Olympic politics and favoritism...

[Carol]

yeah, that's why they put it in effect I bet, to have more than the Russian or Romanian girls competing.

Bingo.

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Olym...ould-Jordyn-Wieber-be-in-the-all-around-final



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[billc]

Well, after using the Troll term a poster on the rec room side of this thread said this...

Part of humanity is the pursuit of physical and athletic excellence...That is what the Olympics is all about.

Apparently, with this rule about only two people from each country being allowed to go foward, regardless of their "...Physical and athletic excellence..." the olympics are no longer about "...physical and athletic excellence..." and are about fairness to under achievers...

But what if Wieber's 3rd place score was higher than the first place score received by a team member from another country? Technically it could happen, but the rules committee guards against it by erasing the scores of each individual gymnast once the two advancing team members have been decided.

 

[Grenadier]

Folks,

Feel free to attack the message, but remember, attacking the bearer of the message isn't allowed in this forum. This includes intentional mis-spellings of people's names.

There are plenty of ways to make your argument more substantial. Personal attacks aren't amongst them.

 

[ballen0351]

Its kinda like the MLB all star rules where every team sends someone even if your team stinks like my orioles they still get to send someone taking the spot of a better player on a different team. Stupid rule should be the best it should not matter if the 8 best come from 2 countries. Cheapened the competition if you as me.

 

[CanuckMA]

It's all about the ratings. The more countries you include in the finals, the larger your ratings will be. Very few people will watch sports like gymnastics if their country is not represented.

 

[billc]

Sooo...you're saying it's not about physical and athletic excellence after all...

 

[billc]

Some thoughts on the London Olympics...

http://reason.com/archives/2012/07/31/why-london-is-yawning-over-the-olympics

London—On the eve of the 30th Summer Olympics, the most striking thing about this city was the complete lack of street buzz. In contrast to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when all of China was mobilized for the games, there was no discernible excitement in the air.

And what was that Mitt Romney said...

No doubt the many snafus in the run-up to the games have dampened public enthusiasm. But the bigger reason Londoners are so unmoved is that the era of nationalistic fervor whipped up through mega-projects is over in the West. The West, quite simply, may have outgrown these games.
The London Olympics, like every Olympics before them, are hopelessly over-budget. The city has already blown its original $4 billion budget target four times over on obligatory new stadiums and athlete villages. Meanwhile, G4S, the firm that was awarded the security contract for the games, failed to deliver enough personnel, forcing the military to be called in. British authorities have also perched surface-to-air missiles on rooftops of private apartment buildings, scaring the living bejeezus out of residents. As if that weren’t enough, a scheme to award tickets via lottery went horribly wrong when overburdened websites crashed, leaving people who had paid thousands of dollars up front hanging for weeks before finding out if they were among the lucky winners.

A BBC-sponsored pop music festival in late June had to post a backstage notice pleading with performers to refrain from “referencing the Olympic games in a negative or derogatory way.” Even more striking are the findings of a January BBC Global poll in which 48 percent of Brits said that the performance of their athletes matters “little” or “not at all” to their national pride.
No doubt the Brits are in a bad mood because they are being asked to foot the bill for the games during a time of austerity, when England’s economy is doing a double dip. But the same poll found that the French and the Spanish are only slightly less blasé about their athletes’ performance, suggesting that the Brits’ ennui is part of a larger Western mood swing.
It’s no wonder. With the end of the Cold War, the Olympics are no longer a platform for the West and the Soviet bloc countries to showcase their rival systems. The games now are more about individual excellence and less about national loyalties.

All this means that Western boosters of the games can’t justify their spare-no-expense attitude in the name of “intangible benefits” such as national honor anymore. Unlike, say, emerging economies such as India and China, the issue for Western taxpayers is not whether their governments are capable of pulling off an elaborate event, but whether it’s worth it. Western citizens are far less tolerant of the excesses and the screw-ups and far more skeptical of the inflated claims about the benefits of the games.
This means that even if the London Olympics go off without a hitch, future games will have a hard time maintaining public support without major changes in their business model.

But...But...I thought it was all about excellence and all that...

The Olympics are a giant exercise in sports socialism—or crony capitalism, if you prefer—where the profits are privatized and the costs socialized. The games never pay for themselves because they are designed not to. That’s because the International Olympic Committee (an opaque “nongovernmental” bureaucracy made up of fat cats from various countries) pockets most of the revenue from sponsorships and media rights (allegedly to promote global sports), requiring the host country to pay the bulk of the costs. Among the very few times the games haven’t left a city swimming in red ink was after the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, when voters, having learned from Montreal’s experience, barred the use of public funds, forcing the IOC to use existing facilities and pick up most of the tab for new ones.

 

[billc]

And the olympic scandal of the day...Boxing judges...

http://deadspin.com/5931226/was-this-disgraceful-olympic-boxing-match-fixed

Knockdowns are exceedingly rare in Olympic boxing. Japan's Satoshi Shimizu knocked down Azerbaijan's Magomed Abdulhamidovfive times in the third and final round of their bantamweight bout yesterday. And yet, the judges scored the round in favor of the one who spent more time on the canvas than on his feet.

"I was shocked by the final scores. He fell down so many times," Shimizu said. "Why didn't I win? I don't understand."
​

After Abdulhamidov was awarded the 22-17 victory over Shimizu, the uproar began. Fans rained boos from the stands, and Japanese officials immediately lodged a protest. It was, by any account, the biggest competitive disgrace of the Olympics so far. And there's reason to ask if this was more than the usual Olympic boxing incompetence, but rather something more sinister.
Last September, BBC Newsnight presented evidence that Azerbaijan had paid millions of dollars in an international boxing organization, in return for a guarantee that two Azerbaijanis would win gold medals at these London Olympics. They found documents showing a $9 million bank transfer, funneled through Switzerland, to a boxing organization owned by AIBA, which oversees Olympic boxing. Whistleblowers reported that the money came from an Azerbaijan government minister, and were strictly a cash-for-medals exchange.