– Both U.S. teams won their first matches at the 2014 Chess Olympiad, then faltered today against high seeds. The U.S. open team lost 2.5-1.5 to the Netherlands, while the U.S. women lost 3-1 to China. Only eight rounds to go.
– The U.S. women’s volleyball team had a disappointing 1-2 start in the monthlong World Grand Prix, righting the ship against Japan.
Seriously. It’s a slow week. Thank goodness two UFC fighters decided to throw down … at the press conference. That’s actually kind of rare for the UFC.
And no surprise, it’s from the 2002 Olympics. It’s the Utah Olympic Oval:
Several members noted the oval was the centerpiece of a recreational gathering place for Kearns residents, quite worthy of the investment.
“The oval is the heart and soul of our community,” agreed Eric Hutchings, a Republican legislator from Kearns and an Olympic Legacy Foundation trustee.
“This facility and the park that surrounds it mean everything to us. We hold our Kearns Hometown Days events there, our “Night Out Against Crime” events. Our big community meetings are in the World Record Lounge,” he added, referring to a meeting room whose name recognizes the oval’s reputation for having the fastest ice in the world. Seven of speedskating’s 11 existing world records were set in Kearns.
Not that we could ever condone cheating, but wouldn’t it be nice to think that if we’re going to bend the rules to get a celebrity into the Olympics, we did it for a violinist? Culture still exists!
Slovenia Ski Association director Yuri Zurej describes some of the problems:
When we checked the competition and all the data, we discovered that, on the results list on the second day of the competition, in fourth place there was a girl not even physically present at the course. Another example was of a girl who told us she fell in the race and then slowly continued to the finish line, but was recorded as finishing in second place.
The good news: There’s no evidence that the violinist in question, Vanessa-Mae, had any idea.
Sure, that money didn’t include all the infrastructure costs, government operational costs or cash that just disappeared into the mountains somewhere, but at least there’s something to show for it.
So what do you say, Oslo? Imagine how much money you can make with most of the infrastructure already in place!
That would be triathlete Gwen Jorgensen. She won again in the World Triathlon Series, this time on the Olympic course in London. And she’s leading the series.
Fellow American Sarah Groff was second.
BEST CHANNELING OF PREFONTAINE
Galen Rupp just keeps getting better. Friday at the Prefontaine Classic, he took down the U.S. record at 10,000 meters. The time: 26:44.36. Oregon fans appreciated it.
BEST RACE
Grenada’s Kirani James ran a world-leading 43.97 in the men’s 400, tied for 10th-best of all time. In second place, LaShawn Merritt … in a world-leading 43.97, tied for 10th-best of all time.
BIGGEST SURPRISE
Tori Bowie transformed from relatively unknown long jumper to the fastest 200-meter runner in the world this year in precisely 22.18 seconds.
ALSO AT THE PREFONTAINE
– Shot put (men): Reese Hoffa won with throw of 21.64 meters, with Joe Kovacs and Christian Cantwell also over 21.
– Triple jump (men): Will Claye needed a meet-record 17.66 to beat Christian Taylor (17.42).
– 2-mile run (women): It’s not run often, but it’s still impressive to see two area records set in a meet by the people who finished third and fourth. The latter, the American record, goes to Shannon Rowbury. (DUKE!)
– 100 meters (men): Justin Gatlin won in 9.76 seconds. The wind will keep it out of the top-10 lists. Michael Rodgers crossed in 9.80 seconds.
– Mile (men): Djibouti’s Ayanleh Souleiman ran the fastest time in the world this year. And in Prefontaine history. And Diamond League history. And Djibouti history. That’s 3:47.32, edging Kenya’s Silas Kiplagat.
Let’s say you’re getting married by the beach, and all of a sudden, Serena Williams walks by. And just think, if she were still playing in France, this would’ve been impossible.
Kerri Walsh Jennings won her 67th AVP event, breaking the record she shared with longtime partner Misty May-Treanor. Earlier this year, she set the record for FIVB wins.
BIGGEST UPSET
Field hockey World Cup: USA 2, England 1. A couple of highlight-reel saves from U.S. goalie Jackie Kintzer in this one:
BEST COUNTRY FOR CYCLING PRODIGIES
Colombian Rigoberto Urán joins Quintana on the podium (2nd). This is only the 2nd Grand Tour in which 2 Colombians finish in top-3 #Giro
– Team USA Sports Scene: Sam Mikulak leads the U.S. gymnastics men, U.S. men beat Brazil in water polo.
– Ollie Williams’ Frontier Sports: 2022 and 2024 bidding update, U.S. engineering archer, plenty of cycling news, good story on once-homeless English soccer player Fara Williams, the other view of the USA’s shocking field hockey win, lots or rowing.
The IOC is bringing all its top people to Norway, and Alan Abrahamson quite rightly sees it as a sales pitch in a desperate bid to avoid hosting the 2022 Olympics in Almaty or Beijing.
The imperative – at least for now – is that the IOC would seem to need Oslo for the 2022 race more than Oslo needs the Winter Games. That is the box. And everyone in Olympic circles knows it.
As we bid farewell to winter sports for the year, some athletes are wrapping club seasons all over the place.
People who read this blog probably know all about soccer and maybe basketball. But how about volleyball? Dozens of U.S. athletes are overseas — many of them making money that soccer players are not.
An NYT story on overseas volleyball introduced me to a neat site helping athletes share information and support. Athletes Abroad is a nice simple WordPress site that lets athletes connect and share stories, with other athletes and with fans. And yes, they’ve already spoken with the ubiquitous Yael Averbuch.
