Comments on: Corruption wins the gold in Beijing

By: chinaman

chinaman — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 05:04:44 +0000

Hi
Fucking hard thinking posts

By: maja

maja — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 05:06:54 +0000

I heard (before these olympics) that the country hosting the olympic games always gets more medals than usual. Maybe it’s an advantage not having to travel so far and all that. I know with aussie rules football the home team is always at the advantage. I think it’s just a thing.

By: BTExpress

BTExpress — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 17:57:49 +0000

Excellent commentary. About the only thing I don’t agree on is banning the entire team if one athlete is caught. How about testing everyone, before, during and after the games? A tube or two of blood and some pee isn’t going to hurt any of them.

By: jared

jared — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:29:55 +0000

its interesting watching the change along east hastings as soon as the olympics was announced for vancouver. you can almost see the dust clouds of homeless people as the government is trying to sweep them under the rug. look at hastings between cambie and carall… that area was dying for help for the longest time, and i would cringe as i used to watch tourists in gas town go down carall to get to chinatown. nothing was ever done to help. now rennie and co are in there building all these super condos where woodwards used to be and god knows what else would be put up in that block. so where do all those homeless and unfortunate junkies go.. they disperse further down in the residential area. great plan. i like the fact it is being cleaned up but that is out weighed by the obvious motivation and the ill-guided end sight. money. not solution.

By: Barbara Doduk

Barbara Doduk — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:36:43 +0000

I was just talking about the “judging” in events the other day with PG… we agree, that it seems like a mistake to have opinions in events, that it should be totally based on points. Glad we aren’t the only ones thinking that.

I lost interest in the Olympics a long time ago.

By: egan

egan — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:42:01 +0000

Well thought out post. I have to say, for whatever reason, I was glued to the tv. Maybe it’s because swimming is such a big draw in the Olympics. As a swimmer it’s really exciting to watch a week of nothing but swimming. Very interesting observations about judged golds.

By: Rhonda

Rhonda — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 03:27:50 +0000

Banning those using drugs, ABSOLUTELY! Sending the whole team packing, absolutely NOT. Could you yourself imagine being at the top of your game only to be sent in the other direction because some jackass decided to use “performance enhancing” whatevers. I think a mandatory testing of your entire team would be better if someone does indeed test positive. To punish the whole would be a little extreme, you can’t control what your teammates do.

We didn’t get to see a whole lot of coverage here, mostly because John likes to channel surf and because of the 12 hour time difference. That was tough. I did get to see some of the gymnastics and do agree that there was a great favoratism towards the host nation. A fall on vault was rewarded to the wrong person to the complete devastation of another. Not to defend just one incident (and I know there were a few) but if we don’t understand a sport, we are not able to take in the difference of adding in the facts of degrees of difficulty. I do think that this new scoring in the sport of Gymnastics does make it better for those that do have the more difficult tricks allthough again, there will always be room for corruption. I do however feel that Kyle Shewfelt is a long way away from being a good commentator

At the beginning of the Olympics, I was tempted to change my fb profile to “more like USA vs. China. Even though I don’t really believe that, nor do I believe the rest of the world any less capable of achieving gold, it was hard not to notice how many medals the two countries were receiving. I could just imagine the backlash from that one!

By: Wet Coast Women » Blog Archive » Olympic Fever

Wet Coast Women » Blog Archive » Olympic Fever — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 03:14:21 +0000

[…] The corruption bothered our own Gus Greeper more than it did myself this year. I think I am so ‘done’ with the Olympics now….corruption, in my opinion, is now par for the course. […]

By: Jacki

Jacki — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 23:33:17 +0000

I agree with you, if someone is caught with drugs then that should be that. No more competions for them. Not sure how I feel about the whole team being banned though. Its not always fair to be blamed for someone else’s mistake and alot of people out there would do it anyway, not caring about the fate of their teamates.

By: Raul

Raul — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 23:25:32 +0000

Great post Corinna, and I think you’ve touched on many things that need to be talked about.

First, the whole idea of judged sports. I felt that some of the Mexican athletes (diving) had been improperly judged. Judging means leaving it up for human failure.

Second, the whole idea of how people will be treated once Vancouver hosts the game. I am also VERY worried about this. Will Vancouver be shipping homeless people out? How are we going to deal with this?

Third, the relevance of the Olympics. When I was younger, I would never miss them. But with the whole corruption thing, I rarely see them. Except to see diving and volleyball

Great post, Corinna. I loved this post.