Posts Tagged ‘olympics’

Another Paralympics has been and gone and another great result for Team GB. We finished with 124 medals including 49 golds. This is the exact same number of medals we won at Tokyo 2020 but with eight extra golds. It also means Team GB has come second in the medals table again.

This marks the 7th Olympics in the row where we have come second in the medals table. Technically, Russia came second at London 2012 but obviously we don’t count them anymore because the country is a bunch of big cheats.

One of the things that makes me proud to be British is that as good as an Olympic team we field, and we do field an excellent Olympic team, our Paralympic team always outperforms them.

What a games! I have such good memories of watching London 2012 and Rio 2016 was a superb performance from Team GB. In comparison, Tokyo 2020 was a little deflating because everything was on in the middle of the night and you would just wake up to see what happened. So, when Paris rolled around and back in our kind of timezone, I cleared my schedule to watch.

In fairness to the organisers, they were brave in trying to do something different with the opening ceremony. But it wasn’t my favourite part. The athletes parade is long enough when they are walking, let alone when you put them on a barge. And stuff needed faster cuts. That horse was running down The Seine for like five minutes. Just get Danny Boyle to direct it next time.

The water quality in The Seine was also an issue. But people in glasses houses and all that. The UK struggles with water pollution and there were similar problems in Rio.

Everything else was brilliant. The venues were beautiful. It was right in the heart of historic Paris. The Eiffel Tower was ever-present and made for some amazing finish lines. And world records were broken in a slow pool. I tried to take in as much as possible. At one point with the gymnastics on the TV, golf on my laptop and road cycling on my phone. I was pretty Olympic-fatigued by day 14.

Overall, we can be really proud of Team GB. Seventh in the medal table is a low finish for us. Japan is arguably on a post-hosting bounce, and similarly France were the hosts. But we would want to beat Netherlands and Australia. Some things just didn’t go our way with Josh Kerr, Matt Hudson-Smith, Beth Shriever, Beth Potter, Kimberley Woods and others narrowly missing out on gold. And it would have been great to see Kate French try to defend her title. But there were plenty of success stories, too: Alex Yee and Tom Pidpock both made amazing comebacks. Bryony Page smashed it, Keely Hodgkinson was a dominant as everyone expected and Nathan Hales set a massive new Olympic record in trap. Also, Toby Roberts is Spiderman.

So, despite being seventh, if you rank it in terms of total medals, we’re third behind the US and China. We have one first place, back in 1908 but by Atlanta in 1996 we were down to 36th place with just one gold and 15 total medals. Compare that to 14 golds and 65 medals in Paris. The BBC has a good breakdown. Many of our Olympic athletes are trying to fit training in around working full-time. When we fund British athletes, we unlock their potential and we win medals.

It’s a shame that Discovery+ own the rights. The BBC’s coverage of London 2012 was much better, whereas Discovery+ has consistently bad service and technical problems.

Two weeks until the Paralympics. We’re consistently the second strongest nation in the Paralympics, after China, so let’s hope we can keep that streak going.

It’s less than 100 days until Paris! TCD put on a small exhibition last week and had some cool stuff: Olympic torches, kit, medals and display boards on famous athletes.

It’s not been my favourite Olympics but the Olympics is always good. Being on in the middle of the night, I kept accidentally seeing spoilers on social media or checking BBC news without thinking and that took a lot of the magic out of it. And the coverage was split between BBC and Eurosport.

However, I did stay up for the mixed team relay and that was amazing.

A record haul for Team GB this year, but that is a total of five medals. There is one big question we’re all asking, though: how exactly do you train for the skeleton? I mean, I don’t know anywhere that has a skeleton track.

The 2018 Winter Olympics featured 2,921 of the world’s best Olympians. And an American skier sporting a Hungarian flag named Elizabeth Marian Swaney.

She competed in the half-pipe for Hungary. There wasn’t much in the way of tricks. She did grab her skies at one point. That was about it. You can watch her run on the BBC website.

The reason she was competing for Hungary is that they have no selection criteria. Unlike the first two nations, she tried to compete for. But, having enough of a varied lineage, is eligible to compete for three.

There is much debate as to whether she was the best, or worst, Olympian.

The answer is “the worst”, of course, but I still like her. Like many others have commented, she gives the rest of us hope. I’ve been running for 25 years. My vo2 max is 45. That’s what an average man of my age would have as standard. Some athletes have double that. I’m never going to be Mo Farah because I don’t have the innate ability.

But I could be Elizabeth Marian Swaney, because she doesn’t have any innate ability, either.

Did you experience a little confusion when watching the Olympic action at the velodrome last year? I certainly did. So I looked it up. Here are the ins and outs of track cycling.

Road cycling is pretty straight forward. People start at one point and then try and ride to the other point as fast as they can. The one who gets there first is the winner. Things get slightly more complex when there are stages and time trials, but the basic idea remains the same.

This is not so with track cycling. There are different disciplines and whole new skills to be learned with each one. This guide takes you through the most popular.

It’s all about the slipstream

Much like road cycling, being at the front is hard work. You have to move all of the air out of the way. In comparison, if you are sat behind another rider, it is much easier because you can cruise behind in their slipstream. This is critical throughout track cycling.

Team pursuit

In team pursuit, each team has four riders that have to complete a distance of 3km. Each member of the team will take it in turns to ride at the front, doing most of the work, before falling to the back and allowing the next member to take up the strain.