Best and worst from the week, mostly overseas …
Best recent success for a new rugby player: Kelly Whiteside catches up with bobsled medalist Elana Meyers as she tries her feet at rugby. A lot of running is involved.
Sharpest commentary: Snowboarder Gretchen Bleiler calls out Sochi for its environmental impact, particularly on birds, salmon, trout and bears.
Best speedskater: The Netherlands’ Ireen Wüst confirms it yet again, winning three of the four distances at the World Allround Championships. (Yes, she won the overall title.)
Best moguls skier: Hannah Kearney, for the fourth straight season, this time in dramatic fashion.
Biggest surprise: Switzerland beat Canada to win the women’s curling world title in a match that swung wildly in the eighth end, when Rachel Homan seemed to have hit a brilliant shot but watched her shooter spin away from the center back toward the front of the house. Switzerland’s Binia Feltscher converted her shot for three, then stole three when Homan missed a difficult shot in the ninth.
We should probably dispense with the idea that Vladimir Putin timed the mess in Ukraine to occur after everyone left Sochi. Another wave is coming in right now for the Paralympics.
And while we in the USA don’t pay quite as much attention to the Paralympics as other countries do — though, in contrast to the Olympics, NBC’s networks will air the opening ceremony live and offer much more live action in the early morning hours — this is a large event that will be taking place under a large shadow.
As difficult as it may be to separate the geopolitics from the inspiring stories of athletes overcoming great challenges, we’ll have no shortage of the latter.
Basically, I’m comparing three different types of results:
1. Majors: How skiers fared in the last Olympics and the last two World Championships. The number in “Majors” is a median — it ignores any null results, and the 2013 World Championships are counted twice so that they’ll be weighted more heavily.
2. Cup: Median of the last four World Cup seasons, with the last two counted twice so they’ll be weighted more heavily.
3. 13-14: The 2013 and 14 World Cups and the 2013 World Championships. A simple median this time, with no extra weighting.
Then for each skier, I calculated the difference between those numbers and his Olympic finish. Then I took the top 10 from the Olympics and calculated the absolute value of each difference. (In other words — I just want to know how far away from reality it was, so finishing four places higher than projected would be the same as finishing four places lower.)
So at bottom right, I took the median of each of the groups of differences. And that gave me a way of comparing which group of numbers was better for projecting medal results.
For the downhill, the 2013-14 numbers were better than the World Cup results, but the Cup results were much better than the majors. For the super-G, the majors were better, but I think that’s skewed by what I will refer to by a name I hope will catch on in statistics — the Weibrecht factor. That’s Andrew Weibrecht, who took bronze in 2010 and did little else in the intervening years before taking silver in 2014.
This is really too much to do for every event, but I think this exercise has pointed me toward a points system I’ll use for predictions going forward. I may do a few more winter events to refine the points system — it’ll have to be adapted for sports that don’t do World Cups and World Championships on the typical winter sports schedule, anyway.
But the next step, starting in a month or so — 2016. And we’re going to have easy-to-read charts of each athletes’ past performances, all leading to a predictive index.
In 2009, a handful of women’s ski jumpers took their frustrations to court, attempting to sue their way into the 2010 Olympics. They found some sympathy from the court, but the legal case was always a long shot:
(The court) didn’t rule in favor of the plaintiffs because the Olympic program is set by the IOC. With that in mind, Canadian law against discrimination can’t apply because VANOC can’t stage an Olympic ski jumping event without the IOC.
In theory, the court could find in favor of the plaintiffs and force VANOC to give up on ski jumping altogether, cancelling the event or moving it to another country. No one expects that to happen. The idea of the suit, Corradini says, is to force the IOC to add the women’s event to save the men’s event.
Though they incurred the wrath of condescending Canadian IOC-crat Dick Pound, women’s ski jumpers finally made it to the Olympics in Sochi. Then a few days after the Olympics ended, I did a massive purge of filing cabinets (long story) and came up with a folder that included the complaint in question — Sagen v. Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
So what happened to the plaintiffs in the suit? How many made it down the ramp in Sochi? Here’s a look:
– Anette Sagen (Norway; misspelled as “Annette” on the complaint): Dominant in the mid-2000s, Sagen was injured in 2012 and didn’t get back in form to make the Norwegian team. She went to Sochi as a guest of the Norwegian federation.
– Daniela Iraschko (Austria): Now Daniela Iraschko-Stolz, the 2011 world champion won the silver medal in Sochi.
– Lindsey Van (USA): The 2009 world champion hasn’t been in great form lately but finished a solid 15th.
– Jessica Jerome (USA): One of the leaders in movement to get ski jumping in the Games finished 10th.
– Ulricke Grassler (Germany): The runner-up to Van in the 2009 World Championships recovered from an emergency appendectomy in August to compete on the World Cup circuit and in the Olympics.
– Monika Planinc (Slovenia): Retired in 2009.
– Marie-Pierre Morin (Canada): No results in FIS database.
– Karla Keck (USA): Last competed in 2006.
– Nathalie De Leeuw (Canada): Last competed in 2009 World Championships.
– Katherine Willis (Canada): Retired in 2009.
– Jade Edwards (Canada): Not active; no results in FIS database.
– Zoya Lynch (Canada): Last competed in 2008 Continental Cup.
– Charlotte Mitchell (Canada): Still only 19; competed in 2014 World Junior Championships.
– Meaghan Reid (Canada): No results in FIS database.
Duresport.com 