They did an okay job of putting the city itself on display, and I imagine it might have been refreshing for the athletes to get a ride instead of having to traipse around a track. The Eurodance segment had a couple of bangers, which was nice. There aren't many people in the world who could do Édith Piaf justice from up on the Eiffel Tower, so I guess we should have seen that coming a bit more obviously than the rumour mill suggested.

Nice moment during the formality where the lads managed to hoist the Olympic flag upside down. Don't worry, there were only about a billion people watching, nobody will have noticed.

I willfully ignored most of the Euros (except when England or Scotland were playing, and a few of Spain's games). And I will do the same with the Olympics.

It seems to be mostly quite dull sports at the moment. I don't know if this is the BBC showing whatever Team GB are doing rather than whatever is most exciting (the fencing on the red button last night was surprisingly thrilling, but had no British representation), but you'd think they'd put cooler stuff on at the weekend when most people will be watching. At this exact moment, we've got hockey on the red button and it was swimming last time I checked BBC1. I don't like this because I prefer wacky sports like archery and climbing.

I blame Discovery+, who have apparently paid so much for the rights that now nobody else is allowed to show most of the events.

Reposted without comment.

(I know you two were eyeing up the big bird at the back left.)

Now, really. I thought this was just /pol/ retards ruining 4chan's /sp/ board with endless ranting about let's see what the wordfilters are here muh love and cherished globohomo retvrn2tradcath Christ-is-King bollocks. Turns out Fox News or somewhere must have joined in. There was absolutely nothing offensive about the opening ceremony apart from how forced and tiresome the diversity was. But these fuckwits have actually got themselves an official apology. Unbelievable. If only any of them could read.

I hope they're also going to apologise for the archery not being shown on the BBC. That's a proper scandal. I wanted to watch that.

Why are football, tennis and rugby Olympic sports? They're all represented globally by world cups/grand slams. You can make an argument for football with their strict selection criteria but honestly I'm not sympathetic to that. Would rather see lacrosse or squash.

>>10318

The 'right' are generally morons for taking such offence at these things. It falsely enables it. The 'left' is now still convinced they're alternative rebels (despite being the focus of the ceremony), and we are stuck in 2001. Having said that, they wouldn't televise a similar thing 'against' Jews or eskimos.

>There was absolutely nothing offensive about the opening ceremony

It was tremendously ugly, which is a much bigger crime.

>>10319
Lacrosse doesn't have enough countries that play it; it would basically be a free medal for America. Squash is a good one; you're absolutely right with that. I think football was added by someone who doesn't fully understand the vibe of the Olympics; a sport shouldn't be included if the Olympics isn't the very apex of that sport. Olympic rugby is rugby sevens, which nobody normally watches, so that can stay.

>>10317
Is that a blue-balled Scotsman?

>>10322
It's meant to be the Greek god Dionysos. The Olympics are from Ancient Greece, you see, just like Dionysos, and he was the god of drinking and partying and hedonistic merriment, which is what we should all have been doing while we kicked off the Olympics on Friday night.

>>10319

Bluntly, money. There are ostensibly many factors that go into the decision to include a sport in the Olympic Games, but the absolute dominant factor is how much broadcasters are willing to pay for the rights.

Five sports have been selected as optional events for 2028 - cricket, flag football, baseball/softball, lacrosse and squash. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that three American sports have been chosen for an Olympic Games that's being hosted in America.

>>10324
The sports that get added are often also representative of the host nation. Tokyo 2020 added karate, and they even split it into kumite (fighting) and kata (practising your form: jumping around by yourself, karate-chopping the air and shouting, "Hai-yah!"). It was ridiculous. Japan didn't even get the gold medal.

https://www.eurosport.com/karate/tokyo-2020/2021/karate-women-s-kata-final-tokyo-2020-olympic-highlights_vid1522546/video.shtml

The Australian women’s rugby sevens team has a player called Sariah laplander.

>>10326

The squad also includes Kaitlin Shave and Lily Dick.

>>10323
Anyone who claims to be Dionysus but doesn't tear animals apart isn't Dionysus in my books, sorry.

