SnideAsides

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.

It's tricksy wording - in addition to Russia winning in 1996, the Soviet Union won the event in 1952, 1956, 1980, and 1988, and the Unified Team won in 1992. Although by that logic every medal Russian athletes win at these Olympics is a first.

Having now watched a bit of it... I'm fine if surfing gets retired after this Olympics. It's been even more of a dud than the skateboarding.

No. The twelve countries who qualified were split into three groups of four for the opening matches. Once the four countries in a group have all played each other, the two best performers advance to the quarter finals, as well as the two best countries who finished third in their groups. Since Iran scored more and lost by less than the US, Iran is currently third and the US is currently fourth in this group. The US mathematically can't finish top two if it loses either upcoming match and would need to rely on the results of the other groups to take one of the third-place places; even if it wins the next two matches, if France beats the Czech Republic and loses to Iran, it's not a guarantee the US will make it to the quarter finals.

Iran on Wednesday afternoon Tokyo time, then the Czech Republic on Saturday night. Should win both fairly easily, but it's crazy to think that the country that's won medals in every basketball tournament since the sport was added to the Olympics (except Moscow obviously) now has to win both of its next two matches to even have a chance to get out of the pool stage.

The Netherlands's artistic gymnastics uniform is EVERYTHING. Dutch flag, cherry blossoms, Japanese text, all with a sunset setting. Amazing.

I agree, but this mostly reminds me of how I bought Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games: Tokyo 2020 for the Switch to deal with my withdrawal symptoms last year, and the number of times the story mode's plot amounts to a random character turning up to watch an event, deciding to compete, inviting you to compete when you pass through the stadium looking for a MacGuffin, and then the two of you being the only athletes in the event is absurd. Like, who were they watching otherwise? (Sorry. It's a deeply shitty game.) Also congratulations to Japan for winning the first gold medal!