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

One of our state universities had six of its former track and field athletes competing in these Olympics. Only two were competing for the United States.

 

Just saw an awesome Olympics scene in downtown Brooklyn. A Jamaican evangelical church was having a service this morning outside Borough Hall. Preacher interrupts service so they can all watch on bigscreen TV the 4x100 women's relay, which of course Jamaica won. Really nice little moment. The Games really are a reflection of human society. There's a lot of it that completely sucks, but a lot's that great, too.

 

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen something like “He was born in Germany but moved to Sweden at 20 and competes for them now.”

Makes for a better world, but a slightly duller Olympics.

 

It's not a lack of talent. The U.S. athletes mentioned are/were all at or near the top of the world rankings in their events. Many are world champions. They just didn't get it done in Tokyo for one reason or another.

 

AND, if we are going to keep score by Nation, the Nation with the most wins, wins. Most medals without most golds is a cute statistic. Best second place team, ever.

 

If the games were a reflection of human society, you'd have half the people arguing that they can be made to run counter clockwise around the track, and that the stop watch is a deep state conspiracy orchestrated by globalists.

"The American 4x100 team actual won the race, and it wasn't even close! Stop the steal!"

 

Holy crap. Sweden utterly collapsed.

 

Sweden was the better team through 120 but there were some bad pentlees, as my Scottish-born father would have said, on both sides.

Congrats to the Canuckistani girls.

 

I have no interest in women's field hockey but I find it fascinating that the goalie is armored up like a hockey player...

That snark aside, the helmet cam the referees wear must be rolled out by NFL officials right away. It gives a great perspective of the on-field action.

 

Kara was born and raised here in our town. She's been doing a great job, and I got to say so in print, as I have been writing daily Olympics columns as a passion project. She Tony Romo'd the women's 5K, saying repeatedly that the Kenyans and Ethopians up front were making a mistake leaving Hassan around so she could hit the NOS button with a lap to go, which is exactly what happened.

Of all the Olympic sports (and maybe sports in general), I probably have the biggest deficit of knowledge vs. popularity of any sport in wrestling. Can someone explain what he did here that merited the winning points?

Another issue was Harrison's race was over 200 meters and lasted about 45 seconds. That said, I saw it on various channels at least three times during the day on Thursday. They might be late to the party but NBC's not going to totally miss a chance to get a moderately attractive American teenager with a gold medal around her neck on TV as many times as possible.

 

The rules in international freestyle wrestling are somewhat different than US high school and college folkstyle wrestling. I don't think there are points for escapes in freestyle or Greco Roman.

 

Since we're asking questions, I assumed that two bronze medals are awarded in boxing and wrestling because the two semifinal losers aren't made to compete for third place but then I saw a clip from wrestling and there were two bronze medal matches.

How is that?