2012 London Olympic Games
, but the Canadian defender should have braced her hands behind her back.
It's women's soccer, c'mon!
A handball should not be awarded if a player is ruled to have handled the ball accidentally.
I think Pederson was favouring the Americans accidentally on purpose.
It's true that the ref could have not called a penalty and there would be the same, if not slightly less, amount of controversy. But the usual metric is the classic: "I've seen them given." The general rule for defenders in the box when expecting a cross or shot is to get your damn hands behind you, face be damned!
But the indirect free kick in the first place was 100% bullshit. Astonishing. I'd like to know if the ref herself had ever made that call in her career prior to yesterday's match.
Apparently FIFA will be investigating the back-to-back bullshit calls in favour of .... Oh Rhett, it's the YANQUIS!
I like how the women's soccer team is doing - their new coach from NZ is doing wonders.
How does someone who stumbles in a trampoline event get a medal?
I'd like to know that too! I watched that and was yelling at the TV. Seriously, Cockburn does an almost perfect routine and doesn't even medal, while He Wenna polishes the trapoline with her ass at the end of her routine and SHE gets bronze? W. T. F.
And don't get me started on the soccer match yesterday. That's my next post, which I'll have to edit heavily for profanity. Good on Tancredi for telling it like it is to that dumbass ref. It's kind of hard to win a soccer game when you have to play against the other team AND the ref!
Also, why does FIFA get to decide what happens and who plays at the Olympics?
BTW, now American fans, egged on by NBC Sports, are going on about how Tancredi supposedly stomped one of their players' heads during the match yesterday. The proof is some grainy video on YouTube that is completely inconclusive - you can't tell whether she even touched the other player, much less did any stomping. But that isn't stopping them from calling Canadians hypocrites for "whining" about the fact that the ref did more to win that match for the American players than the American players did.
I think, by the way, that it's total horseshit that players are supposedly not allow to criticize refs even after the game is over. Sure, okay, you can't question them during the game - I can understand that because otherwise it would make it hard for the ref to officiate the game. But afterwards? What crap. How convenient is that? You can do as shitty a job as you like and the players aren't allowed to say anything at any time about it?
And if that IS against the rules, then why isn't FIFA investigating the fact that Wambach berated the ref into making that shitty call DURING the game?
Yes, and from here on I will be referring to the infamous back-to-back bullshit calls as just BBBC or even just 3BC for brevity.
Pederson sucks! And I think there should be trade sanctions levied against Norway. I hate that whole country after this.
Ha! Well, I wouldn't go that far. :)
But you can bet I'll be wrapping myself in a Japanese flag during the gold medal match!
Maybe FIFA can finish the job that Pederson started, and have their officials hand the bronze medal match to France by banishing Sinclair and Tancredi from it, now that their officials handed yesterday's game to the US.
Well it's USA vs. Japan in the gold medal game. GO JAPAN!!!!!! 
I've been working on renovations so I've missed a lot of this. However, I just saw on the news that some Olympic body is considering punishing the Candian team for complaining about a referee's call. Would this be in the soccer game?
No - they're apparently being investigated for remarks they made AFTER the game, not during.
Oh, okay - thanks!
Just watching the balance beam now - I don't know how the heck these women do this!
An interesting comment from the colour commentator. He says that the women who compete sometimes have "superstitions" about what to do on game day in order to win. One of them is to chew each morsel of food the exact same number of times, and perfectly equal sides of their mouths.
It creeped me out, because this is one of the classic symptoms of anorexia - having these kinds of food rituals. And gymnastics is infamous for encouraging eating disorders in its athletes.
Just saw this: FIFA Considers Action Against Canada Over Referee Comments
excerpt:
FIFA is considering disciplinary action over blistering comments from the Canadian women's soccer team about the refereeing of their semifinal loss to the United States at the London Olympics.
FIFA says its disciplinary panel is "analyzing incidents that occurred after" Canada's 4-3 defeat following extra time on Monday.
Canadian forward Christine Sinclair, who scored all three goals, later said "the ref decided the result before the game started."
