2020, uh, 21, uh, who knows Tokyo Olympics thread

To be fair, you can probably find hundreds of such stories from all sorts of sources.

 

I think you can factor in the extra year of training, media hits, ect., bought about by the pandemic. Plus, not even knowing if these Games would take place?

 

Hummel was two for seven in that game, including missing all three of his 2-point shots. Game Stats - FIBA.basketball

 

Right. Biles made a smart decision.

I have an issue with takes that villify/mock her and takes that want to turn her into a super-courageous hero for that smart decision.

 

In the case of last night's open, you had to do it that way. We were talking about it here 12 hours before it was going to air, and we've seen what social media was doing to her. A different world since, say, USA-USSR hockey in 1980 when there was just a few hours between the final buzzer and when ABC aired it, and as I've noted in other Miracle on Ice threads, social media meant a bunch of us in a San Jose State dorm room listening to Joe Starkey do the third period of the game on the KGO afternoon drive news.

 

This is a good post. The problem with all this is the timing, not the decision itself. It just seems strange, and as if the only thing that brought it on was the poor score in that vault. And, well, sub-par performances happen, sometimes.

 

Ledecky put a lot into that 1,500. I think it's probably the one thing she really wanted to do in Japan.

I could be wrong about her, but I think she will walk all the way away, the way Graf did, and be at peace. Move somewhere, buy a house, marry well outside the sport, tend a garden, her kids have no idea what she did, etc.

 

She'll take up archery and be back in the Olympics in three years.

 

That's a lot of sexism. She may well retire, but is it because she has a vagina that you think that she'll only want to garden, have kids and marry someone with a penis? I'm guessing you have no actual idea what her aspirations may be outside of swimming, and they may not be stereotypically female.

 

She’s been pretty open about what happened. Do you not believe her explanation?

 

I don't think it's as hard to explain as you're trying to make it be. I think that when she got up in the air on that vault and she lost sight of the ground, and you can see when she landed she didn't know she was landing, that it scared the holy hell out of her because what if she doesn't know she's landing and she breaks her neck? I think to that point she thought she could power through, making little mistakes but still scoring well. At that point I suspect she realized there was a lot more on the line. Based on what other gymnasts are saying, she could have risked crashing virtually every time she lost contact with the ground from that point forward.

 

I don’t get the comparison. The USA women’s gymnastics team was competing for a gold medal. The best gymnast in the world pulled out and substantially damaged their chances to win that gold medal.

I can understand an argument that her mental health is more important than a gold medal, but does she really not owe her teammates anything?