Tokyo 2020: Olympics – Day 14

The Tokyo 2020 Olympics are starting to wind down, but our TKFLASTANIs in competition are just starting to heat up!

Along with results for the day’s 21-sport program, we are also very concerned about the age of some women (really girls) competing in diving and skateboarding. And we interrupt our results for a major rant about NBC’s coverage and programming decisions, spurred   when the feed cut out on the men’s bronze medal hockey game with about five minutes to go.

Today’s sports program includes:

• Athletics
• Baseball
• Basketball
• Beach Volleyball
• Boxing
• Canoe Sprint
• Cycling – Track
• Diving
• Football
• Golf
• Handball
• Hockey
• Karate
• Marathon Swimming
• Modern Pentathlon
• Skateboarding
• Sport Climbing
• Table Tennis
• Volleyball
• Water Polo
• Wrestling.

Plus, our popular segments:

• Where’s Marnie McBean?
• What Officiating/Volunteer Roles Would We Want?
• TKFLASTAN Watch
• Fantasy League/Brackets Update
• What’s Up with Mike and Maya?

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 Please do not quote from the transcript; use the audio file as the record of note.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 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: I’m feeling pretty good today. Surprisingly

Jill: got a nap in,

Alison: I got a nap and that just recharged.

Push me through these last few days. And there was some really great competition that helped as well,

Jill: that there was day 14 did not disappoint. So before we get to the action, let’s do a little bit follow up file. Our shook, the Stoney BMX racing cyclist is, uh, Connor Fields is going home, which is very exciting.

Alison: Out of the hospital on his way back to the U S I’m sure a lot of treatments still to come, but he posted a little video and Instagram, so it was nice to see his face and gave us a thumbs up for heading up.

Jill: But good luck, Connor. We are all thinking of you and some COVID news. It was a another record day for COVID cases within the Olympic bubble.

And now the total is up to 353 cases since the beginning of July. I don’t know if they’re tracking how many of these are asymptomatic versus symptomatic, but it would be interesting to know how many people contract COVID and. Have effects from it. Uh, moving on to where is Marnie McBean?

Alison: So Marnie has been to athletics.

She joined in with the Tyco drummers at canoe sprint. She was heading over to soccer and she did answer me on a question I had for her. Cause I speculated in an Instagram post that she may be taking naps in the car. And she said nosies in the cars. That’s when I get work and calls done and post my pictures sleep when it’s done,

Jill: I can imagine. All right, moving on to our segment. What officiating or volunteer job do we want? So, what would you like to do today?

Alison: I’m going to be the ball girl at table because this girl was in little corner. You can’t see her she’s tucked in behind the, I don’t know what you call those, the side pieces and her little head just bounces out and she grabs the ball and scoots back in.

Jill: Wow. I’m going to have to check that out. I was wondering if you would say the people who clean off the tennis team. If I could send it because early on in the games, I did see 1.1 volunteer and like a plastic bag with cleaning supplies. And she just came out, pulled stuff out of her bag, cleaned off the table.

I

Alison: did like how prepared they were.

Jill: I would like to be the pacer at the Kiran race. Uh, this is a race. If you haven’t been watching track cycling, it’s an interesting one. And it’s, uh, developed in Japan. It is a six lap race and the first three are led by a pacing bike, which I believe this has a little bit of an electrical push.

I don’t know. Sometimes you have a little motor break on there, but this one’s not. And. Every lap you go, the pace gets faster until you’re up to a certain number of kilometers per hour on at, by the end of lap three, the pace bike pulls off and then it’s a sprint to the finish for the riders. And it’s, I think it’s a really cool race and I would love to do.

The pacing. That’s a lot of pressure. It is a lot of pressure. And that’s why I think motorbikes help because then your guarantee. Cause if I had to do it all on my, you know, you can’t do that all by yourself. Cause they look, they look like they’re just going for a little stroll in the park, on their bike.

Nice, easy ride. How is okay. Fantasy league time. How is our league doing well? Show

Alison: us, Don is still killing us all at 8 21. PS Gola is at 3 48. Kolibri is at 3 41 and the rest of us are kind of fallen far behind. Um,

Jill: I, once again, I did not get my stuffed on in times.

Alison: But brackets is a little more interesting show.

Liston is at one 60. You and I are tied at one 30 and Olympic fan. Dan is at one 20.

Jill: Ooh, that is interesting.

Alison: And I think all the brackets are locked in now, but the fantasy league, you can still play around

Jill: with. Uh, now it’s time to find out what is up with Mike and Maya, Mike and Maya of the Toyota first date commercial, where Mike asks Maya to the school dance and he does it from his hospital room, but he’s also in the hallway at school.

Thanks to the digital. Screen. So we heard from listener Beth who agrees with listener. Brian thinks that Walter, the cats [00:05:00] owner from the Chevy Silverado commercial is Maya’s dad. So we have two votes for that. I’m

Alison: just a little concerned about Maya and Walter’s relationship. Like does Maya feel rejected from her dad being so obsessed with this cat?

Jill: Do you think that is why she would go out with a skateboarder?

Alison: Hm, looking for attention, looking for the mail validation. Maybe that’s why Heather is so upset about this.

Jill: Interesting. Hmm, good theory to think about. I have to say, I maybe saw that commercial once or twice yesterday. I was really shocked.

Now I’m getting inundated with Google ads on my feed. I’m tired of all of them.

Alison: They needed to have a short run period for these

Jill: commercials. Well, they also needed to do a. Let’s put, let’s take all of the commercials and put them into a carousel, kind of like a slide show and you didn’t get the same commercial every ad break, but you got it.

