Amazed we don't have a thread yet. I will do up a fancier OP tomorrow but this will do for now as a placeholder.

Women's softball opens the games in roughly 5hrs with soccer/football, archery and some other sports starting before the opening ceremony Friday night Japan time.

PREDICTIONS: Rona causes a stupid amount of issues, I still waste approx 100hrs of coverage anyway.

Why have a thread when the event is about to be cuncelled? And change the thread title to 2020 Summer Olympics from Tokyo

I love me some Summer Olympics, but this is going to be a mess with people teams having to sit out.

Why does archery start early, not a sport I've ever focused on?

I love the Summer Olympics.

Change the title, nah, I reckon people will be able to find it easily enough.

And cancellation? Please, zero chance now that there are all there. Obviously some athletes might get screwed, but such is life I guess.

Archery has a "ranking round" which I guess you can call qualifiers for their events on Day 0/Friday. They start giving out medals for their events on Day 1 with the Mixed Teams.

Now, I have no idea why they can't move that all a day back (the last event is Day 8 of the Olympics) but nevertheless here we are. Maybe this venue is also used for another sport? Or they just really want to give out medals on Day 1 of the Olympics.

Who doesn't. It is a shame I have a new job and will actually have to do some work for the second week, but it is what it is.

Softball results today

Australia 1 - 8 Japan (5)
Italy 0 - 2 USA

USWNT getting pissed on by Sweden

I think Australia is great and love to go but Brisbane getting the 2032 Olympics seems pretty random. A relatively small city and far for the rest of the world in terms of travel. I know they like second and third tier cities but shocked they’d pick a city like Brisbane, but I didn’t realize they were favorites.

Literally no one else bidding made it that far into the bidding.

Gold Coast (1hr down the road) hosted the Commonwealth Games (diet coke Olympics for British nations/colonies with 25% of the athletes) well enough and Australia has always over-prioritised things like sporting stadia etc... so they would be fine assuming COVID hasn't killed us all by then.

Great news that my city won the Olympics for 2032.

But can't help but think of this Simpsons episode for the similarities and why I still thought we would fail at the final hurdle (pardon the pun).

Population of Brisbane: ~2.44 million
Population of Atlanta: ~520 thousand

Bunkshakinghead.gif

Anyway, can't say that I'm too fired up about these Olympics. Will probably still watch some of it, especially the swimming, but overall, meh.

Between the crappy time zone, covid, and it being the summer Olympics, probably the games I'll see the least of since Sidney. Will try to catch some of the table tennis and sports that only come up every four years like field hockey and rugby 7s

City population isn’t the best metric, the metro area at the time had around 3M in Atlanta and they sold it as a third world city. The games were also held throughout Georgia and in other states for things like soccer.

The Atlanta metro area is the same size as the South East Queensland metro area, which has a population of 3.8m and is also hosting events. Football is being played in Sydney and Melbourne as well.

Brisbane won it because nobody else wanted it

The biggest issue for Brisbane is how the public transport will stack up.

I mean they are building an underground rail system to the athletics stadium which will be ready for the games which is fine but for the other major sporting precinct being the swimming where I assume it will be held at Chandler (together with the velodrome) there are no trains that run out there but only buses and there isn't even a bus way there and you need to fight like peak hour traffic to get there.

Plus there is nothing out there - no nearby pubs, eating places. It is just suburbia with a city dump opposite it and a huge nursery that once was but has closed now and is overgrown and being used as a driving centre. There is going to need to be some serious infrastructure planning and delivery to have these games work in Brisbane.

This won't be as good as the euros.

The last part now makes the most sense.

This is one of those weird US things, but the Atlanta city limits have nothing to do with what the city is. The population of what any sane person considers Atlanta is closer to 5 million.

Bolded is not at all how they sold it. It had one of the world's biggest airports and could cover the hostelry needs of the Olympics with almost no perturbation of daily life because hosting big conventions was already a part of its economy.

They sold the city as the shining light on the hill in a sea of backwardness.

And they used Andrew Young, former UN ambassador, to recruit the vote in Africa. Some scholarships helped too.

Looking back, the 96 Olympics would probably explain why E3 moved to Atlanta for a few years in 1997 and 1998. I presume it was part of the legacy side of it.
Bloody awful venue compared to the traditional LA location. The only saving grace was the Foo Fighters and Soul Asylum playing live on top of a carpark at the Sony party.

Atlanta was the all Olympic low from the point of view of the local setup, what it did for the city. Impossible to go lower.

well greece went bankrupt after athens

Anyone have a guess as to how much money Tokyo is going to lose from hosting these games with no fans?

Is the IOC allowing ground and stadium sponsors to make up for no fans? It would be strange if they didn't.

correlation is not causation, their national sport is tax evasion

will probably be watching some of the hockey if it's at a reasonable hour but that's about it