A spokesman for the Canadian Soccer Association says the team will not comment on the investigation until FIFA makes a decision.
----------------------------
Some pro-Canada comments follow the article.
These are the folks who will be conducting this so-called "investigation"
I don't have a problem with a world sporting body sanctioning coaches or players who criticize referees. It happens all the time not only in soccer but in other sports. Referees need to feel free to make decisions without fear that they will be publicly pilloried for making a wrong one. Besides, as bizarre as that call was, there were numerous other reasons Canada lost: they couldn't defend corners, they weren't as fit as the Americans, they played to much in their own half and the American women happen to be very, very good at football.
It's a heartbreaker, but I don't think it's right to put it all down to a single call. Refs (and moderators!) have a tough job.
Besides, as bizarre as that call was, there were numerous other reasons Canada lost: they couldn't defend corners, they weren't as fit as the Americans, they played to much in their own half and the American women happen to be very, very good at football.
Oh shit, the Yanquis were stunned on their heels before the ref put them back in the game. You must have been watching another game altogether.
From where I was sitting the Canadians were playing typical modern soccer style with everyone back and defending the lead. THE LEAD as in the Yanquis were the deperate team looking to get even with the Canadians at even strength. They couldn't do it even strength and needed help from the ref. Canadians had the lead at 80 minutes and looking very good for the W until that bizarro 3BC maneuver and team Yanquis kicked the tying goal off Pedersen's whistle. And based on the USA's inability to score their first equalizer until the 54th minute, it surely wasn't looking good for them by end of regulation play. USA was the desperate team not Canada leading up the back2back hand of God interventions by Pedersen the blind referee from some godforsaken barbaric country north of England.
I still can't believe it happened and neither does our team captain who rightly spoke out against the bad refereeing.
Bad refereeing, bad result plain and simple. Yanquis and Pedersen take your bogus w and go home!
from: Embassy magazine
very interesting graphic timeline of medals won (wait 10 seconds for visuals to appear) by States both existing and non-existent, over the decades:
http://london2012.nytimes.com/results
click esp. on Montreal 1976 and Munich 1972: a different world! loads of beefed-up East Europeans winning ....
and surprised that in both 1960 and 64 the German team was a "united team", like Russia/ex-Soviets in 1992
Canada has dodged a bullet and won't be sanctioned at least before their bronze medal match against the French on Thursday.
The person I'd like to see sanctioned is the a**hole reporter who ambushed C. Sinclair with questions about the officiating and Barbara Frum style interrogation. Why does a Canadian reporter suck a Canadian athlete into stupid behaviour? Gutter journalism at its finest, for sure. As if either Sinclair or the a**hole didn't know the consequences of such whining at the Olympics.
HTFG. I hate this shite.
click esp. on Montreal 1976 and Munich 1972: a different world! loads of beefed-up East Europeans winning ....and surprised that in both 1960 and 64 the German team was a "united team", like Russia/ex-Soviets in 1992
Behold the Soviets secret weapon for training athletes during the cold war era: Tudor Bompa.
Not only did the Sovs influence the game of hockey, they introduced new ideas to exercise science in general. Bompa's periodization techniques and variations of it are used by professional and amateur athletes around the world today.
