NearPup

Essentially the easiest possible draw, not too bad xD

Ya, golfers have been asking for a team event since day zero. If golf is going to be in the Olympics this is necessary.

It does seem like the Brisbane games aren't in any real risk of being cancelled, but the big project (rebuilding the Gabba) seems less and less likely to happen.

The way Agenda 2020(+5) awards the games is a big mistake. The complete lack of transparancy and awarding the games this far (11 years!) in advance seems bound to create issues.

This made some sense back when the OQTs were easy, but... they really aren't anymore.

There is also a bronze medal in the men's 1500m from Brendan Corey, who is from my hometown of Fredericton :D

Would be very funny if a bunch of American runners, swimmers and gymnasts fled to Canada and requested asylum after failing to make the US Olympic team.

Woo three ( and ) athletes in the quarterfinals with Corey, Doak and Sarault :D

Still baffled that in the women's 60kg they didn't make three brackets rather than four brackets with a playoff.

Now that artistic swimming has reformed it's scoring system I think it's fair to say that boxing has the worst judging of any Olympic sport. I wouldn't be upset to see the sport dropped entirely for that reason (my preference would be for them to get the judging into shape, but... that doesn't seem to be happening)

Gotta love all this transparency

And for tennis I think it makes some sense, the players are very loosely tied to their national federation and the Russian and Bielorissuan players on tour all seem to live in the US, the Caribbeans or in Western Europe anyway.

And Freestyle Skiing needs to remove it's 32 athlete per country limit It's at least possible now for a country to qualify in every taekwondo event, which imo was one of the big improvement over the old (pre-Rio) qualification system.

He isn't naturalized.

She'll entice her students to watch :P Breaking is going to be such a big anomaly in the history of the Olympics, if nothing else it will be really interesting to see how it unfolds and how the public reacts to it.

You better not watch them in Paris :P

I'm increasingly tempted to change the gender markers on my passports to an X purely to annoy certain people xD

"The North American and European political left" describes both people and positions I agree with 100% and people and positions that I think are batshit crazy so... xD

Then by the definition you gave me I guess every Argentinian is woke? At least everyone who is aware and conscious of whatever "social problems" exist. Which is why I objected to the definition, it's just meaningless, people basically came up with a buzzword and then tried to reverse engineer a definition onto it, and it's just too broad to be useful in a debate. It just describes a feeling, and everyone feels it at a different threshold. In practice "woke" is getting used to mean "anyone who's further to the left on social issues than I am", and since everyone has different views on social issues everyone has a different personal definition of what woke is.

Nothing to do with taste, there are Olympic sports I genuinely dislike (dressage, golf, sailing, shooting and taekwondo come to mind) who's presence on the Olympic program I have no big issues with, and there are sports I quite like (lacrosse...) that I think have no business being in the Olympics. My issue with modern pentathlon is entirely that it takes up a venue and 72 athletes that could be better used on virtually anything else. If there wasn't a 10,500 athlete limit and deep cuts across a bunch of sports it would be a different conversation.

The Olympics needs the U23 Football competition more than FIFA needs the IOC, so that's not happening. Modern Pentathlon did all those reforms and the sport is still unattractive to broadcast (to the point that where the IOC did revenue sharing they had to create a special tier for modern pentathlon because it was lower than every other sports), isn't practice outside of a very small niche (really hard to imagine there is any summer Olympic sport with a smaller base of recreational practitioners, but I admittedly don't have statistics for that), and it's just on life support. I'm very much of the opinion that if a sport or event needs the Olympics to survive as something people do competitively then it is not entitled to remain in the Olympics.

I personally think the obvious solution was to remove modern pentathlon from the Olympics and to let it fail or succeed on it’s own.

I mean, if we are going by the definition you quoted you’d basically have to be either ignorant or a psychopath to not be “woke”. So that seems like a bad definition to me, because I know a lot of people who would not self describe as “woke” but who also are definitively aware and attentive to “important societal facts and issues”. Anyway: 1. difficult question where the right answer will likely vary based on context. It’s a very difficult debate to follow because there is so much bad faith, ignorance and talking past people on both sides. 2. The death of the slalom C-2 has a lot more to do with the ICF not giving a shit about that event than it does with the IOC. Besides, you had to be stupid to not know the Olympics where heading in that direction eventually by the mid 90s at the *latest*. The people who were in power in the ICF and in various NFs that didn’t develop women’s canoeing way more aggressively are to blame. The summer sports that developed gender parity by the early 2000s didn’t suffer at all from the push for gender equality, it’s entirely the sports that dragged their feet that felt the squeeze. So my sympathies are pretty limited. (That and the IOC’s super strict insistence on the rest of Agenda 2020 was a big factor too) 3. Modern Pentathlon shouldn’t be in the Olympics at all anyway, and it’s baffling that the IOC didn’t take this opportunity to get rid of it. As someone who enjoys watching show jumping the level of riding in modern pentathlon is just painful. It was something that was only watchable with a “so bad it’s good” mindset.

This conversation would be greatly helped if there was an agreed upon definition to what being "woke" is.

First criteria is most Olympic and grand slam titles, then most points.