SnideAsides

Masked Singer Australia is back September 13. Costumes include Baby, Kebab, Pinata, and Toilet Brush.

WIDM did a livestream challenge over the weekend, basically just the Sri Lanka election challenge with a larger cash prize and with exemptions involved somehow. Eleven players for the first time since 2002, but even more notable is the diversity. The usual Caribbean person (two this time! One from Curacao and one with Surinamese heritage!), a Latina woman, an old white dude born in the Belgian Congo (now the DRC), an Afghan refugee, and a son of Palestinian refugees. And then the white people are the niche celebrities (opera singer! Magazine editor! Voice of Smurfette!) instead of the big names. Amazing.

I never knew I needed a ska cover of Ode to Joy until tonight.

As usual, the medal match not featuring the United States was the more interesting one. Every Olympics, without fail.

I think the thing with bouldering is just that the scoring is broken. If it was setup as an elimination style event where, like, you get one shot at a time each and they keep going on with each section until a certain number of people reach the top, then it would work better. It's definitely the weak link of the three types of climbing though; speed is nuts and almost all of the issues with lead are due to the camerawork making it hard to tell which way is up.

Oh shit. Paris has to do a "come visit us in 2024!" bit in the Closing Ceremony, doesn't it? CANCAN RIVERDANCE OR BUST.

They used to have both distances but now it'll be only one. I guess they want the marathon to be the longest Olympic event again? (Though if they're doing it for this reason I look forward to them cutting the road cycling. What do you mean it'll never happen?)

Sport climbing and skateboarding have been to these games what rugby sevens was in Rio and what BMX was in Beijing and triathlon was in Sydney: an event that makes a big impact on the zeitgeist at the time but which are completely forgotten by the time the next Olympics roll around.

It seems a bit silly to start a thread for it now that it's over, but congratulations to Belgium for winning only their second team-sport gold medal ever in the men's hockey.

I'm fascinated by how after years and years of being nowhere, with only really Sally Pearson in the women's hurdles making an impact, Australia has suddenly come really close to medals in a whole bunch of athletics events. There's been a few fourth and fifth places this time around, and I don't know if that's because we've actually improved or whether the time zone and the coronavirus have hurt our preparation less than most other countries.

Yeah. We've established already that this particular US team is not unbeatable (and, to be honest, has not been playing particularly well even when they do win); meanwhile, the Australian team is undefeated and last night opened up a 40-point lead in the space of minutes with a court full of substitutes. I don't think this is the usual formality this time around.

There's a very plausible chance (indeed, the most plausible chance) that the men's gold medal match is going to be between Slovenia and Australia, which is a sentence I don't think anyone would have said two weeks ago.

Yeah they're coaches, athletes waiting to compete, and so forth. And people from the same country were sitting together to limit the risk.

This is, however, the first time the summer games have been first. Given the winter Olympics is definitely more of an "I guess, if we can't do this in searing heat" situation at the best of times, it's going to be interesting to see whether the usual mild boredom is even worse this time around when you also add post-Tokyo fatigue.

Lucinda Green is doing commentary for the generic Olympic Broadcasting Services feed, not for NBC or Seven or whoever else. So while the vision is being mixed live and she's commenting on that (probably either from her home or from the OBS headquarters in Madrid), broadcasters are given the option to take a feed with her commentary or commentators in other languages, provide their own commentators, or have no commentary at all, as well as having the option of sending additional cameras for locally-relevant things (eg post-event interviews, though OBS gets the right to the first interview of each gold medalist).

This is giving me sad flashbacks to Munich. Like obviously the reason behind the situation is different and there's only one athlete involved, but Christ the parallels...

Rohan Browning, Australian 100m sprinter, continuing this fine country's established tradition (cf Matt Shirvington) of running by you while you do a double take at how they can fit all that into the bodysuit:

Australia's best result ever is 17 gold medals. We're at 14 with a week to go, with events remaining including track cycling and several team sports where we're looking good. If Emma McKeon was on listed on her own on the medal tally, she'd be higher than Germany.

Russia only ever won one swimming gold medal between Sydney and Rio. I'm not sure it's the focus of their doping program.

Tahiti is a French territory. It's no different to, say, Atlanta's canoeing events being held in Tennessee or Moscow's sailing events being held in what is now Estonia. Or the pool matches in the soccer tournament being held in other cities every four years. It's just further away.

Nobody else wanted them, that's part of why the selection criteria was changed for 2032. They knew nobody was planning on bidding for 2028 (the closest to a legitimate bid was Amsterdam, which only wanted it to mark 100 years since their last games and pulled out when it looked like Paris was getting 2024/when the Dutch government decided to focus tourism on other parts of the country for sustainability reasons), so the dual "Paris gets it now, you get it next" win was setup to avoid being left without a city and having to bankrupt Greece again.

Australia is currently higher on the medal tally than Not!Russia. And only one of Australia's medals so far was won on dry land.

Melbourne.

Sport climbing will be right at the end - heats next Tuesday and Wednesday, finals Thursday and Friday. On the one hand, they've probably left it too late in the schedule (it'll be competing for airtime against finals in a buttload of established events), but also surfing finishes tomorrow and they're not doing the other skateboard event until next week so who knows? I feel like it'll be fine if unremarkable though. Like, while I was looking up the schedule for this I noticed all three of the sports in this thread have already been approved for Paris 2024, and even without seeing how it's handled here I'm less pissed about it than surfing getting a second Olympics.

BERMUDA! I suspect the camera work is the same as they use to film, like, the Tour de France: they're motorbikes modified so a second person can sit on it facing backwards.