Monzanator

I wonder how many Canadians here actually watched the entire 50km race?

Dunfee steals bronze out of nowhere!!!

Dawid Tomala is an Olympic champion!!! Insane upset!!!

1 minute ago, hckošice said:

every race walk fan in the world know where dudince are

Yes, guess anyone who watches 50km walk from start to finish can call himself a fan

12 minutes ago, dcro said:

Apparently Tomala walked his first 50 km... earlier this year.

Yes, this is his second 50km walk ever. The first one was in Dudince in March this year.

Probably @hckošicecan tell us where Dudince is

15 minutes ago Korzeniowski said Tur & Hilbert look the best from the chasing pack and guess what, they have pulled clear indeed.

Dunfee getting dropped. Probably no medal for him.

Looking at the wrist watch is a good thing

3 minutes ago, dcro said:

Ouch. I can see some rhythm errors in Tomala.

He's clearly hurting now but 3:11 lead with 6 kms left.

If he hangs on he'll easily become the most anonymous Olympic medallist in Polish history. Right back to Fortuna 1972 indeed. Nobody knew Tomala before today.

Korzeniowski says Tur & Hilbert should start the serious chase now. Rules Vieira out as he "doesn't have the strenght".

2 minutes ago, heywoodu said:

Surely Korzeniowski is getting more confident? @Monzanator

Yeah, he said he might just get excited soon. Still watching the chasers and says he doesn't see much fire among them.

You can probably tell when cycling peloton gives up the chase on breakaway too?

Early leader Luo lapped after 40 kms.

Barrondo DQ

Haukenes DNF

Korzeniowski analyzing Tomala's breathing technique. No teeth showing means Tomala is still comfortable

1 minute ago, Olympian1010 said:

Because some sport climbing is better than no sport climbing 

 

In fairness, quotas weren’t as tight for Tokyo as they are for Paris. There’s also a lot of rumors as to why the combined event was chosen for the Olympics instead of the individual disciplines, but that’s a loaded topic I don’t feel like getting into.

I think we can safely presume the mixed events are there to cut down the quotas as chief reason. Gender diversity is just a convenient excuse. Getting rid of 470 class in sailing proves that. IOC will be making space for new "urban teenage" events and sailing remains an old school sport that isn't aimed at the teenagers whatsoever. I'm fairly sure we'll have e-sports as Olympic "sport" come 2032.

Korzeniowski says Tomala needs to build 5 min gap in 12 kms for this charge to make sense. He doesn't like the idea at all.

2:10-2:20 hour mark is usually when Korzeniowski started his solo walking up front. Someone needs to tell Tomala he's not Korzeniowski

1 minute ago, dcro said:

Any chance for a fluke Italian gold?

Nope

7 minutes ago, Olympian1010 said:

Which is exactly what the majority of the climbing community, myself included, wants of course. It’s just tough to get there when quotas are tight like there are currently.

Yeah, quotas are tight but one would have thought the new sports will get the glass half-full treatment and some of the old ones get trimmed down. But here they brought a new event and clearly butchered the concept already. If you want to keep the quotas in sport climbing low then why introduce this sport to the Games to begin with?

lead the pitstop contest. One on three warnings and the other at two.

Just now, heywoodu said:

Me too, but I think that's the argument I've seen on here mostly. It's easily the most ridiculous thing in the entire Olympics to have a junior tournament, and a senior men's tournament would be useless, but I doubt they'll ever accept to have only women's football at the Olympics (which would be great)  

The men's senior tournament was basically for communist bloc and Asia for years (because IOC was still following the amateur rules and pro players from Western Europe or South America were ineligible to compete). That's why Poland won the 1972 gold medal with a squad consisting of 90% of players that finished third at the World Cup two years later. Back in 1972 teams like Sudan or Burma managed to qualify, later other scrubs like Guatemala or Cuba. Brazil had some future stars as they fielded junior teams alright but those players weren't quite up to the standard aged 19-20 yet.

1 minute ago, thiago_simoes said:

I wonder how important, exactly. I remember that in 2012 absolutely no one I know cared about the final match against Mexico. I even went to a restaurant with a group of friends at the time, not to watch the match but instead to talk about life. No one there cared about the match in the least, despite the fact that there was a TV there showing the match. But in 2016 everybody went crazy about it because the Olympics were in Brazil. This year, most people don't care about it again.

 

 

Exactly. This means that 98 gymnasts is a low number, because most of them are all-arounders who happen to compete at the Olympics and have a chance to fight for medals in individual events, while a number of great true specialists are kept at home thanks to the insanely low number of gymnasts allowed to qualify. FIG has become more and more welcoming towards specialists: now up to 3 per apparatus can qualify through the world championships and 1 per apparatus at the World Cup Series. In the past they only allowed 1 per apparatus to qualify, and only if this person was the World Champion at the event the year before the Olympics. Crazy.

Besides, 60 people fighting for only 3 medals is a little too much. Especially in an event with such a low number of people generally interested on it, except, of course, for the people in this forum.

But the key is, those people come from influential regions of the world - China, Russia, Australia and most of the Latin America. USA is the only athletics powerhouse that has zero presence in race walking over the years.

7 minutes ago, Olympian1010 said:

Not sure what “endurance boulder” is…but yes, the speed winner can stay competitive in this format because of the multiplication system used for the combined score. On one hand, it’s nice that speed specialists have a chance, on the other hand it’s a bit ridiculous since they tend to be towards the bottom of lead and boulder phases. Obviously, speed will be a separate event in Paris, so this won’t be an issue next cycle.

 

Lead and Boulder are generally regarded as being more similar to each other, than speed climbing is to either, so it’s not shocking that climbers stronger in Boulder and Lead might fair better in qualification. For example 2x16x17 (speed-boulder-lead) is still worse than than say 14x4x6.

The speed speciallists are lucky there are no 30 entries overall or else the entire Top 10 from speed climb wouldn't have made the final. So this combined event is unfair to them. It has to be separated like it is in the World Games. It's like in cycling when sprint speciallists will never contend for the overall Grand Tour or a mountain stage victory.

3 minutes ago, JoshMartini007 said:

To be fair, in artistic gymnastics there is a lot of overlap between the events. Even outside the Olympics FIG is barely welcoming towards specialists.

 

Yeah, I still remember the uproar when Leszek Blanik couldn't qualify for Athens 2004 despite being the reigning WCh silver medallist in the vault No love for apparatus speciallists in gymnastics whatsoever.

Very nice running from #70