Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Monday, August 23, 2004 OlympicsI spent a bunch of time this weekend watching the Olympics on TV.I try to write about orienteering each and every day. But, for a change I thought I'd write a few quick thoughts about the Olympics. USA Basketball I've watched parts of a couple of games. I know they haven't done as well as some people expected. But, I think they've got a very good chance to win. The players on the team might not be the best, but they are very, very good. Larry Brown is a great coach. I don't know anything about the other nations' coaches, but it is hard to imagine any other country has a better coach. Good players + good coaching = they ought to figure out how the play the international game. TV Coverage The coverage from Athens is the best I can remember. They show a lot of different sports and seem to spend a fair amount of the TV time showing the action. In years past the coverage seems focused on "up close and personal" stories (where we learn that just about every Olympic athlete has a relative with cancer). Balance beam I can't watch the balance beam coverage. I don't know why, but it looks like every competitor on the balance beam is about to fall and get hurt. The platform diving can also be scary to watch. Is it just me or does it look like every diver is about to smack their head on the platform? Women's Marathon Watching the women's marathon was inspiring. I love watching "suffering sports." We had the TV coverage on and a web browser opened. The Olympics web page had updates every 5Km and you could see the top 15 places. It was kind of cool to see the American (I've already forgotten her name) who finished 3rd. From the web splits we noticed that she was moving up steadily. The web coverage gave you enough information that you could follow the race behind the front, even if the announcers didn't give you as much info. Judging Lots of people don't like sports decided by judges scoring, like gymnastics and diving. I'm not a big fan of scoring sports. But, they'd be more fun to watch if the commentators didn't try to tell you what they expect the scores to be. As soon as the diver hits the water, the announcer will start saying things like, "oh, that won't be any higher than a 6.0." I could complain a lot about commentators....but I don't want to write one of those "ranting" blogs. An Orienteering Idea A few days ago I wrote something about orienteering in the Olympics and JJ wrote a comment that included: Map secrecy might become a lot more difficult if the motivation of Olympic medals were at stake. It's already difficult with the WOC, but this might be far worse. There are ways to nullify this, like by publicizing the map (without course) in advance and allowing people to train freely on it. For sprint events you can deal with secrecy by putting in special barriers for the event-only. In urban sprint courses, the organizers could barricade a street to make it out-of-bounds. That'd help reduce any advantage locals would have and might make course setting more interesting. posted by Michael | 8:31 PM 
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