The Rio Olympics have come and gone! Although there was great anxiety that it would be a cluster****, the games seem to have gone off just fine.
Because we don’t have TV at home, Katie and I were only able to watch a few select events that were made available by the BBC – mostly synchronized diving and wrestling. I have a few take-aways from having watched ~20 hours of coverage of these events:
- The BBC announcer for synchronized diving should announce all events! That guy was amazing! “Oh wow, what a dive! If that were a steak, it would be medium-rare – just perfect!” “I am literally out of my seat right now!” “Oh, goodness, she just fell like a tree – timberrrrrrrr!”
- Freestyle wrestling is more enjoyable to watch than Greco-Roman wrestling. Greco-Roman seemed to be 90% handwrestling and leaning into each other with occasional passivity penalty scores. Freestyle was more offense-driven.
- Women’s wresting is more enjoyable to watch than men’s. By and large women’s wrestling was more aggressive, more dramatic, and more interesting. At least 50% of the medals were determined by a score in the final seconds of the match whereas men’s matches always seemed to go to whoever was ahead halfway through the second period.
- There may be no crying in baseball but there is a lot of crying in wrestling! Interestingly, while the men tended to cry in victory, the women tended to cry in defeat (and beam in victory). There are several potential psychology and sociology papers to be written about that phenomenon!
- IMD has truly transformed the way I watch the Olympics. Previously I only really cared about the USA but this year I found myself cheering for Azerbaijani and Belarusian wrestlers out of solidarity with my MBA classmates. Frankly the Olympics is more fun and interesting to watch when you care about more countries than just your own!
- 379 – USA
- 221 – Great Britain
- 210 – China
- 168 – Russia
- 130 – Germany
- 118 – France
- 105 – Japan
- 084 – Italy
- 083 – Australia
- 065 – Netherlands
- 30.00 – Grenada
- 15.79 – Bahamas
- 13.90 – Jamaica
- 11.04 – New Zealand
- 08.59 – Croatia
- 06.13 – Denmark
- 05.83 – Slovenia
- 05.75 – Fiji
- 05.71 – Bahrain
- 05.38 – Hungary
- 3.00 – Grenada
- 1.64 – Jamaica
- 0.67 – Bahamas
- 0.63 – Fiji
- 0.56 – Armenia
- 0.53 – North Korea
- 0.47 – Georgia
- 0.38 – Burundi
- 0.37 – Croatia
- 0.34 – Kenya
- 15.42 – Kenya
- 13.86 – China
- 12.71 – North Korea
- 10.06 – Ethiopia
- 06.62 – USA
- 06.57 – Russia
- 05.66 – Uzbekistan
- 05.37 – Great Britain
- 04.83 – Jamaica
- 03.79 – Burundi