Kiwiblog

As I said earlier in the week, I’m glad the Olympics are not going back to the US so soon. Really no country should host them more than once in a generation.

Rio will be the first South American Olympics.

President Obama’s decision to go to Copenhagen to lobby for Chicago to host the 2016 Olympics, must help their chances of winning.

I’m not sure though it is desirable for the Olympics to keep returning to the US so often.

The US hosted the Olympics in St Louis in 1904 and then LA in 1932. A 52 year break and then LA again in 1984 and only 12 years until Atlanta in 1996.

If Chicago gets it in 2016, then that is three US hostings out of the last nine.

Of course it is technically cities not countries that host it, but in reality they are national bids.

The four bids for 2016 were scored by the IOC as:

1. Tokyo 8.3
2. Madrid 8.1
3. Chicago 7.0
4. Rio de Janeiro 6.3

It will be interesting to see who wins.

Raybon Kan has a funny but largely correct column of what sports should not be in the Olympics:

Soccer. The Olympics should be the pinnacle of achievement. If not, get out. For tennis, it’s a Grand Slam. For basketball, it’s an NBA championship. For football, the World Cup. In the Olympics, football is a patronising under-23 tournament. If we wanted to see under-age competitors, we’d watch gymnastics.

I could not agree more here. If winning the gold medal is not the most aspired for achievement in that sport, then don’t have it in the Olympics.

Hockey. This is the best example of a sport really being improved by ice. Handball. As far as I can tell, handball is football with everyone cheating. Or it’s waterpolo without the water. If we must have a sport for people without skills, I’d rather see dodgeball, or even tag.

Ice Hockey is great! I don’t mind hockey at the Olympics but generally think team sports are a bad match, unless it is very small teams such as relays or rowing where no one is potentially a spare part.

Dodgeball would be a great Olypmic sport

Rhythmic gymnastics. The proper place for this is the opening ceremony. Equestrian. I don’t mean to be speciesist but let’s let the Olympics be about humans. Horses, giddy up. You’re outta here. The pinnacle of achievement for a horse is the Triple Crown or Melbourne Cup. Besides, any horse that plaits its own hair is obviously taking some serious stimulants.

If horses are in, they might as well include dogs catching frisbees, or dolphins in the swimming. There’s a reason Mark Todd can compete in this many Olympics: the horses do the work. Is it a summer sport if you can compete at the highest level, wearing that many layers of formal clothing, like the admiral of a brass band? I’m sure there’s a Siegfried and Roy/Dr Doolittle ingenuity to training a horse to be this clever. But do it in Vegas, not the Olympics.

I expect Raybon will receive many outraged missives from horse riders on this!

And how do you think poor countries feel when they see equestrian? The horses eat better than most of their own citizens/refugees/insurgents. Entire developing continents probably watch equestrian because it looks yummy.

Beach volleyball. I feel like I’m watching a bad teenage movie set at the beach. And I am quite a perv. Yet, even as a perv, I have yet to be motivated to watch beach volleyball any longer than it takes to change the channel. The only good thing you can say about beach volleyball is that it positively influenced what women wear in the high jump and pole vault.

Heh indeed.

Whitewater kayaking. Slalom skiing minus the excitement.

Walking. No appeal, no question. Gone. Walking is a bunch of people urgently looking for the toilet, wanting to hide the fact they’re busting. It wouldn’t even be good sped up, with music from Benny Hill. And if a judge can keep pace with a competitor, while studying their feet, and holding a flag, the competitor is not doing anything special. When I get out of the car, and walk to a cafe, no onlooker would say I am making this transition in the spirit of the Olympics. When you do your grocery shopping, you are not performing an Olympic sport, with the extra challenge of weights.

This is also bound to get him many outraged letters!

The LA Times reports on how it is a trans-Tasman battle for medals per capita with Australia 2nd and NZ 3rd. I suspect we will slip back by the end of the Olympics though.

If Michael Phelps was a nation, he’d definitely win the medals per capita count

Later today Phelps competes for his 8th gold medal. It is the 4 x 100 m medley relay. It was very close in the heats.

I was in a strategic planning meeting all day yesterday so watching the Olympics on replay, but great to see the news that the Ever-Swindells won gold, as well as Valerie Vii.

It was a day for close wins with Phelps winning his seventh gold by 0.01s and the Ever-Swindells retaining their Olympic crowns also by 0.01s – my God. And I reckon Mahi Drysdale would have won gold not bronze if he wasn’t sick as a dog.

But Vii’s win was amazing – she set a personal best and crushed the opposition. Peaking in the Olympic final is the time to do it.

Lots to cover in brief. First the Australian political party leader who told off his 17 year old daughter on Facebook, exposing her drunken party photos to the world! Also wonderful is the conversation between two of Alexander Downer’s children on Facebook about why he was so pompous in a photo

Bernard Hickey complains (as I often have done) that we are paying $79 million into TVNZ6 and TVNZ7 yet they won’t make them available on Sky TV. He quotes former TVNZ Head of News Paul Norris in support – they have a reponsibility to make them widely available and could extend them with a flick of a switch to 700,000 households overnight.

