[OT] Olympic gold medal flap vs. Fifth Down game

[Josh '99]

[Q]Roy 82 Wrote:
Now don't get me started on men's soccer. IIRC It is an under 23 tournament so as not to compete with the World Cup. Since when did the Olympics settle for being a junior tournament? If you can't field the very best then drop it.[/q]If I'm not mistaken, the Olympic soccer tournament is U23, with each team allowed three over-age players.

[billhoward]

[Q]jeh25 Wrote:  [Q2]Roy 82 Wrote: The IOC Chief said that baseball might be dropped from the Olympics. He cited that as an example of how the US doesn't control the IOC (did you notice that the ceremonies are conducted in English not Greek, French etc.). The US didn't qualify for the Olympics in baseball. .[/Q]
My understanding is that dropping baseball is a cost containment issue for host countries. Asking countries that don't play baseball to spend large amounts of money to build a world class facility that will never be used after the games is seen as an undue financial hardship.
[/q]
For Greece, it was a financial hardship to build anything on time, let alone on budget and who knows what quality. There's that line in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" where dad laments that his Greek ancestors were doing great things while the non-Greek's predecessors were still swinging from trees. In other words, papa was saying, We used to be great.

That said, one can build temporary structures. I recall you can do an Olympic swimming pool for, what, $1 million in a parking lot, which is a lot, but way less than something permanent. No reason you can't build a baseball field that's half permanent and half tear-down stands and remake it as a soccer pitch. Actually, from the TV angles we saw, in most of the events, you didn't need all that many stands.

The housing can always be reused. In the Lake Placid area, it's prisons and/or seniors apartments. The fence that keeps the terrorists out later can keep the inmates in.

I guess if you want the Olympics real bad, you have to build some stuff you won't use again.

[KeithK]

Please, let us hope that MLB never decides to interrupt it's season for two weeks late in a pennant race for the Olympics.  It's bad enough in hockey where, let's be honest, the NHL regular isn't that important.  I doubt it'll ever happen anyway - why would the owners go for it?  BTW - there's no guarantee that the US would win.  The Domincan and Perto Rico (why the heck do they get a team anyway?)  has a heck of a lot of top major leaguers.

If there's a flaw in the Olympic baseball tournament it's the fact that there were only two slots for teams from the Americas (where baseball is played extensively) and two for Europe (where it's not), not to mention host team Greece.

The baseball tournament also shows some of the silliness of the nationality rules, what with the Greek team being filled (entirely?) by Americans and Canadians of Greek ancestory.  The Dutch team was entirely from the Caribbean, where the Netherlands still have territories (and baseball is big).

[Jacob 03]

why does puerto rico get its own team?  God, that one was hard to find out...
http://slate.com/id/2105234

and i'm not sure the nationality rules are so silly (or at least any sillier than the rest of the olympics are at this point).  nor are the geographic assignments you mentioned necessarily a (or at least not THE) flaw.  with a little digging it's probably really easy to imagine why these systems are in place and what relevance they have to the role of the olympics in today's world.  

[RichS]

Dubya speaks English?  ::rolleyes::

[KeithK]

[q]why does puerto rico get its own team? God, that one was hard to find out... [/q]I wasn't asking who decides - I could've guessing it was the IOC.  I was essentially stating my opinion that if Puerto Rico is a US Territory and it's people US citizens then they should be on the US team.  In retrospect I could've phrased my comment better.

[q]...it's probably really easy to imagine why these systems are in place and what relevance they have to the role of the olympics in today's world. [/q] Oh sure, I'm sure there are reasons.  I still think the end result is often silly, with or without reasons.  But regardless, I don't lose any sleep over it.

[jtwcornell91]

Personally, I enjoy getting worked up about the three-letter abbreviations the IOC and FIFA use for teams and how neither of them conforms to ISO-3166-3. :-D

[ugarte]

[Q]Roy 82 Wrote:
Now don't get me started on men's soccer. IIRC It is an under 23 tournament so as not to compete with the World Cup. Since when did the Olympics settle for being a junior tournament? If you can't field the very best then drop it.[/q]

I'll take the second one first.

For decades, the strict enforcement of amateur standing meant that they rarely had the very best in a number of sports, most obviously, basketball, hockey and baseball.  I know you know this, but Olympic hockey and basketball only became competitions for the best in the world very recently.  Since MLB won't participate in the program for baseball, this only means that Olympic baseball is exactly like it has always been.  Of course, giving three slots to Europe and only two to all of North and South America is crazy. (I know that Greece got in because it was the host country, but the IOC should have considered that when assigning slots.)

I think that it is great that the Olympics are a U23 tournament.  The professional football clubs are as unwilling as MLB to let their players go during the season for yet another international tournament. It gives the rest of the world, who I suspect care much more than the USA that the Olympics include men's soccer, the sport they want to see, and countries developing their programs chances for glory that they can't get yet at the World Cup level.

That said, I didn't watch any Olympic soccer.

[Roy 82]

[Q]Greg Berge Wrote:

 [Q2]CUlater 89 Wrote:

 All of the ceremonies are conducted in French (the official language of the IOC), English and the language of the host country.[/Q]
I noticed that this time around the order of the languages on the scoreboard was English, French, Greek.  Not sure if they randomly order them, or if this is a not so subtle reminder as to who's running the planet these days.[/q]

Not all the ceremonies. Just the short announcements and medal presentations are multilingual.  I watched the closing ceremonies and I assure you that the Athens Olympic Committee chief as well as the IOC President gave speaches and declared the games closed in English only (with one or two words of Greek thrown in to appease the crowd). Not a word of French from the IOC President. who is probably a native French speaker (Belgian).

[jbeaber1998]

The U.S. Basketball team probably would have preferred that Puerto Rico didn't have it's own team....

[billhoward]

From Cornell U's online clipping service:

>>> In The Washington Post recently:
* Aug. 27 - Columnist Fred Bowen writes that gymnast Paul Hamm, who won an Olympic gold medal because of judges' mistakes, should follow the example set by the Cornell football team in 1940  when members voted to "give the win to the competitor who deserved it."  He recounts the story of a game against Dartmouth when Cornell, then the nation's top-ranked college football team, was mistakenly given a fifth down by referees.  Cornell gave up a chance for a national championship by giving up their winning touchdown and giving Dartmouth the victory.  Bowen writes, "Cornell did not want a win it did not deserve."