London 2012 MegaThread [Part 2]

WumBuster

Deleted User wrote: »

Ah sure we might get it in Two mile Borris on the site of the casino that never came to be Lowry can be our Seb Coe

Larry Corbett can come up the suir in a speed boat with the olympic torch ala Beckham and he can pass it on to jimmy doyle

Dreams? Nothing that money can buy. Nothing that money can buy.

WumBuster

WumBuster wrote: »

Dreams? Nothing that money can buy. Nothing that money can buy.

You may laugh now but when the mayor of Tokyo is handing the flag over to Lowry in 2020 ill be straight onto boards to pm you and tell you i told you so :D:D

WumBuster

Deleted User wrote: »

You may laugh now but when the mayor of Tokyo is handing the flag over to Lowry in 2020 ill be straight onto boards to pm you and tell you i told you so :D:D

And if Waterford host it theres only one man to light the torch.. Dan the ****ing man!

WumBuster

WumBuster wrote: »

And if Waterford host it theres only one man to light the torch.. Dan the ****ing man!

For €100k.....id say not a bother

WumBuster

Deleted User wrote: »

For €100k.....id say not a bother

You are not seriously insinuating that our beloved Dan is a money man?

WumBuster

WumBuster wrote: »

You are not seriously insinuating that our beloved Dan is a money man?

Ohhhhhhh perish the thought

WumBuster

Deleted User wrote: »

Ohhhhhhh perish the thought

Well thats grand. ye can keep ye're own money men like Lowry etc. Cant lie straight in bed that fella

brandon_flowers

brandon_flowers wrote: »

Mosney lads, Mosney. It can host the whole lot.

Being looking all over boards for the Community games 1994 appreciation thread

WumBuster

WumBuster wrote: »

Well thats grand. ye can keep ye're own money men like Lowry etc. Cant lie straight in bed that fella

Ohhhhh dont i know it pal but there is plenty in TN who cover their ears at the thought that their beloved likes to dip his hands in the cookie jar once in a while

Todd Gack

Favourite Moments of the games, i'll pick 3.

The US womens 4 x 100M relay team smashing the East German drug fuelled world record by over half a second, great to see one of those records banished in such a fashion. Womens track and field is unfortunately held back by so many of the existing records being held by 80's drug tainted records so it was fantastic to see one being erased in such emphatic fashion.

Elena Lashmanova coming from well behind in the womens 20K walk to break the world record, she was so far behind but ate up the ground magnificently on defending champion Olga Kaninskina to take it in the last few metres. It must be so difficult to keep your form and composure in the walk in a "sprint" finish

Felix Sanchez on the podium, champion in Athens and at almost 35 it seemed as if he was well past his best, ran his fastest time since 2004 to win gold and broke down on the podium. To see how much it meant to him on a personal level after the death of his grandmother was a great moment. A true champion and an enduring memory.

I said 3 but I'll stick a 4th in, I could stick 10 in easily. Michael Phelps after 4th in the 400IM, 2nd in the 4 x 100M freestyle and defeat by inches in the 200M butterfly storming back to win 4 golds and defeating both his conquerors Ryan Lochte (400 IM) and Chad Le Clos (200M Fly) in the 200IM and 100 Fly showed his greatness.

kfallon

Did anyone attend any of the homecomings yesterday for the boxers?

opinion guy

Apparently the French were not too impressed:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19249953

Anyone

Just thinking back, I recon the Closing Ceremony should have ended with Rick Astley performing his hit "Never gonna give you up".

DebDynamite

Anyone wrote: »

Just thinking back, I recon the Closing Ceremony should have ended with Rick Astley performing his hit "Never gonna give you up".

They could've come up with something clever to Rickroll the whole world!

opinion guy

opinion guy wrote: »

Apparently the French were not too impressed:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19249953

The French media being extremely petty there with those remarks. The only French athlete who could feel any way aggrieved with the games is Alexis Vastine, the Welterweight boxer who lost on an extremely dodgy decision. Other then that its pathetic really. It was a fantastic olympics

westendgirlie

Anyone wrote: »

Just thinking back, I recon the Closing Ceremony should have ended with Rick Astley performing his hit "Never gonna give you up".

Oooh, Oooh, and BROS, "I owe you nothing" with Boris running away from the Bank of England

Brussels Sprout

opinion guy wrote: »

Apparently the French were not too impressed:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19249953

Funny that the Germans were really positive about it and the French were really catty. Looks like the old wartime alliances are long gone

kfallon

Brussels Sprout wrote: »

Funny that the Germans were really positive about it and the French were really catty. Looks like the old wartime alliances are long gone

Well London did pip Paris to the hosting of the 2012 games when it looked like Paris were a shoe-in for it so I'm not surprised to see them acting the bollix!

