Posts Tagged ‘olympics’

It’s official! Team GB will finish second in the Rio 2016 Olympics medal table. Nicola Adams’s gold in the women’s boxing moves us up to 26 gold medals. China have 23 and only have medal hopes in three remaining disciplines (men’s 10m diving, team volleyball and taekwondo). Given they are so far behind in the silver medals, they can no longer overtake Team GB.

I remember London 2012. It was magic. We smashed our medal predicts and earned ourselves third in the medals table. It was brilliant. Coming into Rio 2016, this made for a bit of a downer though. Without the home crowd, how could we hope to hold on to our spot as third in the world?

That all seems silly now. We’re smashing our medals target in Brazil as well. In fact, we were predicted to come third with 20 gold medals, just behind China who were predicted to score 22. Both of those targets have now been revised by Gracenote Sports who are now predicting Team GB to finish neck and neck with China.

They are predicting both countries will now finish on 25 gold medals.

China took their predicted gold in the badminton so they remain on track for their predicted totals.

Team GB is now exceeding these predictions however. Nick Skelton’s gold in the individual show jumping today was an unexpected result: Britain was not predicted to win any medal in that competition. Joe Joyce, predicted bronze in the boxing, has just won through to the final too.

Of course one defeat for a British athlete expected to win, or one win from a Chinese athlete expected to take silver, could change everything around. It is going to be a nail biting finish.

I’ll keep this page updated as we go, if I can be bothered.

Day 14

19:31 China continue to follow their predictions: Liu Hong wins the women’s 20km walk by just two seconds, while Yin Junhua takes silver in the boxing, also as predicted.

21:56 Lutalo Muhammad was predicted to lose his semi-final taekwondo fight. He won, and so is through into the gold medal match.

22:46 Well blow me down, England have won a penalty shoot-out! Maybe we should play football as Team GB. Our women coming good in the hockey final mean we move two golds ahead of our predicted total.

Overnight We have teams running in both the men’s and women’s 4x100m relays: bronze predicted in each. China’s other medal hope for today was synchronised swimming, which they hit their silver in.

Day 15

Absolutely heartbreaking for Lutalo Muhammad in the taekwondo final, losing the gold in the very last second. Still, silver is better than his predicted bronze. Our women took bronze in the relay, unfortunately our men could not.

Today, both GB and China are predicted three golds each. We also have Joe Joyce (predicted bronze) in the boxing final and Liam Heath being the fastest qualifier in the K1 final (predicted not to place).

13:08 Liam Heath wins in the 100m kayak! Another unpredicted medal means we are now on 25: giving us three clear over China. We’re four silvers ahead too, so China would need four to catch up. With three predicted goals each for today, that is a tough ask.

15:58 China clean up in the badminton, keeping them on target for 25 with two golds and two more silvers predicted.

16:16 Here is the schedule for our remaining medal hopes today:

18:00 Nicola Adams
01:30 Mo Farah
02:00 Bianca Walkden (if she qualifies, China’s Zheng Shuyin also in contention)

Tom Daley is also fighting for a place in the men’s 10m diving final. He is predicted to make the final and earn a bronze, finishing behind China’s Qiu Bo and Chen Aisen. That starts at 20:30.

No predicted medals for Team GB tomorrow. That’s now impossible though as Joe Joyce is through to the men’s boxing final, and therefore guaranteed one. That starts at 19:15.

16:26 It is looking good for Team GB. Here are the remaining predicted medals for Team GB and China:

Gold: Nicola Adams, Mo Farah, Bianca Walkden
Silver: Joe Joyce
Bronze: Tom Daily, women’s 4×400 relay

Gold: Qiu Bo, women’s volleyball
Silver: Chen Aisen, Zheng Shuyin

We’re currently two golds and four silvers ahead. Given the gap in silvers, China can only overtake us by winning more golds, which would mean three. This is the maximum they can win: Qui Bo and Chen Aisen are both in the same diving competition, so they would need to take gold in all three events to overtake us.

Even if that happened, we would only need a single gold to seal the deal.

16:59 Well done Vicky Holland for taking bronze in the women’s triathlon. Bianca Walkden easily through the round of 16. Unfortunately Tom Daley failed to get into the 10m diving final. China finished one and two in that the semi-final.

We can wrap up second place with a gold for Nicola Adams in the boxing. Just over an hour to go for that.

Some people are simply brilliant salespeople. They have a gift for persuasion. I have always thought physicists must be some of them. They persuaded grant funders that the only place they could put observatories was in the tropical paradise of Hawaii.

Watching the Olympics, I think even they have been outdone though. Consider the successful pitches that must have been made in order to secure our current line-up of events.

“We are going to train horses to dance.”
“Hmm. Jousting? That’s a sport?”
“No, we just want the dancing included. Maybe a bit of jumping.”

“Well, it’s just hitting each other really.”

“It’s an eight-lap cycle race. But for the first five laps, the cyclists will queue up behind a motorbike.”

