Five-ring circus: The Thread of the XXXIII Olympiad

Booker played team ball pretty well. I think the U.S. was better with White out there because he's a better defender, but he was pretty deep on the bench in the final two games. You're spot on about Ant though, and to a lesser extent, that was happening with Durant as well. (Less noticeable because his were going in more.) That's probably the toughest thing to know when you're building the roster - Are the guys outside of the absolute Top 3 going to be willing to do things like screen and play defense?

 

For a guy who didn’t compete in a single individual event, 32-year-old Vernon Norwood had a great meet for the U.S. He finished with two medals — gold and silver — and a world record, and was arguably his team’s key piece in every race he ran.

He led off the Americans’ world record run in the prelims of the mixed 4x400 relay with a 44.47 split to give the U.S. the lead for good. He gave them a 44.46 lead off leg in the final.

In the men’s 4x400 Norwood saved the day in the prelims after teenager Quincy Hall put the U.S. in a deep hole with his horrendous (for this level) 47.27 opener. Norwood, running second, blasted a 43.54 split to pull the team up from a VERY distant seventh back into manageable striking distance, making up a full second on Japan, which the U.S. eventually overtook for the third and final qualifying spot for the final.

In the final, Norwood came up even bigger, running a 43.26 second leg after Chris Bailey handed him the baton in second place. When Norwood handed off to Bryce Deadmon (after blowing past 400 silver medalist Matthew Hudson-Smith in the last few meters), the U.S. was virtually dead even with leader Botswana.

Deadmon’s 43.54 gave the U.S. a slight lead and Rai Benjamin held it to the end with a 43.18 anchor. BTW, Botswana’s Letsile Tebogo ran 43.04 to almost catch Benjamin at the tape.

 

If Curry doesn’t go nuts, we are all still talking about how bad the US defense was during that stretch at the end.

We needed to play team offense to win because we were pretty damn lazy on d and pretty damn slow to loose balls and rebounds.

In the future, we will need to play team offense, better fucking defense and beat the hell out of these teams on the boards.

The worlds getting better, but we will still have the better players to work with.

 

I'm not sure enough is being made of that 2:11 stretch.

20 years from now, that will be my lasting memory of Stephen Curry. Because that was friggin' sublime.

 

I hope the Italian boxer sues Trump. God DAMN that idiot Trump is stupid.

Boxer files legal complaint over gender abuse

 

That's kind of an apples or oranges comparison, isn't it? Jordan's test was turned in on time with everyone else's. This is more like the teacher made a grading mistake, Jordan's mom asked for a correction a day later instead of right after the tests were handed back and scores were announced and the teacher obliged even though there is a policy against late changes on the syllabus.

Romania can be upset if they want, but they should be upset with the judges' initial error, America's slightly slow reaction and the overall tease. Their gymnast isn't deserving of a bronze medal for what was the fourth-best performance (there is probably a better argument for their beef with the other gymnast's score).

 

Yeah, but Durant went Chitwood on the Serbs.

 

Another tough day on the wrestling mat to close out a tough year for USA Wrestling. No gold for the men and only one silver. 2016 gold medalist Kyle Snyder lost his bronze medal match this morning. Not winning gold for the first time since 1968 for the men is incredibly disappointing, especially since a lot of Russians weren't there. Yeah, Russia itself was banned, but there were a lot of high level Russians wrestling for other countries this year.

The future looks pretty good though. We had two young medalists in Spencer Lee and Aaron Brooks. Brooks in particular is inexperienced at the international level. Both will be a lot better in 2028 with the full transition to freestyle wrestling. We've also got a couple of kids in the pipeline about to hit college who look like they could be generational talents and who've been doing really well at junior level international events.

The women did great. Watching Kennedy Blades lose a tough championship match to close-out wrestling this morning was hard, though. She is phenomenal and will only be better in 2028 - especially since she's just starting her NCAA career and women's wrestling in the NCAA is freestyle. Our women's team took a huge jump this year and I expect another one in four years once we've had all these female college wrestlers focusing on freestyle for four years.

Amit Elor should've been one of the crossover stars of this Olympics. Her dominance in her weight class at such a young age is something we've never seen from an American wrestler and we've only seen from a handful of international wrestlers in history. I think this is one of those spots where NBC having its commentators stateside probably hurt coverage because they lose that behind-the-scenes ability for the people who know the sport to put a bug in the ear of the right producers/on-air-talent about what we're seeing.

We've got to figure out a way to have more than six weight classes per style. If that means killing Greco-Roman, I'm OK with that, but I doubt you can get the UWW on board. Three divisions with just six weight classes each doesn't work, and I don't see the IOC letting wrestling add two more weight classes (six total additional medals) to the current structure when wrestling's already been on the chopping block. Too many wrestlers are wrestling out of their normal weight classes and that hurts the overall quality of the event.

 

She's Algerian, which is part of what adds to the ludicrousness of Trump's false claims.

 

I still think NBC could have avoided the Opening Ceremony "controversy" over BlueMan if they had someone other than Kelly Clarkson and Peyton Manning offering context and insight to what was going on with each act of the ceremonies.

Thinking forward to LA in four years - I don't know how they'll make LA seem "interesting" like they make the foreign locales. Maybe team Snoop with someone famous in another country who has never been to LA before? Heck, who knows where our country will be four years from now.