It was a truly marvellous games, anyone who says otherwise is a clown!

opinion guy

Deleted User wrote: »

The French media being extremely petty there with those remarks. The only French athlete who could feel any way aggrieved with the games is Alexis Vastine, the Welterweight boxer who lost on an extremely dodgy decision. Other then that its pathetic really. It was a fantastic olympics

Brussels Sprout wrote: »

Funny that the Germans were really positive about it and the French were really catty. Looks like the old wartime alliances are long gone

Of course this all assumes that the reporters weren't simply cherry picking negative comments from the French papers and good comments from the German papers. Which would not surprise me in the least

brandon_flowers

The media in France is very Parisian when it comes to opinion. I know that there wasn't a bad word said in any papers about the Olympics along the Cote d'Azur mainly because Yannick Agnel comes from Nimes and trains in Nice. And of course he was the unexpected hero of their Olympic team.

el diablo

Interesting article about our track and field team at the Olympics

On a fast track to irrelevance

By Eamonn Sweeney
Sunday August 12 2012
Tori Pena failing to clear a single height in the pole vault, Ciarán ó Lionáird finishing 13th in the heats of the 1,500m and his subsequent TV Mad Scene, Catriona Jennings trailing in last in the marathon, 17 minutes behind the second last runner, Fionnuala Britton being lapped in the final of the 10,000m, the reliably disappointing Alistair Cragg plodding in 17th in his 5,000m heat in a time 44 seconds slower than the one he ran to qualify for London.

It's been a truly nightmarish Olympics for Irish athletics as one awful image has succeeded another.

Where does Irish athletics go from here? And why has everything gone so terribly wrong? After all, it's only three years since a World Championships in Barcelona seemed to promise great things. Olive Loughnane won silver in the 20km walk, Derval O'Rourke was fourth in the 100m hurdles and David Gillick sixth in the 400m, both of them the first Europeans over the line, Paul Hession narrowly missed out on the 200m final.

There was a general air of optimism about. Eileen O'Keeffe had come sixth in the hammer at the 2007 World Championships, Robert Heffernan would bag two fourth places in the 20km and 50km walks at the 2010 Euros to go with Derval's silver. Nobody would have thought the dismal showing at the 2004 Olympics, which had brought the name of Irish athletics into disrepute, would not just be repeated at the London Games but actually surpassed in sheer awfulness.

Rob Heffernan's magnificent fourth place in the 50km walk was an isolated bright spot in an apocalyptically gloomy landscape. But the fact remains that at the time of writing 39 countries had won medals in athletics. Estonia, Guatemala, Botswana and Slovenia were on that list. Ireland weren't.

The excuse that you can't expect Irish athletes to be beating the top Africans and Americans is irrelevant to our performance at these Games because most of our competitors have given displays which were poor not just by international standards, but by their own personal ones. Derval O'Rourke might have reached the semi-final in a season's best but that season's best is her slowest since 2005. In the high jump, Deirdre Ryan failed to qualify for the final after clearing just 1.85m, a height she was exceeding ten years ago as a 20-year-old. Paul Hession's current season's best is his slowest in six years.

This disheartening orgy of underperformance follows a very poor showing in a European Championships where despite weakened fields we never came within an ass's roar of a medal.

Our athletes have been lucky that the attention of the nation has largely been focused on the magnificent achievements of the boxers. But this shouldn't mask the fact that Irish athletics has just endured the Olympics From Hell.

I'm not a knocker of Irish athletics. Over the years in this column I've argued against burdening our athletes with unrealistic expectations and tried to accentuate the positive as often as possible. But you can't ignore the current situation.

What proportion of the blame should be placed at the door of high performance director Kevin Ankrom whose appointment in April of last year has, perhaps coincidentally, coincided with this precipitous slump in the standing of Irish athletics? It's hard to say. Maybe the collective loss of form has nothing to do with him. But if a high performance director doesn't have any effect on the performance of our top athletes, what's the point in having one? In any case, what sympathy you might have for the man evaporated when he publicly criticised Derval O'Rourke's Olympic preparations a couple of days before her heat. Ankrom might have shown a small bit of loyalty to our most successful track athlete of recent times. And it might have been more in his line to worry about the appalling displays of athletes who, unlike Derval, did get to the Games in time to liaise with our high performance director.

