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He might be waiting as long as Prince Charles then.

Hmm... is that a new role for Johnny Ace? In his previous stint in this job, his role was to be the bad guy, AKA "Vince really liked me, the problem was Johnny Ace". Who are all those people going to blame now? Nick Khan?

1. empty arenas 2. Austria winning its first Summer Olympics gold medal since Athens 2004 due to a series of unbelievable tactical blunders by the Dutch team (and rest of the field working against the Dutch team) 3. Austria winning 7 medals despite not having a better team then in London (where Austria did not win any medals at all) or in Rio (where we ended up with a single bronze medal) 4. a bunch of results in Athletics, that I fear will change due to retests over the next 10 years 5. "Hol Dir die Kameltreiber!" ("Get the cameleers!") 6. the absurd scoring system in sports climbing incl. the farce of the men's speed climbing that gifted an athlete gold who might have otherwise placed last in the final 7. the first Summer Olympics medal for my home state since Atlanta (where a former neighbor won silver and bronze) Hmm... I ended up with seven things instead of five, whatever.

If I had any Photoshop (or whatever people are using these days) skills, I would replace the audience with the MST3K shadows.

AKA the group of people that gave you WW1 In other news, it seems as if weightlifting might get booted from the 2024 Olympics. IOC members approved to give the executive committee the power to remove a sport from the Olympic program if they deem to sport to be negative "to the reputation of the Olympic movement". The assumption going around is that weightlifting with its continuous doping issues and the International Weightlifting Federation failing to take the necessary steps against it might get the boot. Boxing also is under pressure. For these Games, organization of the tournament was handled by the IOC itself instead of the International Boxing Association (obviously due to past issues with judging and corruption).

There are a couple of sports that I think should be removed from the Olympic schedule, but none as much as everything equestrian related. I don't want to know how many horses had to put down after cross-country races (this time the horse of a Swiss athlete). In the modern penthatlon, a German (who was leading after swimming and fencing) drew a horse (in the modern pentathlon, horses are assigned by lot) that she could not deal with (or a horse that had some problem, whatever) and you could hear the German coach shouting "hit it real hard, hit it".

Baseball and short track is a wild combination. The only other athletes who won medals in both summer and winter games in "modern" times, had much more obvious combinations (bobsleigh and track, speed skating and cycling). In "ancient" times (1920s and 30s), there was a Norwegian who won medals in sailing and ski jumping and an American with the combination boxing and bobsleigh.

The decathlon probably will be an easy win for Canadian Damian Warner as French world record holder Kevin Mayer does not seem to be in top condition in the track events. Warner opened with a 10.12 s over the 100 m, tying the "decathlon record" (best mark in a decathlon) already held by him and followed it with a 8.24 m long jump (only 4 cm behind (again) his decathlon record) - a mark that would have been good enough for the bronze medal in the long jump event of the specialists. There is a tiny chance that Warner might break the world record today (9126 point), but I guess a mark somewhere in the 8950 to 9050 range is more realistic (still one of the top 10 results of all time).

I am not sure how I feel about kids in their early teens fighting for medals. There is a reason why an age limit of 14 was introduced for diving (and even that is on the low side to me). On the one hand, you are talking about not yet fully developed bodies, on the other hand about (potential) exploitation of kids.

Do you mean the Commodore 64 Epyx games? I remember them having something like a 2/3 "work-rate". AFAIR alpine skiing and figure skating sucked. Do the Track & Field games by Konami (or similar games like Daley Thompson's Decathlon) count? Those also had a pretty good success rate (if you ignore the number of broken joysticks you inevitably had).

What I don't like is that instead of having separate contests for all three pretty different disciplines (speed, bouldering and lead) that are all quite different regarding necessary skills, only the combined event is done (somewhat like only doing decathlon/heptathlon instead of 100 m/200 m, long jump, javelin ...). At least in Paris in 3 years, they will split it into a separate event for speed and a combined event for bouldering and lead.

A big problem handball has vs some other team sports like football, is, that "casual" play (with kids running around unorganized) usually is not much fun. Back in school, we played it from time to time and when I was in a class that had a couple of people who also played in a handball club, it was pretty fun, when it was just a bunch of clueless kids running around, it was definitely not. Volleyball also falls into that category. On the other side, I also remember field hockey being pretty easy to have a nice game with. Basketball fell somewhere in between.

Regarding 3x3 basketball, I somehow would have expected the US to sweep the floor with the rest of the competition, however, they did not even qualify. Any specific reason for that? I mean I have seen them play in the qualifying tournament and they did not get knocked out due to bad luck or whatever but because they were not good enough, but what is the reason for that? Are the "good" players not interested in these tournaments?

The highlight today (yesterday?) to me was the bronze run of Russian (well, ROC) Judoka Madina Taimazova. She went 15 minutes in the round of 16 (where she got her right eye fucked up), close to 17 minutes in the semifinals (where in the end she got choked out cold) and still came back and hour and a half later and won her bronze medal match in something like 5.5 minutes.

Mexico had one of the highest excess mortality numbers worldwide over the last 18 months. One source I found puts the number between March 2020 and May 2021 at 620.000 people (official COVID-19 death toll for that time frame is about 220.000) or about 4.9 in 1000 people. For the US, that same source lists an excess mortality of about 912.000 people or about 2.8 in 1000 people. Other more heavy effected countries fall in the same ballpark as the US (2.9/1000 for Brazil, 2.6/1000 for Spain and 3.0/1000 for Italy).