Sexism, Racism and Swimming at the London 2012 Olympics
Now like all Olympic medallists, Ye has been tested for banned substances, and has come up clean. But that’s not enough for thousands of armchair commentators who have suddenly become self-appointed experts on what could possibly be the ‘natural’ physique and capabilities of a Chinese girl. The fact that Ye, a young woman, had one lap faster than male Lochte has been bandied around as evidence that she was doping, ignoring the fact that overall Ye’s time for the 400 meters was still over 20 seconds slower than Lochte’s, and that it’s not humanly impossible for women to swim faster than men sometimes. The Daily Mail jumped on board to assert that Ye has an ‘unusually masculine physique’ in an article in which the journalist seems to refer to China and East Germany almost interchangeably. There is of course no denying that Chinese swimmers were involved in drug scandals in the 90s, but to assume Ye is doping because (a) she swum fast and (b) she is Chinese, is racism at its most plainly obvious.Denying allegations of racism, John Leonard and others have argued that their suspicions are not due to Ye’s race or nationality but simply the cold hard facts of ‘the way she won the race’. Ye’s swim was ‘an anomaly’ that needs to be pointed out and questioned, they assert, ignoring the fact that every world record breaking swim is, by definition, an anomaly. No woman in history has ever swum that race that fast before, it was ‘an outrageous performance’, Leonard asserts, ‘unprecedented in any way, shape or form in the history of our sport’. Well, yes sweet pea, on the one hand, that’s what a new world record is, and then on the other, it is not that outrageous. Ye only broke the world record by 1 second, and even at the age of 16 she has been swimming internationally for some time already. Leonard claims that Ye’s improvement of 5 seconds over 400 meters makes her swim suspicious, yet young swimmers often take chunks of time off their personal bests – as a teenager Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe also took 5 seconds off his personal best over 400 meters at the 1999 Pan Pacific championships, and just last night 15 year-old US swimmer Katie Ledecky took almost 10 seconds off her personal best to win the 800 meters freestyle. Yet Leonard is not raising any suspicions there.
But were any of Ledecky’s laps faster than a man’s? Well it is more difficult to work out because the distance pool swim for the men is 1500 meters rather than 800 meters, so there’s no direct comparison to draw from. It would be well within the mathematical capabilities of the ‘sports scientists’, coaches, journalists and other commentators to work out her comparative lap speeds, but we won’t know because they won’t bother because Ledecky is not Chinese. She’s white American, and they are supposed to take chunks off their personal bests, break records and win gold medals. For them, it’s just natural.
Unable to offer any actual evidence that Ye was doping, media attention turned to her training regime. Whereas sports enthusiasts generally pride themselves on how hard ‘their’ athletes train and how much they want to win it ‘for team GB/Australia/ team USA/insert country here’, the internet was suddenly full of scathing attacks on what, having never been to China and having no understanding of Chinese culture, they assumed Ye’s tortuous training regime and nationalist indoctrination to be. Images from a Chinese article about unhappy children at gymnastic training camps were taken out of context by western journalists to prove how heinous and inhumane the ‘brutal training camps‘ of China really are. Whereas identifying sporting potential at an early age and receiving a sport scholarship to live and train at a specialist institute is held in the highest prestige in Australia, the US and other western countries, the same practices in China were deemed barbaric, heartless and reflective of China’s vicious one-party ‘totalitarian’ regime.
Now, I don’t have room here to go into the details of the Chinese political system and the life chances or ‘happiness levels’ of an average Chinese citizen compared to citizens of multi-party western states. But no one reacted to Michael Phelps’ highly anomalous 17 Olympic gold medals by opening up a debate about the various problems of the US political system and the desperate measures that US athletes go to in the hope of Olympic glory. And at any rate, anyone who thinks human rights violations and standards of living are significantly worse in China than they are in, for example, the US, needs to have a critical think about the criteria they are using to make those judgements. None of this is to say that they aren’t massive problems with the Chinese state, but ultimately, it has to be asked why it is that when a young Chinese woman wins an event in a white-dominated sport, white men the world over feel both the need and entitlement to prove that she must have either been cheating, or that she’s subject to a tortuous training regime unthinkable in the liberated west. So, true to every bad Hollywood movie you have ever watched featuring an Asian woman, she must either be a villain or a victim. In actual fact, Ye Shiwen is the hero in this story, and it’s about time we let her have the credit she deserves for playing that role in these Olympics.
Good article. Yeah doping in America isn't talked about much. U.S. sports at all levels are rife with drug use. Why cheat in America? Because with a system designed around the profit motive, there will be cheating.
Good article. Yeah doping in America isn't talked about much. U.S. sports at all levels are rife with drug use. Why cheat in America? Because with a system designed around the profit motive, there will be cheating.
So, the Eastern Bloc countries, in the heyday of the USSR and its satellites, were as pure as snow when it came to doping because they weren't driven by the profit motive?
