Olympics

[Wetundies]

So anyone following the olympics?

What do you think of the contraversies.

1. The "malfunction" of the clock in fencing.
2. Losing on purpose in badminton.
3. The Chinese girl being accused of doping cuz she's too fast.

[joel]

1. the clock malfunction sucks pretty bad. they should have had the tools available with all the video being taken to determine whether or not the hit was scored in time and rule based on it.
2. the problem is the format, if losing one game helps you win gold, why wouldn't you do it? if Olympic officials don't want that to happen change the format. when cyclists drop back behind people to draft... that's not called losing on purpose, it's called strategy. nhl teams to do it for playoff matches. sure, maybe it's horrible for the fans. but winning the gold is what matters. when the rules allow for it, you use every strategy you can.
3. accusations are fine. i'm pretty sure olympics are pretty stringent on drug testing nowadays. if she is guilty of it, they will find out. just like ben johnson. media likes to make stories/headlines wherever they can. a woman being faster than a man isn't proof of doping. maybe she just has webbed toes and fingers...

[geForce]

I've been following...

1. Fencing clock malfunction - I couldn't understand the judges' ruling. They admit that there was a malfunction with the clock, but yet they awarded the point to the other girl anyway. There isn't enough information given to tell why the judges ruled that way. I totally don't understand what happened there.

2. Losing on purpose in badminton, just to rig the outcome of who they will be playing in the following matches... just totally lame. Plus, they could've AT LEAST did a better job at losing on purpose. They were playing worse than amateurs, which was so obvious that they were throwing the match. Just plain stupid.

3. Chinese girl doping - as far as I'm concerned, there is no controversy here. The girl was tested before and after the race, and both tests came out clean. It's just a lot of people talking smack.

[geForce]

[geForce]

[Duncan]

[[JT]]

I don't think it's fair that the chinese swimmer is being accused of doping. Just let her enjoy the glory of being a beast.

Also, testing positive for doping isn't as cut and dry and people may think. Marion Jones won a bunch of medals in 2000 olympics, never tested positive.. but admitted to doping 7 years later or something like that then got stripped of her medals.

[joel]

i don't think they broke any rules, i think officials just disqualified them afterwards after all the embarrassment of the event. as for the obviousness of their throwing the game... if both teams are trying to lose of course it will be obvious. b/c it now becomes a competition of who will lose. for instance. if one team is thinking we'll just rally for a bit and then give up a point here and there and the other team is like well i'm not going to even touch the bird. then the first team is going to have to go one step further than that to lose, and so on...
like i said the problem is the format not the athletes using the format to their best advantage to win the top spot.

the last few paragraphs in this article:
http://sports.nationalpost.com/2012/08/ ... ing-right/
Does no one remember the Swedish hockey team, in 2006? Gustafsson publicly mooted the idea of dumping their final game of Pool B against Slovakia, so they wouldn’t have to face either Canada or the Czech Republic (“One is cholera, the other the plague,” he said) in the quarter-final.

Sweden lost 3-0 to the Slovaks in a game that featured a 5-on-3 power play during which Peter Forsberg, Mats Sundin, Daniel Alfredsson, Nick Lidstrom and Freddie Modin didn’t even take a shot on goal. By losing, the Swedes played Switzerland in the quarter-final (while Canada lost to Russia) and went on to win the gold.

There was no Olympic censure from the International Ice Hockey Federation. No one was tossed out.

[geForce]

Even if there's precedence for this type of behaviour that wasn't penalized before, it doesn't make it right. I think sporting competition is about the sport and yes about winning the top prize, but strategy involving losing on purpose defeats the sport. Granted, the rules aren't perfect, but exploiting loopholes like that isn't "sportsmanlike" imho. It's not fair for the fans, and it's not fair for the other team/player.

[se7entse7en]

I have a feeling that Chinese girl was on something. For her to have made the progress that she has in just one year just sounds ridiculous to me. To (relatively) coast through 300m and in the final 100m step it up to crush the world record for the 400m IM just doesn't sound right.

"Ye was more than seven seconds faster in the Olympic 400m individual medley final than she had been in the World Championship equivalent last July."

These aren't beginners who improve by leaps and bounds in just a few months just by working a little harder.

I hope she wasn't, I love watching excellence in sport regardless of the nationality, but I simply find it hard to believe that she isn't/wasn't on something. Perhap time will tell.

To be fair, I find myself suspicious whenever I hear about world records being broken.

In a way it reminds me of YanYan trying to convince me that she ran a mile in highschool in 3:42. Ok, ok, not THAT bad, but still. I think it warrants raising an eyebrow.

[geForce]

[se7entse7en]

And she was probably swimming all her life. She's not a beginner.

[Wetundies]

No one questioned when Phelps was winning all those golds and breaking records.

[Wetundies]

[geForce]