Category: Olympics

Ukraine & Russia hug it out

Olympic medal winners Oleksandr Abramenko and Ilia Burov celebrate their success with warm embrace at medal ceremony.

International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach called for political leaders “around the world” to be inspired by the athletes’ “example of solidarity and peace”. …

BBC

IOC must set minimum Olympic age

It’s stupid and inconsistent to have different age requirements for the Olympic sports.

Especially if you can’t enforce Olympic rules for athletes under age-16.

By Paris the minimum age should be 16. Or even age-18.

The Recent Rise of Child Athletes in the Olympic Games

TOKYO, JAPAN – AUGUST 04: Bronze medalist Sky Brown (age 13) of Team Great Britain (right), Gold medalist Sakura Yosozumi of Team Japan (center) and Silver medalist Kokona Hiraki (age 13) of Team Japan (left) pose after the Women’s Skateboarding Park Finals on day twelve of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at Ariake Urban Sports Park on August 04, 2021 in Tokyo, Japan. (Photo by Ian MacNicol/Getty Images)

Ski Jumping Judging Bias

Ski jumping competitions involve subjective evaluations by judges from different countries.

This may lead to nationalistic bias, according to which judges assign higher scores to their compatriots.

To test this claim empirically, we exploit within-performance variation of scores from all World Cup, World Championship, and Olympic Games competitions between the 2010/11 and 2016/17 seasons. (15,000 jumps)

Our findings confirm that judges assign significantly higher scores to their compatriots. The magnitude of this nationalistic bias is significantly higher in more corrupt countries.

We do not find that judges assign significantly different scores to jumpers whose compatriots are present on the judging panel. …

March 2021 – Scandinavian Journal of Economics – Nationalistic Bias among International Experts: Evidence from Professional Ski Jumping

Most biased were the Russian judges. Judges from Finland and Norway showed no bias.

video analysis in Figure Skating

Seems to me Omega is ahead of Fujitsu in technology.

Gerben Wiersma to coach Germany

Valerie Belenki will be MAG head coach and the women’s team now has Gerben Wiersma.

Both have those positions through the 2024 Olympics.

11 Olympic Ice Dancing teams train with Ice Academy of Montreal

Coaches Marie-France Dubreuil and her husband Patrice Lauzon coach all 3 American tandems, Chinese, British, Spaniards, Japanese, Armenians and the No. 2 Canadians. Also the gold medal winning French team of Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron.

Because coaches at the sideboards usually wear nationally branded Games jackets and coats to complement their skaters, Dubreuil has a stack of outerwear that she has rotated through practice sessions and through last week’s team event, where her American ice dancers won silver, and her Japanese bronze. …

Canadian figure skating coaching couple boasts astonishing 11 Olympic ice dance teams

Kamila Valieva – Olympic quads

Amazing. She twists so quickly.

I’m so sorry this historic accomplishment is being overshadowed by why her coach, Eteri Tutberidze, couldn’t prevent Kamila from taking a prohibited substance.

My second question is WHY the IOC doesn’t have a minimum age for all Olympic sports.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

Eileen Gu – living her best life

I’d say Eileen can do ANYTHING she wants.

Gu, 18, was born in San Francisco to an American father and Chinese mother, who raised her as a single mom and taught her to ski at nearby Lake Tahoe. …

… will attend Stanford this fall. She’s also a model with nearly a million Instagram followers and countless endorsement deals.

In 2019, she announced she’d be competing for China. Now, she’s so popular in her mother’s native country that her gold medal win caused Chinese social media platform Weibo to crash. …

Axios – Eileen Gu: A tale of two nations

Click PLAY or watch her Gold medal trick on Twitter.