Your Rio 2016 Summer Olympics anticipation thread!

the sprint finish of the road race was insane

Stupid Swedes, always copying what Denmark does :(

That crash did look horrific, hope it was less serious than it looked.

Yeah that crash was HORRIFIC. Anyone have further news? Hell of a run in to the end for the top four.

Enjoying some of the archery. Love how everyone's default mode is concentration combined with 'I will kill you now.'

Dutch news says that she's conscious, but in shock. Apparently.

thanks frederik. was really fearing the worst on that one, so that is good news. fingers-crossed she's okay

gold for KOSOVO!!! in their first ever olympic games. majlinda kelmendi in the women's judo 52kg. she looked completely stunned

Dutch cycling union, Koninklijke Nederlandsche Wielren Unie, has confirmed she's conscious, and has been taken to the hospital.

I love Dutch. Perhaps the only language more ugly than Danish. Thanks.

Nah

damn biles gets so much air

omg that crash was horrific

thrilling ending for a dramatic race! Great win for the Dutch, gutted for Abbott tho, sucks when you get so close & run out of gas

love too watch table tennis.

i signed up for a 7 day trial thing to watch nbc but agh the commentators. anyone care to share how they set up their vpn?

that biking course... how did it get through official inspection

drama = hoped-for ratings, more's the pity for the cyclist

19th gold for Phelps.

https://twitter.com/sarahschni/status/762489581300178944

her dad looks like alan cumming

wondering how they're going to get through the rowing program. what i saw on day 1 looked like a surf boat competition and that was apparently the day not worth cancelling due to high winds

yeah god i thought one of the single scull competitors was going to capsize at one point

one of the pairs did iirc

I'm so happy that Raisman made the 2016 squad just so I can watch her parents again.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/australias-mack-horton-chinas-sun-yang-plain-dont-like-each-other/2016/08/07/6c3ba25a-5c53-11e6-9767-f6c947fd0cb8_story.html

Mack Horton, the Australian who kicked off a promising meet for his country by winning the 400-meter freestyle, was addressing the topic of Sun Yang, the Chinese swimmer whom he beat for the gold — and who has generally perturbed him, first for testing positive for a performance-enhancing drug in 2014, then by splashing water in his lane during a training session before the Olympics began.

“I just have a problem with athletes who have tested positive and are still competing,” Horton told the assembled press.

this one too
http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/2016/08/07/finger-pointing-sets-up-us-russian-womens-swim-showdown/88381764/

The thing with Yulia Efimova is a complete farce. Implicated in the WADA-report, busted for using Meldonium (her second offence) and still allowed in at last notice. Nobody can possibly believe that she's clean.

Idk why they let Russian althetes with prior bans compete in swimming but banning people for using meldonium when you have little to no idea how long it stays in the body doesn't seem particularly fair.

What's not particularly fair is Russia having a state organized doping scheme which apparently even included using the FSB to keep doping agencies away from athletes.

The Russian athletes trying - and freaking succeeding - to use loopholes to stay in competition, when next to nobody collaborated with the investigation is shameful.

That has nothing to do with meldonium. I agree the double standard where some athletes with prior bans can compete but others can't doesn't make sense.

The meldonium question is completely pointless, is what I'm saying.

The point is that everybody knows Efimova is a cheat. She cheated before, and her country conspired to protect cheaters. And yet there she is.

Vaguely watching some men's gymnastics here. Who is the UK man bun dude?

Lewis Smith. Relatively few people expected him to compete again - he has been on the Celebrity Come Dancing circuit for the last four years.

love too watch table tennis.

i signed up for a 7 day trial thing to watch nbc but agh the commentators. anyone care to share how they set up their vpn?

― bagging area (map), Monday, August 8, 2016 2:17 AM (20 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

just started watching the olympics this weekend

i'm stateside right now so i had the displeasure of watching nbc -- good lord they're atrocious (as is their coverage as has already been stated)

anyway can i just say CBC, hats off

the best coverage i've ever seen basically

1 sign up for https://unlocator.com
2 setup dns stuff and change region to canada
3 go to http://olympics.cbc.ca/online-listing

so organized, simple to understand, easy to watch, etc

sometimes the live stream causes slight issues when rewinding because it switches to prerecorded video

but other than that it's a breeze

yeah 100% happy with CBC's coverage

so impressed with the young canadians in swimming, another medal tonight.

Going to be difficult to watch Steele Johnson compete with a straight face.

thanking u xposts

Steel Johnson: We're Already Inside Of You http://m.imdb.com/title/tt4595784/

Efimova won silver. Was booed on entering the area, sporadic booing as she received her medal. Danish news says she broke down crying at one point, which sounds good.

not sure of all the ins and outs but the IOC's handling of the RUS team seems to have been a total mess. I don't support the entire RUS Olympic squad being banned (because there are several sports, like tennis, where the athletes are much less connected to domestic programs and where the sport already has its own drug-testing procedures) but the loopholes Efimova found were ridiculous.

Ah Frederik what a shithead you are.

x-post: I don't know, afaict the problem was that the russian state put barriers in place to make the sports anti-doping procedures not work. I was thinking more that some sports, such as synchronized diving for instance, probably doesn't benefit from doping as much, and it might be unfair to ban them.

afaict, athletes who could show a clean doping record in international competition independent of Russian domestic testing were mostly cleared to compete by the individual federations. The main national punishment for state involvement is that Russian athletes with prior bans were mostly not allowed to participate, unlike athletes with prior bans from other countries.

The swimming case is mysterious, though, as they banned several athletes with prior convictions and then reversed that ban without any clear public explanation.

Unfortunately it doesn't really prove anything to not have been caught at international competitions, since doping is used mainly during training, and with the goal of the drugs being undetectable at the events. The only reliable method is to have unannounced doping controls during the training period, and those were also obstructed by the Russians, involving help from the FSB.

yes - some sports (like tennis) have independent out-of-competition testing as well. So I don't get why it ever made sense to suspend the entire RUS squad as opposed to on a sport-by-sport basis. (The RUS tennis player who has been caught taking meldonium, Sharapova, has already been suspended by the ITF.)

Yes, it varies sport by sport so some of the ones with long training periods and limited international competition have had blanket bans applied - the entire track and field team is out.

I would guess that swimming has a more rigorous international competition schedule but idk.

Well, problem is that testing really wasn't that independent. The samples were taken to the WADA lab in Moscow, where they were tampered with. FSB would distract WADA testers so they couldn't supervise the testing properly. And some athletes trained in military cities, where civilian testers would have no oversight, iirc. When British testers were put in charge of testing this spring, they reported massive obstruction. When WADA decided to retest B-samples from the Moscow lab, the samples were destroyed or tampered with. So unless the tennis athletes trained abroad - which is definitely possible - the out-of-competition testing proves nothing.

Track-and-field were banned because the original WADA reports from November and January went into details on the organized doping in exactly that sport, not because of anything with training periods and limited competition.

Most of the tennis players do train abroad, as does Efimova - she's based in the US and has an American coach iirc.

In a way, that ban is even more unfair, as the report said that athletic athletes had no choice over whether to dope or not, but were forced to do it if they wanted to be part of the national team.