Andrew Bolt has a fascinating exchange with an academic over the “stolen generation”. While there certainly is much in Australia’s past that was deplorable (as in NZ), it is apparent that certain portions of it such as the “stolen generation” have been over-hyped. He cites the example of one Aboriginal leader who claimed to be part of the “stolen” generation who was “taken from my family” but in fact was put up for adoption by her father who could not cope with five children.

Lindsay Perigo writes a moving account of his last face to face meal with Anna Woolf, who is dying of brain cancer. Even just reading his account makes the eyes water – I can’t imagine how hard it is for those who are close to Anna, let alone Anna herself.

The Telegraph points out that if Michael Phelps was a country, he would be coming 5th on the Olympic medal table – ahead of Italy, Russia, Australian and Great Britain.

Frog Blog joins Nick Smith on wondering why DOC is spending so much money on a new corporate brand, when it has just laid off 60 workers to save money.

Liberty Scott exposes Sue Kedgley’s scaremongering over cellphone towers. Good God, this debate was settled over a decade ago in terms of science. I’d be more inclined to take Sue’s campaign against the towers seriously if she’d give up her cellphone.

Lindsay Mitchell covers the launch of a second Maori based party. The Hapu Party is led by David Rankin, and three policies to date:

1. To have Maori eligible for the pension at age 56, because of the lower life-expectancy of Maori
2. To introduce a flat rate 18% personal tax and GST rate.
3. To immediately allocate all treaty settlement money directly to hapu and marae

They have me with policy No 2. Policy No 3 is between Iwi and Hapu to resolve in my opinion, and Policy No 1 has no chance. Worryingly for the Maori Party, Rankin also talks of financial irregularities with a Maori Party MP and a SFO complaint.

Good God. TVNZ have cancelled this week’s Agenda for repeats of the Olympics.

Is this an example of the Charter at work?

I mean it is not as if there isn’t an election about to be held. Oh wait, there is.

I could understand if it was for live Olympics. But 10 am Sunday in NZ is 6am Sunday in Beijing so it is definitely only repeats.

Two months before an election, TVNZ dumps for a week the only in depth political show for sports repeats.

Our tax dollars at work.

Michael Phelps has just got his 4th gold medal at these Olympics for a total of 10 Olympics golds. Four atheletes had won nine gold medals each (including Carl Lewis) but he is the first to win 10, and may go on to win 14.

So far he has won gold in the 400m individual medley, 4 x 100m freestyle relay, 200m freestyle and 200 m butterfly. He competes later today in the 4 x 200 m freestyle relay, and later in the 200m individual medley, 100m butterfly and 4 x 100 m medley relay.

What is also amazing is all four gold medals to date have broken the world records. He now holds six world records.

In 2004 he got six golds and two bronzes. The two bronzes were both in races he has already got gold for in 2008. However the relays depend on the whole team, so nothing is certain.

UPDATE: And in the 4 x 200 m freestyle relay Phelps got the team off to a huge start and they smashed the world record to get the gold. First ever relay under seven minutes – more than five seconds off the old record.

China has made great strides in recent years, but one is reminded of how big the remaining gulf is, with the story over the fake singing at the Olympics opening:

The girl in the red dress with the pigtails, called Lin Miaoke, 9, and from a Beijing primary school, has become a national sensation since Friday night, giving interviews to all the most popular newspapers.

But the show’s musical designer felt forced to set the record straight. He gave an interview to Beijing radio saying the real singer was a seven-year-old girl who had won a gruelling competition to perform the anthem, a patriotic song called “Hymn to the Motherland”.

At the last moment a member of the Chinese politburo who was watching a rehearsal pronounced that the winner, a girl called Yang Peiyi, might have a perfect voice but was unsuited to the lead role because of her buck teeth.

So, on the night, while a pre-recording of Yang Peiyi singing was played, Lin Miaoke, who has already featured in television advertisements, was seen but not heard.

The one good thing is that the musical designer who revealed this, felt he was able to do so without disappearing into the night as once would have been he case.

But really to have politburo members choosing the child singer!

And the fireworks were also faked in part:

Officials have already admitted that the pictures of giant firework footprints which marched across Beijing towards the stadium on Friday night were prerecorded, digitally enhanced and inserted into footage beamed across the world.

Now again the good thing is through blogs and elsewhere Chinese citizens are able to debate whether or not they think these actions were good, or not. But they do do real damage.

People like me wonder if the hosts are so willing to fake the singing and fake the fireworks, how much confidence can you have in them to have discouraged steroid use and the like? The technology is always somewhat ahead of the detection, so even the best efforts of international authorities will be limited if a host country condones anything in its desire to be the best.

When Wellington weather is crap, a buffet of Olympics watching is well timed. The rowing heats especially have been superb watching even though the Kiwis have generally crushed their opposition to date.

Emma Twigg’s race was probably the closest as she came from behind to lead in the last 150 metres or so.

The swimming has also been a must see – especially Michael Phelps to see if he can win eight medals again.

Once again I love My Sky. Just fast forward through to the races you want to see!

Got sent these by e-mail. Harsh but funny.