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

As dominant as Arkansas has been in NCAA track and field, I can't believe they're not higher on this list.

 

Cool memories.

 

Kathleen Baker?

 

Google is our friend, it was Abbey Weitzeil

 

Without research I thought of Missy Franklin. Then I did a quick search and she was 2012 for the Olympics. I found Weitzeil in a list of names, but didn't research further. Good pull.

I remember checking homework before class with Freddy Lynn. Anthony Davis was also in that class. Lynn Swann was PR major. Journalism and PR were the same department and a lot of the classes were the same. I had lots of classes with him.


The worst class I had was to fulfill a humanities or philosophy requirement. I ended up in an Old Testament class. First day, I figured it would be easy because linemen from the football team were sitting in the front row. Football players = Mickey Mouse classes. It turned out they were all in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. They were serious about this. There were also a couple of guys in the class who aspired to be a Rabbi. I really worked to pull a C out of that one.

 

Spiraling towards off-topic, but when I went back for my CompSci degree, the one gen-ed class I had to take was a study of the people who wrote the New Testament, focused on how their particular circumstances shaped what they wrote and what we can learn about them.

It was a damn fascinating class, and the professor who taught it did such a good job teaching it when the semester was over I still had no idea if he was a believer or not.

I wonder if biblical scholars regret naming the Proto-Gospel "Q", now that the morons have hijacked that letter.

 

So, everyone thought she'd be back in this Olympics?

Well, I did not, and I was a little surprised about it. And nope, I don't follow every athlete's every social media video or post. I meant in terms of commentary on this board, and on TV, where, yes, I'd had heard/seen virtually nothing, until the comment about how she adjusted her dismount with the grabbing of her legs. I like commentary and analysis. I'm a verbal person, and I don't pretend to know everything about every sport, so I find it helpful and interesting. And given how big a story it was when Biles withdrew from the team competition, I thought the attention given to her competing in the balance beam was kind of minimal.

 

The saddest thing I've seen in the olympics were the watch parties at Dalilah Muhammad's house.

 

She finished tied for 31st in the qualifying round for the individual jumping competition. The top 30 went on to compete for individual medals. She and the rest of the U.S. team will go again tomorrow in the qualifying round for the team competition. As long as her horse is still healthy, you will see her at least one more time.

 

It wasn't. They were extremely careful through all this to never say she wasn't competing again or that she was going to withdraw from all of them in a row. They, and she, were very careful about not stepping ahead of themselves. And in fact I think the general feeling was they all wanted her to compete in some fashion,. I mean, she was on every day in some fashion.

Edit: I tend to not follow children and young people on social media either, especially Instagram, but they kept showing her videos on TV. That's where I saw the videos of her falling on the mats.

 

I presume top equestrians always have people on the lookout for another horse as a potential successor if your current mount gets old or injured. Jessica's Don Juan Donkeyhorse is 12, which is getting a bit grizzled.

 

Top jumper riders, either because they can afford to buy them themselves or through sponsors, will usually have more than one horse that can compete at the top level, as well as a number of horses they are bringing along. Twelve isn't particularly old for a show jumper (and definitely not for an international level dressage horse). It takes years of training and work to get horses to these levels. A twelve year old horse for this Olympics could be competing in Paris. Performance horses are usually aren't started until they are three. It's a very different model than the thoroughbred industry.

(My horse is nineteen and hasn't slowed down a bit. He's as difficult as he was when I bought him at five. My schoolmaster competed until he was nineteen, when I retired him only because of a tumor limiting air intake. He lived to thirty.)