO, yield scores of 8.5 of 10, which is what Cheng got on her second vault. Sacramone should have probably won bronze (although her own vaults were far from great, and perhaps should have also been scored lower). That is a problem with the scoring system... difficulty matters way too much, and the execution deductions are too minor, even if the mistakes are major. I do not believe I've seen any performance at these Olympics scored lower than an 8.0 (save Anna Pavlova's 0.0 on the same vault competition, only because she started her run-up too early... ludicrous, in my opinion, but whatever), and I've seen a fair number of bad ones. Gymnastics should learn from diving, where a bad dive can be scored a 6, 5, 4, 3... I've even seen some 2.5 scores. In gymnastics, I could probably just walk up to an apparatus and walk away, and if I'm Chinese or American, get higher than a 5.

  But everyone here seemed so quickly to forget that Liukin landed on her back in the preliminary round of the uneven bars, and still got an 8.25 score for the execution, good enough to qualify for the finals! So if Sacramone was robbed of bronze, Liukin was certainly not robbed of gold, but instead practically gifted the silver! Oh, and how lucky for her, by the way, that preliminary scores don't count in the finals, otherwise she would also have struggled to compete for any sort of medal, let alone gold. The experts comment on Liukin's fall, and my favorite line of this year's Olympics? "She'll still be in the final, because she's just that great" (emphasis mine).

  For what it's worth, in my not-even-close-to-expert opinion, He Kexin did a much better routine in the final of the uneven bars than did Liukin, and that bronze medalist (also from China) Yang Yilin was also better than Liukin, and should have got silver. Not to mention some of the other athletes in that final, who, not being Chinese or American, were far too underscored and should have at least been much closer to the top 3, if not in it.

  Yes, Sacramone may have been robbed... I wish the scoring system were different, with bigger deductions for huge errors. Then Sacramone would have likely had bronze. And Liukin wouldn't be in the finals at all. And the US men's team would have never got bronze after two of their three gymnasts fell off the pommel horse. Perhaps if the commentators gave some thought to what they were implying, they wouldn't be so quick to claim that every US athlete who didn't win gold was somehow robbed. A pity that most people who would have seen all these events probably believed the experts on the basis of their expertise (and of their patriotism, which I prefer to call xenophobia), rather than think for themselves.

  One more word (OK, maybe a few words ) about another controversy... that of the Chinese women's gymnastics team's ages. They're probably not 16, that much is true. But to me, it doesn't matter what age they are. If the best gymnasts in the world are 12 year olds, they fully deserve their medals, and the other countries need to reevaluate their training methods. International Olympic Committee's president, Jacques Rogge, claims the age limit is there to protect young gymnasts from injuries and long-term effects of practicing gymnastics, but if the fact that China's gymnasts start training at age 3 is so widely known, then so should be the fact that age limits don't help at all... they may not compete, but training is just as dangerous. So either ban China altogether for their training regiment, or let them compete.

  Controversies aside, congratulations to Romanian Sandra Izbasa, who was one of only three gymnasts not from China or the US to have won a gold medal, winning the women's floor finals. The other two were Leszek Blanik of Poland winning the men's vault, where no Chinese or Americans qualified for the finals, and North Korea's Hong Un Jong winning the famous women's vault (sadly, I doubt many in America remember who won that event, only who got bronze), where both the Chinese gymnast and the American gymnast stumbled or fell. Both were great accomplishments, but not nearly as amazing as Izbasa's, who won against two Chinese and two Americans, three of the four having pretty clean performances. How good must that performance have been to win over the judges... of course, the American commentators, after 10-15 seconds of silence, declared that performance "pretty good." On to the other events...

  Handball: A rather odd sport, but one a bit more interesting to follow than, say, field hockey, IMO. Can't say much about it besides that, since, just like with field hockey, the coverage was sporadic, both finals shown late at night despite several games leading up to those finals being shown during the day.

  Judo: Didn't see any of it... nothing I can say about it except that it happened (I think).

  Modern Pentathlon: An interesting idea, were it not for the fact that it was conceived in 1912, and two of the five events (equestrian jumping and fencing, the other three being shooting, swimming, and running) have become quite outdated. It seems that neither the Olympic organizers nor NBC had much interest in the sport; I didn't get to see the men's event, and the women's was shown as a mere recap, from which I gathered that the athletes didn't receive some of the benefits of the state of the art stadiums enjoyed by most of the other athletes (the swimming, equestrian, and running events were held at different stadiums than the main competitions in those disciplines; not sure about the other two).

  Rhythmic Gymnastics: One of the few events at the Olympics that I actually avoid watching if possible. Yet it seems to have had considerable coverage here over the last few days of the Olympics. Can't believe anyone could actually stand to watch that. And I honestly have no clue how they judge it. Russia won both competitions (don't ask me what the two were), a fact that I ordinarily would be quite pleased with, except that I have no idea what it is they actually did better than the rest of the world. Two gold medals more than they should have had, in my opinion.

  Rowing: Yet another event that was rendered difficult to follow by the coverage. Can't say it was the most interesting of events to watch (perhaps because I know nothing about the teams/athletes involved), but it is one of the relatively few that do perhaps belong in the Olympics.

  Sailing: Didn't see any of this either.

  Shooting: Now there's a fun event to actually do! (OK, most of the Olympic ones are). Didn't see a great deal of it either, but what I did see was pretty interesting. It does, however, seem to suffer from the same problem as archery: the competitors are too good, leading the competition to be decided by who makes the fewest mistakes, rather than who does something great. Hard to say what can be done about it, but surely something can.

  Softball: I played softball once, just a couple of months ago, and it was great fun. However, when they (NBC) said it is not really a version of baseball, I laughed. With minor rule changes (shorter game, slower pitches, smaller field), it is baseball! It is being removed from the Olympics of 2012, apparently due to too much dominance by the United States. What irony, then, that in what could be the final Olympic softball game, the US lost to Japan! Like baseball, I won't miss it when it's gone (although unlike baseball, it at least didn't take over the coverage for hours)... I'd rather play it than watch it, anyway.

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  OK, I need a break... Swimming and some more to follow tomorrow.

  • Posted Aug 25, 2008 4:31 pm PT
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