I guess we need a Summer Olympics thread…?

Maybe is wasn’t just soccer using those drones.

well, somehow i doubt the korean women’s archery team will be who stands between me and glory.

and i’m more daydreaming about how to win an olympic medal bc i’m good enough. i’d assume nike could come up with some good national search for the 13th men’s hoops spot in 2028 and sell it to me, archery seems like something a random could actually have a chance at with enough time/money/motivation.

Is this a trick question that you know the answer to? My guess is that you’re way underestimating the advantages of youth. No way a 65 yo has the vision or steady nerves of steel of someone in their twenties at the top of their game. Not to mention the strength of muscle and body control necessary to remain perfectly still before the shot

i guess my argument was/is that 40 more years of practice could outweigh youth :man_shrugging:t3:

i’m not saying i’m right. i mean clearly i’m not, all the medal winners are young. i just asked why?

https://x.com/itftennis/status/1818017593510477995?s=46&t=hUTQWHj9NQWf8Y8RgMv1TA

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I don’t think this is really true. I mean, it’s true that it’s not the best year for US swimming, but it seems to be a down year for most of the world. There are not a lot of world records being set, and there aren’t a ton of plausible threats to those records. During Phelps’s dominance, the US swim team was a freak and a team. Phelps was an absolute freak, but aren’t something like 1/3 of his medals from relays? A freak and 3 chumps can’t medal in relays. You gotta have a freak and 3 contenders.

This Olympics, the US team seems like a team without freaks. Ledecky is still there, yes, but she’s on her 4th Olympics and has clearly lost a step, even if she’ll dominate her signature events. She won’t be on top of the podium for stuff outside of her specialty. So, to me, the US team seems more like a team of contenders without a freak. There are a few freaks out there (Marchand, McIntosh), but they seem to be without the sorts of teams that can win those freaks multiple relay medals as well.

I think that in order to say that the rest of the world has matched the same level as the US and Australia in swimming, they have to be able to show up at an Olympics with a freak and a team where the freak is cleaning up, and the team is picking up some additional individual medals, and they’re medaling in multiple relays. You can’t claim to be among the best when your best are competing with the best in the bests’ off years. You gotta show that you can have the dominant years that the best have had. Or, at least, that there are world record breakers from a bunch of different places, including relays, even if they’re not all from the same place in the same Olympics, would be a decent claim to parity. We’re not seeing the degree of record breaking that has happened when the US and Aussies have been at their best.

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Tony hawk does commercials for joint health supplements

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Al Michaels AI voice sounds like his voice run through some kind of a sanitizer that takes out all emotion and inflection.

Did a bit of archery back in my camp days. My target scoring was just 1/3/5/7/9 scores. I did finally reach the rank of American Archer at 50 yards which was to shoot 5 6 arrow rounds that summed to 100.

So these badass bows are basically set to fight you until you get to the right amount of pull. Like you pull with 40 lbs of force, bow is pushing against you. Pull with 50 lbs of force, and bow stops pushing. Pull with more than that you also feel it.

I mean I guess if you can handle a higher bow force there is less variance, but really archery is about doing the same exact thing every time.

At the olympic level it is doing the same thing every time…and accounting for wind

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So here’s a random thought that popped into my head.

Why don’t any women swimmers shave their heads in the olympics? Some of them might shed about a pound of weight, which has to be worth a couple of hundredths of a second.

Yeah, they’ve got the rest of their non-swimming lives to think about. But I’ve seen surveys of athletes who claim they would literally give up years of life to medal at an Olympics. If that’s true, then this seems like a much smaller sacrifice.

I guess they’ve all decided that it doesn’t make a difference. But it would have to make at least a tiny difference, right?

I’ve thought the same about track sprinters. Many of them wear thick necklaces, and the women sometimes wear long wigs. In a sport decided by 10ths of seconds, this has never made sense.

When you phrased it this way, I started to wonder how much additional practice is worth in archery if you are already Olympic level? Obviously you need to keep training to maintain your skill, but once you hit the age of, say, 30, I wonder how much more “wisdom” or “experience” there is to be gained about the sport?

In football, a quarterback can recognize defenses more quickly and maybe make up for some lost arm strength or foot speed. A pitcher can learn a new pitch to compensate for a slower fastball. A golfer might get better at reading putts or avoiding the trickiest spots on a particular course. Again, I know basicakly nothing about archery, but nothing comes to mind as a similary type of insight that could ONLY be developed over time after someone was already elite.

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This guy’s quickly become a meme sensation.

https://twitter.com/nascarcasm/status/1817985882055754137

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regarding the records and actual times, there are many complaints about the Paris’ pool being “slow”. It’s relatively shallower than usual which somehow causes it to produce slower times. Didn’t bother reading the technical explanations but it’s been talked about a lot.

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I think the pool is slow, there were many world records set this year in other pools.

edit: pony fell in a Parisian pool.

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the shallower pool causes more wake/turbulence leading to slower times. this theory makes more sense than elite athletes just magically getting slower across the board.

That seems like a weird thing to say.

Anyone know what the tension on those bows are? That could also add to it being a young person’s sport. That or there is no money in it and they have to get real jobs after college?

Coco out of singles in 3rd round

Google says:

competitors use recurve bows that draw an average of around 48.5 pounds for the men and 33 pounds for the women.

Olympic archery equipment guide: All the equipment used in archery at the Paris Olympics | NBC Olympics.

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