Maybe every few ad breaks

Alison: and Beijing, we better see Mike and Maya at the dance. Seriously

Jill: before we get to today’s action. We’d like to tell you about our Kickstarter campaign. We are going to Beijing for the winter Olympics because we surprisingly got media accreditations that we did not expect to get.

Those games are six months or less than 200 days away. And while we’re excited for the opportunity to go and bring you a podcasting experience that only comes with having an on the ground presence. We didn’t plan to have this in the book. This early on in, in our, uh, travel planning. So, uh, we could use your support.

We are an independent podcast and that means a shoestring budget, but those shoestrings are not long enough to cover a trip to China. Th that is a fairly long trip to China as well. So if you have, uh, if you’ve been appreciating the show and like what we do, we’d love to have your support, find out more about our campaign and check out our support or bonuses for sending postcards from the Olympics.

We’re having our own pins made and much, much more. That is kickstarter.com/profile/flame alive pod. Thank you so much, everybody who is donated already. We’ve hit the 25% Mark A. Little over 25%. So that means the world to us. And we are well on our way to our goal.

Alison: I want to mention another way that people can help with that.

Kickstarter is sharing it on their social media. So if you’ve been having fun, listening to the show, please share that around because your group is bigger than our group and it keeps going. So if you can share that, that would be great too.

Jill: We would appreciate that athletic. Thank day on the child day.

What did you watch? I watched shot foot. Oh, that was unbelievable.

Alison: What was really fun was listening to Michelle Carter. Talk about the ShotPut because obviously that’s her event and she knows Joe Kovash and Brian crowds are so well. So she was giving lots of little. Insight into their process, which was pretty

Jill: exciting.

That’s interesting. I had the feed on, so I’m going to have to go back and watch this because I think it was part of the primetime coverage. Yes. Okay. So I will go back and watch this cause I have this on tape Ryan crowds or his first throw. He broke the Olympic record. His second throw. He broke the Olympic record again.

And then he broke it a third time, four times, four times, total

Alison: four out of his five throws, beat his previous Olympic record.

Jill: Then it’s just amazing. I mean, he’s just a beautiful, beautiful thrower. So

Alison: the team USA, Teddy bear.

Jill: So he won the gold Joe Kovacs from the U S won the silver and Thomas Walsh from New Zealand, won the bronze.

And this is the same line, the same finishing order that we had in 2016. So 20, 24 could be really interesting.

Alison: And Ryan Crowder is the first American shop order to repeat since 52 56. Wow. And to add to the tears, his grandfather who taught him how to throw died right before Tokyo. Oh. So he had a little sign, you know, dear grandpa, we made it and Olympic champion, and then they switched to the grandmother at home.

Celebrating. Oh, I needed my puffs for that one.

Jill: Definitely. We also had the early heats of men’s four by 100 relay, not a good day for the U S

Alison: I had a good day. I saw this, they screwed up another handoff between Ronnie baker and Fred curly. So they finished [00:10:00] six. There was a very interesting article in the Washington post, how basically the U S men’s four by 100, either screws up a handoff and DQS or wins.

Jill: That’s interesting. They seem to, a lot of the sprinters seem to have been a non-factor almost. Or maybe it’s because I’m not watching primetime as much. And so we don’t get that celebration of the medals that we do. And because we’ve won a Fred Curly’s won a medal, no Alliance has won a medal, so it’s not like they’re slouching, but it just doesn’t feel the same.

I

Alison: don’t think team USA has been dominant as they expected to. I would agree. The other thing that was interesting about this story is that usually team USA does a once a year relay camp, which is unusual because most teams practice a lot more than once a year, but they didn’t even have that camp because of COVID.

Oh,

Jill: and we talked with Andrew rock about relay handoffs and how difficult they are, and sometimes you just have. Figure it out really quickly and you don’t have much time. So I wonder if this that’s what this is. We had the men’s 110 meters hurdles, final gold went to Jamaica’s Hansel parchment. It’s silver went to USS grant Halloway and bronze went to Jamaica’s.

Ronald lovey MSCI race. Really? Oh, lots of hurdles going down

Alison: to me, it just looked like a lot of clipped hurdles, just not a clean race, but. Blew everybody away. It was very surprising

Jill: in the men’s triple jump. Gold went to Portugal’s. Pedro Pichardo silver went to China’s as you coming and bronze went to Burkina Faso, uh, Hughes for brief Zingo.

So

Alison: this is the first Olympic medal for Faso. Nice. And it is the first gold of these games for Portugal also.

Jill: Nice. We also had day two of the men’s decathlon and the women’s have path lawn. Some crazy stuff happened, but club Clara is a big athletics, uh, fan. So she told us what happened in those streets.

Did you see these shoe or do you have something to say on these two? I don’t know. I, I saw a lot

Alison: of it, but I didn’t

Jill: really know what was going on. Okay. Exactly. So Claire told us that the current world champion in heptathlon, who’s Catarina Johnson Thompson from great Britain. She got a calf injury on the day, end of day one, and she refused a wheelchair.

So she got up cross the finish line at the end of the 200 and then withdrew from the race. So that opened up the field a little bit, but the winner was Belgium’s. Nephi TM who repeated as Olympic champ and silver went to an Vetter from Netherlands and bronze went to Emma Oester bagel also from the Northern.

And the men’s decathlon gold went to Canada’s Damian Warner who got an Olympic record of 9,018 points, which is the first time any man’s gotten over 9,000 points at an Olympics. Claire mentioned that he pretty much led the whole thing from start to finish. And one of the reasons he passed 9,000 points because during the 1500, he pushed hard and, uh, did very well.

