Be Excellent To Each Other

Because that's what everyone has been saying, clearly.

I'm fairly sure it was what Mark or someone said.

If it was just, "Rich people have more money" then, well, what was the fucking point in saying it?

If it states that the numbers are roughly equal, then that means you're 14 times as likely to succeed in your chosen sporting field if you go to private school. That suggests that investment is needed in sport in state schools, which is precisely what everyone is saying. 14 times less likely is pretty damned close to insurmountable, frankly.

I don't think that tells the whole story, in state schools you have loads of people who just don't give a damn, in private school I think that number is significantly diminished.

Anyway, my kids are suddenly interested in rowing and canoeing, £60 a year to join the local rowing club in plymouth, doesn't sound too prohibative...

Malc

1) Not equal; far more state schooled athletes
2) Not to mention that state schooled potential athletes have the massive draw of sports such as football, which is probably played by as many people as all the others represented put together
3) It can't be that insurmountable if there are more state schooled people there.

Back to the Olympics.

Amazing afternoon. Gold in horse disco and female boxing!

Come to Britain! Our women will beat you up and them our horses will mock you with their dance moves!

Then there's the Tae Kwon Do people doing brilliantly too!

Yay!

Really wanted that Kenyan to break 100seconds in the 800m! He's a machine!

It was glorious, wasn't it?

What the fuck do you do against that Kenyan? He just goes like the clappers and doesn't stop. What a runner!

And now, the 200m.

*salivates*

Not as much as the Gamesmakers are.

I really wish they'd had Patrick Moore as one.

Skilz

Good working yoinking someone's camera and taking photos of his teammate doing ridiculous poses, there

Have the women done the sprint races yet?

"We were hoping to have an interview with Usain Bolt, but... he appears to have gone for a run."

The 100m was just after Mo Farah, and no-one gave two fucks as a result.

Is that a person or an event?

Nobody cares about wimmins sprinting as they aren't as hot as the heptathletes.

The other two Jamaicans sound much cooler than Bolt.

Both

Bolt is quite posh as far as Jamaicans go. Middle class fo sho

Up here, Yorkshire is above most countries in the medal tables. The news does not stop over it.

And another gold it is!

Lovely Jade Jones!

Love how she went a bit mental at the end and chucked her helmet wotsit in the air.

just to quote bbc's ollie williams

"This is what happens when you don't give a Dutch dressage rider the gold medal. Their hockey team gets ANGRY."

9-2.... just to remind people it happened

Meh, you can have the hockey, we've got everything else

seriously though, nine goals in Hockey is a proper thrashing. Hup Holland!

her boyfriend is an olympic ice skate champion, so quite some muscles...

you might have one chance though he took the wrong lane at the 10k



so you might be able to fool him

We had more of a chance in the women's semi-final against Argentina. Netherlands were always going to be too strong in the men's.

I know there's an England Hockey League, but do any of the teams in it play 'professionally'? Reading Hockey Club are apparently da-best, but their grounds, Sonning Lane, appears to have a capactiy of about 20 from what I can tell from a few pictures/street view.

No, not professional. I had a colleague at PIPEX who played in the Premier League for Beeston.

The Dutch hockey players are "FIT". Plus one just caned an opposing player in the face!

Sexy sexy violence. Ban this sick filth etc.

Bloody hell. Really cagey contest in the wrestling final, between the American and the Iranian. Didn't end in a legdrop, but the American won it by scoring a point in each of the two rounds. He's going into MMA in the next five years.

That's three golds and a silver for Iran in the wrestling.

Did the Iron Sheik compete?

I already made the Hogan-Sheiky reference.

And here they are!

I do wish that athletes and presenters would stop using the word medal as a verb

Better that than "podium"

I'm getting annoyed by all this talk of how increased sport in school will encourage Britain's youth to participate. I hated PE at school - I spent far too many hours shivering in the corner during football and rugby trying to avoid any chance of the ball getting close to me, and the teachers, in their warm trousers and coats, seem to enjoy watching young boys in shorts suffer during tortouus cross-country runs in the bleak midwinter*. Hiking, cycling, canoeing, and swimming were (and still are, though not as much as I'd like) my kind of sport, but other than one term of swimming were never offered as part of the curriculum.

Getting kids to enjoy exercise is a Good Thing, but not by forcing weedy nerdy types to risk being bullied or humiliated due to a lack of interest or skill in 'manly' team sports.

(And if others have made this point earlier, I'm not reading 80 pages)

*One or two of them also seemed to take too much of an interest during the showers we had to take afterwards, making sure we had all removed our kit before entering. Hmmm...

granted, but if your school had done fencing or shooting or somesuch, or you had had a local club and you saw it on the Olympics, you would be more tempted to give it a go.

I agree with Kern. At my school, PE was basically football and that was it. We did wrestling once which I would have enjoyed but we never did it again.

Aye; we don't necessarily need more money thrown at trying to get everyone to do football and rugby. I think trying to find something active for everyone is important. Obviously it's hard to do, but a noble goal if nothing else.

We did loads in PE. It was ace. Two hours a week isn't enough, though, especially having to factor changing clothes twice and showering into each of those individual hours.

Yeah, wrestling or judo would have been great.

I was actually quite good at hockey, but that got gender-ghettoed pretty quickly.

Our two hours a week was a double period, thus avoiding those issues!

Also, we did loads of stuff in PE as well. I honestly tried every Olympic track and field sport barring the pole vault when we were there. We never played football because everyone who wanted to played it every lunch time anyway.

We did a lot of rugby, hockey, tennis, running, indoor volleyball, basketball, cricket/rounders. PE was excellent at my school. And it was full of scruffy cunts.

When I was at a comprehensive school, the sports were varied and interesting, we did 2 hours of gym based stuff and 2 hours of outside stuff a week. The gym stuff was all sorts of things including a load of the gymnastics events, and outside while being a bit weather and season dependent was excellent as well, javelin, discus, shotput, running, all sorts of events and then hockey/football and a few other team sports when it was colder.

When I moved to the grammar school, PE was shit; you did basketball/swimming for 1/2 an hour a week, then went and played rugby/hockey/football. The PE teachers weren't interested in helping you at all unless you were in the school rugby team; it was a real step down.

Ours turned to a weekly two-hour session when we got to years 10 and 11, I think. It certainly alleviated those issues a little, except for the Badminton sessions I picked (we got to pick which sports we wanted to do, similar to choosing your subjects) which involved a 15-minute walk to the community centre because the school's sports hall didn't have the nets.

Similar to you, though, we tried absolutely loads of stuff. Football, rugby, tennis, table tennis, volleyball, hockey, all sorts of athletics, all the throwing sports bar the hammer, basketball, all the field games bar baseball. It was all ace. But not enough. I'd have happily dropped one of the shitty, useless subjects I was forced to take if I could do a little more PE.

We even did trampolining! That was a fucking shambles. We weren't allowed to do it again.

Am on Hampstead heath, place is empty. it is normally rammed given any sunshine. the Olympics has killed London.

There's nothing on today, is there? Diving, mountain biking..?