FancyFenchel

Winter sports world cups during the weekend, what else???

Which I guess is part of why unfortunately 'our' first wild card attempt of the season was rejected last week  

Looks like the gate malfunctioned and Eriksen Sundal was literally pushed by the ad board
 
 

Look of the Games and pictograms: https://olympics.com/ioc/news/milano-cortina-2026-look-of-the-games-and-sports-pictograms-revealed-inspired-by-new-italian-spirit

IOC Press Release 
11th September 2024
The IOC is pleased to announce the addition of the exciting new winter sport of Lugeage (prounounced Lugg-age) to the 2030 Winter Olympics being held in the French Alps. The sport which combines luge and dressage has a cult following in Germany and its alpine neighbours. Horses and riders judged on speed, technique, artistic impression and survival.
In a statement, 1976 Olympic Team Fencing champion and current Weltsportfuhrer Thomas Bach said "It's a mix of balletic precision and high speed action and the only extra expense we expect is the hiring of extra race marshalls with very large shovels if the horses get too excited".
When asked if the sport could be considered dangerous if the sleds went out of control, Bach commented "Don't you think we thought of that before adding it to the programme?"
 
In unconnected news Thomas Bach is to join the board of the popular Belgian fast food chain, Kortrijk Fried Pony when he steps down from the IOC next years

Agree on the basis of this. 
 
But let's take a look at the recently added sports.
 
For how many of them you could absolutely say they have gained interest and are trending positively. I can for only rugby and climbing. Of course rugby has been popular for decades, they only needed to figure out the perfect format for the OG. Sport climbing on the other hand is the only new sport, which has seen a rapid expansion in the past 10 years. No one was taking it seriously as a real sport a decade ago, but now it has grown in different parts of the World, the fan and media interesting is rising. And it gets more popular and popular. 
 
I wouldn't say the same for skateboarding and surfing. I think their popularity isn't at all that high compared to the 90s and early 2000s. In that period they were much more popular in the American / Canadian zeitgeist from what i recall. 
 
Many of the other sports are just host fodder and/or are basically a 3-5 country sports. Flag football, cricket, lacrosse, baseball, breaking have limited appeal. What is the justifiable reason for adding them, beside the host jerking for throwing a ton of money for organizing the Games. 
 
And here lies the IOC's flow. Instead of firstly help growing and popularizing these sports before adding them, they first bring them on the OG in the hope that will automatically make these sports more trendy. It doesn't...
 
If you want to include lacrosse, then the IOC should work with the Governing body and all the National Associations in making a campaign to familiarize it around the World. Say you are including lacrosse, but in 3 Games time, so there is time to make an International footprint. After 8 years if you can make a Lacrosse World Championship with 24-32 teams, then including it at the OG makes it a much, much bigger factor. 
 
Now they beat their drum "We are including new sports, look how modern and urban we are", when the truth is they are a joke event with 6 teams, which gives absolutely nothing for growing said sport and is just another statistic. 

Wow, I had no idea about this. Just looked it up, watched a super young Michal Martikan in 1996 and damn that course looks amazing!

This one is mainly on IOC and their policy of having everything huge, in exceptional and glittering venues. Such crap.
 
Canoe Slalom by nature is a sport you need literally some 200 meters of wild water you can find in every river in this planet. The olympic race in Atlanta (Lake Ocoee was still on river and it was/still is considered as the best canoe slalom olympic races ever held. Sydney in 2000 however stunned the world with a super modern artificial Penrith wild water venue and since then it went all wrong, IOC asked hosts to build similar expensive artificial venues beginning in Athens 2004.
 
If IOC stayed smart and so-green-ecologically thinking institution like they love to be presented, then they would have kept this sport where it belong on rivers, where you do not need anything expensive just a couple of gates and ropes for tying

Never mind table tennis, we should remove men’s pole vault due to lack of competition. Who’s with me?

1) I like seeing new sports at olympics, but I guess total athletes quotas cannot rise substantially, so it allways have some disadvatages and unpopular reductions (for example track cycling - 1km time trial/individual pursuit/points race all gone). While I like olympic village idea, where all athletes from different sports are together - what is exactly problem to have more athletes?  Capacity? Money?