And rounding out the podium and the decathlon with a silver went to Francis, Kevin Mayer, and bronze went to Australia’s Ashley Maloney. And do you know what Mara novella. Got it start. We had the first race walk in the Olympics up in Sapporo Adori park. The gold went to Italy’s Masimo. Stano silver went to Japan’s EK to Kochi and bronze went to Japan’s Yemeni sheet, Toshi.

I want some of this or I had it, I had it on and would fast forward a little bit here and there, there were fans, even though a Sapporo tried hard to keep them away. There were people. And I read an incident in one of the Japanese papers about people from Tokyo were coming up because they couldn’t go to events.

And Tokyo is like, I can get a glimpse of an Olympic event. We’ve waited so long, so I’m going up, but it looks like a pretty decent race. The weather was nice. So cool. I would say it was a 31 degrees Celsius and the humidity was 63%. So maybe a little cooler than it could have been in Tokyo, but I think it was kind of negligible.

Uh, the other thing about the weather that I was looking at was how many people did not finish, because if it was so hot, would we get more people just dropping out of the race? Only three people did not fit. Which was interesting. I mean, you don’t want, you want everybody to finish, but in that case, it’s in the case of extreme heat, [00:15:00] it’s nice that people seem to be prepared and could

Alison: yeah, three DNF doesn’t seem out of the

Jill: ordinary, right.

For, for any race of that length. And then there were only two disqualifications, so it was nice to have a nice clean race as well. It’s back to the track. We also had the women’s pole vault, which was a good competition. I saw many pieces of this. And did you watch? I can’t watch Pobal and it makes me too nervous.

Oh, okay. Uh, USS Katie Najat. Uh, one gold and that was exciting cause she’s from around my neck of the woods. So people were thrilled around here and silver went to our OCS on Angelica and bronze went to great Britain’s Holly Bradshaw, defending Rio gold matter medalist Catarina. Stephanie finished four.

So that was a tough day for her, but Katie got a really nice height. She looks good and was of course thrilled about what she accomplished. And then the evening ended with the men’s 400 meter finals. Gold went to The Bahamas. Stephen Gardner silver went to Columbia’s Anthony Jose Zambrano and bronze went to grenadiers Kieron.

Moving on to baseball. It was a semi-final and USA beat Korea, 72, but you know, it’s the baseball tournament. So somebody final doesn’t mean necessarily that Korea is out of the game. It’s just

Alison: so confusing. And I know so few teams, they played so many games that didn’t seem to mean anything.

Jill: Right.

Especially when they’re called knockout stage and semi-finals, and I know people have explained to us, it’s a double elimination, but I I’m with you a double elimination. When you have like six teams isn’t that it, they have us Korea, Japan, Dominican Republic, Mexico and Israel. That’s it? Yes. It’s funny how softball made you so excited.

And baseball is just been a big question, mark.

Alison: It’s been a big yawn

Jill: over in basket. The men had their semi-final games, a U S defeated Australia 97 to 78 and France defeated Slovakia 90 to 89 high-tech game. In beach volleyball, there were women’s semi-finals and men semi-finals. So in the women’s side, USA’s Rawson, climbin defeated Switzerland’s of various Dupree and Heidrick.

And Australia’s, our chat are tattoed to Solara and Clancy defeated a lot vias at Gardena and Kraus, Nicholas. And the men’s given me one less name to work with on the men’s side, Norway’s, uh, a mall and Sorum defeated Latvia’s Plevin and talks and ROC Chris and the cough and a story enough ski defeated Qatar’s you know, S and T John in boxing, we’re doing some semi-finals and finals action.

The finals were in the men’s featherweight division. The gold went to. Our OCS Albert, but here Ghazi of silver went to USA’s. Duke Reagan bronze is went to Cuba’s Lazaro Alvarez, and Ghana’s Samuel tacky in the canoe sprint, which now I got to put this on my list to go back and watch because Marnie McBean was there also the U S won their first gold.

And canoe on the women’s side. So that’s nice. And the sprint. Yeah, but we’ll start with men’s kayaks. Uh, the singles gold went to Hungary’s Shand or Tanika. Silver went to Italy. Manfredi Rita and bronze went to great Britain, Liam Heath in the women’s canoe singles gold went to USA’s Nevin Harrison again, first female from the U S to win a golden canoe sprit.

Silver went to Canada’s Lawrence, Vincent LaPointe and bronze went to Ukraine’s lewd Mila Luzon in the women’s kayak singles, 500 meters Goldwind to New Zealand, Lisa Carrington, silver, which honestly the men are doing really well. It feels like, well, Lisa,

Alison: Karen. Is now the winningest new Zealander in the canoe.

Jill: Oh, good for her. Very nice. Silver went to Hungary is Tamara ship is and bronze went to Denmark’s. Emma Austrade Yorgen sin in the men’s kayak, double 1000 meters, Goldman to Australia, silver to Germany and bronze to the Czech Republic. In track cycling. We had the women’s Kiran finals Goldwind to Netherlands Shanay, Brisbane, and it, silver went to new Zealand’s Elise Andrew’s bronze went to Canada’s Lorianne gymnast in the men’s omnium, which I started to watch.

And these races were pretty long and they involve points in there. All kinds of complicated. That is one to go back and watch when I have. Uh, gold went [00:20:00] to great Britain’s Matthew Walls. Silver went to new Zealand’s Campbell, Stewart, and bronze went to Italy’s. Ella Viviani in diving. It was the women’s 10 meter platform competition.

