and Dan Goodfellow....... in the interests of fairness in a Synchronised competition - and to stop Mama Goodfellow from further ranting on social media!!
Hearing a lot at the moment about "The Greatest Olympian". Of course there is a strong argument for Phelps to be this person, but like many discussions, aren't people often thinking of the most simplistic argument which is, whoever has the most gold medals must be the best? But surely you are not comparing like for like. You can't compare a swimmer with a decathlete for example, but a decathlete is only going to get one gold medal at most. Now Phelps is clearly one of the greatest, but to say any more than that you have to be very specific about what you are comparing - which of course the media aren't going to. If you don't do that I would argue you aren't saying anything meaningful. The argument follows on from this I think. If you had the potential to be the greatest athlete of all time, but had not even chosen a sport to be the greatest at, but had the ambition to be the greatest Olympian ever, I would suggest you should take up swimming. Another way of saying this would be to ask the question "how do you get to be the greatest Olympian of all time" and the answer is "well first you have to be a swimmer". I don't think that's fair on other sports and IMHO there does seem to be a large number of medals in swimming that could possibly be argued as redundant, or not sufficiently different to ensure that different people have to specialise in order to win them. Compared to the track for example, it is extremely unlikely to win multiple golds - didn't Lewis once win four? But that was four medals and that was once. It is relatively common for a swimmer to get four golds at one games. So one swimming guy can be good enough to win at several strokes, but if not still gets the chance in team and medley events and relays. On the track, even the 100m and 200m are often not won by the same person. To a certain extent you could argue that on the track it's a simple measure of who gets to the line fastest. You can pretty much have any sort of technique you like to get to the end. In swimming they have four different fastest. Of course if I were a swimmer I'd probably think differently, but to me it's not much different from having an Olympic backwards 100 metres or hopping 100 metres. So when they say that Phelps is the greatest Olympian I would say that he may be, but he also had a huge advantage being a swimmer. You could easily argue that Steve Redgrave and the criminally underrated (in honours terms anyway) Daley Thomson are equally great Olympians for different reasons.
Agree entirely: swimming has way too many similar events, there are actually five fastest as they do the medley event too. It's like athletics having freestyle running, hopping, continuous jumping and running backwards.
Well, they've already got hop, skip, and jump - which we used to excel at. Maybe the 100 metres for people with no sense of direction is the way to go?...
I honestly believe that a hopping or backwards 100m on the track is a more sensible way of getting to the end than butterfly is in the pool!
I used to swim for London schools when I was a kid. I still love swimming now. But butterfly is the most impractical, uncomfortable, pointless way of getting from one end of a swimming pool to another that I have tried.
Michael Phelps is living proof that there are far too many events in the Olympics. Come to think about it, Mark Spitz proved there were far too many event at the Olympics back in 1972.
Roberto Soldado has ruptured his knee ligaments and will be out for six months, apparently. Did it in a friendly, very early on in the game, as he fell awkwardly. Poor bugger. Doesn't have a lot of luck, does he? Hope he has a quick and full recovery.
In further ex-Spurs news, Niko Krancjar scored and set up two in Rangers' 5-0 thrashing of Peterhead yesterday. And VDV joins Danish side FC Midgetland, where he will now have 3 team mates and a manager all named Rasmus. Wishing them both all the best as they enter the twilight years of their careers
Just added up the medals by sport. On the face of it there are 32 swimming golds and 48 athletics golds. But then I thought that wasn't really comparing like with like as the athletics total includes everything, not just track related, so includes the walk and marathon, and of course 16 of those medals are for field events. The only way to compare would be to include all the water based events into the swimming total, so that means adding the diving and sychro swimming. This brings the swimming related stuff up to 42. Not quite sure what to conclude from this, but just feel somehow that athletics should be more prominent. NB while I was doing that I noticed that there are 14 judo golds, which seems quite a lot (one more than boxing). There are also 15 shooting, 15 weightlifting and a whopping 21 wrestling golds!
Apparently Neville was on £1.2m per year before he quit Sky. He has apparently returned on £1.5m per year.