What's the most effort you've ever put into posing for a photo?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/olympics/videos/c0dm32x1y1po

Every time I see something I might like to watch at the Olympics I turn it on and it's a medal ceramony. The only thing I've actually caught live was the mens mountain biking, which was a great deal of fun, especially whent he French fans got all upset about a UK rider winning it. It was spoilt somewhat by the moaning of the UK rider after the fact, because he should have been cupping his ear and and completely taking the piss out of them.

>>10331
The first time I intentionally tried to watch it this year the choices were either a posho wankfest over equestrian or watching a teenager repeatedly fall off a skateboard, so I turned it off.

The only thing I've actually watched so far is swimming because that's always entertaining.

An Austrian woman earlier looked almost in tears as she struggled to win even a single point against her Chinese opponent at table tennis. What a stereotype.

>>10333
Big China has avoided the mistakes we made by making football incredibly popular and cricket quite popular and as such are able to dominate the table tennis world. Having a population of 1.8 billion or whatever helps too. We should try that actually, we've got room if we build more flats. Then no one will be able to stop it Coming Home.

>>10332
I wanted to watch the skateboarding, actually. Also you reminded me of being up late and watching the Beijing Winter Olympics two years ago and the "women's" snowboard halfpipe was almost all thirteen year old girls. I think there was a venerable sixteen year old and a twenty year old the commentators spoke of as if she were a kind of revenant. Personally I think sixteen should be the minimum age to compete at the Olympics, because I don't think we should have sports where you're considered perma-crocked by your mid-teens.

>>10334
They have that rule for gymnastics; I would have expected it to be a rule for every sport. I remember there was a 13-year-old swimmer a couple of Olympicses ago; she was either Lithuanian or Estonian and she was pretty good. But I do think they need to do something about the skateboarding. However, they won’t because the whole reason it was added was to attract young people.

After all the raging about drag queens in the opening ceremony, we now have another of Those Arguments. Algerian women’s boxer Imane Khelifi is one of those women with a phenomenal physical advantage over her opponents. It is believed that she is intersex, like Caster Semenya was, and is a biological woman with astronomical testosterone levels. But as always happens, people can’t hack this and are wheeling out the same opinions they had last time. It was interesting to see one of her opponents, a wispy Italian woman, quit mid-fight after being punched just once by Imane Khelifi. I don’t watch a lot of women’s boxing but it can’t be common for an Olympic boxer to just change their mind and pull out a few seconds into their event.

>>10336

The usual suspects are convinced that Khelifi is trans, despite the fact that her birth certificate says she's female and it's illegal to be trans in Algeria.

A lot of athletes seem to be arguing that a) only biological women should be allowed to compete in women's sport and b) medical tests to ascertain someone's biological sex are a gross intrusion. Dunno how they hope to resolve that one.

>>10337
She’s not even that good. Out of 50 fights, she has lost nine. Also, I got her name wrong: she is Imane Khelif, not Khelifi.

Interestingly, there is another women’s boxer in these Olympics, Lin Yu-Ting of “Chinese Taipei” AKA Taiwan, who has also been banned in the past for not being female enough. I was hoping they might face each other, but according to Wikipedia they are in different weight categories.

>>10336

Clearly the workaround here is to get rid of male and female categories, but set a boundary for testosterone levels. Have a high testosterone and low testosterone categories. It gets to the core of the issue, which is not the gender or sex or any bollocks but the testosterone levels thereof; nobody can say it's sexist or transphobic or any shite, while it still effectively defacto segregates the sexes.

>>10339

We've largely done that in many sports. Abnormally high testosterone disqualifies you from competing as a woman, even if you've got XX chromosomes and "female" on your birth certificate. There's still loads of grousing about it. As best as I can tell, some people think that their opinion on whether you look like a bloke should be the defining criteria.

Clare Balding doesn't seem to age, then again she's looked like she was in her fifties for about 25 years now.

>>10341
Getting old early is a good way to look younger for longer and she's no John Carpenter, in fairness.

Just one more thing about the boxing controversy today. If I was the PM and a Team GB boxer started crying within the first minute of a match I would genuinely revoke their citizenship and leave them stateless.

>>10343

Yeah, but she got punched really hard in the face. How was she to know that such an awful thing could happen in a boxing match?

The hammer throwers are simply lovely.

