Winter Olympics: Search and Destroy

this supercut of commentators from different countries reacting to it as it happened may be relevant to your interests

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FhOoEzIsh4

Oh I have watched that a couple of times too. As well as the full length replay of the whole event. I don’t who the commentator team is but I really like their rapport.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNhZ_jw-6ek

rather watch her skate than not. but tbh i've never cared about doping in sports unless it's framed around athlete welfare concerns like concussion or excessive pain killing injections etc.

Uh, she's a 15 year old who was given a heart medication she doesn't need in order to improve her blood flow. she says it was an accident, but then yesterday it was reported that her test sample had traces of THREE different heart medications, one of which was the banned substance and another that has been misused before - by dopers in cycling.

There's also nothing healthy about the Russian figure skating programme, where most of their female champions burn out before they turn 20: https://medium.com/@maddnik/eteri-tutberidze-and-the-future-of-figure-skating-ede4aea1cf76

on a related topic, i don't watch FS regularly but the biased judging is really egregious this year. It's always been bad, but anyone who watched it last night would have been completely baffled by the scores given to Russian skaters, who did not put on perfect skates by any means (falls, putting their hand down on the ice, etc.) but are somehow leading the table over the Japanese skaters with similar elements in their programmes and skated clean (in both senses of the word).

I just read through that, and jesus. It's pretty much what I expected, since the Russians keep producing these 15-year-old champions who have disappeared by the next Olympics, but it's still horrifying to read. At the point where you realize that to hack the whole sport all you need to do is starve and permanently injure a steady stream of children, and you're allowed to do that, it's clear that the whole thing is rotten. Shut it all down, or at least don't let girls compete until they're 17 or 18, which would maybe keep this coach from disabling quite as many kids.

the ROC and the rest of the world are just talking past each other at this point since they clearly don't think there's a problem with anything they're doing

why should they when the sports and FS establishment consistently turns a blind eye to and even rewards them for what they're doing?

I feel awful for Valieva cause she's just a kid but it actually is incredible that they allowed her to continue competing - almost any other athlete in any other sport who fails a doping test would get an immediate suspension pending appeals.

the worst was the IOC announcing after that they wouldn't hold a medal ceremony if she podiumed (pending a full review), meaning that this whole mess will likely end up not only robbing her but other athletes/medalists of their full Olympic experience  

yeah totally agree with all that. it just sucks.

regretting my cavalier attitude before, it’s true that doping is a different thing when we’re talking about literal children

lol @ american curling team in their trucker hats

and that's just the women

This Winter Olympics has made me realize I really like curling. It has that (often maligned) element you find in baseball where there’s 13 seconds of action in between longer cerebral bits of planning/anticipation/strategy. I guess that could apply to many sports but baseball came to mind first.

Chaotic scenes at the women's figure skating final last night which really underscored all the problems with the sport. Russia's coach Tutberidze should be banned, and they need to seriously look at raising the age limit of competitors.

Valieva completely botched her free skate and her coach berated her the moment she came off the ice, that poor girl. They never should've let her compete. :(

gold medalist Shcherbakova was utterly miserable, sitting alone hugging a stuffed animal, while her compatriot Sasha Trusova was furious at winning silver after performing five quads:

Astonishing postscript to a chaotic women’s event. Sasha Trusova awarded silver medal after historic five quad performance. “I will never go out on the ice again. I hate this sport.” (To coach Eteri Tutberidze): You knew everything. Everyone has gold medals. Only I don’t.” https://t.co/TqNCYsrfyn

— Eoin O'Callaghan (@EoinOCallaghan) February 17, 2022

None of them are 18 yet and I suspect we won't see any of them again next Olympics. it's all just really sad

i haven't watched it yet (i guess we will, painfully, tomorrow night) but i wonder if some part of valieva realized that choosing to not win was the better path.

instituting an age floor of 18 wouldn't cure the sport but it would be a decent start.

This Winter Olympics has made me realize I really like curling. It has that (often maligned) element you find in baseball where there’s 13 seconds of action in between longer cerebral bits of planning/anticipation/strategy. I guess that could apply to many sports but baseball came to mind first.

Thanks to the curling the *UK are actually going to win a medal at the Winter Olympics.

(*i.e. Scotland)

gb had 5 in the last two but before that there were lots of 0s and 1s

we do much better in the winter paras

https://www.nme.com/news/music/watch-olympic-ice-skater-alexandra-trusova-skate-to-the-stooges-i-wanna-be-your-dog-3164601

I Wanna Be Your Dog in the Winter Olympics skating competition via a cover from movie Cruella. Trusova skated to it

wouldn't be in favour of age restrictions. the female medalists in skateboarding at the summer olympics looked to be having a p great time. lydia ko was wrecking fields on the lpga as an amateur at the age of 14.

Great curling semi final win for, er, 'Britain' lol

Nicola Sturgeon should, er, strike while the iron is hot and rush through that legislation for IndyRef2

wouldn't be in favour of age restrictions. the female medalists in skateboarding at the summer olympics looked to be having a p great time. lydia ko was wrecking fields on the lpga as an amateur at the age of 14.

Skateboarding and halfpipe (and other X-Games type sports) are so very new to the Olympics with a very different kind of sporting culture so it won’t happen in the near future at least, but they might become institutionalised enough for countries to eventually emulate the same kind of development tactics in figure skating and gymnastics - preferring younger, smaller and lighter athletes that can pull off ever more difficult tricks. golf is different in that sense too.

The only sport I follow really closely is tennis which has at least put in limits on when minors can turn pro and how many competitions they’re allowed to play per year in order to avoid early burnout or permanent injury - this was in response to Jennifer Capriati, who openly struggled after exploding on to the scene at 13. There will always be child prodigies in every sport and yeah they’re fun to watch but too often, there aren’t any safeguards to make sure their bodies can handle it long-term, or that they’re emotionally equipped to handle the demands of professional sport, or that they’re not being exploited by adults whose abuses get brushed aside because they get ~results

yeah figure skating and gymanstics both seem to be pretty toxic in similar ways.

women's final was about as uncomfortable as i could possibly imagine. valieva was obviously rushing, extremely strong "i don't want to be here" vibes. just awful for her. she never should have been there.

for trusova's part, it sure seems like they convinced her that if she landed all 5 quads she'd win. she did, and you could tell that in her mind she'd nailed the program, but she's a truly awful artistic skater. that left poor shcherbakova, who was excellent, and no one from her own team cared as they dealt with the above fallout from their more favored skaters.

i do not expect any of this to change anything about how russian skating goes about its business, but it really sucked.

one slippy shoe, one grippy shoe...

suck it Hungary.

(we do, of course, order the medal table by medal colour rather than total medals when it suits us)

wheelchair curling is a bit more combatative than the normal kind, seems to rely less on pixel perfect stones (understandably)

gold for uk in your first paralympics must be kinda tippy. and the one-run format seems a bit brutal.

sitting slalom looks like fun, in those little pods.

the american snowboard-cross rider has mountain bike shock absorbers built into his custom racing leg