London 2012 Olympics Thread

[Lief 🗽]

I thought the first performance, with the industrial revolution and forging of the rings, was pretty amazing. The performances after that weren't as good, but they were kind of entertaining (Rowan Atkinson is always lovable).

[Lief 🗽]

I'm pretty sure they called it "Palestinian Territories", but yeah, they showed the delegation and talked about it.

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China wins the first gold medal.

[Lief 🗽]

Handball is such a great sport. The women's France-Norway game today was epic.

[Lief 🗽]

Woohoo, Canada beats the Brits, Americans beat Kiwis, Frenchies beat the Swedes in women soccer. Perfect.

Really, France should just abolish the men's team. They're worthless, vulgar morons who can't play. It's really disgusting that there's such a big deal made about them when nobody notices that the more talented female team is 10x better.

Uh, the female team probably couldn't beat a random men's second league French team.

[Lief 🗽]

The French women's team is not "more talented" nor is it "10x better" than the men's team. That's just a fact.

[Lief 🗽]

jesus christ, that women's triathlon finish

These two people swam 1500 km, biked 43 km, and then ran 10 km, and they still finished within 1/100 of a second of each other. It was ridiculous.

[Lief 🗽]

Water polo is just a slower, less exciting version of handball. Now there's a great sport.

[Lief 🗽]

The British TV coverage is getting completely unbearable...

North America is hardly better:

CTV: Full coverage of the token Canadian guy in every race, excitement when a Canadian doesn't place last or next to last. But they do cover other nations, tbh.

NBC: America is the only country competing, so they only cover Americans. Though unlike Canadians, the Americans actually win something.

FOX should be the Olympic affiliate for the US, and CBC should be for Canada. I wonder why this hasn't happened?

C.R.E.A.M.

[Lief 🗽]

USA pulls ahead of Red China on gold medals and total medals. Wonderful.

[Lief 🗽]

The problem with diving is that it's become so all pervasive in the sport that often times if you're rightfully fouled (and there are many players and teams that have perfected the art of small, niggling fouls that are hard to catch but break up the play of the opposition) but you don't go to ground, the referee is not going to take notice and call the foul.

As to why it happens less in the women's sport, the unfortunate answer is probably that women's football is much less developed. Male players play up to 50 or 60 games per year, when you factor in the games for their clubs and the games for their international sides. Women players play significantly fewer games, with a lot less pressure, money, expectations, etc. riding on them. There are club games in Europe that can literally decide whether or not your team is going to earn ten or twenty million euros. In that sort of situation you're going to try and get whatever advantage you possibly can. There's nothing anywhere near comparable in the women's football leagues (the United States doesn't even have a women's football league, last time I checked; I'm pretty sure the majority of the American team basically only plays competitively in internationals).

[Lief 🗽]

Can someone explain to me why this race walking thing isn't as dumb as it looks.

[Lief 🗽]

Well, we did it. We beat Red China. Congrats America, you're still #1.