Five-ring circus: The Thread of the XXXIII Olympiad

I saw the clip of the girl from (I think) Poland doing it in 6 seconds?
My gracious

 

I’m assuming they’re playing golf in LA at Riviera?
LACC wasn’t very well liked IIRC.

 

He didn't blow it but he just about called it for the brit.

 

Jesus, have track and field in this idiotic big 10 olympics at Hayward Field

 

Burroughs isn't wrong about the need for more weight classes, but I'm not sure what happened to Vinesh is the poster child for that need.

First, there is a 53 kg weight class for women at the Olympics and that's the weight she wrestled at in Tokyo. She was in the 50 kg class in Paris. The article Burroughs snipped said her natural weight is about 57 kg. That's way too much weight below a wrestler's natural weight for them to be safely getting to for competition. Apparently the Wrestling Federation of India would not allow her to wrestle at 53 kg this go around, and left her only the option of cutting to 50 kg as payback for her speaking publicly about Brij Bhushan's sexual abuse of athletes.

It's taken a long time for the sport to shift attitudes about weight loss - and the old school attitudes still persist in some places - but the idea that you should wrestle two or three weight classes below your natural weight has largely been pushed out of the sport in America. The wrestling community has slowly come to the recognition that athletes who aren't drained from expending so much energy putting their health at risk to make weight are better performers. I think most coaches in America today would balk at a wrestler cutting 14 lbs to make weight on a regular basis and a lot of the governing bodies here prohibit that kind of weight loss anyway. Weight loss has to be incremental and maintainable.

Burroughs on the other hand missed the Olympic team this year at 74 kg, but he likely makes another Olympics if they had the 79 kg class that is used at Worlds but that's missing from the Olympics. He's got an axe to grind about the number of weight classes, even though he's not wrong on that. For most of the sport's history they've had 8 weight classes (or more) for each style of wrestling, with the exception of the first few years of women's wrestling. Now it's at 6 weight classes per style at the Olympics but Worlds are still using 10, and it's creating problems.

What should've happened in the Vinesh situation, in my opinion, is that the Olympics need to have a small weight allowance for the second day of competition. That's become pretty common at American wrestling events - to have a 1 lb allowance on subsequent days of a tournament. I think it's particularly important for the women's category where water retention is more complicated. I would do a 1/2 kilo for men and 1 kilo for women at international events, if I was in charge.

 

Absolutely. That has been around forever and just makes sense.

 

I think Kerr thought he had it won, too.

 

France, leading by one in Team Handball, turns the ball over in the final seconds. Germany scores at the buzzer to force overtime.

 

Looks like Deutschland pulled it out with a goal with four seconds left in OT. I'll have to watch that one tonight -- sounds like a classic.

 

This is crazy. Don't we have some Wilson grads here?

Wilson High School in Long Beach, California has had an athlete at every Olympic Games over the last 72 years
High jumper Rachel Glenn and water polo player Max Irving added to Wilson’s reputation as an Olympic sports powerhouse by qualifying for Paris 2024

Paris 2024: One high school has produced an Olympian at every Summer Games since 1952 - Yahoo Sports