Monzanator

25 minutes ago, Agger said:

 

Every member of the Norwegian team is not asthmatic (at least not openly from what I know). That is in fact the most problematic thing, that Norway has a tradition of using it, even on (usually) healthy athletes with some temporary ailments. 

But I really think you're oversimplyfying things (I feel it's not the first time that I've thought so  ). It is in no way unusual to get asthma as an elite athletes. We would see a massive decrease in athletes in most endurance sports and even a sport like swimming (where chlorine most likely doesn't help) if we suddently banned all asthma medicine.

Occam's Razor works for me   Cross country is the national sport in Norway, if we get rid of the asthmatic frauds there will be many more ready to replace them - without the phoney TUE excuse. The massive decrease in endurance sports you fear won't happen either. The wholesale ban on TUE will force athletes to win the clean way like it or not, cycling has been dragged through the mud enough already, nobody will cry after Chris Froome & pals either. Bradley Wiggins has been rendered as media pariah after the jiffy bag mystery so yeah, heroes come and go and the world will always find new ones.

11 minutes ago, Dunadan said:

Muddying the waters...or maybe the "know-it-all who actually knows little or nothing and is always right anyway" syndrome - if doctors' TUEs don't need to be obtained to take a drug legally then all the talk about doctors-athletes complicity and faking illnesses doesn't make sense (like in the case of real TUEs) but whatever.

It's called common sense. Sick people shouldn't be able to have a superior physical ability to healthy ones. Not to mention every member of the Norwegian cross country team is sick with asthma. If the sick people are able to dominate like that where on Earth are the healthy Norwegian skiers?

8 minutes ago, Dunadan said:

Lots of misinformation and mixing apples with oranges - Froome's case is not TUE doping, he went over the salbutamol limit allowed without having a TUE, if he had been granted a TUE by a doctor there would have been no case. Same for many Norwegian skiers who (ab)use (of) medications within the legally allowed limit but if they go over that limit they risk disqualification not having been granted any TUE (see Sundby).

 

And of course Russians are persecuted by evil whites because they are brown, "it is known".

This is how muddying the water works. It's not the drug itself that is banned but the illegal dosage. And then you get dragged into the picogram nonsense. I'd say BAN every TUE drug available and stop with the "80 picograms isn't doping" nonsense!

Bradley Wiggins had to fall out of the public eye over Team Sky's "mysterious package", hell nobody wants him to compete in rowing anymore, anyone remembers that stunt he tried to pull off? He's completely gone from the media now, God knows his TUE crap excuse is suspicious as hell given how much doping there is in cycling.

17 minutes ago, Grassmarket said:

Redgrave’s medal was in the Four. 

 

 

Still, it's not an individual sport In NFL we have a player who was born without a hand. Faking an illness to take advantage of TUE is the real evil here.

10 minutes ago, Grassmarket said:

Well Steve Redwood won an Olympic Gold in rowing as a diabetic, there are diabetic professional soccer players, there is or was an-all diabetic pro cycling team in the States etc etc.

In the rowing eights? Please! If all eight rowers had diabetes then you have a case. But if you have 7 healthy rowers that doesn't matter.  Pro cycling in the US? That's some second tier crap team most likely? You didn't even mention their name. Norway in cross country is light years ahead in terms of results. Chris Froome is also pretty successful last time I checked. Nobody cares about participtaion trophies here. TUE doping is being used among the world's elite and nobody can do anything about it. Hell, UCI said Froome was let off the hook because Team Sky had so much money they could provide all the medical tests and then some half of the world can't even afford. Reminds me of the celebrity lawyers, justice can always be blindsided if you have enough money. And Norway has enough money to invest into the fake asthma BS in their national sport. What's the point of the sport being 'fair' when the money still runs this world too?

1 minute ago, dcro said:

 

Everyone (mostly Democrats though) always seem to forget about the silent majority.

Silent majority is the biggest bullshit in politics alright. Jeremy Corbyn jumped on this train in the UK and look where he is now

12 hours ago, Olympian1010 said:

Except that Bloomberg has to get those same people to like him for that happen. Plus, his a Super Bowl ads get jack shit. Most people hated them.

