S06.E01: Venice Qualifiers 1

[Kromm]

Apparently they received like 4 or 5 times the submissions of any previous season (and had to expand the regional try outs) but.. Kim Lyons?  REALLY? (Who lasted all of 3 seconds)

[Kromm]

Sorry, the date is totally wrong (but I have no idea how to edit it).  The proper episode date is 2014.05.26

 

Wow, this appears to be a tougher qualifier course than usual.  That spinning wheel thing doesn't LOOK tough, but apparently it is.  And that Slack Ladder thing?  Egad,  That looks damn impossible.

 

And... here's the Pack O' Olympians (Gymnasts, Lugers, etc,).  Since they never train that specifically for this, they rarely do that well (no exception here).

Edited May 27, 2014 by Kromm

[Fukui San]

In the US version, maybe not. The Japanese version has a history of Olympians going deep into the tournament.  The Hamm brothers (US gymnasts), a Japanese trampolinist, Bulgarian gymnast Yordan Yovchev.  All have gone to stage 3 and Yovchev made the final round once.

 

I've been pleasantly surprised by the moonlighting football players who show up on ANW.  I'm amazed that these huge defensive lineman can do some of the obstacles that they do. I'd expect that the wide receivers and defensive backs would stand a better chance.

[Skyfall]

This would be better if they removed the public interest stories that waste 30-45 seconds for every full run we see (not the clips when they come back from commercials). Luckily I'm DVRing this season so I can skip it.

[jhlipton]

I'm with Skyfall -- I'd much rather see all the full runs than the repetitive "human interest" blaterations we get.  I DVR as well, and skip most of them.

 

ETA: The story of the diabetic training his rescue dog to be a service dog was pretty cool.  A parent organization is http://www.dogs4diabetics.com/

Edited May 30, 2014 by jhlipton

[Richness]

My first post here. Oooooo...

 

Three hours of ANW was quite the night. And there will be two hours for the next episode. I really enjoyed the one hour highlight show to kick off the season.

 

 

I continue to fast forward through most of the player profile segments. I did, however, get a bad case of the feels when the diabetic contestant rescued a dog and trained it to sniff his insulin levels. Didn't even know that was possible. I was also amused by the introduction of the twins.

 

I also think the original Beast should have the title since he's the only one of the two that has a hairy chest. Do all the contestants shave their chests? The only one that seems to have any hair besides their head is the one bearded guy. And a few of them don't even have head hair, or even eyebrows!

 

Glad to have ANW back on NBC since I don't get the Esquire channel.