Suffering for the late night, but no regrets! Murray match was astonishing and the spirit and sportsmanship of both was great to see: genuine mutual respect Sunday just got better and better - Whitlock, Rose, Smith, Kenny, Skinner, Bolt, with the van Niekerk 400m WR almost the highlight for me. Incredible performance! Now to catch up on some sleep
This is where drugs really taints the experience for me. It's when a relative unknown like van Niekerk comes and smashes the world record, not only a record which has stood for 16 years, but does so from lane 8, surely one of the hardest lanes to run from (I would argue its the hardest). I understand he's also the only man to have sub 10 for the 100, sub 20 for the 200 and sub 44 for the 400 - again amazing because the physical requirements for the 100 and 400 seem to be so different. He won the world championships last year but I'm not sure what he'd done before that. It is of course possible to have done all this completely clean, in which case we can blame the drugs cheats for casting suspicion on those who have not.
The knock-off version of Donald Trump is predicting we'll finish 6th or 7th. At the rate of these "bold" predictions our dressing room wall is going to start looking like this... please log in to view this image
Fully agree, it was a magnificent match and top reactions from both men. All the more so as they haven't got on in the past
I think that he has been on the radar for a while as a potential champion and Bolt sings his praises, but totally agree that there will always be a cloud over record-breaking performances because of the doping scandals. Actually, the victory that would surely attract more attention would be the Belgian girl Thiam who pipped Jess Ennis for gold. She set 5 personal bests out of 6 events....... Now that is one helluva performance turnaround!!
Our track cyclists almost always set personal bests at the Olympics. It's called peaking at the right time!
Yep, see it a lot with the training cycles weight lifters use. Also, with things like swimming i often wonder how many times the athlete will break records in training where its not official. I broke the record for time taken to eat 3 cream crackers once but as nobody from Guinness world records was there i'll never be credited for it.
So in the 1936 Olympics you could win a medal for making a medal - but in spite of there being a medal for making a medal, the medal event did not have a gold medal. ...I think I just broke my brain.
The two incidents that most disappointed me at the weekend were a 'foul' on Mata and one in the Arsenal Liverpool match where a foul was given despite the offending player being nowhere near the opposition player. I know that contact isn't actually required for a foul but these ones were nowhere near a foul. I can see how refs can miss fouls but they really shouldn't be making them up if they don't occur.
Jason Kenny going for a GB record equalling 6th gold soon We will some other golds too tonight Incredible to think that we were once happy to win 3 or 4 golds at an Olympics. 25 is par these days
Well done Jason Kenny Nerves of steel to win after the near disqualification. And at last we have a bloody couple to replace Posh & Becks!!
Ahead of where we were at this stage of 2012. Absurd. Ridiculous how we've become so good at Olympics events (probably due to funding) but are still utterly hopeless at mainstream team sports (which are also well funded). Is this because those team sports require funding at grassroots level, rather than the elite funding that our Olympians get?
GB currently seems like an ideal nation to root for. Not particularly big, but very strong for its size. Enough highlights for plenty of good events, not so many they get boring. The US is a continent. Winning is very dull. It's as bad as rooting for Europe. My highlights of the Olympics so far: the single skulls, where the Aussie watched a Croat pull past with two strokes left, and somehow managed to lever and time his last stroke to get his bow ahead by one inch; and the women's 400 m, with the Bahamian diving across the line to beat Allison Felix by inches. Also, while the designers of the road race probably deserve jail time and were lucky not to get somebody killed, the last twenty minutes of both races were gripping: up a hill to get the climbers in front, then down a hill and onto a flat, so the climbers risked their necks to try to hold off the time trialists on the flat. Both races, one of the climbers crashed. The Dutch woman was lucky not to be paralyzed. (Typical great American commentating earlier: one started talking about how many safety precautions had been taken; the camera panned the downhill section, which was lined on both sides by a bare and particularly jagged foot high stone curb, and a series of iron poles placed at ten foot intervals with what looked like crepe paper draped between them.) In both races the time trialists caught the climbers near the finish line. In the woman's race there were only 200m to go. The winner, a Dutchwoman who'd ridden past her teammate lying in a crumpled heap on the curb, burst into tears.
You're out of date. Didn't you realise from a couple of Olympics ago that it's now called "Beijing at the right time".
Elitism has been the philosophy in the UK since the early 80's so it's in line with that to see our medal count rise. Not something that excites me.
I suspect its more because those sports are organised in a way where the GB team can be kept together more or less permanently so the coaches can work with the athletes without the distraction of them going back to clubs between events. Interesting that we win a much higher proportion of events in the track cycling than we do in the road cycling. I think football clubs are learning the techniques though. Having lots of marginal gains will add a lot of points across a whole season.