You watched, I did not get a chance to watch this. I did watch

Alison: this. So this was really good competition. There was a couple of fun things. The Malaysian coaches, there was a Malaysian diver in the finals, which is unusual. They had tiger print shirts and the Malaysian swimsuit had just a little bit of a tiger print.

Jill: Oh, very nice. So

Alison: it was very chic and kind of fun for Malaysia. Uh, but I did want to talk a little bit about the gold medalist from China, Hong Kong Chang. She got two dives in that she

Jill: scored a 10 on wow, perfect score. And that almost never happens in diving.

Alison: It’s very, very rare, especially on a 10 meter, but I’m more concerned about the fact that she’s 14 years.

This is her first international competition. What she would not have qualified to pur, uh, to participate last year. Cause you’ve got to be 14. So nobody’s seen her, uh, which is problematic. And there’s been a lot of discussion in the news with the gymnast and with the skateboarders. Some of the very, very young girls, especially participating and saying, well, if they’re good enough, they should be allowed to compete.

And I say, well, what have they been through to be good enough at 14? What have they had to suffer and sacrifice to be good enough to win an Olympic gold medal at 14?

Jill: Okay. I would interject that in China, they’ve sacrificed everything they get from family, you know, th th that basically. Give up their lives and all they do is diving.

So, right. So these points are not being protected. Oh, right. Well, yeah. Yeah.

Alison: So I think 14 is a ridiculously young age for these divers to be allowed to compete internationally.

Jill: I would agree. I don’t, I think it puts a lot of pressure on a lot of people to do more things at a younger age and. Trying to be something at a young age, or if, if you don’t, you’re nothing, which is not true.

And putting a lot of pressure on, especially in America, because everything is, self-funded putting a lot of pressure on parents to join travel leagues or key, take their kid all over the country or all over the world to do sport. And part of it is okay. That exposure is good for the kid because they get exposed to different cultures and they can learn new things.

And sometimes I think when we talked to Josh Levin, he said like his family’s built vacations around his, some of his international competitions, which makes sense. It’s hard because I get the whole kids got a lot of time to devote to a sport. They get good really quickly. Let’s bring them up there. So we have the best in the world competing today.

It’s also weird when you change the rules of eligibility for Tokyo 2020. This was diving in gymnastics, particularly where they have age requirements and they decided that the age requirement would be valid for 2021. So that meant if you didn’t qualify, if you were too young in 2020, but old enough in 2021, you still could compete in these Olympics.

And I think that made stuff a little bit unfair for a lot of

Alison: flips. You ended up with a 14 year old girl that has never been in an international competition before winning an Olympic medal. And I wonder what kind of position that puts her in. Obviously China is. Unique and how it runs at sports programs.

So we do kind of have to put that to the side and say, there are all kinds of problems in how China runs its sports programs, but I don’t think having 12 and 13 year old girls on the world stage and skateboarding is a good idea either.

Jill: No, and we’ll get to that. And I know we talked about it yesterday, but we’ll probably talk about it

Alison: again.

You know, there are physical things that are happening. You know, we we’ve talked about Tarla Penske who had to have hip surgery at like 25 because of jumping and doing the sports that she did before she had developed properly and gymnast who can’t walk later. And these girls who are doing these things so young, too much, too soon, never mind the psychological pressure.

So if you want to have the youth Olympics. We’re not fans because of that very reason, but we need to raise the ages and protect these kids.

Jill: I have noticed that announcers on the feeds do mention if they went [00:25:00] one, the youth Olympic games, cause that’s come up quite a bit lately where, and I, I would assume that the IOC wants to tout the whoa, this youth Olympic games is a nice stepping stone to becoming an Olympian, come participate and.

It’s a nice idea, but I just think it’s a lot

Alison: too much too soon. Have we learned nothing from the tennis players, like Jennifer Capriati, who ended up going to prison because of burnout, we need to protect 14 year old girls from the world stage

Jill: beyond the fact that she was 14 and had two perfect guys.

How was the rest of the competition?

Alison: Again, up and down, there was some beautiful diving and there weren’t any real. Disasters where people were scoring ones and twos, but some messy entries and some sloppy jives, but it’s worth it to go back and watch.

Jill: Okay. Rounding out the podium. Silver went to Chiang Yushi from China and bronze went to Australia’s Melissa.

Alison: Which is a feel-good story. So that’s

Jill: worth seeing and football women had the bronze medal match, and that was USA defeated Australia for two, three. And it was the USA was leading for a while and Australia kept chipping away at this lead. So they got a late goal to get within one point. And it was. Too little too late.

And the USA does walk away with the medal on for their scores. It was Carli Lloyd and Megan Rapinoe, each got two goals and the team was very happy with the bronze because, uh, there’ve been stories where they’ve said, yeah, w we weren’t playing well. And we had to figure out how to get it together as a team.

So it’s nice that they figured that out and, and Mayday when happened in the middle happened in golf. The women had the second round of individual stroke.

And handball. We had the men semi-finals and this is fascinating little quirk, both. Semi-finals had the same score, France defeated Egypt, Denmark defeated Spain, both 27 to 20.

Alison: It’s like there was a glitch in the matrix.

Jill: So Chris from Olympia pod said you should tune into the finals because it should be a really fun day. It’s Denmark versus France. Denmark’s been amazing. France just keeps producing and they’re having a really great games, even though recent history has not been so kind to their team, the bronze medal match.

Is going to be fun because Egypt is looking to make history with their first medal in handball. And they would also be the first non-Europeans men’s medal since 1988. And then if you’d like the Spanish team tune in, because it looks like it’s going to be the last game for many on their team, in the hockey mat.

