You've got to be kidding me...And handball was first played at the Olympic in 1936 and added as a permanent sport in 1972. The US hasn't qualified to play since 1996.
Well, of course, it depends on where you live. I had even tried it a couple of times, as my community had a moderately active curling club up until about ten or fifteen years ago when they weren't able to keep up the maintenance and costs of their own building and rink, so they merged and now share a building and ice with another club about 20 miles north of us.Lord Jim wrote:Just like in the last Winter Olympics we learned about "curling"....
Until the US network with the Olympics rights had nine different channels going on, who the hell had ever heard of that?
You can see the full schedule for today here:Rio 2016 Olympic Games: Day one - Campbell sisters, Mack Horton win swimming gold, as it happened
Australian athletes have had a successful day and finish it on top of the medal tally with two gold medals and a bronze, while our teams have given Australia a solid start and a Syrian athlete has alredy left her mark.
Bronte Campbell, Cate Campbell, Emma McKeon and Brittany Elmslie won gold in women's 4x100m freestyle relay final
Melbourne's Mack Horton won his 400m freestyle
The men's archery team picked up Australia's first medal in Rio with a bronze
The Matildas drew with Germany in women's soccer, while the Boomers and Opals got off to a solid start
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tea ... bad215af5fTeam Refugees Gets Standing Ovation At Olympics Opening Ceremony
The first team of refugee athletes in the games’ history marched behind the Olympic flag.
Team Refugees, the Olympic Games’ first ever team of refugee athletes, received a standing ovation on Friday night when they entered the stadium during the games’ opening ceremony in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
The 10 athletes of Team Refugees were the second-to-last Olympic team to walk into Rio’s Maracanã Stadium as part of the time-honored parade of nations. (As is tradition, the host country, Brazil, was the final team to march out.)
Team Refugees walked behind the Olympic flag, since conflict has driven them from their home countries. Rose Nathike Lokonyen, a runner from South Sudan, led the team, carrying the flag.
As the athletes paraded, smiling and waving, the crowd in the stadium gave them a roaring cheer and stood up to applaud them.
United Nations Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon was among the audience members who could be seen applauding enthusiastically in the stands.
Earlier in the evening, U.S. President Barack Obama tweeted a supportive message to Team Refugees:Samantha Power, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, said in a video message posted to social media that in addition to rooting for Team USA, Americans should also cheer on Team Refugees this year. [Yeah, Obama should definitely be supportive of Team Refugees, since his policies of inaction helped to create so damn many of them.]President Obama
✔
@POTUS
Tonight, the first-ever #TeamRefugees will also stand before the world and prove that you can succeed no matter where you're from.
4:22 PM - 5 Aug 2016
“These are athletes who have trained their whole lives to compete in the Olympics and they’d like nothing more than to compete under their own flags, but unfortunately instead of being able to do that they have been displaced from their homes,” Power says in the video, in which she sports a Team Refugees T-shirt.
This is the first year the Olympics will feature a team of refugee athletes. As Power noted, the world is currently in the grips of the worst refugee crisis since World War II, with 65 million people fleeing their homes.
Team Refugees consists of five runners originally from South Sudan; one runner originally from Ethiopia; two judokas originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo and two swimmers originally from Syria. All of them now live outside their home countries.
At least one team member owes her life to her athletic skills. Yusra Mardini, 18, a swimmer from Damascus, Syria, now living in Germany, helped save herself, her sister and a group of 18 other Syrian refugees. The refugees were on a dinghy from Turkey to Greece when the engine died; Mardini and her sister, who is also a swimmer, pulled the boat to the Greek island of Lesbos over the course of three and a half hours. Like many Syrian refugees, they had been trying to make it to Greece from Turkey so they could continue onward to wealthier European nations.
http://www.nbcolympics.com/news/team-re ... 6-olympicsTeam Refugee athlete Yusra Mardini wins her 100m butterfly heat
Yusra Mardini, 18, is competing at her first Olympic Games, just like many of her competitors.
But unlike some of the athletes she’s up against, Mardini is also on a brand-new team on the Olympic stage, the Team Refugee Athletes. Mardini fled Syria with her sister; part of their journey included pushing their flooding, overcrowded dinghy through the Mediterranean Sea as the strongest swimmers on board.
The Syrian swimming star, who competed at the 2012 Short Course World Championships, eventually made it to Germany. Her training facility was originally built to host the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
“Since arriving in Berlin, I have been humbled by the warm welcome I’ve received from the swimming community and everyone associated with the Olympic Games,” Mardini said through a VISA press release, one of the team’s sponsors. “It means so much to me to have a partner that accepts me, includes me, and provides me with the same opportunities as other athletes competing in Rio.”
Mardini and nine other Team Refugee Olympic athletes entered the Opening Ceremony on Friday night as the last delegation before the host nation; normally, if a swimmer or other athlete is competing the day after the Opening Ceremony, they will not march (see: Michael Phelps for the past four Games).
Instead, Mardini marched with her newfound teammates, joined in Olympic unity under the “refugee” umbrella.
Then, Saturday morning, she raced to one minute, 9.21 seconds in the 100m butterfly. She added about a second to her entry time, listed at 1:08.51. She didn’t swim fast enough to advance to the semifinal Saturday night (Sarah Sjostrom of Sweden advanced in first place with a time of 56.26 seconds).
It didn’t matter: She won her preliminary heat, made up of swimmers from Grenada, Yemen, Rwanda and Qatar.
And her Olympic schedule isn’t over; Mardini is entered in the 100m freestyle, where the preliminary heats begin on Wednesday. She’s even looked beyond the Rio Games, telling the Associated Press, “I hope for more in Tokyo,” the next Olympic Games in 2020.[It would be very nice if next time she were able to march under the flag of a democratic Syria, free of ISIS and free of the butchering war criminal Assad...]
She's a very appealing, likeable and charismatic young lady, (and also of course a heroine)... I'm sure that PR firms are tripping all over each other to sign her up. However she does in the competition, she's going to emerge as one of the stars of these Olympics. She's certain to get lots of public exposure and interviews, probably endorsement deals and maybe a book deal about her experiences as well.Yusra Madini is amazing, and I'm rooting for her all the way. I hope she also helps put a face on the Syrian refugees, that these people are not undercover villains, sent by Isis, but real people struggling to find a safe and peaceful life.
From the guy who likes to watch paint dry (aka cricket, chirp, chirp). If you get past your bias, synchro diving is just like regular diving, except instead of having one person alone doing impossible maneuvers with minimal entry splash, two divers do the same impossible maneuvers next to each other and try to be as synched up as possible. For many, it is more compelling for spectators, especially those watching the television, which is why it is being promoted big time.Gob wrote:I read on the BBC website that the UK just won a medal for "synchronised diving".
"Synchronised diving" FFS!
That's up there with "horse dancing" in the list of "why the fuck are these olympic sports"?
For many, it's like watching paint dry.Long Run wrote:For many, it is more compelling for spectators, especially those watching the television, which is why it is being promoted big time.
It's not a gun, it's a rifle.air rifle. (not even areal gun!)
