Summer Olympics 2012 LD
- Thread starter Tastycles
- Start date
Captain Morgan Freeman
Taught Elvis how to play karate
Ireland on course for their first gold medal. Is Feider linn!!
Lee
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No it's Supermod!
It looked fun, but Laura was being interviewed on BBC3 so that won.
Captain Morgan Freeman
Taught Elvis how to play karate
Patriotic sheep is enjoying the Olympics.
ÐаÑбоÑа
doesn't know REAL wrestling...
The American bus must have finally arrived at the athletics stadium.
Which was quite shocking on both counts. I fully expected a team full of relative unknowns to provide a serious challenge to a team featuring Kobe, LeBron, and a team full of NBA calibre players.
Really? I think most intelligent people would have expected Team USA to soundly defeat Australia, like they did. After all, the very best players in Australia have not traditionally fared well against the very best players from America. But that is what's so great about the Olympics. No matter which country they come from, you know you're seeing that country's very best in that sport.
I agree Sly, but surely a sport like basketball shouldn't be in the Olympics anyway. Not because it has no merit as a sport, but because it's not really competitive. No other country in the world has a basketball league on the scale of the NBA, also it's not bound by the same rules as football where you are limited to only three professionals in the squad or if there is the USA has managed to circumvent it pretty easily.
I enjoy watching basketball but it's the only sport out of the 26 sports at this olympics that isn't competitive at all and it just doesn't make sense to me.
I enjoy watching basketball but it's the only sport out of the 26 sports at this olympics that isn't competitive at all and it just doesn't make sense to me.
I guess there's no need to go down this road again, we debated this to death the other day and I guess we will agree to disagree. I just think it is unfortunate to see a quarterfinal matchup be decided by 33 points, with everyone astonished by the fact that at least Australia managed to keep it somewhat competitive for three quarters.
And now we have a semifinal matchup to anticipate featuring a rematch with Argentina. With any luck at all, Argentina can manage to keep the deficit lower than the 29 point differential last time round. Although I doubt they'll be able to do it.
Likely we will see a Spain/USA final. And a double digit loss by the Spaniards. Hardly the spirit of competition.
Richard Blonoff
Make America Rassle Again
Men's is competitive, but not the the extent it should be. Countries like Spain and Argentina typically field good teams and Brazil and Lithuania and the former Yugoslavia have fielded competitive teams in the past. Even before they changed the rules in '92 to allow NBA players the US still dominated, winning all but two golds in that time. The issue is that the sport is just now becoming popular on a global scale. Every year the US team gets a little bit less dominant. They got rid of baseball and softball because they were too uncompetitive, but the margins there weren't nearly as great. Also the UK is poor at it and you are jelly
Women's basketball however
I guess the argument of "they are just too good" doesn't make sense to me when it comes to Olympic competition. I'm still wondering why they continue to let Michael Phelps keep coming back to the Olympics if we're so concerned about how dominant someone is.
It just seems absurd to me to disqualify people from an Olympic sport because they are "too good". It seems it completely tarnishes the entire concept of the Olympics.
It just seems absurd to me to disqualify people from an Olympic sport because they are "too good". It seems it completely tarnishes the entire concept of the Olympics.
Misty May-Treanor and Kerry Walsh have won three straight gold medals in women's beach volleyball and have won 21 straight matches in Olympic competition. Michael Phelps has won more gold medals and more total medals than anyone in Olympic history (Phelps has won TWICE as many gold medals as the next person on the list). Are we going to exclude them as well?
It's...Baylariat!
Team Finnley Baylor
The entire point of the Olympics is to represent your country and to win a Gold medal for said country. If you're so good at something, why not represent your country in competition and try to win a medal? Phelps is dominant because he's better than everyone else. May and Walsh are better because they've played together more than 15 years and no one else in the Beach Volleyball category can match them.
If you can't beat them, then don't complain about it. Train harder, work harder, and get better.
If you can't beat them, then don't complain about it. Train harder, work harder, and get better.
It's not the same thing, Phelps and Lochte are both extraordinary individuals but their career will span four, maybe five Olympics at best, with realistically only three with them on the top of their game. Beach Volleyball is the same, a pair of extraordinary individuals, as with British Cycling (6/8 gold medals in the velodrome). Individuals performance is very much short term compared to America's dominance of basketball.
Basketball has been an Olympic Sport since 1936, eighteen olympics ago, America has won the gold medal fourteen times.
The times they didn't win:
1972 (Munich) - Wasn't born but after reading it it looks a little bit like America got screwed
1980 (Moscow) - USA boycotted the 1980 Olympics
1988 (Seoul) - America was the only country whose league counted as professional, as such NBA players were not allowed but professionals elsewhere in the world were.
2004 (Athens) - God only knows what went wrong for the US in that tournament, but it seems as though it's the only gold medal America was denied because someone beat them fair and square.
When you could make a case for a nation to have won an olympic event at 16 out of the 18 olympics the sport has been at, it's not competitive. That's my point, there is no other Olympic event which has had such a stranglehold by one nation for almost eighty years.
The Dragon Saga
Whale in a Teardrop
Katie F'N Taylor!!
Ireland invaded an English arena, they may as well have held the fight in Croke Park with the atmosphere, if I was the Russian fighter I'd have shit my pants from the reception she got. Great fight and a great win, not ecstatic for Cian O'Connor's victory yesterday cause I think hes a prick, but Katie Taylor is someone I can get behind!
Ireland invaded an English arena, they may as well have held the fight in Croke Park with the atmosphere, if I was the Russian fighter I'd have shit my pants from the reception she got. Great fight and a great win, not ecstatic for Cian O'Connor's victory yesterday cause I think hes a prick, but Katie Taylor is someone I can get behind!
