Bolt is one fast Mofo...he was real loose b/f the 200m and then turned it on...very amazing... Softball lost to Japan for silver...USA vs Brazil in women's soccer is on now...
Who said the chinese don't boo? Everytime the Opals are in China's end of the court they're getting booed by the crowd.
Somebody posted it before I did and a lot of other event finals. Seems like everybody is saying f--- the spoilers. Why should I even try anymore? It's not like softball is a primetime event either.
Intentionally lose the finals in hopes of getting softball reinstated in the Olympics... makes a lot of sense, especially since gold=silver in medal count anyway.
I mean, are there any new players on the softball team? If not then everybody on the team already has a gold medal and perhaps more than 1.
Watching soccer players flop and whining and crying on the ground is one of the most annoying thing to see ever.
yeah I recorded it. I was just giving him a hard time. I would have seen the results on the nbc website at some point today anyway.
Although, most (all?) of the other U.S. softball games have been on live at 11:00 PM CDT. This was the exception.
If memory serves me, most Olympics will have events that are not located anywhere near the village. In Atlanta several events were held in locations 1-2 hours away from the city. It's obviously due to terrain requirements (like rowing I guess). I'm pretty sure there's some other events in China that are not directly in Beijing.
Did a quick search and couldn't really get any good answers. I skimmed a bit of the rule book for gymnastics, and I'm having enough problems finding the policy there, although I wouldn't doubt it if I missed it. Even if the answers could be easily found at Wikipedia, I wouldn't necessarily know what to look for when it comes to other sports with judging. If you can find some good links with info, I'd greatly appreciate it. AFAIK, they do that in gymnastics. I thought about that too, but when they were explaining the tiebreaker between Nastia and He in the uneven bars, they mentioned how the process worked. When calculating the execution score, the high and low scores are thrown out, and then an average is computed using the middle 4 scores. That's how I understood it anyway. I figured that would do the job too, but maybe they're really worried about bias affecting the results. Thanks for the clarification. I must have missed that during the broadcast, although it doesn't really make me feel any better (actually makes it seem worse IMO). If anything, I'd rather have it the other way around. A judging error would probably have a bigger impact on the individual events, where the athletes only have one routine to perform instead of 4-12 where they could still try to overcome the error. I don't really understand the advantage for using it in the individual events, but not the others (if it is OK for the all-around and team finals, why not the individual events?). On a related note, does anyone know how you can get the judge scores from the events? I wanted to double-check this (which judges were used in what events), but I couldn't find it. I downloaded the official results from the FIG and US Olympic sites, but it just shows the final execution scores. I've seen specific judge scores mentioned 2-3 times during the week, so I'm guessing they have to be somewhere.
RC Cola, the following LAT article may have answered your question. http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-olysound20-2008aug20,0,991019.story From the Los Angeles Times STEVE SPRINGER / ON SPORTS MEDIA In gymnastics, the real bias was in NBC broadcast booth Announcers Al Trautwig and Bela Karolyi embarrassed themselves with a jingoistic display after Nastia Liukin lost a gold medal to China's He Kexin in a tiebreaker. By Steve Springer Los Angeles Times Staff Writer August 20, 2008 The gymnastics competition in women's uneven bars ended in confusion turning to consternation culminating in outrage. And that was among the broadcasters. When He Kexin of China was declared the winner over Nastia Liukin of the United States at the National Indoor Stadium by virtue of a tiebreaker, after both had finished with a score of 16.725, several members of the NBC broadcast crew reacted with an embarrassing display of jingoism, a degree of home-team bias that would have made Rex Hudler blush. "They are tied," a perplexed Al Trautwig said when the scoreboard showed that, despite the even score, He was listed as the winner. "What did they do, invoke some sort of tiebreaker? . . . [Liukin] wants to know what the heck is going on." Hello? Trautwig has been the lead gymnastics announcer since the tiebreaking mechanism was installed for the 2000 Olympics and he still doesn't know it exists? Can you imagine him at Yankee Stadium in December 1958, the New York Giants and the Baltimore Colts tied at the end of 60 minutes in the NFL championship game? As the first sudden-death overtime in league history is about to commence, Trautwig is lost. "What's going on?" he says. "An official is on the field tossing a coin. Is that how they are going to decide this game?" When He was on the victory podium receiving her gold medal, Trautwig said, "Does she really think she won the gold?" Yeah, she deluded herself by believing the judges. To his credit, analyst Tim Daggett, while also questioning He's victory, did so on the basis of the judges' standards and deductions, a fair argument in a sport based on subjective scoring. Daggett finally calmed Trautwig down by explaining a tiebreaking procedure that had been called confusing and convoluted. While the high and low scores among the six judges are routinely thrown out, the next-lowest score is also eliminated to break the tie, hardly rocket science. "The rules were in place," Trautwig had to concede. "Once you begin to play a game, you have to know that's the case and it may not have gone your way." So a sense of fairness had finally surfaced? Not with Bela Karolyi just getting warmed up in the NBC bullpen. When the scene switched to Bob Costas and Karolyi in the studio, Karolyi, nostrils flared, arms waving, didn't know where to strike first. So he lashed out in all directions, attacking the judges and the tiebreaker. "Knowing and understanding the scoring system is gone," said Karolyi, who obviously hadn't been paying attention to Daggett. "Everybody's just guessing, why that score? Why is that happening on the floor? "Where is the fairness? Maybe there is a biased judge. Maybe it is a judge who is just incompetent." Speaking of possible bias, it should be noted Karolyi is a former U.S. coach and his wife, Martha, is the U.S. team coordinator. The tiebreaker wasn't employed only for the uneven bars. Poland's Leszek Blanik beat France's Thomas Bouhail for the gold after both had identical scores. Where was Karolyi's outrage then? What happened, Karolyi asked in reference to the awarding of the gold to He, to "the idea of the Olympic spirit?" It clearly resides in the 18-year-old Liukin, who added a more mature voice to the conversation, saying, "Gymnastics can get like that sometimes, so you just have to accept it." Nastia, you and Bela really need to talk. steve.springer@latimes.com
Tyson Gay? Talk about a complete and utter disappointment. From failing to qualify for the 100M final to botching the baton handoff. You can only use the injury excuse for one of those choke jobs.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/olympics/2596307/Swimmer-David-Davies-soaks-Chinese-official-at-Beijing-Olympics.html I just like the irony in this article
First, let me say I questioned a lot of the judging in gymnastics. But on this one particular issue, the announcers reactions to the tie-breaker was silly. Objective rules are objective rules and a winner had to be declared.
Spoiler I think softball seems to work like NCAA baseball. On the US Softball website they said after the US beat Japan the first time, they said Japan would face the winner of Australia and whoever they were playing. So if they are playing double elimination style, Japan would move over to the loser's bracket, and then of course would have to play the US again since they beat Australia. The only question that remains though, the US loss would leave them with one loss, just like Japan. So in double elimination play, wouldn't that mean they would have to play one final game?