If you read social media and watch CNN you get an impression most people hate Trump as well. Yet he somehow won the damn election

Speaking of CNN, even they can't spin the Iowa caucuses delay fiasco. "Chaos" and "failure" is the two most common words I hear all morning. Way to go, dickheads! Someone even said Donald Trump can call himself the winner of the Dems Iowa caucus Bloomberg's decision to skip this mess looks better by the minute.

Guess nobody will blame this on the Russian hackers? Dems look every bit as incompetent like I even didn't think they would.

12 hours ago, Grassmarket said:

There’s plenty of people with diabetes & many other manageable conditions who benefit from TUEs.  Are you saying they should be thrown out of top-level sport just because a minority abuse the rules?  Hardly fair, the solution is to amend the rules to prevent abuse - only neutral doctors can prescribe, renewals are not automatically granted, statistics are published at year end etc etc.

If you're faking an illness any doctor can provide the right papers to fool the system which is deeply flawed. It's a foolish assumption that athletes and doctors are separate items, they're the two sides of the very same coin. Who in the world believes that "those poor naive athletes got used by those evil doctors". That's nonsense and you know it.

Please name me which of these asthmatic skiers or cyclists also have a diabetes? You have asthma or diabetes and you want to be a world class athlete beating healthy competitors? Geez, find a new job. People who are 2 meters tall might also wanna win the Kentucky Derby as jockeys, hell, I haven't seen a 2 meters jockey though! Why? Isn't life supposed to be fair? 5'2" jockeys win the Kentucky Derby and not 6'3" jockeys. That's why asthmatic people shouldn't be winning endurance events either.

Just now, heywoodu said:

 

But thinking everyone with a TUE fakes an illness is plain stupid, I hope you don't mean that.

TUE only turns up in endurance sports like cross country or cycling. So it doesn't apply to everyone. In NFL people got banned indefinitely for being alcoholics. But in cross country hordes of Norwegians are faking asthma and become national heroes and Olympic champions. Ban TUE all across endurance sports and the problem is solved. If you really have asthma then become a lawyer or something but if you're faking it, you will still remain in cross country but just try to win it without the phoney support.

5 minutes ago, heywoodu said:

Banning TUE's entirely would be just as terrible for sports.

Why? Faking an illness to gain illegal advantage should be removed by default.

1 minute ago, Vojthas said:

They don't have asthma, they are only diagnosed with asthma. I cannot find the link right now, but I think it was Steira who said they were taught how to breathe at the survey to get that TUE for symbicort. And the best thing - nobody has done anything with that process by now. And is not going to, I'm afraid.

Yeah, I know that's all one huge fraud. After Norway got their butts kicked at 2009 World Champs they rolled out the TUE chainsaw and it's all over. Nobody will do anything about it since Norway controls the FIS cross country section and won't allow anyone to overthrow their empire. Even Sweden can't do anything about it. I bet every single junior skier has a fake asthma history already just in case to cover it up.

Symbicort is just a pharmacy name for the drug, it's about formoterol that is included in symbicort. It has the same effects as salbutamol that got Chris Froome in trouble. TUE should be banned from every sport outright and I hope this will happen one day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formoterol

3 minutes ago, heywoodu said:

Jesus you really never read any thread before you post something do you?

 

Did you hear the Norwegians had a couple of thousands of doses of asthma medicine?  

It's called symbicort. Do you know every god damn Norwegian skier has asthma? I wonder where they stuffed the healthy athletes? If the poor sick ones are dominating then I want to see the healthy ones in action!

10 minutes ago, Olympian1010 said:

People like Bloomberg, but no one wants to vote for him. At least that’s what I can tell.

The same was said about Trump four years ago. "Who's gonna vote for this clown?". And the rest is history.

If Bloomberg wants to mirror Trump's run then I wouldn't be surprised if he actually makes it all the way while the Dems will continue to bicker about "electability" and lack of diversity of their candidates. They've wasted enough time on in-house fighting already and Bloomberg will simply wait them over.

