Are there, dear reader, too many sports and events at the Olympics? I say yes.
I should probably hasten to add that I'm not saying 'yes' for the trivial reasons Chris or Sam would, either. I have trivial reasons of my own.
Michael Phelps, we are told, is the greatest Olympian of all time based solely upon his medal count, for instance, which is just plain stupid. Could, pray tell, a javelin thrower have possibly managed to get 8 gold medals based upon javelin throwing prowess alone I ask? Of course not. Michael Phelps, on the other hand, gets to enter 8 variations on much the same event and he's just instant Captain Fancy-pants. Is it coincidence that the previous record of 7 medals was also held by a swimmer? Are the Illuminati involved? It's not even as though swimming is all that interesting to watch anyways.
I propose, in future, that winning a swimming event be only worth 1/8 of a medal with each such winner having to compete in some manner of free-for all involving crocodiles and rotating blades. The first to manage to construct a complete gold medal gets to keep it. Then that sucker would be worth something.
Team sports, also, are for the most part kind of dodgey. Synchronized swimming? Bizarre floor routines involving a ribbon, ball and a bola hat filled with plum wine in which a single apple floats? Scrap them, I say. Walking shall stay, but only if snipers are placed at random positions around the track. Let's see the bastards maintain their silly "walk-not-run" discipline then, shall we?
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2 comments:
Comparing across sports is difficult. In terms of dominance in a single event, you can use z-scores to good effect, but as far as I know, there's only one guy bothering to sift through the historical data and do this.
I also think that there are too many sports in the Olympics. Generally speaking, the Olympics should be the pinnacle of the sport, and this is not true for tennis and soccer in particular.
I'm also not convinced that white water kayaking really deserves a place in teh Olympics.
I'm not all that sure how I feel about all the different kinds of swimming strokes, either. We don't have a 100m hop event. We only have a 100m sprint. We present athletes with some distance and say 'cover it as quickly as you possibly can'. The winner is the fastest man/woman alive. In swimming, however, we have fastest swimmer categories in addition to fastest swimmers who agree to swim in a fixed self-imposed sub-optimal manner.
Also, in equestrian events, they should give the medal to the horse.
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