SO much action, and SO many unexpected things happened today at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Buckle up because we’ve got 30 sports on today’s program.
In this episode we talk:
- 3×3 Basketball
- Artistic Gymnastics – both the men’s and women’s team competition
- Softball
- Boxing
- Canoe Slalom and our TKFLASTANI Luuka Jones
- Cycling – Mountain Bike
- Diving – 10m Synchro Platform, men and women
- Equestrian – Dressage
- Fencing
- Handball
- Judo
- Rugby
- Sailing and our TKFLASTANIS Stephanie Roble and Maggie Shea
- Shooting
- Surfing
- Swimming – Can Jill intimidate Alison?
- Table Tennis
- Taekwondo
- Tennis
- Triathlon
- Weightlifting
Plus, our “Where’s Marnie [McBean]?” feature and the return of Jill’s “What officiating and/or volunteer job would I like?” segment!
Join in the fun – viewing guide, fantasy league, brackets and more at https://flamealivepod.com/tokyo
Text us/Leave us a VM! 208-FLAME-IT (208) 352-6348.
Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, keep the flame alive!
TRANSCRIPT
Note: This is an uncorrected machine-generated transcript. It contains errors. Please do not quote from the transcript; use the audio file as the record of note. If you would like to see transcripts that are more accurate, please support the show.
Jill: [00:00:00] Konnichiwa Olympics, fans, and lovers of shook, Liston, and welcome to keep the flame alive. The podcast for fans of the Olympics and Paralympics. I am your host Jill Jaracz, joined as always by my lovely co-host Alison Brown. Alison, Konichiwa.
Alison: Wow. What a day?
Jill: Oh my goodness. We have so much to talk about. Uh, but before we get to today’s action, we’d like to tell you quickly about our Kickstarter campaign.
We have media accreditations to cover the Winter Olympics in Beijing, which getting those was a huge surprise for us, but that those games are less than 200 days away and they are going to. Cost some money for us to get there and we have a pretty tight budget, so we need some help and support to get, finish out the funding.
So we have a Kickstarter campaign. You can find it at kickstarter.com/profile/a flame alive pod. Help us bring you better coverage for Beijing and unique coverage that you can only get from having an on the ground presence. We have some great support or bonuses like postcards coming to you from Beijing, or, you know, your pet could be our mascot for the week, much more.
Check it out. kickstarter.com/profile/flame of life, pod, and a big thank you to all the supporters who jumped in right away on day. One of our campaign. We’ve gotten off to a great start and we really appreciate your sport. We can’t support. We can’t tell you how much we appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Alison, take a
Alison: breath. It’s been a 24 hours
Jill: on my goodness. Whoa, what a day in order. Okay. Well, fantasy league update. How has our league. She’ll Liston is killing it at the top of the rankings, like a hundred points ahead of second place right now. Uh, Colibri still in second. And, uh, PS Cola climbed above me to now take third, but we’re close.
So I’m gunning for you. I’m pretty sure this is Patrick from green bay. So I’m gunning for you, Patrick. Watch out whether. The tropical storm came through. So that meant that rowing got rescheduled. Archery started late and, um, triathlon course was really, really wet. Uh, sailing was quite windy and surfing was though the wave conditions were so choice.
I would say that they moved the finals up so that they would have bigger waves for the finals. So we got more surfing in today than we thought we would. Alison. Where is Marnie McBean today?
Alison: Okay. Well, Marnie McBean, as far as I, as far as has been posted of where she has been, she has been at swimming, softball, basketball, weightlifting, judo, doing an interview in a supply closet and in the car with her volunteer driver numero.
Jill: Wow. She has gotten her. She was also on zoom because I saw her there doing that was when
Alison: she was in the
Jill: supply closet doing a media call, uh, you know, yesterday was the 25th anniversary of her gold medal at Atlanta, 1996. And she
Alison: did watch the softball finals. Oh,
Jill: nice. Bringing back a feature from our coverage in Pyeongchang 2018.
What officiating job would I like? If you don’t know, I officiate roller Derby. So I, I really love officiating. And I always try to think about, is there another sport I could add to my officiating job? So today I would like to blow the horn on weightlifting and what is they signal the start of the lift and, and weightlifters have 30 seconds to get their lift off.
And then when the lift is. Good or, you know, when they’re in position and they hold it for a couple seconds, they blow the horn again to signal that the weightlifter can drop. And not just because that sounds like a cool job, literally and figuratively, but also they keep going to look at the jury on the sidelines and the jury is wearing their fancy placers.
And all I can think of is their Swedish pockets.
Alison: When we looked at the patterns for their special blazers and they talked about Swedish pockets, which we still have never been able to. Have any seamstress identify for us?
Jill: Yeah. I had talked with a master tailor, had never heard of them, so I think we might have to go to the source.
We we’ve got time before Paris. We’ll figure. So big day on the docket, did you do any catching up from yesterday? I did. So
Alison: I went back and I watched the men’s gymnastics team competition. So I went back and watched the men’s team gymnastics competition. The Russians were amazing and the Japanese were amazing.
And the. Did [00:05:00] better than the score indicated to me.