Good article. Yeah doping in America isn't talked about much. U.S. sports at all levels are rife with drug use. Why cheat in America? Because with a system designed around the profit motive, there will be cheating.
So, the Eastern Bloc countries, in the heyday of the USSR and its satellites, were as pure as snow when it came to doping because they weren't driven by the profit motive?
I didn't say that. There were athletes on both sides of the political divide shooting dope into their veins. Doping occurred on both sides.
The difference was, I am saying, was training techniques. Russian, Bulgarian and Ukrainian weightlifters, for example, dominated that sport for decades. The dope only works so much before something else has to kick-in. So if both sides were doping, and one side dominates certain strength-based sports for decades, what else is there?
It was obviously training technique. Plyometrics, a training technique used for developing explosive muscle power, I believe, was first developed in East Germany. Periodization? That's Bompa.
Russian and Chinese, Canadian and British athletes are not following Joe Weider's half-baked methods. Bompa is there at York University, and his methods continue to be a part of amateur and professional training techniques around the world. It's not a cold war secret anymore. The former Sovs no longer surprise us in hockey or weightlifting competitions or any other sport. We know their secrets.
Ayup! 
On P&P tonight one of the panelists said he has inside info on the penalties Canada will get: a $50,000.00 fine, and two player suspensions, for the offence of "referee abuse". It'll be after the bronze medal game is played.
Now they at least have to cough-up bronze medals for the best team in the world after today's victory over France.
Now they at least have to cough-up bronze medals for the best team in the world after today's victory over France.
Why would they give the Japanese (or the Americans, depending on today's match) the bronze medals?? Normally, they give gold medals to "the best team in the world"...
Yeah, but unfortunately that didn't happen today.
Canada may not have been the best team in the world - it could have been Japan. I guess we'll never know!
I wonder if that win will make up for Hope Solo's loss on "Dancing with the Stars"?
Usain Bolt is incredible to watch.
Yes, Usain Bolt just looks super human. I really think he's the best athlete I've seen in my lifetime, just unbelievable. And he seems to be having so much fun out there.
The USA's Michael Phelps is quite superhuman in the water, and I think I saw that he's the most successful Olympian of all time. The Chinese guy who swam to gold - he's ever bigger than Phelps and likely will go on to an incredible Olympic career as well.
The USA's Michael Phelps is quite superhuman in the water, and I think I saw that he's the most successful Olympian of all time. The Chinese guy who swam to gold - he's ever bigger than Phelps and likely will go on to an incredible Olympic career as well.
I think there's a reasonable chance that another Olympian, sometime in the next few decades, will eventually win more medals than Phelps (who won 22 of them, 18 of which were gold). But, I suspect that no one alive today will see another Olympian win eight or more gold medals in a single Olympiad.
Why not? You've seen someone win seven twice!
London Transport cleaners were picketing the Olympics today. There's a support campaign for them on Labour Start
So, the Eastern Bloc countries, in the heyday of the USSR and its satellites, were as pure as snow when it came to doping because they weren't driven by the profit motive?
They were driven to cheat by what were in a sense, similar motives...relative material privilege within their society.
And we can include Finnish athletes for having contributed to the early development of modern exercise science as well.
Although periodization is attributed to Russian weightlifters, Finnish cross-country skiers were responsible for introducing the early concepts of periodization. After that, Soviet weightlifting coaches came up with mathematical models for periodization; thereafter, they shared their knowledge with track and field athletes and swimmers. Swimmers shared with rowers and kayakers. Eventually every sport started coming out with their own periodization models.
Poliquin is a Canadian authority on exercise science. Periodization training is used in training athletes in a variety of sports today. Olympian Michael Phelps and USA Swimming do periodized training throughout the year.
Usain Bolt is incredible to watch.
This. Cannot be said enough. Usain Bolt is a living legend.
Usain Bolt is even more incredible to watch when they showed the replay with the commentary by the Jamaican announcer. The passion. You just don't get that from North American announcers. Absolutely love the Jamaican announcer's line after Bolt won the Men's 200m: 'Is there a throne in England big enough to hold this man? I think not!!!' 
This is def my favourite line from the London 2012 Olympics.
