Be Excellent To Each Other

PAGING MARKG!

Edit: Damn, too slow.

Also Tony Hawk looked silly on a board when he was eighteen, he's just too gangly and tall.

He looked right daft with that fridge, too.

Tony Hawk was 31 when he became the first skater to do a 900.

BMX on BBC3/BBC HD now!!!

The course looks fantastic.

Yep! So cool!

It looks like Tellietubbieland with a bypass running through it!

Really enjoyed that (first time I've ever really seen it).

That fall looked nasty that one of them had, though she seemed fairly okay afterwards.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/olympics/201 ... 8:50-00:00

You can see it here, just winded I think.

Yeah pretty bad tumble. Hopefully she'll be back on again for the races! The men are on now by the way - they cut to something else for a bit.

Another nasty fall in the Men's. Nasty. He's up, though.

I have no idea if a run is fast or not until the time comes up, and it seems the expert commentators don't either!

Hah yeah. They were slating someone for an average run before, only for him to come in second place, 0.1s behind first. It's really difficult to judge.

There is a very strange clapper at the table tennis, he applauds for far too long, well after everyone else has stopped clapping...

That's not clapping.

Holland vs New Zealand female hockey goes to a shoot out.

In other news, bloody hell the Dutch team contains some absolute stunners!

Unfortunately the wife got home just as I realised the potential this held.

Naomi Van As is my new favourite.

Don't get your hopes up for the mountain biking, XC is notoriously dull to watch.

Thanks for the explanations about Australia and the sporting rivalry, I was completely unaware. I would have thought Australia and GB would have been sporting chums. I guess I've never heard people from the UK gloat about sport before. I don't like it :/

It's kind of expected. I have some Aussie friends, and if I didn't mock them they would feel put out. Weird, but it's all meant in a chummy way; like how you insult your best friends jokingly.

I'm not usually joking. Most of my friends are right wankers.

Your mums a right wanker. Which suits me, as I finger with the left.

I can use either hand.
Ambisextrous.

BBC Commentator, "so Andy Turner has just failed to qualify, let's see what he thinks of that."

Related to that, every bloody time someone wins a medal the interviewer asks them "So what does this mean to you?" And every bloody time the answer is "It means everything!" JUST ONCE I'd like to hear someone reply "Eh, you know. I'm obviously pleased but let's keep a sense of perspective. All I've done is run a distance infinitessimally faster than a bunch of other people, it's not like I'm curing cancer or anything."

Ask, and you shall receive.

Wiggo is my hero, even if that scotch cunt has got more medals now.

Alex Salmond?

Listening to R4 this morning, apparently the Yanks like to delude themselves that they're ahead of China in the Olympics medals standings, simply by counting the total number of medals won regardless of colour (i.e. a bronze carries equal weight to a gold )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_medal_table

I mean, honestly. They reckon Russia is ahead of the UK despite having only won 11, as opposed to fully 22 golds...

Where the heck did you find that news site?! It's a classic SEO spam blog, with very little effort put into the writing. It's not really intended to be read, basically!

But yeah, I did read something before the games started that the Yanks were famous for measuring "winning" The Olympics using whatever metric best suits them. Bloody Yanks.

Sorry, wrong link lol

But yeah, Radio 4 this morning. Honest.

It should only be measured on gold medals. Anyone with equal golds then get placed based on silvers. Then those with equal gold and silver get ranked by the number of bronze medals.

That is all.

Aha!

Agreed, though I'd still much prefer to have Russia's total medal haul over anyone above them (barring GB, USA and China).

I'd just like them to ask about the sport. Fuck the emotions, they'll tell us about them if they want to. Tell us how the run/swim/paddle was. It's sport!

Medal table ranked by population

http://simon.forsyth.net/olympics.html

That's a bit silly what with some of the small sample sizes.

Interesting, though.

I think that's sort of the point.

it's missing Cornwall.

If we're including anachronistic parts of Great Britain then Mercia and Wessex should be in there as well.

Holy fuck what an amazing performance by Nicola Adams. That made me genuinely emotional.

Another snotty private-school educated gold medallist there.

In the dressage, you mean, right?

I saw somewhere (Guardian) a split of medals by state/private school. Both in total and by sport. I think only shooting and sailing had more non-state educated medallists.

Right. Now look at those numbers again, and take into account that there are around 14 times as many kids in state schools as private schools, and tell me whether it still looks like a reasonably equitable distribution between the two.

That's hardly the point. Privileged people are more likely to succeed at whatever they do. Look at Kim Jong-Il's kid; he became ruler of a nation!

It somewhat puts away the notion that state school kids can't succeed, or that there are insurmountable barriers to entry.