Tired of the "Are you watching the Olympics?" "Did you see Phelps or Lidecki?" queries,

[Brainfade]

The next time someone asks me "Are you watching the Olympics?" "Did you see Phelps or Lidecki?", I am going to respond with "Are you watching India kick some Caribbean butt?  "Did you watch Bhuvneshwar Kumar swing the ball like a pendulum?"  or "Did you watch Ajinkya Rahane effortlessly caress that leather sphere through the cover fence through 2 ft tall wet grass?"  You didn't, did you?  I did.

 

It seems to have become a fashion statement, status symbol if you will, to follow the Olympics.  I get it.  Michael Phelps has the wingspan of an Airbus A 380 and has won 28 golds or whatever.  But if you made a sport where you win a gold medal for doing the same thing 16 different ways, AB Devilliers would also win 28 gold medals over 16 years.  Bat left-handed.  Bat right-handed. On a grassy pitch.  On a patta pitch.  Against a fast bowler.  A swing bowler.  An off spinner, leg spinner and a left arm spinner.   From the pavilion end.  From the Garware end.  And every combination thereof.  

 

Don't get me wrong.  It is admirable, what these athletes do.  So is what Ashwin, Rahane and Kohli do.  And leave me the heck alone to watch them and F off to your zika-infested piece of garbage land with algal bloom filled waters.  Just call me when the 100m sprint final is on. I will give up 9 seconds of my life just to humor you. 

 

 

[coffee_rules]

Si, I get that you don't like watching olympics! 

[jonas10]

Butt hurt Indians getting excited about how many medals they could win in cricket until Australia would bring them back to earth.

[Adi_91]

Sorry, but Olympics is the pinnacle of sport, not cricket. And to deflect attention from the poor performance at Rio, we can't change the topic to Cricket.

 

I would rather want India to win 10 medals, than see the cricket team kicking a horrible WI side. 

[Mariyam]

I'm with the OP on this one. The Olympics have no placed in the modern world. A meaningless relic of the antiquity that has been shamelessly promulgated by the evil West, just so that they can highlighted their achievements in these games as some kind of a yardstick to measure their 'success' at a societal level (or the 'success' of other nations who follow the ways of the West).

 

In 400BC it matter who could run the fastest, lift the heaviest weights, or scream the loudest. Now we have cars, pulleys and Lady Gaga respectively to do all of that. What excellence are we even trying to measure?

 

Conveniently, all games that we are good at aren't considered. Kabaddi, Khokho, teen patti, hopscotch etc. Yeah, but Basketball is an Olympic sport.

 

 

[Tibarn]

48 minutes ago, Mariyam said:

I'm with the OP on this one. The Olympics have no placed in the modern world. A meaningless relic of the antiquity that has been shamelessly promulgated by the evil West, just so that they can highlighted their achievements in these games as some kind of a yardstick to measure their 'success' at a societal level (or the 'success' of other nations who follow the ways of the West).

 

In 400BC it matter who could run the fastest, lift the heaviest weights, or scream the loudest. Now we have cars, pulleys and Lady Gaga respectively to do all of that. What excellence are we even trying to measure?

 

Conveniently, all games that we are good at aren't considered. Kabaddi, Khokho, teen patti, hopscotch etc. Yeah, but Basketball is an Olympic sport.

 

 

Just pointing out a fun fact, Basketball is the 3rd most popular team sport in the world. Behind football and cricket. Some 300 million Chinese alone play basketball.

[maniac]

I thought the OP's complaint was more to do with the NBC coverage of telecasting boring swimming contests,Women's soccer(didn't end well for US  ) and boring poor quality Basketball games and worse "They put Golf in the olympics"

 

instead of

 

Track and Field action,Wrestling(not the WWE kind) boxing badminton ,Field hockey etc

 

[G_B_]

Did u watch Phelps?

Sent from my Wileyfox Swift using Tapatalk

[Mariyam]

On 15/8/2016 at 7:40 PM, Tibarn said:

Just pointing out a fun fact, Basketball is the 3rd most popular team sport in the world. Behind football and cricket. Some 300 million Chinese alone play basketball.

300 million Chinese play basketball? That is a rather large number. Seems like a spurious claim on the part of the Chinese.

In the 2010 games, the Chinese had introduced some board games called Xiangqi which they claimed had some 100 million + players (all Chinese, of course).

 

I suspect that the Chinese are yet to master the art of using Decimal numbers, and are inadvertently shifting the decimal a few places to the right while reporting these figures to the IOC.

