Dumping Them Out: Olympics Fever
Welcome back to Dumping Them Out. The first ever Summer Olympics edition of the Dumping Them Out blog series. The Paris 2024 Olympics. The Paris Dumping Them Out Summer Olympics 2024 extravaganza. That it what this is.
I always try my best to keep up with the Olympics. It's always hard. Especially when they're happening halfway across the world. Where if you want to watch anything live you have to tune in 6 hours ahead of time (time zones).
For example, I woke up at 830am this morning (US Eastern Time), and I had already missed all of Simone Biles gymnasticsing. But I think she did well, right? I saw that she had a crazy good vault score. I know her vault was good. But I saw she did a floor routine as well. I wasn't as sure about that. Personally, I was impressed. Her flips looked impressive to me. But some of her landings weren't 100% stuck. And I get my news off Twitter. So when I Twitter search "Simone Biles", all the results I get are….
"OH MY GOD SIMONE ASS QUEEEEEN ASS BILES!!! q;woiehgn;aos dnf;lakjdnsf;oqiwe jFASDVASDEQV;AW;OIENVA OISDNF;IJDS;LFIJ;ALSDIJF AIN;OIQNWEO"
Which implies she's doing great. But like… I watched her whole floor routine…. to my uneducated eye she wasn't necessarily nailing the landings.
Maybe her trick difficulty is so much more advanced that she can afford to not nail every landing. I don't know. The extent of my gymnastics knowledge comes from the few hours of Olympics I watch every four years, and whatever is posted on Livvy Dunne's Instagram feed.
Simone Biles expectations are so stupidly high. It's not like she's just expected to be the best Olympian. When people talk about her they're like, "Well Simone Biles is obviously the best gymnast the world has ever seen so she'll surely be winning every gold medal and it won't even be close and everybody who dares compete against her shouldn't even bother because what's the fucking point."
I would like for someone to start a Twitter account or a website that I can quickly go to that tells me how well Simone Biles is doing. Something that features an "How Good Is Simone Biles Doing" meter. Because it's hard to follow gymnastics sometimes. All I want to know is whether or not Simone Biles is living up to expectations.
I did manage to catch China vs Spain women's basketball this morning. Really great game. Honestly, one of the best basketball games I've watched in a while. But the main thing that stuck out to me was the way they handled replay situations. It was amazing. Both refs walked over to the monitor. They were both mic'd up. The broadcast showed the "who touched the ball last" replay from multiple different angles, and we heard the refs talk through the play from start to finish. They were able to watch the play from a specific angle, then say, "sync this up with an opposite angle". And at the end the got the right call. Why wouldn't the NFL do that? It seems so obvious.
Speaking with NFL. I tuned into the Scott Hanson Gold Zone. Which is the Olympics version of NFL Red Zone. For about 10 minutes I watched Olympic sailing. One of the worst sports I've ever watched. I can't imagine a less entertaining sport. None of the boats are even close to each other. They're moving slow as shit. It was horrible all around. I do not recommend watching sailing.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, the USA basketball game vs Serbia was one of the most entertaining sporting events I've watched all year. Just a great product. I was thoroughly entertained from start to finish. You get to watch the best basketball players in the world actually trying their hardest. They beat the shit out of Serbia. And the best part is, in the Olympics, point differential matters. So when the USA is up 20 in the final few minutes, they don't take their foot off the gas. They just keep firing shots. Was a great watch the whole way through. Except the group stage of Olympic basketball features maybe the dumbest rule I've ever seen in sports. In group play, the winner of each game is awarded 2 points. The loser gets 1 point. How does this make any sense.
The only explanation I heard for why that is was that if a team forfeits they get 0 points. So I guess it discourages teams from forfeiting? Like that was a problem or something? Or maybe it just makes shitty basketball teams feel better about themselves. If they go 0-3 then they can at least go home proudly knowing they secured 3 points? Seem real dumb to me.