Jill: Yes, I, I, cause I went back and watched it too, and I saw some really good routines out of the Americans. So that was very good. I mean, the Russians were a step above the Japanese also. Really really solid routines. So congratulations to both of them. And
Alison: then I went back and watched the men’s 10 meter platform, synchro diving.
Jill: I also saw some have got my Cynthia Potter in commentating for NBC. That was
Alison: some gorgeous, gorgeous dive. It’s just each one was getting better and better and better.
Jill: Right. And that one, one of the last dyes from team GB who did end up winning the gold was just so perfectly in line from the side angle.
You couldn’t see the diver on the far side. That’s how inline they were. It was so beautiful.
Alison: Right. So, uh, Tom Daley and Maddie Lee, as we mentioned, and it was very interesting to watch their dynamic because clearly, um, Tom Daley is the more experienced and kind of the big brother of the team, which was fun to watch because he came, when, when he came on the scene, he was what, 14 or 15 years old.
So for him to win this gold medal and GP is just killing it in the pool left and right.
Jill: Exactly all
Alison: kinds of things. The Brits are having a games, man.
Jill: Anything else you caught up on? Not sleep. Um, I did go back and watch the weightlifter. Women’s weightlifting the 55 kilograms. Oh, you need to go back and watch this because Lynn Diaz from the Philippines was so much fun to watch.
After every lift, she was so thrilled and so happy and she just kept getting better and better. And she ended up getting a new Olympic record by seven kilograms. Not an insignificant amount of weight. So that was beautiful to see. I watched the victory ceremony, two things. I noticed that in, in weightlifting on some of the side screens, because they’d have the, the scores and the, the rankings in a screen above the competitors, and then they’d have screens kind of on the sides of the stage.
And every once in a while they chilled the cauldron. Yeah, it just like they had called her and cam on. So just
Alison: to remind you where you are,
Jill: and that was kind of cool. Uh, did watch the metal ceremony that went with that. The IOC member who handed out the metals was from the Philippines per. So that was beautiful.
High-demand was crying before the ceremony even started. She was clapping for the other two winners. It was, it was really beautiful. And at the end, when they were doing all the final pictures and they had their masks on, I know somebody and then they took their masks off. And I noticed down in the.
There’s somebody holding up a sign and it’s it’s reversible. And I could see the reverse side, which said masks on. And so they must have somebody down in the front that just flips it over and says masks off and you take enough pictures and then they flip it back and it says masks on.
Alison: Maybe that should be my.
Jill: There you go. Good volunteers.
Alison: Yeah, I like that job. Good volunteer mask off.
Jill: All right, let’s get into it. Three, a today’s action. Three X, three basketball. I did watch Latvia in Japan. On the men’s side, we are in the quarter finals. So this was a quarterfinal game and it was close and Latvia was ahead in Japan just kept coming back and coming back and you thought maybe they would pull it out, but near the end, uh, this was a game decided on points because Latvia did make it to 21 and they did it on a free-throw.
Alison: Oh,
Jill: uh, the rest of the quarterfinals happened on the way. And so going into the semi-finals for the women, it’s going to be USA versus France and ROC versus China. And on the men’s side will be Serbia versus ROC and Belgium versus Latvia. I’m taken Serbia. All four of those games are going to be insane. I
Alison: am taking Serbia,
Jill: artistic gymnastics.
Wow. What happened? Okay. So
Alison: as of right before we taped, the New York times has published an article saying that Simone Biles withdrew, because she was not in a state of mind to compete. And she feared serious injury given where she was missing.
Jill: Which is completely legitimate because her tricks are so difficult that one little misstep, or even lack of focus, she could break her neck.
Alison: So she did vault and [00:10:00] she pulled out of the vault. She was supposed to complete an car and did not. She took out part of the twist. She sort of balked at midair and I thought she was hurt when I saw it. Right. Because of the way she landed. She didn’t quite land solidly. She landed gingerly
Jill: right. And very low and took a big step.
So that I thought was, oh, did she get hurt? But I can totally see where she’s not in.
Alison: So in a tweet that you sent out and I’m going to paraphrase it, it was I’m under a lot of pressure. We had a bad day and it was not sounding like someones typical. I’m going to come back and we’re going to be stronger and go USA.
So clearly something is going on and. Until Simone shares, what’s going on the very cursory, uh, statement that she’s issued saying she was not in a good place mentally. And she feared for her safety is what we have to, we have to go on clearly rattled the rest of the U S team, nevermind that they lost all those difficulty points and they ended up very unexpectedly losing
Jill: well.
So
Alison: I say losing, cause it’s the first time they’ve lost in an international competition since 2010.
Jill: Right. But they won the silver, they won the phone, they earned the silver too, because they did, you know, because ROC won gold and then great Britain won bronze. Uh, but the U S did make some mistakes. I will, uh, I’ll say right.
RRC had some people falling off beam. Oh, we had some people leaving the floor on floor. They landed out of bounds. Jordan chiles fell down on floor. Um, but so our gymnastics was not totally up to par.
Alison: It almost felt like when Simone pulled out, the entire competition got rattled, like not just the Americans, like it was not great gymnastics,
Jill: no way around.
No. And I wonder if having so much a difficult. And putting the pressure on to have so much difficulty and for Simone, oh, what are you going to come up with next? Because you are the greatest of all time and amazing. And that just adds a layer of pressure to force yourself to do something that’s more dangerous, more and more risky.