 

I'm sure 100s of millions of Indians have played gilli danda, aankhmicholi, teen patti, kabbadi and snakes and ladders at some point of time in their life. I don't think that should qualify a sport as an Olympic discipline. Else Equestrian or Golf would never cut the grade.

 

 

Edited August 16, 2016 by Mariyam
Mistook Go for Xiangqi

[Tibarn]

8 hours ago, Mariyam said:

300 million Chinese play basketball? That is a rather large number. Seems like a spurious claim on the part of the Chinese.

In the 2010 games, the Chinese had introduced some board games called Xiangqi which they claimed had some 100 million + players (all Chinese, of course).

    That number 300 million comes from the NBA(http://www.forbes.com/sites/darrenheitner/2015/03/25/nba-commits-to-further-growth-in-china-schedules-two-games-in-october/#652603234e44), or National Basketball Association. This is an American basketball league similar to the EPL in football or the IPL in T20. However, the NBA is considered the premier basketball tournament in the world, the Olympics and FIBA World Championship are secondary and tertiary as basically all the best basketball players are American.  The NBA is a private business, not government run, so their numbers are no doubt accurate.

    I threw in the 300 million number only to demonstrate how many people play it globally. China, in basketball, is the equivalent of a Zimbabwe or Bangladesh in cricket. There are numerous countries that send players to play in the NBA, such as: Germany, UK, France, Canada, Australia, Russia, New Zealand, Spain, Italy, Argentina, Brazil, Ghana, and more. Even we had our first player drafted into the NBA recently. All this is only to illustrate the fact that basketball is the third most played team sport in the world, and deserves a place in the Olympics, even though the Americans are head, shoulders, and feet above all the rest.    

 

8 hours ago, Mariyam said:

I suspect that the Chinese are yet to master the art of using Decimal numbers, and are inadvertently shifting the decimal a few places to the right while reporting these figures to the IOC.

    This part is funny, as it reminds me of the term Shanghai Statistics which refers to how economists cast a skeptical gaze on how China's national GDP targets are always met to the the decimal point. It does call in to question economic data sourced from the Chinese government. However, as I mentioned, the data comes from the American business. Even looking at the 300 million number, it comes to less than 25% of China's population plays basketball at some level. I would wager that we would likely find a higher, or at worst similar, percentage of Indians play cricket in some form. As the most populous country in the world, any activity, even at a small percentage, taken up by the Chinese would drastically increase the global number of participants in that said activity.  

8 hours ago, Mariyam said:

I'm sure 100s of millions of Indians have played gilli danda, aankhmicholi, teen patti, kabbadi and snakes and ladders at some point of time in their life. I don't think that should qualify a sport as an Olympic discipline. Else Equestrian or Golf would never cut the grade.

    I agree with you that lots of people play these games, but, aside from Kabbadi, most of those would exclusively be played in India. As these are Indian sports, the onus is on India to organize proper competition, spread these games, and push for them to be in the Olympics. Whether the IOC would accept these games into the Olympics is another question, but, if the preeminent guardian of these sports doesn't push them, then why would the world care? Field hockey is the fourth most popular sport in the world, and India hasn't even provided her athletes proper AstroTurf grounds to come level with the Europeans in this regard. In terms of cricket, the IOC is hungry to include it in the games, and the ECB is for it as well. The ball is in the BCCI's court. If the BCCI is willing, as thereby the ICC, T20 would be included in either the 2020 or 2024 games. 

    This last point isn't specific to you Mariyam, but the general ambiance of this thread. If anyone doesn't like the Olympics, it's fine, nobody is forcing anyone to watch it. It happens once in four years, so just tolerate those people excited with this stuff. I don't really follow it at all. However, the idea that the Olympics is obsolete is ridiculous. Most of the primordial sports are included in the Olympics. These sports have existed since time immemorial, such as running, and they will exist and remain relevant globally .   

   Even from an exclusively Indian perspective, we have hundreds, and sometimes thousands of years of history with many of these sports. Many of these sports are tied to the Indian ethos. Rama was an archer, Hanuman a pehlwan, Krishna played field hockey. Sports such as Musti Yuddha(boxing), Malla Yuddha(wrestling), martial arts, kick boxing, have deep, historic connections with India. The Chinese have much less sporting history, and were in a similar position as us, but, instead of adopting a defeatist attitude of putting down the Olympics, they saw an area to improve. The borderline retarded and legendarily incompetent governments we've had since the dawn of "azaadi", were failures in reviving Indian sporting traditions, but that doesn't mean we give up and discard part of our history. That is like if someone broke their arm and instead of having it mended, they amputate it. 

 

Edited August 17, 2016 by Tibarn