What we've witnessed from Irish athletics at the current Games is the betrayal of a great tradition. Athletics, after all, is our second most successful Olympic sport after boxing. We have a right to expect better and there's no reason things can't be turned around if the problem is properly addressed.

As Kenneth Egan pointed out last week on RTE, all the chat about our boxing tradition ignores the fact that before the inauguration of a proper high-performance strategy the sport was going nowhere in Olympic terms. In 2000 and 2004, we qualified just one boxer who was promptly beaten long before the medal stages. There was nothing inevitable about the triumph of Irish boxing. Hard truths had to be faced up to and hard work put in behind the scenes.

But when you see Katie Taylor, John Joe Nevin, Paddy Barnes and Michael Conlan, or for that matter Cian O'Connor and Annalise Murphy, excelling against world-class opposition, it makes you lose sympathy for athletes who don't even look like they're capable of achieving similar goals.

It's time, for starters, to stop Alistair Cragg and Tori Pena dining out on the Irish dime. Whatever the pragmatic case for bringing in top-class athletes with genealogical connections to this island, there's no point bringing in mediocre ones. There is something disheartening and damaging about Cragg's serial flops. They are a PR disaster for Irish athletics.

So was the performance of Jennings in the women's marathon. She may have been hampered by injury but if she was hampered to the extent of only being able to run a time accessible to most decent club runners she shouldn't have run. By finishing the race she did neither herself nor Irish athletics any favours.

Similarly, it was obvious that Ciarán ó Lionáird was neither in the physical nor mental shape to do himself justice at the Olympics. His 3:48.35 in the 1,500m was 14 seconds outside his personal best. On the plus side it was only a second outside the Irish under 17 record. Yet it wasn't a surprise given his recent form. Again, Athletics Ireland would have been better off telling him to stay at home.

The irritating thing about this laissez-faire attitude towards allowing crocked athletes to let themselves down at the Olympics is that the stance on not accepting runners with 'B' standards was apparently based on the need to avoid the image of Irish athletics being sullied by poor performances.

But the irony is that some of the 'B'-standard athletes who weren't allowed to run would have done much better than some of the 'A'-standard athletes who were. Cragg and ó Lionáird ran their qualifying times last year and produced nothing like the same time this year. Yet, in the month before the Olympics, Brian Gregan, Jessie Barr and Mark English all gave displays which suggested they would have gone well at the Games. But, because all three missed out on the 'A' standard by a whisker, they weren't selected.

Gregan would have certainly made the semi-finals in the 400m where Steven Solomon of Australia, with a PB just nine hundredths of a second better than Gregan and who was sent on a 'B' standard, actually

made the final. Ditto Jessie Barr, whose PB would have got her into the 400m hurdles semis and who's out there anyway as a member of the relay team.

Less than a month before the Games, Mark English finished a competitive fifth in a high-quality world 800m junior final. The first and second runners that day were Botswana's Nijel Amos and Timothy Kitum of Kenya who finished second and third behind David Rudisha in the most memorable track final of the London Games. In the world juniors, English was less than a second and a half down on Kitum who went on to run 1.42.53. in the Olympics. The Letterkenny runner's absence was the most galling of all.

The refusal to treat each qualification case on its own merits meant Athletics Ireland sent runners who weren't fit to the Games while leaving at home a trio who could have provided a welcome good news story for the sport and showcased young talent on the way up. And God knows Irish athletics needed a good news story this past week.

Athletics Ireland and Kevin Ankrom can either take comfort in deluded and defensive self-justification or admit that right now Irish athletics has reached rock bottom. The sport can't go on like this. If it does, it runs the risk of becoming an irrelevance at Olympic level with all the funding consequences this implies.

During the Mills/Cuddihy affair the amount of athletes who tweeted their disapproval of Athletics Ireland, and the harsh nature of that criticism, was astounding. If the runners themselves are losing faith in the sport's governing body why should the rest of us feel differently?


- Eamonn Sweeney

steve9859

el diablo wrote: »

Interesting article about our track and field team at the Olympics

It is difficult to argue with any of that. I wonder whether any of the track and field guys have gone and trained with athletes from other federations. And if not, why not? The Olympics was littered with stories of opposing athletes training with each other....the Ugandan guy that won the marathon trained in the Kenyan system, Mo Farah trains in the States with his American opponent. Is Irish athletics so insular and inward looking that it won't agree to any of its top athletes going overseas?