And yeah, if, if you’re having a bad day mentally, That makes it all the more tough I will say I had women’s gymnastics on, on my television. I had the four feet, four apparatus feed and on my laptop, I had the feed with commentary and thank goodness, honest to Pete. I do not. I’m not watching prime time tonight.
I did watch prime. Last night for the start of the start of this day, uh, because it just like, oh my Terico and you see scenes of Tokyo and it kind of sets the stage and all of that stuff. And what’s an easy way to catch up on some events. But I do not want to hear what the three commentators have to say, because it has been nonstop.
Camera’s on. And even, I, I guess I saw a tweet during the competition where there were still a tall, these photographers trained on Simone, and that is just an unbelievable amount of pressure. And all you hear about all the time is she’s the goat. She’s the goat. Let’s go check in Simone. What Simone doing?
Oh, she’s looking on her phone. What Simone doing now? Oh, she’s braiding her teammates here. What Simone doing and there’s other competition going on and to put that level of pressure on an athlete, I think it’s. I think it’s kind of irresponsible in a way, because the media does do that and I get how the media wants a story or they have to report on this, but there’s also ways to report on it and there’s gotta be a way to do your job and not make it so hard on an athlete.
But then, um, at the same time, if you take that route, you end up getting a message. You get a very craftily. Uh, you could end up with just messaging and dealing with that instead of trying to build a relationship to get a story. But, you know, you’ve probably got thousands of journalists who are trying to build relationships with Simone and get that story.
Alison: I’m torn because on the one hand, Simone has done it to herself by pushing the sport in this direction, in the same way that Michael Phelps did it to himself. By choosing to compete in eight events. So the athletes themselves need to take responsibility for putting themselves in positions that they can’t handle.
Jill: Hmm. Okay. I will take that point. I think that’s a fair point. You
Alison: know, she keeps do you [00:15:00] know, her gymnastics has always been about more dangerous, riskier, more exciting tricks, not about a beautiful pair of wet on the beach. And I think we are seeing the backwash from that in this competition, because if you watched some of the Chinese gymnastics, they did not have the difficulty and they did not metal, but boy were they gorgeous to watch.
And I hope this is a wake up call. Just like I would like a wake up call and figure skate. With all the quads and the falling down fans love the risk, but we also want to see people do it well, and we certainly don’t want to see somebody having a mental breakdown. No, in the middle of a competition. I mean, how horrific is this for her?
Jill: Oh, it’s yeah, it is. And it’s, it’s gotta be so tough and you can see it on her face where. Feels so much pressure and so much expectations. And I think that yes, having a superstar is good, but I, you know, we’ll see this again in swimming where the focus is on the superstars. And from one point of view, they’re not delivering on another point of view is how much of trying to turn them into us.
I can’t even put my thoughts into words here because. Because there’s focus on these athletes that is so intense to the detriment of both them and the detriment of their teammates in a way, because somebody gets singled out for attention. And the rest of the team has to deal with that.
Alison: And ultimately for the detriment of their sport, because there are so many other things like what we try and focus on, all these other things that are happening in the sport.
Literally Simone Biles face is the face of the NBC coverage.
Jill: So, well, that’s it. I do want to point out if you do want to routine to what. It’s uh,
Alison: can we talk about the ridiculous music for
Jill: just two seconds? I was going to get the, I was going to get to a flat of Slava eras OVAs floor exercise mat music, which was the orchestral version of rolling stones painted black.
There was
Alison: also an, uh, an orchestral version of ed Sheeran’s
Jill: shape of you, right? That’s right. Wasn’t that one of the Chinese gymnast?
Alison: I think so. And then there was a function. Beethoven’s
Jill: fifth. Oh yes. Oak done classics.
Alison: And there was for your enjoyment. A few Eastern European folk
Jill: songs. Well, you know, that just comes with the territory.
I do want to know what Victoria, uh, Alissa Nova from ROC what her choreography was because she did something that looked like the funky chicken and a lot of her routine. And I think she was doing like a 1920s cause I was watching the replay. The nice thing about having the four apparatuses on one feed and the NBC stream on my computer was that the four apparatuses.
30 to 45 seconds behind. So if I caught something out of the corner of my eye and went, what is that? I can go and look at the other feed. And that’s when I realized she was doing kind of a 1920s jitterbug choreography, but it just looked so fun, a place. So artistic gymnastics, really weird day for them.
But there’ll be interesting to see how the whole team comes back from this. And I would be curious to know what’s happening on the coaching side and how the coaches are working with the gymnast’s to get them them back in the game. I mean, but like Sunita Lee had a beautiful bar’s routine, an unbelievable parser
Alison: Jordan trials didn’t know she was going to be competing on, on bars and beam today
Jill: and pulled it out and pulled it out.
All right. Let’s move on to the next weird event for us was softball.
Alison: I am heartbroken and not heartbroken this the best
Jill: way to
Alison: put that. I know the bronze metal game with Canada and Mexico. Great game Canada pulled it out. Interesting little tidbit. Every player on both teams has competed in NCA.
Jill: Oh, that is interesting.