“It’s like the long jump, but the athlete will do a hop and a skip beforehand.”

“Well, it’s not quite a javelin and it’s not quite a shot put, but man, will they be able to throw that hammer a long way.”

“Yes, it’s diving. But there will be two of them. Doing exactly the same thing.”

“Exactly, it’s volleyball. Except with a lot of sand, and the women will be in bikinis.”

I’m very much enjoying the Olympics. I have no idea how I managed to fit the rest of life in before it started. However, it is clear that it is lacking some of the most fun sports on the planet. Below, I have highlighted some I think are worth including for Tokyo 2020.

Kabaddi

Kabaddi is a massive sport in South Asia. It’s the national sport of Bangladesh and India loves it too. If you haven’t heard of it, you might think it sounds odd. The idea is to go into your opponents half, tag them and run back, all while holding your breath. So the referee can see you are not taking a breath, players chant “kabaddi” the whole time they are doing it. You can watch some on Sky Sports and England’s women’s team want it included in the Olympics.

Flag football

What would American football look like if it was replaced by a far less dangerous non-contact version? The answer is flag football. All the fun of the NFL without the inevitable season-ending injury.

Wife-carrying

One of the traditional sports of Finland, the rules are now relaxed so you can carry any “wife” as long as they are 17 years old and weigh at least 49 kilograms. The heavier the better because the prize is your wife’s weight in beer. Traditionally the piggyback was the lift of choice but Estonian-style has now become the dominant technique.

Bog snorkelling

It’s like regular snorkelling, but in a bog. The annual championships take place in Llanwrtyd Wells, Wales. It is a straight race that you must complete just using the propulsion of your flippers.

Dodgeball

Dodgeball teaches children a lot of important skills. If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball. Despite extensive coverage by ESPN-8 of the American Dodgeball Association of America’s tournaments, dodgeball has not yet managed to make the Olympic roster.

Cheese-rolling

This isn’t really a sport, but would still make a fun show. The rules are simple: someone starts a cheese rolling down a hill and everyone has to chase it. The winner is the first one to the bottom as nobody ever actually catches the cheese. Several people usually end up in hospital though.

Air guitar

Every year the town of Oulu in Finland welcomes music lovers for the air guitar world championships. Each contestant faces two one-minute routes, one of their own music and one chosen by the organisers. They are then scored by a panel of judges on a series of criteria including technical skill and stage presence.

Baking

With Great British Bake Off about to start, the competitive baking season in the UK is literally heating up. Some people would argue it is not a sport. Not so. Whisking a sauce for ten minutes takes incredible arm strength and has Bake Off shows there is a competitive element., thus fulfilling the definition of sport.

At very least, it is more of a sport than wrestling, which enjoys a large section on Sky Sports.

Quidditch

In real life quidditch is far less amazing than it is described in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. But it’s still a fun game to watch. Players are mounted on brooms and the snitch is moved by an impartial player who runs around with it. Since 2009 the sport has even had an international governing body: International Quidditch Association.

Ultimate frisbee

Ultimate is a form of competitive frisbee throwing that in practice is a lot like netball. The score you have to catch the frisbee in the opponent’s end-zone, similar to American football. The game is usually self-refereed with people just being honest when they commit a foul.

A couple of weeks ago I was speaking to a friend who works for G4S, the company that totally messed-up the Olympics security.

He was telling us how we can somehow become some kind of comic villain – he only works on reception and yet he was telling us how kids have been booing him every time he goes out to get some lunch.

More importantly however, it turns out that G4S have a corporate song! Not just any song, but a rock power ballad with someone singing “G4S, protecting your world…” It’s brilliant! Check it out below.

Tired of Great Britain languishing near the bottom of the Olympic medals table? So am I. That’s why I’ve created the adjusted medals table.

This takes the so called official medals table and reconfigures it so that Great Britain’s medal count includes all the countries we used to own. This includes all the Commonwealth countries such as Canada, all the former colonies such as the United States and even countries we just invaded a large part of, such as France. I feel this is a more accurate reflection of our sporting legacy.

Oh, and if you do it this way, we’re doing very well!

Recently, we witnessed the London 2012 opening ceremony, and what a sight it was to behold. Breathtaking and magical, it was enough even to warm my icy tax payer heart. It’s architect, British film director Danny Boyle, received almost unanimous praise from the media and twitterarti alike.

However, it stuck me that both the TV pundits and media writers the day after, essentially wrote a conclusion that said something along the lines of “it was never going to be as good as Beijing, but Danny managed to do the best second best that we could hope for.”

I take exception to this.

The Olympic opening ceremony that took place four years ago in Beijing was indeed an amazing ceremony. It’s a perfect example of what a totalitarian state can do when it throws enough money and slaves at something to really impress the rest of the world. But that’s all they had. While a big fireworks budget and lots of synchronised dancing is very impressive, it isn’t the only metric.

