Ignorance Talks a Big Talk

I don't mind a little jab here or there at people, places, or things (nouns, really). Sometimes feigning ignorance is done for comedic purposes or for satire, but lately it seems like a lot of people have been criticizing the women's vault finals. Primarily the fact that Cheng Fei got the Bronze medal instead of Alicia Sacramone.

Here is an example, which I saw linked to on the Yahoo! home page.

Look, I don't know much about gymnastics, but I do know that landing a vault on two feet is better than landing one on two knees. Olympic gymnastics judges evidently disagree with me, as they awarded China's Cheng Fei a bronze medal yesterday even after she fell on her vault landing. American Alicia Sacramone finished fourth despite, you know, not falling.

Yes, landing on your feet is better than having some knee touch the ground. But landing is not the only thing taken into consideration during a vault. Other than the obvious start value and execution, the vault is actually graded on an average of two scores, and anyone who watched the whole event can tell you Cheng Fei easily had the best first vault of the finals. People forget that part.

Wikipedia has the details, but to summarize: Cheng Fei scored a 16.075 on her first vault, and when averaged with her poor 15.050 on her second vault, gave her a better score than Alicia's. People don't notice that Fei did get an 8.550 on her execution, it was simply that her vault was much harder (6.5 against a 5.8) than Alicia's that saved her.

So basically, Cheng did phenomenal on a hard vault, and bad on a hard vault, and together those beat out Alicia doing good on a hard vault and good on a moderate vault. I'm all about America, but I don't think this is the scoring battle to fight.

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Olympics and Whatnot

There is actually a reason for my lack of posting recently. My schedule typically runs like this: sleep for ten hours, watch 3-4 hours of Olympics (recorded, or live), go to work for about 8 hours, go out for two hours, and repeat. Needless to say, not many movies have gotten watched (though I did see the mediocre Pineapple Express), which sort of makes my Netflix a bad investment. But the Summer Olympics only come around once every 4 years, so whatever.

It's tough to watch sports that are not Swimming or Gymnastics, because those are the focus of much of the American media circle. With that said, I will begin there.

Gymnastics are immensely entertaining, and I'm so glad USA won the gold and silver in women's all-around events. Nastia Liukin and Shawn Johnson performed amazing, and it proves that Alicia Sacramone was a weak link (with two crucial falls in her performances). Nastia deserved the gold for her fantastic routines (namely on uneven bars and beam, in my opinion). Shawn was great, but Nastia is a lot prettier, so she wins by default.

And how can we ignore the phenomenon that is Michael Phelps? He is a beast. Tonight he got his eighth gold medal this year, which means he went eight for eight. With his closest victory being by only .01 of a second, it was quite a thrill to watch him compete. Seeing his final race tonight is bound to be a piece of history long remembered, and I don't see anyone coming close to his accomplishments for a long, long time.

More entertaining than Gymnastics and Swimming are events such as Football (Soccer), Handball, Diving, a select few tennis matches, and Field events. Fortunately I have some random Soccer HD channel which shows almost all of the Olympic soccer games during the day.

Handball is a great sport which seems not so popular in America (we don't have either a team in either men's or women's). It is a fun sport to watch, especially because of players like Anita Gorbicz, who -- while not only a pleasure to look at -- make some of the most ridiculous plays ever. In a match between Hungary and Brazil early on, the score was 28-27 for Brazil with one second left in the game. Time was called on a foul, and it was expected that the ball would be quickly passed and then shot at the last second in an effort to tie; however, the ref placed the ball in the player's hand (not Gorbicz, some other chick), and she rocketed the ball overhand, much like a baseball pitch, straight into the goal before anyone knew what hit them. It's plays like that which make the Olympics so entertaining.

Another fantastic match was woman's Tennis singles, Serena Williams against Elena Dementieva. Williams was the number four seed and dominated early on, taking the first set 6 games to 4. During the second set Williams was up 4 games to 1 (I believe, or 3 to 0), but Elena managed to win 9 games in a row. This gave her the second set and must have messed Williams up mentally. Up 4 games to 0 in the last set (yeah, it must have been 4-1 in set 2), Williams managed to win a couple games, but Elena closed out the match, forcing an upset and creating a fantastic comeback. Great match.

And it stinks that a lot of these lesser sports aren't more widely broadcast. But I watch what I can, and maybe I'll report back in a few days.

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