Alison: So NCAA man, get on that because obviously all the U S players have as well. And then the gold medal game comes around and Japan just outplayed the U
Jill: S right. It
Alison: was short ball on offense, singles, bunts sacrifices, you know, a walk here, a walk there and defense so much [00:20:00] amazing infield defense.
Jill: Did you see that Double-Play, that the us had a couple of women on base.
They were, they were getting them rally because they were behind to nothing at this point. And there was, uh, a hit was in the air. It was a line drive bounced off of the third baseman’s glove. I believe the shortstop was backing her up, caught it. And then through to second for the double. Which was just amazing and God gotcha.
Gotcha. Pan out of a very tight spot. And I think that was almost the big momentum shift. I mean, after that, uh, the U S uh, one of the outfielders had an amazing catch that robbed Japan of a home run, which that boosted them up a little bit, but you could really see on the seventh ending the bottom of the seventh, they just did not.
They knew they knew it was over. Yeah. If,
Alison: if you are a fan of short ball, you know, that that real kind of grind it out. Good pitching really solid. Um, in fielding, this was a match made in heaven.
Jill: Yeah, it was, it was, uh, a heartbreaking loss for team USA because they were the only team that was undefeated until the gold medal game.
But. Japan does love softball and their team is phenomenal. So you can’t be so upset with this loss because they really deserved it.
Alison: And what I thought was interesting, and I hadn’t heard this before and the other matches Monica Abbott, one of the USA pitchers has played professional softball in Japan for 11 years.
And two of her teammates are on the Japanese team. Oh,
Jill: wow.
Alison: So there’s. Because now your opponents, but tomorrow you’re going to be teammates again. Right. And there was a really beautiful interaction between the Japanese coach and the American coach. And there, the, somebody was interpreting for them. Oh, nice.
And they were both just kind of hugging and crying. And it was really very, very sweet. And the love of the sport is what I loved about the entire softball. These women just love softball. And so many of the other teams came to the gold medal match. Oh, that’s nice. Canada was there, Mexico. Was there a bunch of the other coaches?
So the stands felt like
Jill: something happening. Nice. Nice. Well, I hope the baseball tournament is as exciting as softball because softball really set the stage for validating why they are in the Olympics.
Alison: Now coaches do not get metals. Correct. So I guess we can’t count Lori Berg as the first shook was on metal.
That is correct. I’m counting
Jill: it in your heart. You can count it in my
Alison: heart team USA where my girl.
Jill: We had some preliminary action in basketball and beach volleyball, boxing, more preliminary rounds for the men’s welterweight and the women’s lightweight. Apparently something was in the news about, in the heavyweight division.
I believe Morocco’s Eunice Bollea who was trailing by points against New Zealand, David NAICA bit his.
Alison: Oh, come on.
Jill: And was disqualified. Have you seen
Alison: what David NAICA looks like?
Jill: No, but I bet he’s big and intimidating.
Alison: I am on, uh, New Zealand teams, uh, Instagram, and he D he’s been doing all that. He is definitely one of these gentle, giant looking guys, but if I saw him in the rain.
I would run the other way. How could you bite that? Guy’s ear? Cause he’s got the, he, you know, he’s one of those guys who obviously he’s huge, but also when he puts on that game face, he’s terrifying. But then he smiles and you’re like, oh, that’s fine. He wouldn’t hurt a puppy, but man biting his, what is that?
Why is that a go-to move? It’s not the first time we’ve
Jill: seen it. Nope. And it’s, it’s desperate. So. There was a disqualification for that. Um, canoe slalom, Luca Jones, our shiftless Donny did make the final. She finished fifth in the semi-finals, but in the final round, she ended up in six. And gold went to Ricardo funk from Germany.
Silver went to the Rio gold medalist, uh, myelin Sharat from Spain and bronze went to Australia, Jessica Fox. I did right before we taped, I, I had been, uh, fast-forwarding through so much, so [00:25:00] much of the competition to see how Luca did I got to say. That course looked so tough. There were there, right at the top, there were three gates where you, they were kind of parallel to each other on the same line and you had to go upstream through one girl cross to the other side of the river, go upstream again, then come back to the first side and go downstream.
And that was really, really challenging. I think for a lot of the paddlers, I don’t think Luca was very happy with her
Alison: finish. She was not happy and that broke my heart. You know, through, I think three out of the eight finalists had, um, penalties at the top of the course because of how hard it was. So I hope she is not beating herself up because that was an amazing, we difficult course.
And she, I wish it wasn’t a podcast. So we can talk about that. The look on her face when she was going, oh man, she is a fierce competitor.
Jill: Well done. I’m very proud of her.
Alison: It should. Plus Don is proud. New Zealand is proud. I mean, I hope she feels the
Jill: love. There you go. Uh, cycling women took to the mountain bike course.
Switzerland swept this whole thing. All the metals went to Switzerland, uh, Yolanda Neff, one gold Sina Frye, one silver and Linda Angerland one bronze.
Alison: They do have mountains
Jill: and diving. Uh, women took to the 10 meter platform for their synchronized competition. Gold went to China of G Zhang. Silver went to the Americans, Jessica Perato and Delaney Schnell and Mexico took bronze with, uh, Gabriela, uh, uh, Gunas Garcia and Alejandra Orosco Alyssa.
I watched this. You did watch this. Okay. How would you.
