Search results

Team USA got saved by offensive rebounding on this one, not by teamplay.

The number of things that can go wrong with an ankle is astronomical and can require totally opposite procedures for recovery. To the doctor you go. Thanks Obama.

Spitz record was 7 gold in a single Olympiad (Phelps brought that to 8). The funny part is that Spitz competed in 'only' 2 Olympiads (equaling the record of 9 gold medals, but faaaar from the 18 medals total of Larisa Latynina) and retired from competitive swimming at 22! PS: Sorry for the...

I agree, but the counter example is the aforementioned Oksana Chusovitina who at 41 is competing in her 7th games! She won a team gold medal in 1992 and a vault silver medal in 2008! That said, for a gymnast to have this extremely rare longevity AND being dominant throughout seems nigh impossible.

From a purely numerical standpoint, it can only be a swimmer or possibly a total freak of a gymnast (on paper a male gymnast can win 8 gold medal in a single Olympic - in practice, the best I could find with my Google-Fu is that in 1980 the russian Dityatin managed to get 3 gold, 4 silver and 1...

I noticed the thread enjoys a number of swiss female athletes, so congratulation to Heidi Dithelm Gerber who beat the world N°1 in the bronze medal match! Oh that was in 25m Pistol Shooting and she is 47! An impressive achievement when you consider the oldest female medalist in an...

Women's single officially turned into a free for all: Svitolina managed a high quality performance with good court coverage and a good balance maintained from start to finish between aggressiveness and regularity, Williams' erratic play could not withstand it and so the World N°1 got ousted in...

Told me, told me, you were saying they tweaked the rules to favor japanese judokas! :D

In Judo, 8 out of 14 events are done and Japan got "just" the one gold and 6(!) bronze medals. Only Russia won two gold medals so far. Pretty international sport after all!

Table tennis: North Korean Kim Song I turning her opponent ranked 40 places above her bonkers with her defensive style. Leading 3 games to 1 currently (need 4 to win the match).

It should be mentioned there are 96 medals awarded in swimming, without counting the 6 for endurance swimming in open water (usually it's 10km, but maybe this time it will be the ones that go the further without puking?). That being said, the US won 14 of the 37 medals awarded so far (4 out of...

Djokovic-Zimonjic got kicked by the experienced brazlians Melo-Soares out of the men's double, so no medal for Djokovic this time around (he got the bronze in 2008). Good luck guessing who will win that event though, look at these quarter-finals: JOHNSON-SOCK vs BAUTISTA-FERRER (8) Sock has...

I'll forward that to my miniature gamer friend. I wonder if he knows the guy this documentary is about.

Japan will possibly maybe win the gold in men's team gymnastic. If you have the opportunity to catch world champion Kenzo Shirai's exercise on the floor, it is pretty insane.

In the early 2000 there was a very famous french soccer coach, Guy Roux, who also commented some matches on TV and he said that defenses in soccer are now so well organized and the passing game so precise that the sport was about to become handball played with the feet, where you move the ball...

I have a pile of DVD to watch and several film I want to see in theaters but the 'oh what is this?' effect when flipping through the TV guide made me watch: Gambling Lady (5/10): A 1934 film by Archie Mayo with Barbara Stanwyck as a street-wise professional card player who does not cheat who...

You probably expected american handball, a variant of gaelic handball which is one of the many 'hit ball against wall(s) with your hand' sport (see also Basque pelota). None of these are Olympic sports as there are very few practitioners with minimal geographic spread. Apparently, the world map...

The french pair Mladenovic-Garcia also lost in the first round of the women's double, so that draw is pretty open. The men's double also saw some massive seedicide with the Murray brothers losing as well as Herbert-Mahut. Honestly, with very few people monopolizing titles, it's pretty cool that...

Well... high five all around at the Federer estate: Del Potro beat Djokovic 7-6 7-6 in the first round of the Olympic tournament, landing 30 forehand winners in the process and, I believe, without facing a break point.

On the tennis front there is a Djokovic (world N°1) vs Del Potro (former US Open winner who struggled with injuries this past three years) match that is pretty damn intense. Del Potro won the first set and is clobbering the ball with his forehand like in the good old days.

There is a number of team sports in these Olympics...

Btw, the dutch cyclist is alive, concious and speaking. I assume that if she was paralyzed from the neck down they would also mention it...

Could it be because it works differently in international basketball like intentional fouls being called technical fouls?

Looking at the medals in the past Olympics, Japan dominates, but not outrageously and in 2012 they got just the one gold out of 14 categories (an outlier but also the most recent datapoint). How did they change the rules?

By "this type of injury" I did not mean broken legs. I meant stress fractures turning into actual fractures while doing regular movements by yourself (in this case, a reception).

I always feel that this type of injury can only happen in sports that lack the money to have a high level monitoring of the health of the athletes (or maybe to athletes that lack the ability to monitor themselves). The guy missed the previous Olympics too :/

Adebisi meant the Howard Hawks film of 1932.

China made a concerted effort to do that for the Beijing Olympics in an attempt to maximize their medal count. Along the building of the infrastructures they tried to reorient athletes toward sports they felt was less competitive (notably BMX if my memory serves me well). I don't think that...

As a terrible contrarian I would say that my two favorite Ghibli movies are My Neighbors The Yamadas directed by Takahata (slice of life comedy based on a comic strip) and From Up On Poppy Hill directed by Goro Miyazaki (a movie about the energy of youth and the lasting damages of war, adapted...

There is no doubt competitive walking is extremely strenuous, but I would say it is unidimensionally demanding while other sports require a broad range of athletic abilities. Even something like decathlon which is very diverse in what it asks of the athletes is limited by the fact it's a sport...

Curious about Dog of Flanders I looked it up and it should be said that the sum total of Isao Takahata's contribution to the 1975 animated serie is the storyboard of one of the episode!

I interact with a number of teenagers and young adults and answered "No". It's possible my sample is not representative though as most of them are engaged in competitive sport.

You might think that if you didn't know it's one of the most physically demanding non-combat sport! Men's Double is more spectacular as it is way faster, but athleticism is on better display in Men's Single. London 2012's final:

Are they still making movies? They co-produced a feature film made by a dutch director with some artistic supervision from Takahata called The Red Turtle. It's about a man shipwrecked on a tiny island. I would embed a trailer, but frankly 80% of the film is in it! I saw it with a friend a few...

Somewhere in my distant memory I seem to have this notion that the Megadrive/Genesis version of Cool Spot was superior to the Super Nintendo / SNES one. Is my brain tricking me?