So angry about this and hockey men’s bronze medal. Uh, India defeated Germany five for which fantastic first hockey medal for India since 1980. Really? Yes. This is a big deal. It’s a huge deal. And it was a very young team. I didn’t realize 10 out of the 16 players on the team were in their first Olympics.

So this is exciting

Alison: for Paris

Jill: then. Yeah. Oh yeah. It’s going to be good. But so I had it on and I had on a couple of different things, but I, I pop on the sound on the hockey game every once in a while, and it’s getting close to the end. And so I’m paying more attention to it and watching, and, and there are five, four, but anything can happen if you still got like seven minutes on the clock and I’m watching and watching five minutes to go, NBC started embargoing it because all of a sudden that went, I can’t remember if the screen was coverage will return soon or coverage has.

And I couldn’t believe it. And it just, it didn’t come back. And I went to my television and looked through the menu and sure enough, I believe can’t quote me. Cause I can’t remember anything at this point. The game was going to be shown on television a little later in the overnight cover. Like on one of the cable channels,

Alison: this has happened to me so many times where I’m watching an event and all of a sudden in the middle of it, it gets embargoed and cut off.

Jill: And I’m sorry, I, I’m not going to go back. And I get that. Probably they’re making more money on the commercials in on the television coverage. Or there, well, the Simone Biles thing, Sydney McLaughlins race, other races. They are holding for prime time coverage the next day, which just seems so archaic at this point and pulling something because there’s going to be an audience [00:30:00] for it in the us.

And we’re going to show it on cable and probably make a little bit more money off of the advertisements. Although with so many advertisements on the feed, I I’d love to know how much they’re making off of these. But the problem NBC is that I’m not going to go and watch this whole match again, just to get to the final five minutes.

I will find out the score and then I’ll wait for the feet to come back and I’ll watch it then, which I watched it this morning. People who are large

Alison: in the feed want to see it. Then the people who are going to watch it on TV are going to watch it on TV. It’s two separate

Jill: audiences and treat it that way.

It’s it’s really the, the, the coverage has been kind of the way NBC has handled their coverage. It’s it’s, it’s really old-fashioned. It’s like, you’ve still got people maybe up at the top who are from the bud Greenspan era and have this way of, this is how we covered the Olympics. And now you have this streaming world that they don’t understand how to deal with.

And don’t sell bug

Alison: screen Greenspan that way. I think he would have moved with the times.

Jill: Well, no, I, well, I wouldn’t be surprised if he did move with the times, but I, the problem is I think the other people wouldn’t have moved. They aren’t moving with the times. Right. And they’re just stuck in the past and you know, you had your formula and it’s easy to go, oh, we have our formula.

This is how our formula works. And it’s been golden for us all the time. But now you have a different way of doing things. You know what I would like. And I know we’re doing this in the middle of the hockey recap. I would love if in the feed they would put 30 seconds or 20 seconds, whatever commercial length they’re going to put in a feed, it would be a Mike Trico update here and there and just say, Hey, this is why, you know, this is a score of the handball game that just happened.

You might want to go over to that part of the feed. You know what

Alison: else may be mad in the feed. I would go to the feed website and I would get spoiled. Oh, even if I was just an hour behind, they would have the results and I’m like, I’m coming to the feed. Cause I want to watch it. You’re spoiling me for the feed.

Nevermind that the television coverage is going to be in 12 hours. So they’re not even thinking this

Jill: through, right. Because they want the headline for what happened. And because you have to get first with the headlines and that’s, and, and I get what they do, but you know what they should have, they should have two separate websites they should have here is our, whatever we’re doing.

TV coverage wise, maybe. And then have you want the OBS stream go to this platform? We’re having all of these events, full events, full replays, go to that platform and you won’t find out anything. Cause it’s really hard not to get spoiled. If you don’t want to be spoiled or you just go whatever, by the end of this various or by the, by the end of the competition, I won’t have remembered who won in.

But what was so

Alison: upsetting to me was, you know, at seven in the morning, I’m watching something that started at five say, and then I’m going to watch something that started at six. When I go back to the homepage, just switch screens, they’re spoiling something that literally just finished. Oh. And I’m thinking, this is your site for the fi.

If I’m coming here, I obviously want to see it quickly. Why are you putting headlines on

Jill: the feed page? I wish they wouldn’t do that either. Yeah. Cause they take, and they also take a valuable real estate for the screen. It makes the viewing screen much smaller. And when I’m trying to watch something and take notes for us, or I’m trying to watch two things at once, it’s really hard.

It just feels like

Alison: NBC. No overall mission for it’s viewing. It’s like, we’re just going to throw this all out there and hope people find what they want and nobody is finding anything.

Jill: No. And you know why I’m not finding stuff because it’s called field hockey. Hockey taught ourselves the, if we taught ourselves the Olympic way, go with it.

Alison: It’s not track and field at that. It’s

Jill: athletics. And you know, while we’re on that one New York times, it’s not synchronized swimming anymore. It’s artistic. Anyway. Okay. Let’s get off our soap boxes, uh, for the other

speaking of hockey. The gold medal match. I kind of want to go back and watch this because this looks like this was a one to see. So Beldam defeated Australia that was score was tied one, one at the end of regulation and went to a shootout. Belgium got the shootout three to two. Wow.

Alison: I love and hate when games like this engine issued out.

