Off Topic Sport Other than Football - formerly the Ashes Thread

Technically not, as the IOC Refugee Team have (one second...) 29 competitors in this year's Games

That and, according to the Chinese, Taiwan isn't a country...

 

Tonight’s Hundred game swung one way, then the other.
It’s proving to be quite entertaining, but I’m irritated by the commentators’ fear of using cricket terminology for some strange reason and disappointed the England stars such as Bairstow and Stokes are no longer around.

 

It has won me over, and I am enjoying the fact that they are all double headers and most are going the distance

 

Fair comment. Actually I've tried to find Chinese Taipei on the map, but where it is supposed to be there is a giant island called Taiwan. Can't be the same place surely? At least North Macedonia are now competing at the Olympics and Euros under that name, even though it's a compromise. Ugly world out there. Anyone seen the Czechoslovakian team recently? Perhaps Yugoslavia didn't send a team this time.

 

Not sure about these jokers who claim Hong Kong is a country, either...

 

And Jamaica wins the woman's 100m with a new Olympic record!

.... which is still over 0.1 secs slower (which is quite a lot in 100m record terms) than a certain runner "achieved" in 1988. Which is a long time for a record to stand.

The problem is both that the prevalence of performance enhancing drugs (perhaps even moreso in the 80s) makes the record questionable, and also that if the athlete was clean (and lets be honest she was never caught doing anything wrong), her performance is tainted by the fact that so many others were on drugs. Can we be sure that all the drugs cheats were caught? So the answer is that we'll never know and the authorities have a responsibility because they didn't properly get to grips with the problem.

 

Flo-Jo cut about half a second of her best time in under a year and one of her own teammates claimed to have sold her drugs.
Ben Johnson, of all people, cast aspersions in her direction. Takes one to know one, I guess.

 

Flo Jo's definitely suspicious given she came from nowhere, broke a shedload of world records, then very quickly retired

 

... and died quite young.

 

Struggling to remember the last time I really enjoyed an international game of rugby union

 

Last Lions tour was great, haven’t watched the previous games on this tour but this one is decent. A lot on the line. Thought the last World Cup was good too.

But generally I agree, the game has changed a lot since I last played (~10 years ago) and I don’t think for the better in terms of watchability.

 

South Africa are the Stoke City of world rugby

 

More other sport-adjacent than other sport, but this is all because some toff decided to wobble their various chins at Alex Scott's enunciation

 

Great game tonight - although low scoring.
Rashid is a great bowler.
And Harry Brook can't be far away from the England team - Joe Root's technique meets Ben Stokes' power. Looks an incredible talent; the only batsman tonight who middled the ball on a regular basis.

 

Well nobody is actually questioning what has been said by Asher-Smith (and I'm ignoring links to the git Piers Morgan). She said that she was in the shape of her life, but also that she had a hamstring injury. Bit of a contradiction surely? She has decided to withdraw from the 200m due to still recovering from the hamstring injury, but apparently is able to take part in the 100m relay. Really? If she has a hamstring injury she really isn't going to be able to run is she? And if she can run she can run 200m. Apparently the injury happened at the British Olympic trials a while back. So if she was injured why did she even go to the Olympics? Why not send someone else who is not injured? How is it that nobody seems to have known about this injury? Could this be she is just fishing for excuses for not making the 100m final?

 

I'd hazard a guess and say that Team GB had a lot invested in Smith going to Tokyo (as did Smith's sponsors) so they thought she'd recover in time

Considering how much of the commentary for the parade of the athletes boiled down to "Oh look, here's a country with a competitor in the 200m, they'll be losing to Dina Asher Smith" (seriously, I counted at least half a dozen times that chestnut came up) that underlines how much emphasis was being put on her to compete at these games, which begs the question if they were planning on doping her up with painkilling injections like Liverpool did with Fernando Torres or chucking her on the track when unfit like we do with Harry Kane once or twice a season

 

Piers? Piers? PIERS???

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Completely agree with that.

On a related matter, Italian guy surprisingly wins 100m gold. Winners that come from nowhere are suspicious, though this guy apparently has been around for a while. The problem is, as I've alluded to earlier, even if this was a clean victory, the guys deserved accolades are tainted by all the previous drug scandals (particularly in the short sprints). It's a shame however you look at it.