XXX Olympiad - Day 8 (8/3)

So excited for track and field!!

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I am loving this "Most Adorable Olympic Photo Ever":



sports.yahoo.com/blogs/olympics-fourth-place-medal/ryan-lochte-missy-franklin-most-adorable-photo-ever-184318414--oly.html

Are they doing aerial stunts? Jumping from trampoline to trampoline?

I should probably look this up.

I wonder if there are any Cirque performers on an Olympic team. I'd bet they'd kill.

They don't award two medals so they tossed out their lowest scores (both on beam) and that put Aliya ahead of Aly.

I hate trampoline. Trampoline is for a) practicing new skills in gymnastics and b) fun. It's not it's own fucking sport.

As track and field gets under way, I'm really interested to see what NBC does with Tamorah - the one that didn't do the 100 run off at trials. You know they are going to do some story on her, and I'm curious to see how it plays out.

steeplechase? this is a human event? off to the googles...

yes, the googles have told me that this is not the most graceful looking event at times.

I had no idea humans did steeplechase too. I've only heard that term used to refer to horse racing over jumps. Learn new things every day. Particularly here.

Yes, there's only 1 we sent to trampoline. The top 2 guys were actually brothers, and they had to compete against each other for the spot. Thanks, npr, for random trivia.

He's saying they should have let up at some point?

Meh...I don't know. The Canadian women's hockey team took heat in '10 for beating the shit out of their opponents. The US women laid off of theirs once the scores started getting far apart.

On one hand, is it necessary to win by 75 points? No. It's not. But on the other hand, the badminton players just got DQ'd for playing down (different scenario, I understand), but wouldn't laying off an opponent to not run the score up be considered playing down?

And then where do you draw the line? Is winning a swim race by a body length too much? Is winning a gymnastics meet by 5 points too much?

It's tricky.

The US hockey women made the point in 10 that they want to play their best game to encourage the weaker countries to play up to their level - they didn't want to 'play down' to theirs to make it more fair. I can see that argument too.

OMG, that first photo is disturbing.

But I also don't know if things like that happen here or not either. I know we don't have these camps where you spend most of your life to the point where you don't know that your grandparents died last year or that your mother had breast cancer but is now in remission already...but I would think that Olympians do have to deal with grueling pressure during training too. Just hopefully not like those kids do. The photos of them yelling while in pain are too much.

Gymnastics training here in the US can be pretty intense. Some people may dare call it brutal.

A lot of the flexibility stuff fucking hurts. We used to do oversplits - get into a split. Then you would put your front leg up on a mat so you were still in a split, and your front leg was now going up. For added fun, the coach would come and take that front leg and start pulling it higher. Yes. You would often cry. Because that shit fucking hurts.

But I was...jeez...11-12 once that type of stuff started?

Gymnastics hurts. I think the question here is how young is it supposed to start hurting?

Sibil - Gabby Douglas has been living in Iowa for 2 years. I don't know about the other gymnasts.

I assume the US can be bad if this friend commented upon seeing the cross eyed Russian (or was it Romanian?) girl that Marta would have slapped her eyes straight. I think she was only half joking.