London 2012 Summer Olympics |OT3|

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Are both our most recent boxing medal winners in there?
 
This is my point exactly, if you do a medal per x citizen count you get a very different top 10

There's also the interesting factor of sports choice, Things like Basketball are big in the US, Table Tennis is big in China, Judo is big in Japan. There's whole sports that are basically dominated by countries, India's biggest sport is by far cricket, which isn't in the Olympics, for India to achieve their medal 'potential' they need to get people interested in Olympic sports.
 
I have to say, I love watching lots of obscure sports like table tennis, horse dancing and basketball for a few weeks. Its such a nice change from the usual. :-)

Dressage was good only for the high of 30 seconds of completely doubting reality when I learned that not only was it done competitively, but it was done competitively in a way serious enough for the olympics.

I had the same reaction to learning about handball because I thought it was a nameless thing made up by middle school PE teachers. We always called the game where a ball is bounced off a wall "handball" and had no name for what is apparently normally called handball. I don't judge it as negatively as dressage because I didn't watch it. My "random sport" time all went to volleyball.
 
So what about India and China, which each have 3x as many people as we do? Only factoring in population is pretty silly.
It's not silly at all. A lot of countries do not have dedicated sports programs. India obviously doesn't put much effort into developing athletes. When comparing countries who do have significant funding toward athletic programs, of course it's logical to consider population totals.

Many consider Australia's results in Sydney the greatest olympic performance by any country ever. When a country with 21 million can compare to the US with 310 million, then yeah, population totals and per capita medals is extremely significant.
 
Dressage was good only for the high of 30 seconds of completely doubting reality when I learned that not only was it done competitively, but it was done competitively in a way serious enough for the olympics.

I had the same reaction to learning about handball because I thought it was a nameless thing made up by middle school PE teachers. We always called the game where a ball is bounced off a wall "handball" and had no name for what is apparently normally called handball. I don't judge it as negatively as dressage because I didn't watch it. My "random sport" time all went to volleyball.

Handball in the US is different to Handball everywhere else
 
There's also the interesting factor of sports choice, Things like Basketball are big in the US, Table Tennis is big in China, Judo is big in Japan. There's whole sports that are basically dominated by countries, India's biggest sport is by far cricket, which isn't in the Olympics, for India to achieve their medal 'potential' they need to get people interested in Olympic sports.

China likes basketball, they still suck at it.
 
I think the point is that if any smaller country was as successful as the US were here, we wouldn't be so annoyingly arrogant about it (it's probably a minority, but it's a loud minority, Americans are even better at being loud than they are at sports). There's a lot to be respected talent wise but not much else. USA basketball team carried themselves well though, for such huge superstars they never made light of the tournament and seemed generally thrilled at their victory - and I think that's in part due to the quality of the competition. Anyway, team USA have been impressive.
 
Thing is, why the sudden animosity against the US for having a good Olympics? Its like some just saw the medal count and reality kicked in and they're now proceeding through the stages of grief.


This is the only time basketball is on television in the UK.

Really? At no other time do they show basketball from even Euro countries?
 
Dressage was good only for the high of 30 seconds of completely doubting reality when I learned that not only was it done competitively, but it was done competitively in a way serious enough for the olympics.
The Lion King routine was much longer than 30 seconds.
 
Thing is, why the sudden animosity against the US for having a good Olympics? Its like some just saw the medal count and reality kicked in and they're now proceeding through the stages of grief.




Really? At no other time do they show basketball from even Euro countries?

NBA only. And even then you barely get a mention of who won the NBA finals.
 
Really? At no other time do they show basketball from even Euro countries?

British Basketball league has been on tv, not sure if it still is. But it's rare. We didn't even get good coverage of Olympics basketball. You had to watch online or press the red button and go to B in the alphabet, then down to basketball. It's annoying because the sport could've done with the coverage, the quality of some of the games has been a good advert for what international / euro basketball could be if more people got in to it.

It's also nearly impossible to follow the NBA properly (well, it was when I watched it, ESPN gives decent coverage now I think) I had to watch highlights on nba.com / stay up stupidly late for poor coverage and listen to the NBA today to follow it. NBA tv or whatever it's called wasn't really an option for me online. Oh and I normally just caught the finals in the states, that was the best way to do it - catch them on my holidays. You really have to put the effort in to follow basketball here. I think it's improving since ESPN started here though.
 
Salty? Fuck no, I'm ecstatic.

Our nation of <70m people threw an amazing Olympics and managed to win 29 golds in a wide variety of sports against other very strong nations.

Like I said. Best. Olympics. Ever. (IMO)

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I was going to make a comment about how patriotic belief does not equal reality but then I saw your "IMO" and that's acceptable, you're good man.
 
This is my point exactly, if you do a medal per x citizen count you get a very different top 10

Well that table isn't exactly usefeul either. I think everyone knows - even the American's deep down :) - that bigger, richer countries are always going to be expected to win more medals than small poorer ones.

I think the thing Americans are most happy about is that they beat China, because they're pretty scared of China on many levels (as much of the west is). China beating them in sports as well would be a massive hit to their self image.

Ultimately all this socio-political nonsense is a sideshow. You only to need to look at the athletes and the massive respect they have for one another to see what this really should be about. This isn't 1936 any more, and the nationalism is rather souring after a great games.
 
Thing is, why the sudden animosity against the US for having a good Olympics? Its like some just saw the medal count and reality kicked in and they're now proceeding through the stages of grief.




Really? At no other time do they show basketball from even Euro countries?

You can probably get it on Sky Sports, which is a subscription service. As far as I'm aware it's never on the channels like BBC and ITV, which the vast majority of people watch.
 
Well that table isn't exactly usefeul either. I think everyone knows - even the American's deep down :) - that bigger, richer countries are always going to be expected to win more medals than small poorer ones.

I think the thing Americans are most happy about is that they beat China, because they're pretty scared of China on many levels (as much of the west is). China beating them in sports as well would be a massive hit to their self image.

Ultimately all this socio-political nonsense is a sideshow. You only to need to look at the athletes and the massive respect they have for one another to see what this really should be about. This isn't 1936 any more, and the nationalism is rather souring after a great games.

Nobody is scared of China, we knew we'd beat their commie asses when they lost home cooking
 
I'm glad that the next Olympics will take place in Rio since that timezone syncs with North America. I feel like I missed out on a lot of stuff because the timing was just too different. For instance I would have liked to have seen the Men's Marathon but it was at like 3am.
 
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