Jill: I do too. You kind of wished just play to the death, but that might actually literally be the death in Tokyo. And I don’t want anybody to die because of the. Once again, podium gold, Belgium, silver, Australia, [00:35:00] and bronze to India. Good tournament. You know, I, I know we haven’t talked about it a whole lot, but that sounds like it was a great tournament on the men’s side, moving on to karate.

New sport for Tokyo only going to be in Tokyo, going to, it seems like. So we had the women’s kata and men’s committee 67 kilos and women’s commentate 55 kilos. Did you see any of this?

Alison: Not yet. That was on today’s schedule

Jill: for me. Okay. I saw a couple of people do kata and I think you might like this book, CLO Claire liked it a lot.

She was very surprised. Uh, I mean, because it’s similar to figure skating, you have a routine that you have to do, and this is, uh, katas are set patterns in that are the building blocks of karate and they are called their forms basically. And you have to perform the form. There’s like a list of 300 of them, or so, and I believe.

The competition works, where the competitors choose three different forms and perform them and they have to make them as perfect as possible. So there’s a lot of, this is why you didn’t start off the day with.

There’s a little bit of that going on too. Yes. Oh, oh yeah. I think you’re going to like this, but it was really interesting to watch. And I, I dipped into a couple of people. I saw, um, the will do the podium. Gold, went to Spain’s, uh, Sandra Sanchez, Jaime, who is like one of the top people in the world. And she’s.

I believe I saw her. She’s amazing. Silver went to Japan, Shimizu Kyo, and bronzes went to Hong Kong’s mushing. Grace allow. Uh, Italy’s Viviana Butaro. So that is wanting to go back and watch today on the men’s comity. I saw a little bit of this too, so I want to watch more with announcers on so that I understand it a little bit better.

I know Tom Scott told, told us how it worked, but it’s interesting to try to figure out where the. Kick and where they punch and, and that kind of thing and how they score points. So in the men’s 67 kilos gold went to Francis, Stephen DeCosta, silver went to turkeys, erase. I’m done. Bronze, went to Kazakhstan’s darken a satellite.

And the women’s 55 kilos gold went to Bulgaria, Yvette Baranova silver went to Ukraine’s Angelica, Tara Lee, UGA bronzes went to Austria’s Bettina, plunk and Chinese Taipei’s when two young marathon swimming on the men’s 10 kilometer race. I did watch some of this through a feed. I mean, and by I watched the feed through watching a feed of the athlete.

Because it almost sounded like the female commentator was very excited about the feeding portion.

Alison: Maybe she was hungry,

Jill: but she didn’t, they, they did stress. They, I wonder if they got a lot of comments about this because they did stress that the bottles would get picked up after being tossed in the ICU or

Alison: troubled by it. I’m sure you weren’t the only one

Jill: very troubled by that. Did you watch any of this? I did. Okay. What did you think?

Alison: It looks exhausting.

Jill: It did look exhausting. The New York times talked with some of the competitors and I guess the water got warmer and warmer when they got faster and faster. But the. The air temperature was about 81 degrees Fahrenheit. The water temperature was about 84. And that wasn’t far from the cutoff of 88 degrees.

That’s the upper limit set by the, by feet of the governing body. But what was great about that was that the silver medalist Christophe Rosofsky from hungry said, yeah, I trained in a lake where the temperatures over 90 degrees. So this was cool.

Alison: It just made me think of a new England clam bake that they were just throwing all these swimmers in the pot.

Like you put the lobsters in and the clams and some seaweed and some corn and potatoes, and it’s delicious when it comes out. But I don’t think these kids were too happy when they came out of the.

Jill: Mm. Mm. Gold went to Germany’s Florian, Vel Brock. Silver went, as we said, went to Hungary’s as AUSkey and bronze went to Italy’s Gregorio.

Paul Canary modern pentathlon competition started very excited for Samantha Schultz. Our shook Sistani, although not with day one, because they, they do a round of. They re they do around a fencing to rank everybody. And fencing is not [00:40:00] Samantha’s strong suit. So it’s really tough fencing. The fencing component of modern pentathlon is you fence against everybody in the competition, but you only fence one point.

So whoever wins that point gets, uh, a victory and then you’re ranked on your numbers of victories and defeats. So Samantha had a record of nine victories and 26. Tough. She’s in 35 place right now, which is second to last, but her mother she’s really, really strong in the laser run, so hope and she’s a strong swimmer.

So hopefully she’ll be working her way back up in the final competition. The leaders on the women’s side are Germany’s Annika, Korea as Kim and, uh, Ireland’s Natalia coil.

Alison: This is like the worst kind of speeding.

Jill: Oh, it is, it is poke at each

Alison: other and then you swap places.

Jill: So we did watch this. Ben was very excited to stay up and watch Samantha.

This was we’re in the stage where. A lot of what I want to watch that’s on my list is between like the one in the morning and 10 in the morning. And I just can’t have never gotten my schedule to align with that very well, because it would basically mean that I wouldn’t see Ben for two weeks. So we stayed up way past her bedtime and it did not work out for us.

So the end, it was really hard to watch. I feel bad because I don’t. I think that anybody knows the best way to show this on television. It’s really difficult because they have like 10 fencing pistol going. And there’s, it’s really hard to understand what’s actually happening besides the few that you can focus on.

Alison: The other segments of pentathlon are much easier to follow.

Jill: Yeah. So tune in for that. And, uh, we’ll see what happens on the men’s side. Great. Britain’s just fie tune is in. ROC is Alexander living off is, is ranked second. And Belarus is Iliya Palos golf is ranked third skateboarding. I watched some of this.

Alison: I watched some of this as well. The men were better than the women.

