Topic: Olympic Review Part 1 from Bud Charniga

[Shaun Le Conte]

Bud wrote a review of the Olympics on his Sportivny Press web site:

http://www.sportivnypress.com/English/frames.html

Find there - it's in the competition report section.

I like the photos and what he had to say in his comparison of the Russians and Chinese.



Shaun

[Brooke Burkhalter]

It sounds like the Chinese men lift similar to the Bulgarians leading up to the comp. Plus the pulls.

[Dave Chiu]

It's interesting to think...

Were the Russians "scared" by the Greek, Bulgarian, etc. positives?

Why didn't Klokov, Chigishev, etc. under-perform?

Were the Russians expecting the Chinese to also be "off their game"?

Did the Russians have an off-site training hall?

Is the flexibility of the Russian selection system worth emulating? 

The US trials system is "transparent", but probably less than smart when we are no longer expected to dominate outside of Swimming and Basketball.

It's not an easy thing to have a multi-factor selection (witness the BCS).

BB has it easy, as the coach can make game-day adjustments that reflect reality.

Yes, the failure of '08 is primarily due to USAW, but the gross shortfall of athlete participation due to the IWF is a major factor as well.

[Dave Chiu]

PS --

Chinese names go w/ the surname first.

So it would be more consistent to refer to Liu and Cao along w/ Slivenko, etc.

Chinese surnames are almost NEVER multi-syllabic, and the growing confidence of the Chinese caused them to be more true to themselves by insisting their athletes not have their names listed western style some years ago.

Chinese names sound better in the proper order (at least if you speak Chinese), since they are designed to be spoken in that order, and have a more limited variety of syllables/sounds than English. 

Also, they never have a domestic reason to list their names in reverse order, as we do here.