Alison: Diving there diving was not good. There was a lot of missed dives. Yeah. It was very dull. I shouldn’t say it wasn’t like huge misses. It wasn’t like, oh my God, she got zeros and ones and twos, but it was a lot of that was good. Yeah. A lot of, no, that was nice.
It was. And I don’t know if it’s because there was no spectators. There was no energy to this, but man, where the Mexicans happy at the end.
Jill: Oh, I’m sure. That’s, that’s always nice.
Alison: And they didn’t want it there. I just want to mention one more thing about the Mexicans real quick. Okay. There was one. And I don’t have in my notes who the other, uh, who ended up being fifth, they were waiting for them to dive and they miss the dive and the Mexicans didn’t want to celebrate that somebody else missed a dive.
Um, but they had clearly just secured the bronze. So they’re all sort of like shearing small. It was very, it was very kind. You could see the balance of trying to respect your competitors, but, oh my goodness. We just won an Olympic medal.
Jill: I did tune into a little bit of the dressage Bella road. Th I saw the very tail end.
So I saw the U S writer, uh, Charlotte douche. Daysha Dan from great Britain. And then, uh, Germany’s dressage writer as well. So I don’t know who fell
Alison: over. If you saw the anchor of Germany, you saw Isabelle verse who’s on Bella rose. So yes. Okay, but by the way, did you say you saw the tail end? Um,
Jill: I know why you like that commentary because that’s Dame Judi Dench.
She sounds so much like her, but I agree. She is fantastic about explaining stuff in a, uh, in a way that’s appropriate for. Uh, people who are intelligent about the sport and people just coming into the sport. It’s a very, very good commentating. So props to her, um, it was very pretty to see. I do have a question.
I don’t know if somebody on Twitter answered it because I put it on Twitter, but if, you know, let me know. I don’t know enough about equestrian to know this answer. When a horse sweats do they foam at the mouth because Charlotte doozer Dan’s horse was foaming at the mouth. By the end of the, the test. I think, I think that is.
And I wondered because when you see a horse, horse foaming at the mouth and mouth and froth, like falling on their legs, it’s like, it’s a little unsettling. And then I thought, well, maybe they’re just sweating because when I think of foaming at the mouth, it usually has a dog who has rabies. And I know that may not be the case here.
So no.
Alison: Well, first of all, I don’t think horses can get rabies.
Jill: That’s fine. I don’t care if they can get rabies. I don’t know that either. I don’t know a lot about horses.
Alison: Well, we know that Bella rose came back from a deadly foot injury. [00:30:00] There you go. She has a gold medal. I don’t care about Isabella birth.
I’m all excited that the horse got the map.
Jill: Nice. Oh, okay. Uh, fencing. It was the women’s team. Epee competition. Gold went to Estonia. Silver went to Korea and bronze went to Italy. I did watch handball. I tuned into a good chunk of Brazil versus. Which would be a good one to now going into a, it was on B, Brazil who was really dominant at the Pan-Am games in 2019, uh, be hungry 33 to 27.
And they were dominant. I mean, they had an empty goal at one point and hungry could not capitalize on that. It was just beautiful to watch sharp passing, really intricate gore schooled scored. Fast play. It was, it was a lot of fun. So that is always something to tune into. I know it’s preliminary still, but key pan ball on your radar because it’s a lot of fun to watch.
In judo. Uh, we had the women’s 63 kilogram and men’s 81 kilogram competitions yesterday, uh, for the women’s side, Francis Clarissa, new one gold Slovakia’s uh, Tina Tursen neck one, silver and bronze has went to Canada’s Catherine and Italy’s Maria’s and trust Keogh. Um, on the men side. Gold Japan one. Yes.
So a Technori Nagasay one gold. Mongolia’s Saeed. Malali one silver now. So he’s not Mongolian. He defected to Mongolia from Iran, but then he dedicated his metal to Israel because they have been very supportive of, of him and his efforts. That’s an interesting point. Put a pin in that for one second. The bronzes went to Belgians Mathias, CAS, and Austria’s.
Uh . So the Israeli thing is interesting because remember how, uh, the Algerian 15 Noreen with drew from the. Just in case he had to face in Israeli opponent, he’s been suspended by the international judo Federation, which is a bigger deal than just the Olympics. And then Sudan’s Muhammad of Durazo. UL did not show up to face this Israeli fighter in their round of 32 boat.
On Monday, he waited for the boat then did not show up for the boat. We don’t really quite know why, but there could be another protest. So that makes Molly’s silver dedication. Even more poignant.
Alison: I have no doubt that these athletes from Algeria and Sudan are not totally making their own choices here.
Jill: I mean, maybe not one of the other interesting things that I saw pointed out was that, uh, the Sudanese judoka is ranked 469th in the world.
And why is he even at the Olympics in the first place? That gets into the whole, you know, the IOC really wants global participation. They want it to be a global event, but they also want it to be the pinnacle of sport. And if you have somebody who is ranked a 469th in the world, that is not the pinnacle of sport, that is nowhere near the pinnacle of sport.
I wonder if this could also be a wake-up call to the federations to figure out a better way to get the best people at the tournament.
Alison: Right? Because we talk about regional quotas and you have to have it from these areas and these areas, and it makes sense up to a point.
