London 2012 Olympics

[Cavernio]

phelps: The woman who previously held the record for the most medals in the olympics wasn't a swimmer, but a gymnast, and she only got her medals over 3 olympics, not 4 like phelps.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/...79914812dbb548

shiwen: Yeah, I was gonna say that there's ways to hide blood doping, there was an episode of House where some guy was just putting oxygen into his blood but was never caught, sounds like the link that rubix posted.
Her arms moved really fast in the footage of her that I saw, if that means anything.

I dunno, as much as cheating in sports is bad, there's a fine line for what is bad and what isn't. Like if an athlete is anemic and then takes iron supplements to get 'back up to normal', but what if their normal is to not absorb iron very well? It's acceptable to take the iron still. But what if an athlete's normal, (woman or man), testosterone level is abnormally low? It's not acceptable for them to take testosterone.
We should just make the Bionic Olympics where anything goes as long as you use your own body and get over this whole cheating thing. (Yeah yeah, then there'd still be the question about what counts as 'your own body')

women's synchro (diving): I watched that all yesterday while waiting for my car to get checked at the dealership, and it just reminded me why I don't like watching the sports which I like watching often; things like figure skating, gymnastics, and diving (the pretty ones!) where there's no definitive measure of performance.
They chinese team (which I think probably should have won anyways), won by a landslide, but it really sucked that when on one of their dives, they showed us in slow motion, that they got quite out of sync, yet they got really good marks for synchronicity on that dive-higher than anyone else because the judges only base it on real-time. And then other pairs that looked very in sync but had sloppy dives (sloppy I guess-I really dunno what goes into a perfect dive), still got low scores for sync.
And again, I'm not judge of dives, but all people can pretty much tell two people move the same at the same time, especially in slow motion.
Honestly, it makes me want to do a study about how similar the two divers look alike (since the chinese divers looked very alike, same hair cut, same skin tone, same height and build...they looked more alike than any other team diving IMO) and see how much it correlates to syncronicity scores. Probably more than we'd like to admit. Of course, something like being the same height makes a lot of sense in being in sync, but hair cut and color certainly doesn't.

I know, they try to be impartial, they take away the lowest and highest marks, they choose judges carefully from multiple countries, etc. But it still never seems to be enough. For instance, I went saw live the Canadian Figure Skating Championships (well, a large chunk of them), and they specifically skate people in order of how well they think they'll do (probably based on past performance). Worst people first, best last. That's like, the worst thing you can do if you're trying to impartially judge performance.

I took advantage of the opening ceremonies and went camping at Mt. Carleton park, in the hopes that we could get one of the nice camp sites. It worked, but the following day it was still too crowded for my liking.