Tokyo Olympics

[James]

USA women’s basketball beats Japan to win it’s 7th consecutive gold medal. Powered by five UConn alumni.
US women volleyball wins it’s first gold ever over Brazil.

 

[SSSdave]

This retired person enjoyed watching a modest amount of the day time Olympic NBC coverage these last two weeks. Thank you Japan for presenting a reasonable games under such difficult conditions. Congratulations to all those exceptional humans athletes across our planet that participated. Am one of many that always dislike the US news media focus on numbers of medals they invariably term a "RACE" and multi medal winners. But then I don't have any social media accounts either. Just competing in the games is a world class honor. The US media always wins GOLD for being the biggest bully. Especially enjoy seeing athletes from small countries win medals. Four countries just won a single bronze, 8 just one silver, and 7 just one gold.

In the women's basketball gold medal final game the US versus Japan match, was like giants versus midgets. The Japanese women showed how skilled short folk were able to put up a surprisingly good effort. Many older sports were designed during eras average human height was lower and in this era provides huge advantages to tall players like, tennis, volleyball, and basketball. IMO if baskets were 12 feet off the floor instead of 10, if tennis nets were 60 inches high instead of 42 inches, and volleyball nets were 10 feet instead of 8 feet, these would be very different sports.

Especially liked this story:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2021/07/26/hidilyn-diaz-philippines-first-gold/

 

[James]

Pretty amazing that the Bahamas own the 400m. Gold in men’s and women’s. Neither was a close race too.

 

[dan ross]

US woman’s pole breaks during vault.

In high school I saw a pole break -fiberglass, could have been a dura-fiber pole fortunately the vaulter was ok .The new poles have a high carbon fiber content . CF is great but when it fails it fails catastrophically.
I was a horrible pole vaulter which was a big disappointment as I so wanted to be a good one. Our poles were dura-fiber ( remember their skis?) and another brand I can’t remember.