2) Competition format in some sports was quite strange - for example Double sculls rowing -  13 pairs entered, and we had heats and repechages to eliminate just ONE pair, everyone else continued to semifinals. Was it so difficult to add few more teams (or remove one and start with semifinals)?

3) OG should be top event for all athletes - this will probably never work for some sports (and some decisions do not help that - why soccer has age limit??)
Also why there is nation quota limit in some sports? You can be number two in some sport, but you are not allowed to participate because number one is also from your country. In all individual events (and probably also in double/pairs events) country should be allowed up to 3 entries if they are among best on world, so they can fight for medals.
 
 
 
 

As always, most of the suggestions I see make me think "wtf, no", but also I'm not creative enough to come up with lots of realistic suggestions myself  
 
I would love for football to be kicked out though. It takes up so many spots and especially the junior men's event is just ridiculous (as an Olympic event).
 
As for mountain bike: please no shorttrack, those races are the epitome of 'it must be short and spectacular', resulting in usually nothing happening at all until the last 2 minutes. It's not done on the same course, it's done on a short course (hence the name) of which most of the mountain bike elements have been taken out to increase the speed. Yes to downhill though, absolutely, that would actually add something.

Paris 2024 was the 4th Games (Sommer+Winter) where i did not care about the medal table. And enjoyed the Games and sport very much. (well Eurosport, Max, DiscoverPlus (branding may vary by region) has destroyed it for me by showing the medal table at pauses in the broadcast.)
 
It weird concept to me, summing medals from team and individual sports, sports with a lot of same-but-little-different events or lot of different weight classes etc.
Yeah, a lot of people don't care about sport, games, about the athletes, about the competition, but just care about a number in a table.  There is a plenty of statistic on the world ranking countries - why not interested about that?
 
 
 
 

Ok, this one. This is probably one of my all-time favourite interviews  
 
"All the coaches were laughing, because I was swimming out by myself, because I wasn't arsed to swim behind anybody. All I could think was I can't be arsed to get kicked in the face"  
 
"After the gold I thought about pulling out, but I wanted to do it because my friends were doing it, but I didn't actually see any of them."
 
What a legend.
 

No! Leon! NO! Leave the flame there!

Not really a 'moment', but it is great that every session i saw the stands was full and the crowd was there. After the 'silent games' it is great to have all the fans! Great atmosphere.
 
I like the new ritual of opening of every session by hitting three times with wooden staff - i think you know what i mean.
 
Men's Volleyball QF vs was the most thrilling and positive moment for oblivious reasons. And also, the fight in the semi-final after being behind and having serious injuries.
 
 
I think the Korean archery coach is really cool. (Playing "Gangsta's Paradise" for presentatnion of the archers and coaches was just perfect!) 
 
Speaking of archery: men's individual final Kim vs. Ellison and the 5th set tied after both achieving 10-10-10 and the shoot-off (where both shoot 10s, too). C'mon it was just the peak of the archery level you can achieve and this in the Olympic final!   

And now we start the countdown. 1439 days left!

Well this was funny. Actually I liked it more than the OC (except the boat parade)
The LA segment came up with music which was “in” when i was in high school (RHCP, Dr Dre, etc) and I am almost 45 LMAO.

“I declare the games of the 33rd Olympiad Paris 2024 closed”
 
The words you dread. 

that was a weird version of US anthem

Did you know besides an amazing speaker, he was also a great athlete? Won Olympic gold even in fencing, 1976!

No, like seriously, guys.
 
This is million times better than the opening ceremony. I stand on what I am saying since Day 1. ceremonies should stay at stadiums it fits much better, this time Opening Ceremony was a failure, but this closing one is clearly saving the face and is awesome so far

I think there needs to be a balance between having stability in the program and also evolving.
 
I think adding sports like climbing, skateboarding and cricket were all overdue changes, I’m just not super keen in how it was done.

Two closing ceremony in the 21st century with Queen songs 

Of course.
Totallympics is the finest sports forum I know.
Feels great to be here with you guys!

This entire conversation is just proving that those constant changes in every edition is more troubling than helping I mean there are young athletes out there training to get to the Olympics only to learn after each edition that there sport might be out, I hope the next president will care enough to make a program for the long run