Week off of armchair sport
Feb. 14th, 2014 02:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
abendgulesI've had this week off work, partly to spend time with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
badgersandjam, partly to hunt for our next place to live.
I didn't set out to take time off during the Olympics, that's just a surprise bonus, or something.
With the hockey burbling in the background, I'm shocked at how dirty the game has grown: sticks everywhere, pucks regularly off the ice, checking left and right. This is both the mens and the womens game. Even I, as a non-player, non-fan, can see naughtiness on the ice, with no apparent penalties.
It's a real shame, because it's a choice to play that way: choice by players, by coaches, by officials, by fans. Robert suggests that 'the money must want it that way', because if they didn't, it wouldn't be that way.
We watched the rugby recently - union, rather than league (which is a bit like choosing CFL over NFL, AFAICT). In rugby, the officials are in charge: you don't talk back to them, they don't tolerate any dirty tricks, and they use video replays to help make their decisions. They are mic'ed, so you can hear every word they say to the players. The least argument gets the player sent off.
That's the way the players train, the coaches work, the officials behave and the fans are happy with it.
There's still aggression, on the fringe of the game; I saw some pushing and shoving between teams after a contested try. But Robert pointed out this was not during the game - the refs are fully in charge of game safety while it's on the clock and don't tolerate any player aggression while the game is in play.
It makes me wonder what it would take to bring hockey back to the ice, rather than the dirty game that's being played.
Watching the skating makes me feel nostalgic for home - watching skating on TV feels like a part of a Canadian winter (as does turning on the TV, finding it's curling, and trying to find something else to watch).
It's charming to see that Canadians are still contenders on ice, and and that Brian Orser is coaching two of the top men. I always thought he was robbed of gold, and I'm not certain that their new scoring system is any better than the old score out of 6.0. Any 'sport' that needs a judge to tell you how you did, to me, isn't sport - it's athletic art.
It doesn't take away from the athleticism or the accomplishment, and I still like watching it - it just doesn't fit the 'higher, faster, stronger' qualification.
I tried to look up the names of the coaches for Canadian athletes, but it's as if they don't exist - they're not listed on the official Sochi 2014 site (which has all the athletes for all countries), and they're not on Skate Canada site and the Canadian Olympic site is a joke of a blog site. Hope they didn't pay a lot of money for the design, because it's appalling.
The British seem a bit embarrassed by the winter Olympics - as if it's not very British to be good at throwing yourself down a snowy hill at top speed, though it's ok to be expert at horse dancing in the summer events. Many people refer to the 'tea tray' event (skeleton and luge); I don't know who coined this term, but it's widespread in England, where I'd never heard it in Canada.
Blessedly, the BBC are doing an awesome job of coverage - they now have the capacity to cover all the events at once online, so if you don't want to watch the stick-fighting on ice, you can watch the flinging-down-the-hill events instead.
The BBC's crew is using a shopping trolley to carry their kit on the main campus, carrying light stands and other bits and pieces...and the trolley now has a following on twitter. It's extremely silly.
badgersandjam, partly to hunt for our next place to live.I didn't set out to take time off during the Olympics, that's just a surprise bonus, or something.
With the hockey burbling in the background, I'm shocked at how dirty the game has grown: sticks everywhere, pucks regularly off the ice, checking left and right. This is both the mens and the womens game. Even I, as a non-player, non-fan, can see naughtiness on the ice, with no apparent penalties.
It's a real shame, because it's a choice to play that way: choice by players, by coaches, by officials, by fans. Robert suggests that 'the money must want it that way', because if they didn't, it wouldn't be that way.
We watched the rugby recently - union, rather than league (which is a bit like choosing CFL over NFL, AFAICT). In rugby, the officials are in charge: you don't talk back to them, they don't tolerate any dirty tricks, and they use video replays to help make their decisions. They are mic'ed, so you can hear every word they say to the players. The least argument gets the player sent off.
That's the way the players train, the coaches work, the officials behave and the fans are happy with it.
There's still aggression, on the fringe of the game; I saw some pushing and shoving between teams after a contested try. But Robert pointed out this was not during the game - the refs are fully in charge of game safety while it's on the clock and don't tolerate any player aggression while the game is in play.
It makes me wonder what it would take to bring hockey back to the ice, rather than the dirty game that's being played.
Watching the skating makes me feel nostalgic for home - watching skating on TV feels like a part of a Canadian winter (as does turning on the TV, finding it's curling, and trying to find something else to watch).
It's charming to see that Canadians are still contenders on ice, and and that Brian Orser is coaching two of the top men. I always thought he was robbed of gold, and I'm not certain that their new scoring system is any better than the old score out of 6.0. Any 'sport' that needs a judge to tell you how you did, to me, isn't sport - it's athletic art.
It doesn't take away from the athleticism or the accomplishment, and I still like watching it - it just doesn't fit the 'higher, faster, stronger' qualification.
I tried to look up the names of the coaches for Canadian athletes, but it's as if they don't exist - they're not listed on the official Sochi 2014 site (which has all the athletes for all countries), and they're not on Skate Canada site and the Canadian Olympic site is a joke of a blog site. Hope they didn't pay a lot of money for the design, because it's appalling.
The British seem a bit embarrassed by the winter Olympics - as if it's not very British to be good at throwing yourself down a snowy hill at top speed, though it's ok to be expert at horse dancing in the summer events. Many people refer to the 'tea tray' event (skeleton and luge); I don't know who coined this term, but it's widespread in England, where I'd never heard it in Canada.
Blessedly, the BBC are doing an awesome job of coverage - they now have the capacity to cover all the events at once online, so if you don't want to watch the stick-fighting on ice, you can watch the flinging-down-the-hill events instead.
The BBC's crew is using a shopping trolley to carry their kit on the main campus, carrying light stands and other bits and pieces...and the trolley now has a following on twitter. It's extremely silly.
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Date: 2014-02-14 02:33 pm (UTC)