Jill: Yes, they were. And I wondered if the women just because they’ve been doing it for longer, I I’m guessing I’m, I’m guessing that men skateboarding developed first. Tony Hawks because we, Tony Hawk is the name and skateboarding. I don’t know any female skateboarder names, but there could be a whole range of reasons why we don’t know that, but the men skewed older and they also could do bigger tricks.

So I, I don’t know, but you, I caught some of the prelims and then I caught a little bit of the final and, you know, I feel like in a way I feel like I’m doing my own NBC primetime coverage. Because I’m dipping into different sports here and there. And I just don’t get my Terico and I, this is not working for me.

I need need Mike.

Alison: Yeah, Mike, I mean, let’s not forget that skateboarding also has a sexism problem. That there’s a reason why the female skateboarders skew so young because women in an older age bracket were kept from parks. They were kind of bullied out of the skate parks.

Jill: What I saw in the prelim. There was a lot of falling.

Again, a lot of, I think it was taking risks and not getting and just missing out and runs would end very quickly because of this. And I wonder if that’s typical for a skateboarding competition or if it should have been like weightlifting, just get a run that gets me on the board. And, but I don’t think they really get punished as much because, and weightlifting, it’s a no lift and you are.

You could be out of the competition if you don’t succeed, but you just get lower point values. I don’t know. Did they do any better about telling you how the points were smart? Oh great. The Facebook group is talking a lot about this competition. And one of the things they mentioned was you couldn’t really see how deep the bowls were and that’s where the impressive aspect is.

And I would, I bet that’s very true because the park that they’re skating through. Is is pretty complex. It looks like. And the cool thing, I think they built, it looks like it allows for a lot of creativity in your run because there’s a lot of different elements to go off of. And that, to me, it was more interesting than street for some reason, because it was just like, oh, there’s a stair rail.

Oh, there’s another like really thing and maybe a ramp. And maybe it’s because. Maybe it’s because the streets, you know, you think stair rails, I think like open public space. And then I think of the sign posted that says no skateboarding, so maybe I’m just [00:45:00] predisposed to not liking it.

Alison: Right. And this also had, you could skate over the sushi rolls.

Oh yeah. One section of the park was called the sushi rolls and if the announcer said, oh, over the sushi rolls, one more time. It’s going to send them to the corner with Mike and Maya.

Jill: So what is up with, uh, Kiran w Woolley?

Alison: So poor Kiran, as he was coming at the end of his run, he did something on the rail and smashed right into the camera man, who was trying to get the close-up shot all.

Thankfully the cameraman did not hit his head. Okay. Good. Which was relieved. The me, the cutest point was after he smacked into the sky, he suddenly became a little kid. He’s only 17. He was horrified so upset and he’s like, are you okay? Are you okay? And they fist bumped and the cameraman was okay, but all I kept thinking was Karen Willy’s mom must be so proud of him that he’s in the Olympics, he’s competing.

He hits somebody and he was very worried about hurting this other person.

Jill: Very nice,

Alison: but the good news is nobody was actually hurt. It was scary though, for a few seconds.

Jill: So it turned. The competition ended with Australia’s Keegan Palmer, winning gold, uh, Pedro Barros from Brazil, winning silver and the U S Juneau winning bronze.

It was interesting. I, I saw that, you know, scrape boarding developed in the U S but we did not do well in this competition compared to if we did win a couple of medals, but the Brazilians who were skateboarding is also quite popular, really did well. And in Australia has. That’s all we want to do in our ongoing concern over the difference in ages between the men and the women, because the men did skew older.

I think the youngest person in this was 17, that was Kieran Willie and went up to 46. And when I think about a competitor’s kind of together, if they have men’s and women’s competing in the same time, I don’t know what the culture is like, but I think about like, 20 and 30 and 40 year olds hanging out in the same place with a 12 and 13 and 15 year old.

That gives me a lot of red flags go off.

Alison: Yes. Most of the men’s finalists were in their twenties. And I think almost all of the girl finalist, and I say girls very purposefully were in their teens at

Jill: best. And the Chiodo news had a story about Japan, sucker USAA Zumi who won the gold medal in the women’s park, skate boarding.

And she said that she treats the sport. Like it is her boyfriend to whom she is committed 24 hours a day. And that made me kind of sad because that was another cultural kind of expectation. It felt like. And I don’t mind that she’s committed to our sport and wants to do her sport 24 hours a day. I do mind that the expectation of women was that they have to commit to their man

Alison: girl, we got to have a talk about what kind of boyfriend you’re having, that he expects you to be committed to him 24 hours a day.

Mm.

Jill: Moving on to sport climbing, where we got our first medals. This was the men’s combined, uh, gold went to Spain’s. Did you watch any well, did you watch any of this? Okay. I did watch it. I didn’t get to see a whole lot of it. I saw the tail end of the lead competition. They had 80% humidity there. So already, when you think about that and trying to hang on to these grip, these boulders, that’s pretty incredible.

They did use lots of chalk. I will say that. But, uh, gold went to Spain’s Alberto heinous Lopez. Silver went to the USS Nathaniel Coleman and bronze went to Austria Yacob Schubert, and the lead competition was really cool because one of the things they did nicely on the feed was show you how high up some of the other, the other leaders had gone.

And basically Yacob was the last competitor to go. If he got so far up. The, uh, favor one of the leading climbers in the world, Adam Aandra would have won a medal or won the gold, but he got a little further, which made Alberto heinous Lopez win. And it was just kind of interesting to see how somebody else’s competition affected the whole rank.

