I have noticed a lot of people coming into the site searching for “Olympic Medal Design”, and I felt bad because I don’t think they found what they were looking for. Here’s an image from the associated press that describes the Medal Design.
It’s interesting to note that the back of each medal is unique to the sport that it is awarded in. I wonder if multi-gold medal winners ever swap medals with other winners in an effort to “collect them all.”
Excellent work on the previous two Caption Contests. Let’s see how you do with this image:
Be sure to check out the Buy.com deal of the day (linked to on the sidebar) - it’s kind of like Woot, only less trendy. Today they’ve got a 1 gig USB 2.0 flash drive for $30 - if anyone’s in need of portable storage.
This is an actual scene from an actual Olympic Ice Dancer program. This is the second of three Olympic Caption Contests. Get in on the fun now 
Please keep your captions PG-13 or lower
This is the first of three days of consecutive caption contests. All of these will deal with the Olympic Winter games.
In a society where the line that divides the roles of men from the roles of women is erroding away, perhaps there is nowhere that erosion is happening faster than in the world of Figure Skating. For years, these girly men non-traditional males have endured snickering and sneers for their outlandish outfits and their rather feminine sport. At the Turino games, Bulgarian couple Denkova and Staviyski have taken additional steps toward gender neutrality. Both skaters, you see, have the same haircut!
Question: Look at this image quickly. Which one is the guy and which one is the girl?
Biathlon: Coolest Olympic Sport Biathlon, unfortunately, doesn’t sound like it is a cool sport. It doesn’t involve sequen-bedazzled skaters doing triple axles while wearing short skirts like Men’s figure skating does - and it doesn’t involve lazy stoners flipping themselves in crazy ways like Olympic Halfpipe does - but it does have something that no other sport has. It has guns.
Biathlon has guns.
In Biathlon they ski around a course and shoot targets (they have 4 to shoot at at each station - two standing, two prone). If they miss a target, they have to do a “penalty lap” around a little oval off to the side of the shooting area. The targets are incredibly small, and the athletes are incredibly accurate: the winners often go the entire race without missing a single target.
I want to see a Summer Olympics Biathlon - with handguns
I want to see a Summer Olympics Biathlon - with runners and handguns. To make it even more difficult - the target would be on a track so that they would be constantly moving - and the runners hand to turn and shoot them on the run. Sure, it would be a difficult thing to do - but if you make a Gold medal in that category and some country will devote a lot of resources to being the top “run and gun” country in the world. (Kind of like South Korea and Short track speedskating)
Eliminate the “no shooting each other” rule
The only problem with Biathlon is the lack of threat from competitors. They should have some special qualifying round (like a blindfolded shooting round or something) where the winner of that round gets a special designation. A “License to kill” if you will. This person, when they are headed towards the finish line - had the ability to use his rifle for more than target practice - and can down the guy in front of him if he needs to. 
I think that would make the games much more interesting than they currently are - with everyone toting guns but nobody shooting them. It also would not cause the anarchy that giving everyone the ability to shoot whenever they want too would. Maybe they could use paintball to try to cut down on fatalities, I don’t know. These are issues for the IOC to work out.
technorati tags: Biathlon, Olympics, Torino, violence, shooting
If you have watched any of the Olympic figure skating, you have probably heard about the new judging system. There are now 12 judges. Of those 12 judges, 9 of the judges are chosen at random by a computer. Of those 9, the highest and lowest scores are removed. The remaining 7 scored go into judging the competition.
Those familiar with statistics and probability (obviously this would not include the idiots who came up with the scoring system) will notice immediately that this has a critical, unintented flaw. The computer can potentially have a big influence over the final results.
John Emerson, an assistant professor of statistics at Yale, has a very detailed page describing the nature of the flaws. He breaks down a recent figure skating competition that was scored under the new rules and discovered:
Only 50 of the 220 possible panels would have resulted in the same ranking of the skaters following the Short Program. Scores calculated using all of the twelve judges would have resulted in the same ranking, but with slightly different numerical scores.
Random elimination of a different set of judges could have radically changed these standings. Only [the first place finisher’s] standing was secure; each of the other skaters could have placed as high as 2nd or as low as 5th in the Short Program. If the scores had been similarly close following the Free Skate (they were not, fortunately), the medal standings would have been determined by the random selection of the panels of judges.
The mathematics behind it all is very interesting - but the jist of it all is that they need to bag the whole random/throw-out-scores thing and just go with the 12 judges.
He’s updated his page and now provides a breakdown of the Olympic pairs results. There was a 1/8 chance that the 4th place finishers would have had the Bronze medal - based on the selection of the judges. He has provided his Excel files to anyone who wants to run through the calculations for themselves.
Click here to go to his page
We have added the Torino Olympics Medal Count (powered by Yahoo) to the sidebar of RyeBlog.
If you don’t want to see the medal count - just don’t expand the menu. (This will allow you to avoid “spoiling it” if you are planning on watching the games and you realize that your favorite country didn’t get any new medals that day so therefore you know that athlete X will not win…)
Another less cool way of viewing the medal count involves Google. Simply searching for “medal count” on Google http://www.google.com/search?q=Medal+count (or anything roughly related to olympic medals will also work) and the current medal count will show up in a little box above the search results.
Update:
You probably want to rely on my medal count - Google doesn’t know how to count, apparently:
In pair figure skating, Americans Rena Inoue and John Baldwin landed the first Triple Throw-Axel in Olympic competition. In the replay, you can easily see Inoue’s movements - thanks to a new feature of the Torino Olympics. Open space.
The general lack of crowds at the pairs figure-skating competition was hard to ignore. Large gaps of lower-section seating was completely unclaimed. Entire rows of expensive seats behind the judges are completely empty. It made the games feel a little cheaper - like a UVSC (or high-school girl’s) basketball game. Torino is supposed to be a bigger city than Salt Lake - so where are the crowds?
If you look closely, most of the “spectators” in this shot are actually ushers.