I'm sorry to add a second horny post in a row to this thread, but one of the Belgian women's hockey team had thighs so thick she probably has to get her trousers specially tailored.

>>10346

I want to see for myself, but it's basically impossible to find a specific event on iPlayer.

>>10347
This will not have been helped by the BBC losing the rights to Discovery. As part of some other provisions, probably to do with at least the Olympic ceremonies being protected events, they get a couple of feeds, but the blanket coverage is on Eurosport.

>athletics

>>10345

Now there's somebody that can give you a proper angry wank with her hands.

>>10350

I'd like to see someone who could give me a proper angry wank with their feet.

>>10351

>give me a proper angry wank with their feet.

Paralympics should sort you out in a few weeks.

These skateboarders are better in real life than I was when I used to play Skate 3.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czjXeeVPZAI


I'm not otherlad who just posted Grace Long in /b/.

Does the 400m hurdles have four times as many hurdles as the 100m hurdles?

>>10355
No, they're just four times further apart.

Based on all the coverage they're doing, you'd be forgiven for thinking Noah Lyles has just won the 200m.

>>10357
t. Guy who came fourth.

>>10354
Savannah is fitter.
https://youtube.com/@savannahgraceycomedy

>>10359
Unless she's competing at the Olympics save it for the weekday thread, you vertical video virgin.

The weightlifting is horrible. Might as well be a "who can get kicked in the dick hardest" competition. It's just lads screaming in pain and falling over.

>>10361
The rock climbing disappointed me. I was hoping it'd be more like Gladiators.

I'm watching the weightlifting and there's people whose jobs are to slap and rub the muscles of these big strong women. The dream.

Rachel "Raygun" Gunn was hilariously shit, but she does have a lovely arse.

>>10364

>>10364
Her coach has put out a message about bullying and what 'Raygun' has had to endure for her performance. It must be incredibly embarrassing for her, although her performance was bad, like really fucking bad. I guess she's tried to do some novel expressions and shit, but fuck.

>>10366

She did a PhD on gender and breakdancing. It must come as a blow to be confronted with the possibility that all those people who said you were shit at breakdancing weren't sexists after all.

https://figshare.mq.edu.au/articles/thesis/Deterritorializing_gender_in_Sydney_s_breakdancing_scene_a_B-girl_s_experience_of_B-boying/19433291/1?file=34528847

>>10367

Don't be daft, you know this will just confirm and redouble her conviction that everyone who says she's shit is a sexist. Probably find a way to blame evangelist christian korean youtubers too.

Fishery is a completely dead end ideology in the 21st century.

Volleyball, beach and not-beach, is actually very entertaining. I think I prefer beach, but they're both pretty good.

>>10366
I don't know why people are so upset by her being there. If people think she's disrespecting breaking then they should be more upset that the Yanks have already said they won't be including it at the LA games in 2028. Also isn't it basically an Olympic tradition that there's at least one competitor in a completely random sport who's just there for the craic, fully aware they aren't going to come close to placing anywhere half decent? I don't know, the world's so full of miserable fucking cunts, I don't know how more people don't go postal from social media exposure. Having said that...

>>10367
>>10368
... you retards should kill yourselves.

>>10369
>isn't it basically an Olympic tradition that there's at least one competitor in a completely random sport who's just there for the craic, fully aware they aren't going to come close to placing
I think it's differnet for 'breaking' (when has it ever been called that before now? Sounds so dumb) where a large part of it is 'fronting' and bigging up your dance partners to show up the opposition. The whole "Yeah, what you got?" after performing a thing, only this time it was like .. what the fuck. She straight up clownin' dawg.

>>10369
>I don't know why people are so upset by her being there

From what I've read breakdancing being there was a bit of a farce from the very beginning because it was pushed by the World DanceSport Federation, who ideally want ballroom dancing to become an Olympic event but realised they'd have more chance getting their foot in the door with breakdancing first as it's more modern. The problem with this is that they have pretty much fuck all ties to breakdancing, which itself didn't really have much in the way of an international organisation so WDSF were able to try and co-opt it. Many established dancers didn't like this and stayed well clear of the Olympics.

The reason "Raygun" qualified was because she won the inaugural WDSF Oceania Breaking Championships last year, which sounds like it was a complete amateur hour event.