Same with rowing and canoeing. The Irish should go train at Caversham with the Brits on a regular basis....because, like athletics, those sports (at which we were once strong) are going nowhere under the Irish systems

marienbad

steve9859 wrote: »

It is difficult to argue with any of that. I wonder whether any of the track and field guys have gone and trained with athletes from other federations. And if not, why not? The Olympics was littered with stories of opposing athletes training with each other....the Ugandan guy that won the marathon trained in the Kenyan system, Mo Farah trains in the States with his American opponent. Is Irish athletics so insular and inward looking that it won't agree to any of its top athletes going overseas?

Same with rowing and canoeing. The Irish should go train at Caversham with the Brits on a regular basis....because, like athletics, those sports (at which we were once strong) are going nowhere under the Irish systems

Rowing trains abroad with other nations all the time. Or at least they used to , maybe something has changed.

steve9859

marienbad wrote: »

Rowing trains abroad with other nations all the time. Or at least they used to , maybe something has changed.

I assume something has changed, since we don't have any international standard rowers any more, except for the Latvian (?) born girl. We used to have loads and I would have thought that lightweight rowing is a sport made for the Irish...

mike65

French? sour grapes? surely not?!

They will be seething about the Olympics until they stage it. So for about the next 30-50 years then!

cgpg5

They have the next Euro's don't they? That'll do them!

marienbad

mike65 wrote: »

French? sour grapes? surely not?!

They will be seething about the Olympics until they stage it. So for about the next 30-50 years then!

I think not, the French reaction to London 2012 was generally positive and I can only assume ,as one poster has already pointed out , that any bad comment was highlighted and the good ones glossed over.

The french reaction to sport is unlike other nations anyway and can be ambivalent at best, even when they are winning.

Ulysses Gaze

Interesting article about our track and field team at the Olympics

It's very difficult to argue with any of the article.

We shouldn't be allowing sick/injured athletes to the Games and we need to look at what's been done right in boxing, in terms of preparation, and apply it to athletics.

DEFTLEFTHAND

steve9859 wrote: »

It is difficult to argue with any of that. I wonder whether any of the track and field guys have gone and trained with athletes from other federations. And if not, why not? The Olympics was littered with stories of opposing athletes training with each other....the Ugandan guy that won the marathon trained in the Kenyan system, Mo Farah trains in the States with his American opponent. Is Irish athletics so insular and inward looking that it won't agree to any of its top athletes going overseas?

Same with rowing and canoeing. The Irish should go train at Caversham with the Brits on a regular basis....because, like athletics, those sports (at which we were once strong) are going nowhere under the Irish systems

Gillick (although he didn't compete at the games) was based abroad up until recently, Paul Hession has trained and competed in the States, Cragg also. I'm not sure about many of the others. A few of the young athletes with potential can end up training in foreign Universities with strong Athletics programmes.

el diablo

el diablo wrote: »

Interesting article about our track and field team at the Olympics

Interesting indeed. He fairly shoots from the hip there. id be mixed enough about it in some ways but there is a huge need for change.

With the exception of Rob Heffernan (who is a top 10 if not top 5 athlete in the world in both his disciplines) yes it is in a terrible state and the Mills/Cuddihy affair was an embarrassment. The selection criteria is totally bizarre.
Cragg has underperformed on track no doubt but he did win a European indoor gold in 2005. Its wrong to suggest though that he should not be part of team ireland because he holds the national record at 5000 and 10000 (as well as 5k on the road) and until such a time that someone is better then him then he should be a part of the team.

Tori Pena likewise holds the pole vault record. I would take the point that someone suggested that ireland needs to be less insular. Train at conditions of high humidity and altitude.

The Athletes are almost like a football team that is fed up with their manager. O'Lionairds interview where he cut a figure of frustration and disillusionment. It does need change i would agree but i dont think the baby should be thrown out with the bathwater.

marienbad

Until we resolve the dilemma of participation versus success we will always be bit players and punch way below our weight.

Other countries only send athletes if they have realistic chance of making that later stages and so maximise their resources . Maybe it is time we did the same .

Oh and cut down on the number of officials . I believe that pro rata we had an excessive number. Anyone know a link where I can find the actual numbers ?

marienbad

marienbad wrote: »

Until we resolve the dilemma of participation versus success we will always be bit players and punch way below our weight.

Other countries only send athletes if they have realistic chance of making that later stages and so maximise their resources . Maybe it is time we did the same .

Oh and cut down on the number of officials . I believe that pro rata we had an excessive number. Anyone know a link where I can find the actual numbers ?

