NearPup

I hope you got to see the women's team pursuit / women's hockey / men's 5000m relay golds live at least, because those were really nice (bouncing back in women's hockey, finally winning in women's team pursuit after having been so dominant for so many years, and re-establishing the Canadian dynasty in the men's 5000m while giving the best possible sendoff to one of Canada's great Olympian). ...it's just, ya know. Lots of frustrating near misses and underperformances too.

The NFL is really putting their weight behind Olympic flag football. They quite clearly want to reproduce the Barcelona dream team moment.

Don’t even have to go back that far, 2022 was pretty dire (after amazing winter games from 2002 to 2018).

I mean obviously. It’s road cycling, not rural cycling.

Best I can do is a 2x3 mixed team time trial relay.

The way I think about it: the team batting first sets a target. There are two likely outcomes for the team batting second: either they fall short of the target (so team 1 wins by the number of runs team 2 fell short by) or team 2 reached the target with X wickets and Y overs to spare (so team 2 wins by X wickets).

Such transparency!

Is there a list of disciplines that were proposed anywhere? I was able to find a couple of them (like compound archery) but not a full list.

Volleyball has a statistic called “kill”. Volleyball is literally a sport where the objective is to have the most kills while limiting errors. Is volleyball glorifying violence?

The IOC is considering a proposal to make Bach the Eternal President of the IOC. (or rather they are considering letting him run for a third term, but… ya)

I actually think it’s better for everybody involved for this to be a third games rather than part of the summer or winter games. The summer games are already bloated, and esports also requires more flexibility than traditional games (the individual games are more akin to sailing boats rather than events, so it isn’t really practical to lock in a program four years ahead of time for instance). But I do think that, at this point, esports is an important enough part of the sports ecosystem that they deserve to be part of the Olympics in some way. And hey, chess is an esport too so there will be something for more traditionalist folks :P

I have zero faith this will be any good as long as Bach (and friends) are in charge. But I have long wanted to see a third edition of the Olympics focussed on esports and mind sports (like chess), so in that sense I’m very supportive of this. But Bach has so drop his silly opposition to esports that “glorify violence”.

It’s also mad that surfing and skateboarding didn’t start in Rio.

Modern Pentathlon is completly getting rid of show jumping for all International competitions. Because of the horse punching scandal thing (at least that's the stated reason, I think the image of the Modern Pentathlon show jumping event being a lottery both because of the horses but also because the athletes are really bad riders was getting to be too much of a PR issue)

The Olympic champion from 1976 deserves as much room as he wants!

If they want to add obstacle racing to the Olympics they should just do that and dispense with the farce of attaching it to fencing / swimming / laser run.

Modern Pentathlon surviving is a bit baffling to me tbh.

The cycling road race already has a quota number that is way too small for it to be a proper road race.

It’s not even a rumor, Christophe De Kepper straight up said on the record that Boxing would be included in the LA 2028 program.

Local politics coming into play is sort of an inevitable consequence of allowing the host organizer to pick some additional sports. Especially when presumably there was some quid pro quo wrt adding cricket, a sport that was obviously not *really* picked by the LA organizers.

It was also very funny to see all the pearl clutching over a lack of diversity in surfing. Amusing fact: surfing is the only Olympic sport where North America, South America, Africa, Asia and Oceania have all won medals but Europe hasn’t. And that’s after awarding just six medals…

Something like one in five human lives in the Indian subcontinent, I think it’s pretty reasonable for to get one sport. Plenty of very Eurocentric and East-Asia centric sports in the Olympics already (and the addition of Lacrosse and Flag Football is *very* North America centric - and heck we even have a sport that is dominated by tiny Oceania!).

Wrong thread I’m actually pretty excited about this, if they end up having a match in Florida or Texas I’ll be tempted to attend.

Has anyone seen both of them in the same place?

Cricket is very simple to explain to someone who knows how baseball works - the main thing that is hard to grasp is that in cricket outs are valuable and runs are cheap, whereas in baseball runs are valuable and outs are cheap. Everything else is very easy to explain.