Table tennis always seems like one of those sports the average out-of-shape guy could play. Until you watch them play. They may not be triathletes, but you’ll see more fat baseball players than fat table tennis Olympians.
For tennis, we’ll once again rely a good bit on Wimbledon results. Basically, we’re not betting against Serena right now, and neither should you.
Away we go …
Should we worry that the home page for the 2011 World Championships at 2011taekwondo.org has been replaced by a 400-word piece of prose? It starts with this: “The happiness is simple that they did not guess, who it such. And they have demanded, that it has collected installation. And it has made it. But he knew that first of all will code him.” What is this, an online numbers station?
This sport has its idiosyncrasies. Let’s leave it at that.
In any case, the last picks were done after the World Championships. Then the WTF released an Olympic ranking. If you follow that link, the PDF you really want is the “draw sheet,” which lists the top eight seeds. The rankings are a bit more, um, detailed. And remember that we only have eight Olympic weight classes, and each country can only enter four. So a lot of what we’re doing here is checking to see which of our 2011 favorites actually wound up going to London.
Strap on your chest protector, head gear and electronic sensors. Away we go.
One of the few good ideas on this blog last year was to hold off on the original swimming projections until after the World Championships. Swimmers peaked for that, and they’ll obviously peak for the Olympics. So don’t expect many changes in this.
Thankfully, somewhere in FINA’s truly horrid site, they have lists of the swimmers who qualified for each event along with their entry times, so we can do a reality check on who’s in what event and who’s really capable of going really fast.
Dive on in …
At last, we’re getting to the sports in which the original picks were done after the most recent World Championships. So we might not change very much, but we’ll peek at the world rankings and then make sure the shooters in question are actually going to London.
Ready … aim ….
Did you know that the world sailing federation shares its initials with NATO’s International Security Assistance Force?
The unarmed version of the ISAF has a good list of qualified sailors, and you can look back at the World Championships, held late last year in Perth, that qualified most of those sailors after the original picks were made. They also have rankings. And sailing also has separate world championships for each class. (When we say “Worlds” in these picks, we mean the big “Worlds” in Perth. We’ll mention the class championships separately; e.g., “49er Worlds.” We’re putting more stock in the big “Worlds” because they were the primary Olympic qualifier, so there were really no excuses.)
Into the ocean we go …
Oh my, I love this: Official Olympic rowing preview. Bless you.
The previous picks were done before last year’s World Championships, so we’ll have some revisions.
So turn backwards in your seat. Away we go …
Holding a world championship in an Olympic year always seems a little redundant. And we really don’t know if we can peg someone a favorite for being in peak form in the Big Show a couple of months before the Really Big Show.
That’s the case in modern pentathlon, but in addition to the 2012 Worlds, we also have world rankings to consider, as well as the 2011 Worlds, which were moved from Cairo to Moscow last year.
Triathlon just keeps going and going, with athletes picking up ranking points. They tell us not only who has the most points but who only needed a couple of races to get them. The federation is also kind enough to give us updated start lists.
Check the previous picks for both sports. And away we go …
Quick aside to MMA fans: We’re probably not looking for the next Ronda Rousey here. Not many people are that good at landing the armbar and marketing themselves. But maybe the next Rick Hawn? Dude’s doing pretty well in Bellator.
In any case, the USA has someone who can do even better than Rousey in Olympic judo — Kayla Harrison, the 2010 world champion.
Check out the previous picks and some rankings — the Olympic qualification rankings and the overlapping current world rankings, which will tell you the World Championship results in very small type. Or you could just check the World Championship results in a separate window.
Now see if you can figure out who actually made the teams. Countries with more than one qualifier had to pick one somehow. In the process of trying to figure it out, I stumbled into a great not-quite-safe-for-work Uncyclopedia entry that explains the brutality of judo: “You are never unarmed when you can hit someone with a planet.” You could also check the European Judo Federation, where you’ll see headlines like “Europe example of good refereeing.”
But finally — we’re rescued! The International Judo Federation tells us who’s in!
Off we go, and remember that they award two bronze medals in each weight class.
To do truly accurate gymnastics projections, we’d probably need spies in small gyms in China, Romania, Russia and elsewhere. We can’t do that, so we’ll just go with the 2011 World Championships and whatever we had from the previous list.
In women’s gymnastics, that means we’ll have near-total turnover. Few gymnasts last multiple Olympic cycles, and this time, we’ve seen world champions from 2-3 years ago fall far back. The USA had several gymnasts attempt comebacks, but the young guns are just too good.
Men’s gymnasts have a bit more longevity, so we have more competitions from which to choose. We’re a little more confident about those picks. Maybe.
(Update: I’m going to plug this informative gymnastics blog that is tracking each country’s participants through all the nagging injuries and team selection dramas.)
On to the rings, bars, ribbons, trampolines and horses (not the equestrian kind) …
The original post makes the requisite Inigo Montoya reference. Unfortunately, it also got some of the events wrong. They change up the team events from time to time. We’ll have a few corrections to make.
The federation has a handy list of qualifiers. See how they do that, other federations?
Here we go …
Duresport.com 