Only three riders need to finish the race. In theory, the team could go the entire race with all four riders. However, often one rider simply cannot keep up with the pace. Or, more often, the team will work tactically so that one rider does an extended spell at the front, burning all of their energy, before allowing the remaining three to finish the race.

Sprint

Spring is a competition between two individual riders. Distances vary but is often three laps of the track. In sprint races, you will often find the riders going very slowly for the first lap or two. The reason is that if the riders went off fast, the rider at the back would tuck into the front rider’s slipstream, save their energy, and then pass them on the final lap.

To prevent this, the front rider will cruise around at a walking pace, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. They will then suddenly rush off, hoping to catch the other ride unprepared. The other ride attempts to keep close enough to perform the undertake, often riding around the top of the track so they can rush down for a sudden gain of speed.

Keirin

Kieran is a race of 2km. However, for the first three-quarters of the race, the riders follow an electric bike around the track and must keep behind. The bike gradually increases in speed before pulling off the track near the end of the race, at which point it is a free-for-all.

Omnium

Omnium is the heptathlon of the track cycling world. Riders compete in a series of different races including pursuits, elimination races and time trials. An elimination race is a simple race around the track where the rider at the back is eliminated each lap until a winner is found. Omniums will typically end in a points race. This could be over 100 laps, with points given every 10 for the first four riders.

Nothing to see here. Correlation does not imply causation.

In fairness, if you line the countries up in population size, they come out in a pretty similar way. But it doesn’t fit quite as well as these figures do.

Caster Semenya is a South African athlete who recently won gold in the women’s 800m at the Rio 2016 Olympics. That should not be controversial, but it is, because she has hyperandrogenism.

Hyperandrogenism is a medical condition where you have an excess of testosterone in your body. Because testosterone helps you train harder and recover faster, it is on the banned substance list in athletics. If you get caught taking it, you will be banned from competing (unless you are Russian, of course).

Caster Semenya hasn’t been taking it: she just has incredibly high levels of it in her body. But other athletes claim it is unfair: they say no matter how hard they train, they can never compete with someone who has so much testosterone.

My view, is that that is tough luck.

Caster Semenya isn’t cheating. She is just naturally bigger, stronger and faster than other athletes. That is just how sport is. It has never been a meritocracy. You can train as hard as you want, you are never going to beat Usain Bolt in a sprint. When we take the top athletes in the entire world, of course, they are both hardworking and physically gifted.

I have been running for 25 years and I still can’t get my 5k time to within a few minutes of Mo Farah’s 10k time. No amount of training is going to make me faster than he is. However, for consideration, I have laid out the possible paths we could take.

Let Caster Semenya compete

This is the obvious one, and the one I favour, as outlined above.

Not let Caster Semenya complete

So now we’re banning anyone with hyperandrogenism competing because we’re confused about their gender? That’s obviously discriminatory.

Make Caster Semenya take medication

You know, like we did with Alan Turing to try and cure his homosexuality. We could give her pills to reduce her testosterone levels to a “reasonable” level.

This sounds like Kurt Vonnegut’s distopian short story Harrison Bergeron in which ballet dancers must wear weights, newsreaders must have stutters and smart people must be dumbed down. We will be giving Usain Bolt a drag parachute and removing large segments of basketball players legs so that I can compete in the NBA?

Do away with gendered sport

Instead of diving everyone into men and women, we could just allow everyone to compete in the same competition. Do away with discrimination and give everyone an equal opportunity.

Make Caster Semenya compete with the men

Which would be totally unfair, because she is a woman.

Have a new “we’re not sure” category

As well as having a men’s race and a women’s race, we could introduce a new intersex category that would allow the IAAF to parade around anyone who doesn’t exactly fit into their nice gender boxes.

Conclusion

Personally, I find all other possible routes out of this situation either ridiculous, or offensive, or in some cases both. Caster Semenya is a wonderful athlete and should be allowed to compete.

I have really enjoyed the Rio 2016 Olympics. London 2012 was pretty good: a spent a lot of time watching that too, but no where near as much as I spent watching Rio. My love of sport has grown over the past four years. This time I was watching it from 9am to midnight most days. I am exhausted from sitting around watching sport.

It helps that Team GB has completely nailed it. Without home advantage I assumed we would be unable to hold on to third place in the medals table. The predictions said we would match last time. But as things progressed, people asked question. Could we beat China? The answer was yes. We finished in second, our best performance for over one hundred years. The only time we have ever done better than third was when we came first at the 1908 London Olympics. We have never matched that away from home before.

Brazil did a good job overall, in my opinion. Their opening ceremony was okay, but if we have learned anything from Bejing and London, you probably do need to spend an obscene amount of money to make it mind-blowing. Despite the odd technical glitch, Rio did a wonderful job though. Compare this to #SochiProblems at the Winter Olympics two years ago, or the absolute disaster that was India’s attempt at hosting the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Things were not perfect, but isn’t it better to give a developing country a chance and accept it isn’t going to be London?

Brazil’s support for the Paralympics has clearly fallen short of the mark, and I will not defend them on that count.

In some ways, the Olympics has also been depressing. I remember spending an afternoon watching dressage. I lay on my sofa, wishing I had the motivation to get up and sort my life out and get things done. But all I could do was lie there and watch more dressage, a sport I have very little interest in.

But for the most part it was just sport, amazing sport, and the Union Jack being hoisted up a flag pole again, and again, and again.