A comment about the track events in general. It is absolutely wonderful to watch ethnically African women and men achieve their full potential and so thouroughly dominate the sport. There are far too many aspects of the human experience in which our horribly racist capitalist-imperialist economic system prevents ethnically African women and men from achieving their full potential. I'm very glad that ethnically African women and men have track as one of the few things in this world that they have made truly theirs; and that they can achieve their full potential in track even if they come from the global south.
LOL, she looks like she is really mad that it is past her bedtime.
Yes, Usain Bolt just looks super human. I really think he's the best athlete I've seen in my lifetime, just unbelievable. And he seems to be having so much fun out there.
Some people don't like what they see...
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/olympics/usain-bolt-fiercely-criti...
[Carl] Lewis, the former 100 and 200 Olympic champion, has raised questions in recent years about Jamaican drug testing procedures.
Following Bolt's performance in Beijing, Lewis told Sports Illustrated: “Countries like Jamaica do not have a random program, so they can go months without being tested. I'm not saying anyone is on anything, but everyone needs to be on a level playing field.”
Bolt had already dealt with one question about doping when he was asked Thursday if he could guarantee that Jamaican sprinters — who swept the top three spots in the 200 — were clean.
“Without a doubt,” Bolt said, sitting in between silver medalist Yohan Blake and bronze winner Warren Weir. “We train really hard.”
Yes, because if anyone has the moral authority to question athletes' drug use and testing practices, it's Carl Lewis and US Athletics.
What I really like is that you have to athletes, Bolt and Phelps, who are absolutely dominating their respective sports and shattering records and it really seems like both of them are clean whereas so many athletes who've done so in the past (Lance Armstrong, Barry Bonds, the list goes on) turned out to be tainted.
So, Bolt just claimed to be the greatest athlete ever to live.
Anyone agree? Disagree?
I mean, he is the fastest ever in two events but it's hard to compare athletes across different sports. Is he a better runner than Phelps is a swimmer or Gretzky was a hockey player or Ali was a boxer?
Also, it's hard to compare athletes from different eras even when they're in the same sport. For the most part, athletes just keep advancing. People used to think nobody would ever be able to run a mile in 4 minutes. It was a huge deal when Roger Banister broke that in the 1950s. These days, a 4 minute mile is routinely achieved by high school runners. Better training, better equipment, better science and technology in general.
Colder war shananigans at the London Lympics.
USA! USA! USSA!
Hey, someone in the mainstream media finally mentions the profit-motive of ensuring the US played Japan for gold.
I don’t think there’s anything shocking or implausible about Canadian Olympic athletes Christine Sinclair and Melissa Tancredi suggesting the ref in their soccer semifinal was in the tank for the U.S. and would wear an American jersey to bed that night. She called what amounted to a non-existent foul at a crucial point. You have to go back to 2002 to find another instance. There’s no good explanation for it, which amounts to a licence to speculate on why she really made the call.
I don’t think the Canadians were saying the Norwegian ref is infatuated with Americans; but rather that there’s a bias at upper levels in FIFA, the Olympics and the major broadcasters for having a U.S. team in the final — much as the NHL would doubtless prefer Stanley Cup finalists from major U.S. cities for similar commercial reasons. Officials know that and if they get a chance to bolster that bias, they may, consciously or by a more tortuous route. It’s the way of the world; matters like money and audiences enter in. If you ignore those interests, you mightn’t get as many choice games to officiate.
So it wasn’t shocking or absurd to suggest that was the ref’s motive. If it’s true, her call would be wrong but at least make some sense. Yet as far as I can see there’s been almost no support for the athletes’ view, especially from journalists. At most they got sympathy for being upset and advice to move on for the bronze game, which they obviously did.
FIFA and the Olympics make a lot more money if American stations broadcast the gold medal match than if they don't. And I doubt they'd bother broadcasting it if the gold medal match had been between Canada and Japan.
Oh, and I saw a hilarious comment under a Toronto Star article on the whole refereeing debacle.
FIFA = "Fix It For Americans"
Ha!
NOW we know! Thnx Michelle.