Good natured rivalry at it's best. The United States, Great Britian, and Australia are my three favorite nations.Posted on 08/08/2012 11:34:18 AM PDT by sinsofsolarempirefan
Australia's sports minister is set to don a Team GB shirt and take to the water after resigning herself to losing a wager with her UK counterpart about who would win more gold medals.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
Both Australia and Russia have laid an egg.
Good natured rivalry at it's best. The United States, Great Britian, and Australia are my three favorite nations.The Anglosphere has ruled the games.
I'm not sure what the deal is, but host nations always get a bump in medals. Hey, I like that. Good one...One thing is the lack of travel which may help.
Although the Chinese will probably not learn the lesson, due to their sheer number of medals, the smaller anglo-sphere population has earned more medals through a culture of self-motivated individualism than China has through its sick system of athlete factories were future athletes are trained from toddlerhood through beatings and shame to bring glory to the motherland...
But China mostly has won their medals in the individual events, and they’ve done poorly in the team events.
One thing that is troubling for the US, however, is that fact that most of their medals are from the women. The men, outside of Michael Phelps, have not done well at all.
I may be dense, but why should either nation have a “sports minister”?
Pardon?
Medal count currently Men’s are tied with 31 medals each for US and China.. not sure why you think they haven’t done well at all. While certainly some folks have underperformed this olympics... to say the men haven’t pulled their weight is a bit disingenuous. Lochne should have won a few more, but didn’t, that would have put the men out of a tie had he.. and a few other instances but hardly is that a not done well at all group.
Women have wone more medals, but overall are in 2nd place currently against their chinese women’s counterparts.
China is doing the same thing the USSR did, hopefully USA will come out on top, and believe they will as more of the track and field medals come to play as the games close.
Let's see, didn't even qualify for soccer, got blown out in Water Polo and Volleyball in the Quarterfinals, under performed in Men's Gymnastics, few Golds in Track for the men, already eliminated from winning any medals in boxing, shall I go on?
Perhaps so.
For Australia, it makes sense. Sport is a huge industry here - which is one reason why we normally do well at the Olympics. This time round, has been a bit of an exception.
Our system of government requires that somebody in government is specifically responsible for everything significant. That person will be a Member of Parliament who is appointed to the position of Minister. Only senior Ministers make up the Cabinet. The Minister for Sport is not a Cabinet Minister - technically she's a Junior Minister in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.
It's often part of a combined portfolio - while we do currently have a Minister for Sport, at other times it's been combined into the Minister for Youth and Sport, Minister for the Arts and Sport, Minister for Sport and Tourism. Basically we spend $300 million a year of taxpayers money on sporting related activities - somebody has to be reasonable to the voters for that money.
Altogether, there's about 40 Ministers - about half of whom are Cabinet Ministers. Basically anything the government spends real money on has to have somebody responsible for it.
They do. You also get a bump if you did well in the previous Olympics, and GB did VERY well in Bejing four years ago.
Thank you Vaners9. I wasn’t aware of that.
I turned off the Olympics several decades ago when you couldn’t watch an event without a ten minute sob story up front. “Oh this athlete or another had a very hard time in life. Let’s wallow in it shall we...” It had nothing to do with sports.
I did turn on a small portion of this Olympics coverage, and was impressed with the professionalism, the pure coverage of the event, and little else from what I observed.
My take on it now, is that I may actually pay some attention next Olympics.
I found myself wanting to watch more, not throw a brick at the television screen.
My advice is to watch it via the BBC instead of NBC, of which it seems no-one has a good word to say about how they cover the Olympics...
Thanks for the mention.
It surprised everybody really!
I can’t speak with total knowledge on the subject, because I didn’t watch anywhere near enough to have a comprehensive understanding of all that took place, but what I saw was very good. It was covered as a sporting event, not an outreach project to older women who care more about personal drama insights than the actual games.
Watching some of the events on HDTV, you got a much better view than if you had been there in person. Simply amazing...
BTW: The Olympic Torch was a work of art. At the closing ceremonies when that thing blossomed out, I was impressed.
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