Jill: Uh, rowing up postpone because of the weather, because they need clear or they need smooth water to be able to row.
And it was really choppy yesterday. Rugby sevens playing in the rain. We are down to the men’s quarterfinals. I know in the
Alison: rain make, made it so much better.
Jill: So in the quarter finals, New Zealand beat Canada, 2110. Great Britain beat the U S 26 to 21, Argentina beat South Africa, 1914 and Fiji beat Australia 19 to zero. So that puts our Fijians in. Excellent. I would say
Alison: I never expected to be cheering for the Fujian rugby team. And then Ben, Ryan came into my life and what can I do?
You
Jill: can’t do you, can’t not cheer for them. And they’re playing really well. I think there have been times where you just go, what’s going on here, man. But, uh, they pull out, they’ve been able to pull things out. So that is really good. Uh, over at the sailing venue. There were several types of races, but important to us is the 4 49.
Our FX for the [00:35:00] women, uh, Stephanie Roble and Maggie Shay are racing. They had three races yesterday. They finished, uh, third place in race, won second place in race, two and 14th place in race three. So. After three races, they’re in second place overall and they have several more races to go. And the commentator said that they’re allowed to drop their worst score so that 14th place may drop.
Hopefully they’ll keep up there. Uh, I have to say the racing, the sailing commentator also very good at his job. He was really good at explaining. Little details to look for. I really learned, I knew what I was looking at and he would say why they put out the Spinnaker, why they put it back in, they would say somebody has priority.
Um, they had really strong winds that day and he was really good at explaining how fast boats were going to that. I really appreciated. Uh, he did say at one point, uh, somebody told me once that watching sailing is like watching grass grow. I beg to differ. It was, it was fun to watch. Uh, I will go back and watch, I think the coverage now that we have drone technology.
The coverage of sailing is much better. Cause I, I believe, I bet it used to be all helicopter and they couldn’t get super we’re close in, but now they have onboard cameras with some teams. They have, um, uh, drones that get in pretty close and they have good technology. To let you know where people are at in the race, and you can see they’ll go, they’ll switch to another screen.
That’s a digital interpretation of what’s happening in the water so that you can better see where different boats are in the race. So I would say given. Shooting the, uh, there was the, a lot of mixed team competition yesterday in the air pistol and air rifle. So air pistol gold went to China. Silver went to ROC and bronze went to Ukraine and the 10 meter air rifle mixed team gold went to China.
Again, silver went to the USA and bronze went to ROC surfing. So Monday night, the. Committee, the organizing committee made the decision to cram quarter-final semi-finals and finals all on the same day because the storm was coming in and it made really good waves for the surfing competition. They were like, we’ve got good waves.
Let’s use them. So everyone’s like, all right, we’re in. Um, I will say Ben did ask me, why are you watching so much surfing? I, you, you don’t know what’s going on. I’m like, I keep trying, I really keep trying. And I had no
Alison: idea what was going on.
Jill: See, they, they are doing a horrible job of explaining what’s going on.
You really have to know it more about the sport.
Alison: And I also think, you know, they’ve improved. What you were talking about with sailing was the drones and, and some of the technology is improving. Being able to watch it. I thought this was a terrible sport for television, the way it was being.
Jill: Yeah, it’s not, I wouldn’t before the games, when I was trying to watch surfing.
And this is months ago, I tried to watch some surfing competitions on TV and was not understanding it then either. And I kind of got what they were talking about priority in terms of choosing waves. And I got that he is 30 minutes long and you try to do as many trick or get on as many ways as you could.
But part of the strategy was wave chore. And not just wave choice for you, but if you had priority, making sure others didn’t have access to waves, which I thought was a really interesting strategy, but then. Once you add the tricks in, I don’t know. I don’t know. What’s more difficult than another trick. I don’t know how they’re scoring tricks.
I just don’t understand.
Alison: And it’s not that I don’t recognize the athleticism or the difficulty of what they’re doing. I can tell that this is hard. I mean, I know if I tried to get on a surfboard, I would drown clearly what they’re doing is very difficult, but they’re not presenting it in a way. That makes us want to fight to keep this in the games.
No,
Jill: and, and I get that there are plenty of people who want to keep this in the games and think it’s it. It still looks pretty cool, but I still don’t understand it. So next time, please do a better job with how you present the sport. You’ve got three years to work on. Make it more understandable. There are a lot of people out there who do not have surfing knowledge and it’s your job to educate us.
Uh, but on that’s it on that note goal on the women’s side, gold went to Carissa Moore from the U S who is also a native of Hawaii. We’re surfing was born. So that’s really nice to be able to take the gold back home to the home of [00:40:00] surfing, uh, south Africa’s Bianca boudin. Doug won silver and Japan’s a Moro Suzuki one bronze on the men side.
Gold went to Brazil, Italia, Ferrera, Japan, uh, Canoa Igarashi won the silver and Owen right from Australia, won the bronze so that that’s surfing’s debut at the Olympics. I don’t know. I don’t
Alison: know. We’re
Jill: confused. Let’s go over to a different pool, the swimming pool, which we do understand. Right. And
Alison: wow.