For example, we don’t recognise War & Peace as one the greatest novel because it’s really, really long. The quality of a novel is defined by the quality of its wordplay, the character of the story and the emotion that it generates. Not that Beijing didn’t have these, but London had them in bucket loads.

London had both. Clearly, we didn’t have grandeur on the scale of Bejijing, but it would ne nieve to say we lacked it entirely. An army of almost ten thousand performers were involved in the opening ceremony. Bejing may have had an amazing spectacle of thousands of drummers – but so did London.

As for character, soon after the ceremony it quickly became apparent how hollow the Beijing opening ceremony had actually been. The firework were pre-recorded and the girl who we thought was singing, was actually just miming while a girl deemed too unattractive sang from behind a curtain. Meanwhile, in London, we trotted out a series of heartwarming choirs, choirs that were actually singing, for real. In their need to achieve perfection, apparently, Beijing dare not compete with that.

We trotted out an endless list of amazing people – Isambard Kingdom Brunel, The Queen, James Bond, Mike Oldfield, Arctic Monkeys, Dizzee Rascal, David Beckham, Tim Berners-Lee, J. K. Rowling, Paul McCartney, Rowan Atkinson, Emeli Sandé and more. Again, Beijing simply couldn’t complete with that.

While China does have a long and noble history, we were really able to shine in celebrating our recent accomplishments (recent being the past few hundred years). Whether it be providing a shining beacon of socialist utopia as the world looks to the NHS as the model for universal free healthcare or a mega mix of the last fifty years of music, gently reminding everyone that the only people even in the same league as us when it comes to producing internationally acclaimed an enjoyed music is the United States, the ceremony reminded us all that Britain is both a cultural and social world leader. With a civil liberties record the likes of China, Beijing couldn’t complete.

Nor could it compete when we celebrated the two greatest turning points in modern society – the industrial revolution, that brought our economy from primary industries to secondary industries, and the creation of the world wide web, that took our economy from secondary industries to tertiary industries. Both owe their origins to Britain, allowing us to casually at the end of a house party scene, drop in “oh, btw, here is the guy who fundamentally changed how the world communicates.”

All that while respecting our own citizens Human Rights. And mostly^[1] respecting other people’s as well.

So don’t be so quick to judge the London 2012 opening ceremony as the best we could do as an inevitable runner-up to Beijing. In so many ways, it was Beijing, that was hopelessly unable to complete with London.

References

¹ http://www.antislavery.org/english/campaigns/slavery_free_london/slavery_free_london/team_invisible.aspx

I wasn’t going to write about this, but so many people have now mentioned it to me that I’ve decided it is worth while commenting after all…

It’s now been six months since Lloyds TSB started the processing of correcting the account they had incorrectly set up and then started billing our charity for. They’re still working on it. After all this time, you really have to wonder if they ever will get it done.

This is a bank of truly incompetent scale – no wonder they had to sell 77% of it to the government as part of a £37,000,000,000 bailout from public funds to the major banks. That’s about £800 each btw.

So what did such a bank do with all it’s ill-gotten gains from hard-working taxpayers?

They spent £40,000,000 sponsoring London 2012. As if the tax payer hadn’t paid enough for the Olympics already, Lloyds TSB are now taking our emergency bailout money and spending it on making itself a sponsor of London 2012!

Not only that, but this is only the money paid for the sponsorship deal – and one imagines that the expenses of having a party bus follow the Olympic torch around and anything else rack up to quite a bit. In fact, they’ve even made a website about everything their blowing money on this summer.

It’s absolutely unbelievable.

Hosting the Olympics has been a harsh affair. We’ve had to temporarily (hopefully!) transformed into a semi-totalitarian state.

But on the flip side, we get to go to the Olympics. Or do we?

The Olympic Stadium holds 80,000 people. So even if you allocate a rather large amount of 800 tickets to sponsors and other interests in the private sector, that still means we can sell 99% of tickets to the generic public. But apparently not. Only 75% of the tickets have gone on sale to the general public. When it comes to the high profile events, that already rather low number of 75% drops to 35%!

But, of course, you have to give some to the private sector. They’re paying for the games after all. Otherwise, the tax payer would have to foot the bill. But, as it turns out, and we all knew already, we are footing the bill.

According to the Guardian, sponsors have contributed £1 billion of funding. They’ve made the data available for free too. The Guardian is actually being generous here – a report by Parliament puts the figure even lower.

Meanwhile, the total cost was reported to the House of Parliament as being around £12 billion. Jules Boykoff points out this isn’t entirely accurate though and, indeed, according to Sky Sports, the figure is actually around the £24 billion mark.

So do the maths on that one. We’re footing 92% to 96% of the cost, yet we’re getting 35% – 75% of the tickets.

Last month, I went to Temple Newsam to see my mum perform at the Olympic torch celebration. The choir were fantastic, well done to everyone involved!

Getting in was a struggle. After the padding down and the cavity search you then have to have a long argument about whether the folding furniture you have brought counts as genuine folding furniture. No prizes for guessing who was sponsoring the event either…