Olympics 2024 - discussion thread

[manqiangrexue]

So... Swimming has concluded (unless you count open water, which is not even advisable in a place like Paris) and the US has 8 gold to China's 2. In Tokyo, it was 11 to China's 3. So an 8 medal margin went to 6... and last time, at least on the surface, there wasn't foul play. This time, we got these results through sleep deprivation sabotage. I'd say that's pretty good!

Los Angeles is going to be dangerous; I wouldn't even advise going cus I don't put arbitrary inprisonment or even assassination below them in America's current desperate state. If China and Russia both don't go, the US can have the self-jerk-off games. You make the medals; you compete at home; you keep 'em. Clap clap.

But beyond that, we should communicate with WADA that this is clear cheating by denying Chinese athletes sleep so they should 1. test the teams equally, not China 6x more 2. they can test our athletes before we enter a sleeping room that is free of drugs then seal the room but they must allow at least 8-9 hours of undisturbed sleep every day. These demands are so reasonable that if made public, they cannot refuse or they will look unreasonable to the whole (non-Anglo) world.

 

[Bellum_Romanum]

Birthday boy continues to make westerners seeth.

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[coolgod]

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C-C-C-C-Combo Breaker!





WTF?

 

[antiterror13]

This is the image of China in the 21st century..

Long Live the Motherland ..

I can see the possibility of banning swimming coach to China by the bully

 

[grulle]

Hong Kongers getting in on the action watching table tennis final. Good to see them supporting our athletes.

 

[CMP]

C-C-C-C-Combo Breaker!

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WTF?

I heard rumors that China paid him off. I can't believe it looks true...

Wait, I don't see this on his Insta. This a photoshop?

 

[FriedRiceNSpice]

Despite performing poorly in the individual events, Qin's performance today and yesterday were the 1st and 2nd fastest times in the 100m breaststroke at Paris. Did anyone else even manage to go sub 58 over the course of the games? Redemption arc successfully concluded!

 

[manqiangrexue]

In genetics, we are all set on the path to become women when we are conceived. Androgens produced by genes active on the Y chromosome will pull males apart from the path to become female onto the path to become male. If a person is XY with a female phenotype, it means that either the production of those androgens have been stalled or that the receptors making the body react to them have been mutated. In this case, they may be inactive, resulting in a pure female phenotype or they may be partially active resulting in an ambigious phenotype when that path is pulled towards the male path but not completely there. The latter is the case with the 2 athletes in contention. There is also the case of an XX female who is obviously masculine and has very high levels of androgens. Shouldn't this person be allowed to compete as a female because she's XX? No. Because the reason she has these abnormally high levels is because she has a part of a Y chromosome inside her X chromosome! When her father's gametes underwent meiosis, during recombination, part of his Y recombined onto his X and that X was passed onto her. So she is still partially male. Because we are all by default female at conception, there is virtually no situation where a true female can come to resemble a male as that would require multiple "gain of function" mutations that mysteriously start to produce specifical hormones that are NOT in her genome to produce.

@tankphobia
Sorry, I need to amend this. I was thinking only on the X and Y chromosomes because we were talking about those 2 possibilities. However, congenital adrenal hypoplasia (CAH), which is not a sex-chromosome related and it is actually a situation (or a group of situations) in which a true genetic female with no male input can grow to strongly resemble males.

Generally, the official way to handle this is to force them to use medications to drop their testosterone levels to below a certain threshold but that's not really fair because it's a natural genetically-defined woman using her inborn abilities. It's just that those abilities are gained through the same mechanisms by which males gain a superior physical edge over women. It also doesn't work very well because they have already taken advantage of those higher testosterone levels their whole lives and built thier bodies' foundations under those hormones so suddenly dropping the testosterone has very modest effect. Genetically speaking, I would have to medically clear this person to compete under the logic that she is 0% male and completely natural. I would also say that it is unfair to make her drop her innate testosterone levels because it is hers naturally.

However, nobody likes to see these things. If this results in a sports trend where every nation flags babies born with CAH and begins to train them for the female events, is this what we want to see? China's population means that we will have the highest number of these individuals. It is estimated that there are over 60K of them in China and over 26K of them in the US. Do you want to see the whole Chinese female team look like men? Do you want to see every female podium dominated by these individuals? Although I can not scientifically justify excluding or taking away their advantages, my ethical answer is no and I would never watch sports again dominated by these individuals. They are just too unrelatable.

 

[nimitz123]

So with the US's gold = China, what is the future competition? Are there any sports that both have the advantage? Can China's gold surpass US this time ?

 

[manqiangrexue]

So with the US's gold = China, what is the future competition? Are there any sports that both have the advantage? Can China's gold surpass US this time ?

The one major difference I can see this year is that weightlifting used to be first but now it's last so that will leave our medal count more deflated at the beginning but give us extra power towards the end. I don't know if other things got shifted around because I follow weigthlifting specifically and basically not much else. Other than that, generally speaking, at normal Olympics, China comes out with a big lead in the first week, then if the US overtakes, it does so on the last 2-3 days and once that happens, China won't have enough events to catch up.

Was hoping Jamaica would take down the US in the 100m dash but they lost by under 1/100th of a second. They literally took out the fine instruments to measure that Lyles of the US won by 5/1,000ths of a second.