The Miscellaneous Sports Thread

[Syt]

[not from the Olympics]

"Table tennis is boring!"

https://twitter.com/NYinLA2121/status/1422027318365622273?s=20

(It's from the 2017 World Championships)

[jimmy olsen]

The high jump was interesting. Italian guy and a Qatari who looks like a Mr Men character share the gold.
I didn't know this was possible.
If you can agree to stop competing and just call it then why jump at all. Gold for all!

Well, the bar goes up distinct intervals, with each level. If they can't go higher, they can't go higher.

[Grey Fox]

The high jump was interesting. Italian guy and a Qatari who looks like a Mr Men character share the gold.
I didn't know this was possible.
If you can agree to stop competing and just call it then why jump at all. Gold for all!

It's more they agreed to not have a run off.

They don't re-swim a 100 meters when top 2 come at the same time.

[Admiral Yi]

Fucking frostbacks.

We got robbed in women's footie.

[jimmy olsen]

That kind of sentiment is running rampant among young men here.

Tim, are those likely to be those 'celibate can't get any' types?

More like hundreds of thousands of young men thinking "I spent every moment of my life from age 12-24 studying for exams and a woman beat me out for the job I wanted, obviously it was fraud/cheating/affirmative action, etc."

[celedhring]

I don't get sailing. Boat finishes 6th, but wins the gold because there have been like a bunch of other previous races and a super-complex scoring system. It feels deflating. 

[Josquius]

Also that they let false starts go halfway around the course before telling them...

[Liep]

Denmark's 4 man 4000 pursuit is so much in front of Britain in the semifinals that they crash into their 3rd guy. Now no one knows the rules, usually it's a win if you catch the 3rd guy but what happens when you crash into him?

[Liep]

They're through to the final!

[Josquius]

No disqualification for lead Dane?

No idea what happened with Britain on that. The 3rd guy fell miles behind.

[The Larch]

After the defeat of the Spanish basketball team today, the Gasol brothers have announced that they're retiring from the national team. It is truly the end of an era. 

[alfred russel]

I had no idea one false start meant elimination. Seems harsh.
Turned it onto the Italian channel as their guy won the 100m. Funny to listen to.

False start rules have become a lot harsher this century.

https://www.liveabout.com/false-start-rule-history-controversies-3259158

Although I hadn't realised, despite it happening ten years ago according to that article, that they'd got rid of the rule that allowed an athlete to get away with the first false start in the race with the second and subsequent false starts being automatic disqualifications regardless of the athlete involved.

Personally, I'd rather they reverted to the pre-2000 rules for false starts; the current system is ridiculously harsh in my opinion.

Although, admittedly, the British athlete's false start in the 100m final was a spectacular example of jumping the gun..

The winning 100 meter final time was 9.80 seconds. Silver was 9.84 seconds and bronze was 9.89 seconds. Everyone in the finals was under 10 seconds. Reaction times are obviously critical when you have such small differences in winning and losing.

The old system of giving runner a free false start had half the field false starting because everyone was trying to get that small edge. What was worse was that forced all the runners to tire themselves out in a bunch of false starts. The previous system of giving the entire field one false start was actually dumb, because you usually had some joker burning it intentionally in big races to amp up the pressure on other runners. In practice it wasn't much different than the "false start = immediate disqualification" system of today.

[Grey Fox]

Fucking frostbacks.

We got robbed in women's footie.

It half makes it up for the 2012 London screw job.

[celedhring]

Spain has made it to the footie final 

The Euros team was so young they were able to bring back a lot of them for the Olympics. The players doing a repeat *do* look rather tired, though.

[Valmy]

So I saw an amazing Men's 400m Hurdles race last night. The top three runners were all on WR pace and the winner shattered his own record by almost a full second. Insane.

America's son Rai Benjamin shattered the previous world record and will take home a silver.

Best Olympic race I have seen so far.