Once again, what a night in the pool. And I say this, every Olympics, I am always amazed how every night in the pool is just one thing after another. Excitement even without the huge
Jill: crowds. Yeah. It’s, it’s really interesting. Uh, let’s just go down the list of finals, starting with the men’s 200 meter freestyle, uh, gold and silver team.
GB gold went to Tom Dean silver went to Duncan. Scott, Tom Dean had COVID twice. Oh, throughout the pandemic, pulled up a beautiful win. And then bronze went to Fernando Shaffer from Brazil, but wow, this was a race could not be happier for, for them. Then, then we move on to the women’s 100 meter backstroke gold went to Australia’s as McCowen.
Uh, silver went to Canada’s Kylie Massey bronze went to USA’s Regan Smith Olympic record go Austria. Oh, should we, or should we say advanced Australia? Aussie Aussie Aussie. Then we had the men’s 100 meter backstroke and gold went to, uh, gold, gold, another two countries or one country getting the top two metals golden silver, both went to the ROC.
Uh, you of Guinea relaunch won the gold and, uh, climate Cole’s knockoff won the silver and bronze went to USA’s. Ryan Murphy. Never peg ROC as being strong swimmers. Then the last, uh, final of the evening was the 100 meter breaststroke, best friends of the night. Oh wait, wait, hold on.
Oh, that’s my Lily king slapping. And I think part of the problem here, here again is an NBC. Commentary crew, and I know you love them, but I have two, two beefs. One was talking and talking up how she intimidates people because Lily king is kind in the package they did on her lowly king to me is interesting because she’s very confident and very sure of herself.
And sometimes in a way that crosses that line to that typical swimmer arrogance that I don’t like. And I, I know what it is. So don’t, we all know what it is. Um, don’t like to. Her being a very gracious teammate. Yes. Yes. And we’ll get to that, but, but just the let’s watch a Lily sit in the warmup room.
Let’s watch Lily sit on the sidelines and slap herself and slap herself. And I know I do an officiating job every day, but I will say the volunteer job I want is the person who tells the swimmers when they can and cannot go on. You know, when they’re lined up for the finals and they bored and like
Alison: a red card, that is
Jill: my job.
And I pass anyway. W so Lily king is highly, highly favored, but they’re talking about her being a back-to-back breaststroke winner. She won golden Rio. This is another one of those unheard of feats. However, she does not pull it out, who pulls it out a 17 year old from Alaska, Lydia Jakoby. She is the first Alaskan to compete in swimming at the Olympics.
They showed a watch party at her high school. And everyone was going crazy. It was so fun to watch how much they were behind her.
Alison: They were throwing chairs. I mean, nobody can celebrate like a 17 year old boy who doesn’t know why he’s celebrating, but he’s going to go for it. And they were just jumping up and down and throwing things.
And it was, it was fantastic. That was a lot of fun to watch.
Jill: And her reaction to her victim. She didn’t know what to do with herself off her Goggle. She’s like, and you could just see it wash over her, the disbelief and the realization of what she had achieved was just really, that’s one of those Olympic moments that you really love.
Silver went [00:45:00] to south Africa’s Tatyana shown maker and Lily king won the bronze and
Alison: in the interview. They ask Lydia how she won and she says, I don’t know,
but then Lily king sort of comes into the interview and is like you were saying incredibly gracious, incredibly, um, calm. And not a sore loser at all. And yet in the package before she’s so unlikable. And so like, yeah, I intimidate other people and I like to scare them and I stare them down and yeah. So she’s, she’s an enigma.
Jill: Enigma is the best way to put it. Okay. We do have to talk about Arianne. Titmus says coach, Dean Boxall do we? We do. Because we need everyone to understand that what is happening here on in American television? Because he went to NBC, did a whole package on him in prime time. The other night when the, when we had the 400 meter final.
And when I heard him talk, they had a lot of footage of him coaching Ariane. And when you heard him talk, he was quite mean. And, and how he talked to her, just like you gotta do more. You have to, you’re not doing enough. What do you want? And just in a way that was just kind of a little cringy to me. And then the cameras panned up to him, losing his mind when she won.
And then now that’s a viral moment of him losing his mind. And last night, Many mentions on NBC of coach box all in a way that reminded me of how the gymnastics commentary team lauded, Bella Karoly and true, huge red flag to me, just like, oh, here we go again. Let’s laud and honor this coach that what we’ve seen of him.
Is, it’s kind of about, it looks to me and now I don’t know him at all beyond what we have seen, but it’s almost like it’s about him and I’m not sure he treats his swimmers. Well, I don’t know, but what we saw and how the, just the way and the tone of voice that the at the Dan Hicks had just reminded me so much of how they talked about Bella,
Alison: the way that Dean box.
Reacted to her race was not normal. I will say that straight out. You know, we’ve seen lots of people celebrate. We’ve seen people go crazy and lose their minds. That was not normal. And I completely agree. I got the same reaction in my head. Like this is. The way they used to talk about Balak Raleigh. And what’s interesting is that my daughter pointed this out to me that there is a lot of talk on social media among young women.
That they are concerned for our tapas and her relationship with the coach that it seems abusive. So it’s not us being old women looking at this, getting nervous women who are Aryans age are looking at this going, this is his fan golly situation. This man, we’re going to hear the stories a year from now about how he was abusive.