Going down. It w I think it was cool. I I’m looking forward to tuning into the women and seeing how they do, and I hopefully can watch more of the competition. It’s kind of a long event, but it looks like a lot of fun to me in table tennis. We had the women’s team event you watched. I watched the

Alison: gold medal round.

Okay. And how was that? China blue. Japan away. Wow. Just, it was so decisive and clear that China. [00:50:00] Just superior to them. The only thing that bothered me was China does a lot of yelling. Oh

Jill: yeah. I heard it’s like Monica

Alison: Celis in tennis though. I just dated myself.

Jill: When you don’t date ourselves, somebody on a, uh, Twitter, the person who runs games and rings blog brought up the triple cast to the Olympic triple cast.

And granted, she was very young when the triple cast came out, but it was back in 88. I think you could, NBC was selling this package where you could get three channels of Olympic coverage and it just sounded fantastic. But to a little girl, it was way beyond her financial reach. Anyway, back to back to modern times,

Alison: back to modern times, the Chinese were just yelling all the time.

And the most fascinating thing was I never watched the serve so closely. Some of them stare at the ball, like they’re manifesting it, but they stare into the eyes of the ball. You will cause an ACE.

Jill: And it usually did. Apparently it did. And they did talk

Alison: pimples. Like we talked with Millie Tapper.

Jill: Interesting. So, uh, in that competition, Bronson went to Hong Kong who defeated Germany 3, 2, 1 in volleyball. We had the men semi-finals ROC defeated, Brazil, three to one, and France defeated Argentina three zero. So it’ll be R O C and France for the gold and Brazil versus Argentina for the bronze. In water polo, we had the women’s classification matches for fifth through eighth places.

And, uh, the women’s semi-final. So Netherlands defeated China 13 to six, and the Australia defeated Canada 14, 12. Those were the fifth through eighth places. And the semi-final was USA defeated, ROC 15 to 11, and Spain defeated hungry eight to six. So us and Spain we’ll go for the gold and ROC will avert and hungry.

We’ll go for bronze. Wrestling, which I did tune into. Again, we had men’s freestyle 57 kilos gold went to ROC you give silver, went to India’s Kumar, Ravi, which was a big deal. And I saw this mansion and it would have been like one of their first gold medal, again with India, with the gold medal. We know from reading Albina Bender’s book.

How I want to say crazy, or just how intense that time was because Italy. India’s first individual gold medal of their Olympic history and they keep hoping for the next one. And bronze is went to neuro slum, sunny of from Kazakhstan and Thomas Patrick Gilman from the U S in the women’s freestyle 57 kilograms.

Japan won a gold, which would make you happy because this is the division where the sister moved up a division so that her other sister could compete as well. And now they both have won gold medals, which was, I will take that even though she did take out our Helen mirrorless, but silver went to Belarus arena.

Kurt kina bronzes went to Helen Ruelas. Uh, fantastic boat on technical superiority. It was, and that means basically she won 10 to nothing or 11 to nothing. It was. A very, very good about and bronzes, uh, also went to Evelina, uh Nikolova from Bulgaria and in the men’s freestyle, 86 kilos USA’s David Taylor got the gold.

This was a good match. He beat, uh, Iran Hassan. Yes, Daneen Shirati and he got it. He was losing by one point and with about 10 seconds left, he got a take down and that propped them over and he won the gold on that. And then he got up and he had this giant hole in the back of this signal. Like the seam head Hedrick depart from the rest of it.

Like this gaping hole in his back, but he was so thrilled, uh, walked around and was like, you know, I won the gold medal. They can never take that away from me. Just the realization of what it means to be an Olympic champion was really interesting to watch.

Alison: He didn’t have a wardrobe malfunction

Jill: though, with the tear.

No, I don’t think so. I think it was just part of the action that. No surprise that happens. No, but nothing on tour. Um, but that’s definitely a match worth going back and watching that’s for sure. And Brontez in that division. Went to RFCs our turn and uh, oh, San Marino’s Myles Nassim. Amini. San Marino walking away for, with three medals so far.

I don’t know where they still can be.

Alison: What is going on San

Jill: Marino? No, it’s fantastic. And now they both

Alison: have men’s and women’s medals, right?

Jill: It’s intense. And the dulcet tones of Jason Bryant, heavy San Marino. T-shirt now [00:55:00] a Breslin TV. Feel good story at the game, San Marino, we’d like to take a second to thank our Patreon patrons whose ongoing donations help keep our flame alive.

And those continue to propel our buzzers. And the more patrons we have, the more things we can do with the podcast. If you’d like to make an ongoing contribution, please check out Patreon.com/flame alive pod. All right. Shook, Liston. Watch what is on tap for day 15.

Alison: Jacqueline Semino and team Canada begin the team artistic swimming competition with the technical routine.

Evan Dunphy is up in Sapporo for the 50 kilometer race walk. Tom Scott competes in the 75 kilogram division of Kara karate’s, Kuma, Tay, and Samantha shelter competes and modern pentathlon.

Jill: Wow. So even though the games are winding down, shook is still here. All right. That means it’s time to say CYA Nara as always.

You can email us at flame alive. Pottage gmail.com or text or voicemail us at 2 0 8 3 5 2 6 3 4 8 2 0 8. Flame it, you can follow us on Twitter and Insta at flame alive pod. And also we had to keep the flame alive podcast group on Facebook, which has been so much fun to hang out with during. Please do not forget our Kickstarter and help us reach our goal of bringing you on the ground coverage at Beijing that’s kickstarter.com/profile/flame alive pod.

As we go out to music by mercury sunset. Thank you so much for listening and until tomorrow, keep the flame alive.