1 minute ago, Agger said:

 

WHAT? That was the very worst in my opinion (And it was more Black Eyed Peas ) . Vocals were not good at all and man was I sad that they felt like punishing Slash by being a part of it.

Sadly other than Katy Perry, I seem to almost only remember the bad stuff for the last 10 years. A lot of forgettable shows, though it's without doubt a matter of taste.

I'm a hard rock fan so I have a Slash sentiment. Fergie & Black Eyed Peas are lousy music for me to say the very least and I'd never say anything positive about pop or rnb however I think Perry or maybe Taylor Swift or even Grande are a lot better singers than Lopez & Shakira despite my actual disdain for their music genre.

Get Metallica for a SB half-time show and then we can talk

Bloomberg had two ads during Super Bowl that I saw, I read somewhere he skips iowa & NH primaries as irrelevant and will make the big push later on. In fact it's not for the first time I read that Iowa and NH are basically only important because of their timing and in general they're not as important in the grand voting scheme at all.

12 minutes ago, Olympian1010 said:

I see we can’t even agree what halftime shows are best  
 

We have to be the most consistently opposite users on Totallympics.

Lopez and Shakira are past-prime entries, it's not 1999 anymore. If they wanted to include some Latinas then Ariana Grande or Becky G would be a lot better.

Katy Perry was at the peak of her powers during 2015. Her performance clearly outshone Beyonce's from 2013 as well. The second best of the last decade was probably Fergie & Slash. I'm not even gonna talk about Maroon 5 or Bruno Mars which were just about the most forgettable of the lot.

The half-time show was bad IMO, only slightly better than Marroon 5 trash. Shakira "singing" from playback was fucking insane, if she can't sing live anymore what's the whole point of even being there?

Like many said, Katy Perry and her show pretty much killed the half-time competition for years to come. Lopez & Shakira were a long way off that.

2 minutes ago, Agger said:

 

But where do you see the numbers from this year. I haven't managed to find anything

Super Bowl numbers from this year? It's 8:00 am on the West Coast there, it's a 9-to-5 working day in USA so they're still drinking coffee there

Btw, I found reports there was 180k SB viewers in Italy and 34k in the Netherlands ( @heywoodu )

11 minutes ago, Agger said:

 

Where do you get the 170 million? Haven't been able to find official numbers other than 2014 saying 180, but several other sites mention numbers in the 3 or 400s. I'm aware that there are many ways of counting, but that's a big difference. Articles without sources are always questionable but it's an extremely inflated number if they say double the amount that actually watched.

Correct, the Liverpool-Tottenham final was a 6-year low for these UCL games, The 2018 final Real Madrid vs Liverpool drew 480 million which makes it a slam dunk in these rankings.

3 hours ago, heywoodu said:

Now I'm rather curious which annual sport event(s) is/are that much bigger  

Like mentioned above, UEFA Champions League final (170 million) draws more viewers annually than Super Bowl (ca. 160 million worldwide). However I've read the Indian Cricket League final draws even 200 million viewers (can't say much about it since I don't watch cricket).

FIFA World Cup final draws over 550 million viewers globally but that's obviously once every four years.

5 minutes ago, Olympian1010 said:

It’s a rather common mistake, but he’s the damn president and he should know better.

Narcisstic billionaires like Trump usually don't care about such irrelevant things like geography

24 minutes ago, Olympian1010 said:

Trump congratulates the Kansas City Chiefs of...Kansas. What an idiot 

I wouldn't be surprised if 80% of Americans believe Kansas City is actually located in Kansas (which of course it is not).

Kyle Shanahan has completely blown the playcalling with a multi-score lead in the SB again...

6 minutes ago, Olympian1010 said:

If you’re not getting commercials, then you’re missing out on the true Super Bowl experience. Every American would back me up on that.

I absolutely fricking hate commercials myself. Put this shit on mute at the very least. One would think the whole game is just a distraction for the halftime show and the damn adverts.

26 minutes ago, Olympian1010 said:

Me and My family were just having a goof laugh about Europeans watching the game.

It wouldn't surprise me if Americans think Europeans don't have a clue about NFL