Id agree with that pretty much so and as for the number of officials that doesnt surprise me one iota. Its similar to the kind of thing Roy Keane referred to all those years ago with the FAI pre the Genesis report.

sock puppet

marienbad wrote: »

Until we resolve the dilemma of participation versus success we will always be bit players and punch way below our weight.

Other countries only send athletes if they have realistic chance of making that later stages and so maximise their resources . Maybe it is time we did the same .

Do many countries do this?

opinion guy

marienbad wrote: »

Oh and cut down on the number of officials . I believe that pro rata we had an excessive number. Anyone know a link where I can find the actual numbers ?

You can apply this to many aspects of Irish life - the Dail, the civil service, the HSE...etc etc etc

WumBuster

This is the awesome soundtrack from the industrial sequence at the opening ceremony, by Underworld. Heavenly music

kfallon

This is my fav Underworld tune, it was played as the teams were parading, old skool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6XOuiqW0WI

keith16

Is there anywhere I can watch the BBC montages?

Came home this evening to find ****ing "O' Gorman" on RTE. What a load of cock.

robinph

sock puppet wrote: »

Do many countries do this?

No.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/olympics/2012/medals/countries

Only 79 countries got a medal of any colour out of 204 competing IOC nations. The vast majority of the medals then being won by US, China and Russia.

robinph

keith16 wrote: »

Is there anywhere I can watch the BBC montages?

Here it is on the Beeb, but that is probably blocked for most of ye:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/olympics/19237987

It is good, but I wonder if the BBC knew what the content of the closing ceremony was when they put it together. It would have had a better impact if the same song hadn't been used during the closing ceremony.

Edit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe22Komkz8w

smallerthanyou

Just finished watching the Closing Ceremony. I miss the Olympics now. Evenings seem long and boring and I may have to start going outside again.

steve9859

smallerthanyou wrote: »

Just finished watching the Closing Ceremony. I miss the Olympics now. Evenings seem long and boring and I may have to start going outside again.

What do you mean? You've live greyhound racing, Hampshire v Somerset in the cricket and Brighton v Swindon in the Capital One Cup on Sky! That's a sporting feast if ever there was one.....

steve9859

keith16 wrote: »

Is there anywhere I can watch the BBC montages?

Came home this evening to find ****ing "O' Gorman" on RTE. What a load of cock.

The hour long Eddie Butler montage is on the iplayer if you can get it....was jut watching it. And absolutely worth it. Its a brilliant piece of teevision. There is some way to get BBC iplayer in Ireland I think....some piece of software you can download. I've no idea...but I swear I've seen a thread on it somewhere....

Beefy78

Run a search on Google for 'expat shield'

opinion guy

Anyone else actually getting some work done now ?? :pac:

oceanmachine

Nice to see the Spice Girls, but Posh has really let herself go...

http://twitter.com/TheOceanMachine/status/235462375241818113

smallerthanyou

steve9859 wrote: »

What do you mean? You've live greyhound racing, Hampshire v Somerset in the cricket and Brighton v Swindon in the Capital One Cup on Sky! That's a sporting feast if ever there was one.....

Even a gold medal at the end of it wouldn't make cricket interesting.

I just noticed Beefy has 2012 posts and went wow. I need to let the Olympics go.....

Sala

Hope the powers that be get their act together for a proper homecoming for the paralympic team. I have high hopes for Team Ireland 2.0 - I don't think we'll be cheering a single gold medal either.

Ruski

So apparently the Pink Floyd classic is a new Ed Sheeran song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35TbGjt-weA

robinph

The Kaiser Chiefs had some new material as well.

Just a shame that they let George Michael get away with playing a new song. Really shouldn't have let him do that.

marienbad

robinph wrote: »

No.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/olympics/2012/medals/countries

Only 79 countries got a medal of any colour out of 204 competing IOC nations. The vast majority of the medals then being won by US, China and Russia.

I am not sure about London 2012 , but previously countries did a lot more targeting of medals to ensure the biggest bang for their buck- the classic example being Denmark and men's lightweight rowing which they have dominated in the olympic catagories since about 1993 and all done with a surprisingly small pool of rowers .

Holland and New Zealand and the former Czech countries have done the same with other events and the classic example is Hungary with watersports ( no - not that one )

While it may be true that only 79 countries got medas, we should be comparing like with like - i.e. other similar sized developed nations and on that basis our record is dismal , and any success we do have seems to be down to individual brilliance and not organisation .

Maybe Boxing at this games is showing the way .