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

Boldin again: "The runners who are in danger of being on the podium are the ones who run easy in the early rounds."

Wait - the US had a woman who won the gold in the discus - and they spent 4 seconds on it?

 

Wow!

 

That was insane. Rai Benjamin destroyed the world record -- and finished second.

Warholm is, as one of the announcers said before the race, a Norse god.

 

I think it happened yesterday after prime time. She got caught in a dead zone. And it’s hard to show field and keep people’s attention

I’ve noticed they’ve done next to nothing except snippets

 

And the guy NBC has covering those snippets is a guy I worked with when we were starting in the business 30 years ago, which will never stop being strange to me.

 

The Winter Games has always had the simple problem of geography. Even before you talk about city size and hotel rooms, but you have to be within a reasonable drive of significant mountain ranges. The minimum vertical drop for an Olympic downhill is 800m (2,600 feet). Given the scope of things like the hockey tournament and all of the necessary logistical accomodations, the field thins even further. If you throw out PyeongChang because all the ice events were in Gangneung on the coast, there hasn't been a city smaller than 200,000 people to host the Winter Games since Lillehammer.

Beijing is already a stretch. The ski mountain is 140 miles out of town and doesn't regularly get natural snow. The only alternative was Almaty, Kazakhstan, which lost by only four votes, depriving us all the Borat jokes we could handle. Oslo would have won, but the government told the IOC to go F themselves, particularly after a newspaper leaked the IOC's demands, including but not limited to: a cocktail party with the King of Norway (on his dime), dedicated traffic lanes solely for IOC members, near-total control over advertising billboards in the city and seasonal fruit in members' hotel rooms (in Norway in Feburary). It didn't help that this bid process took place in fall of 2014, immediately after Vladimir Putin broke the bank and a few other things.

It's already happened. Denver won the bid for 1976 in 1970, but by 1972, opposition to the bid on environmental and budgetary grounds forced the Colorado government to put the Games' funding to a statewide referendum, which failed. The IOC offered them to Whistler, which declined. Salt Lake City volunteered, but the IOC opted for Innsbruck, Austria, which had hosted just 12 years before.

I would pay good money for one of those hats but I can't find them anywhere on the web.

They didn't just turn a profit, they turned a huge profit. The LA folks invested that into sports programs throughout the city including a tennis program in Compton from which came a couple of African-American sisters you may have heard of.

To Ato's credit, I haven't heard him use the words "drive phase" yet during this meet, which used to be one of his verbal tics.

 

Would a fastskin suit slip them into the water even faster?

 

Doesn't Gisele slap it out of his hand before he can even think about it?

 

That 400 meter hurdles was insane.
Edwin Moses wouldn't have even been in the picture at the finish line.

I feel bad for Benjamin.

 

Any one else remember when Germany (east/west/combined) used to win medals?
I am watching some sort of Kayaking and just remembered that country.

 

He used it tonight in the 200 prelims.

 

A German won the women's long jump.