So I completely agreed. NBC is going for the story and not looking underneath.
Jill: Um, I I’m concerned
Alison: she has issued a statement. Oh, she has, she has answered some of these people on social media saying, no, he’s my coach. He’s here for me. And how many times did we hear that from the gymnast? So.
Jill: Something to watch out.
And if you have any news on him, let us know. Yeah. It would be
Alison: curious to hear from our Australians,
Jill: if, if he’s a name in Australia at all table tennis, I did get to, I wanted to go back and watch the gold medal match and the bronze medal match and the mixed doubles, uh, did not get to because I couldn’t find it on the streams, but I did find a clip.
Yeah. Oh, my goodness, Japan surprises, China to win, and they did it down. They were so far behind in this match. Uh, they were down to nothing. They came back to tie the score of two to two. They went down two to three and it’s best to seven. They tied it up three to 3, 1 40. And it was just [00:50:00] incredible how they pulled it out again.
So sorry that fans were not in the stands to see that.
Alison: Can you imagine
Jill: just the mental toughness? Not just because table tennis is a huge, tough mental sport because you just had to be on point and be so agile and react so quickly to what’s happening on the table, but the mental strength for two people to be.
In concert to come back from such a far desk deficit against eight. Very, very. Very strong team to win.
Alison: I know bill Millie Tapper told us that there’s never an issue with them banging into each other, but how I’m watching it and going, how are they not tripping over each other? Because it is a very small space that they’re sharing the coordination and the feel for one another is just fantastic.
Jill: So if you can watch them that, uh, match go back and watch it, uh, TaeKwonDo. So this is another one where I love the feed because, and this happens mostly on the women’s side. There is a lot of squawking for every point.
Alison: I thought that in fencing, there was a lot of yelling. Oh no. Then I turned on some of these fighting sports. Holy cow people.
Jill: And the OBS, the OBS commentator is hilarious. He just, he comments on it all the time and you can tell he is done and over the squawking, but he’s really good. He’s really good at other parts of it to a very concise at when things hit.
To score points. Uh, so that is I’m, I’m learning a lot watching this, but the squawking on the women’s side is it’s getting to me. Uh, so this was the women’s 67 plus kilogram. And the men’s over 80 kilograms, a gold went to on the women’s side. Gold went to Serbia’s Mullica Amanda silver went to Korea’s lead up in and bronze is, went to a great Britain’s Bianca walk walked in and Francis Althea, Lauren.
Um, the men side Goldwind to ROC Vladislav, Lauren silver went to north Macedonia’s deja, uh, Dayan, uh, Georgia Wysocki and bronze is went to Cuba’s. Rafael, you near Alva Castillo and Korea’s in code. Uh, in Q Don who won the bronze, he, the, one of the matches I watched was earlier on where he almost lost to Afghanistan’s Minori and one, right at the end 13 to 12, but it was really looking like Afghanistan was going to take this match.
It was really. Tennis Naomi Osaka lost in straight sets to Marquette and of the Czech Republic. So she is out of the tournament in the third round. Play continues on. Triathlon women’s triathlon happened and it was a soggy soggy course out there. I did, I had it on today on my small screen. So I did watch a little bit of it.
I know Booklo Claire said on Twitter that there was a rainbow during the competition. Yes. I saw that. When did it happen?
Alison: Um, it in the, um, running portion.
Jill: Oh, nice. Nice, nice.
Alison: Because it sort of came out of the road. It was, you could see it on the TV. So that was pretty amazing.
Jill: That’s very cool. So Bermuda’s flora Duffy one gold, which is Bermuda’s first gold medal create Britain’s Georgia Taylor brown, one silver and Katie’s Jeffries from the U S one.
Bronze. That was a good, that was a. Uh, good race, Florida Duffy really had a commanding lead during the run preliminary round play, continued in volleyball and water polo. And then in weightlifting, it was the women’s 59 kilogram and the women’s 64 kilograms. Competitions in the 59 kilogram Chinese Taipei’s one gold silver went to Turkmenistan’s Paulina and, uh, undo Mikiko from Japan, won the bronze in the 64 kilogram competition.
Canada’s macho, Aron won gold, uh, Italy’s uh, Georgia boarded, neon one, silver and Chinese Taipei’s Chen. When way, one.
Alison: You’ve been doing very well with all these names, by
Jill: the way. Yeah. I’m working on it, but I got a lot of improving to do. So, uh, we’d like to take a quick shout out to our Patrion patrons who support the show financially on an ongoing basis.
Their financial support helps keep us afloat. If you are interested in an ongoing donation to the [00:55:00] show, please check us out at patrion.com/flame alive pod. So Alison. Is on tap with our tomorrow.
Alison: is quiet right now. Uh, the only ones who are on tap are Stephanie Roble and Maggie shade with some more preliminary races,
Jill: which I will probably tune into because now I like watching.
Alison: You knew it was going to happen.
Jill: So on that note, it’s time for us to say Sayonara, you can always get in touch with us. Email flame alive pod@gmail.com or call or text us at (208) 352-6348. That’s 2 0 8 or check out our Facebook group. Keep playing live podcast. Happened. I can’t keep up with it. I know.
We’re just fantastic. So thank you all so much for listening and until tomorrow, keep the flame alive. .