(07-20-2021 11:08 AM)BruceMcF Wrote:  

(07-20-2021 09:17 AM)quo vadis Wrote:  

(07-20-2021 08:51 AM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  

(07-15-2021 08:06 AM)AssyrianDuke Wrote:  The Olympics have always been awful and overrated; what started out as a way for rich people to compete amongst themselves and exclude the lower class rabble has somehow gotten worse. Shameless money grabs (well, except for the host country, who is left with the bill and a higher rate of VD), sports no one really cares about, and Bob Costas forcing you to be sad for any competitor that ever knew someone that died? SIGN ME THE EFF UP!

That said, JMU has three alumni in the Games this year: https://jmusports.com/news/2021/7/14/wom...mpics.aspx

To each his own. I love the Olympics. Ultimately, I love watching people compete at the highest level with the highest stakes. Now, I get that the IOC is a terrible organization and their bidding process has perfected Chicago-style political corruption (which ironically was used to choose Rio over Chicago for the 2016 Olympics), but the Games themselves are truly great.

I haven't seen a full Illini Olympian list anywhere yet, but I know that there's at least one track athlete, two gymnasts and two golfers heading to Tokyo.

Me too. I'm a huge fan of the Olympics, winter but especially summer. But with no fans in the stands, I wonder if I will enjoy this Olympics as I have all the others.

Frankly, the biggest downer is the opposition from the Japanese. The most recent poll I saw says 78% of Japanese think the Olympics should not go forward because of the virus.

IMO, that is incredible. The virus has killed a total of 15,000 people in a country of 126 million, and right now, the seven-day moving average for deaths is .... 15 per day.

To me, the Japanese people have lost their minds over the virus (in that, they are by no means alone, btw). Fine, that's their prerogative. But it has cast a huge negative cloud over these games to me.

Yeah, they are focused on an elimination strategy, because they don't want to end up like the US or the UK. Maybe they think that with an aging and shrinking population, they can't afford to be as reckless in killing their people.

Well, I'm not sure the Japanese are "focused on an elimination strategy", when their vaccination efforts have been so poor, and because there's no evidence that the virus can be "eliminated" from any but extremely tiny, low population and isolated places, which Japan isn't.

The Japanese are nutso in my view, as were the USA and the UK with our endless lockdowns and denigration of mass social and economic life, all over a virus that probably kills about 1 in 280 people if it ran wild, with an extreme skew in risk towards the extremely elderly. Heck, about 2.2 million Americans die every year before the virus, we didn't upend our world to try and save them - and we could have.

I would never, ever, want 280 people to have their lives upended in order to try and save me. We should have used extreme direct measures to protect the elderly from the virus as best we could (the handling of nursing homes and other facilities for the elderly was a true catastrophe), but otherwise, lived our lives.

But that's just me. And sadly, the media panicked the vast majority into thinking otherwise. They are still trying to do it with incessant blather about the "Delta Variant" and ominous talk about needing to return to masking and maybe shutdowns again.