You need huge natural physiology though. Like cycling.
Is being a hardy hardy person a talent?
The Rio Olympics really was ruined by the locals.
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Team GB won one gold and 15 medals in Atlanta. In London they won 29 gold and 65 medals.
Part of the improvement was targetting technical events like rowing and cycling where most of the world wonât have resources to compete. The other element was going to schools and doing tests and finding kids with physical characteristics that would make them potentially good rowers/cyclists. My recollection is that They pulled funding from basketball on basis they would never compete.
Are there many Chinese rowers in this Olympics.
Anybody in the world can run for free. Itâs why the track medals are so hard to win.
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Some golds are worth more than others, whether we like it or not
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What time is the swimming on?
She could win the gold medalâ â Rhasidat Adeleke tipped for greatnesâŚ
Today at 01:30
Rhasidat Adeleke during a training session at the Stade de France yesterday. Photo: Sam Barnes/Sportsfile
There was a time when he was out there, blitzing his rivals, smashing world records, lighting up the Olympic stadium with his golden spikes and walking off with a bag full of gold medals. These days, Michael Johnson has a less-pressurised role, though itâs one in which he remains the worldâs best.
Over the next eight days, the 56-year-old Texan will be studying and commenting on the action in Paris for the BBC, his technical analysis dripping with unrivalled insights. One of the events heâs relishing most is the womenâs 400m, which will feature Irelandâs leading medal hope on the track: Rhasidat Adeleke.
âWhat Iâd say to the Irish fans, who I know are super excited about Rhasidat, is that she could win the Olympic gold medal here â thatâs a possibility,â he says. âShe could medal here, thatâs a possibility, and she could be out of the medals. All three of those are all real possibilities.â
He believes Adeleke is one of the four athletes most likely to fill the podium. The other three are Nickisha Pryce of Jamaica, Natalia Kaczmarek of Poland and Marileidy Paulino of Dominican Republic.
Adeleke has better 100m and 200m speed than all of them, but an inferior personal best over 400m.
One area Adeleke and her coach, Edrick Floreal, have sometimes disagreed on is how fast she should run the first 200m, with Floreal asking her to split 23.0 in the European final in June but Adeleke well off that with 23.69. She nonetheless smashed the Irish 400m record, finishing in 49.07 to win silver.
What does Johnson feel is Adelekeâs optimal race strategy?
âIâd absolutely agree with Edrick: sheâs gotta get out quicker. When you have that kind of speed, when speed is your weapon, you have to use it because youâre not going to be able to match them from a strength standpoint,â he says.
âThe other three are all strength runners and youâve got to use your weapon and for Rhasidat, thatâs speed. Thereâs a few different ways you can run 23 seconds in the 200m. You can run it hard or run it relaxed, but when you have her kind of speed you can run it relaxed. Thatâs much easier said than done, because relaxed doesnât mean slow.
âYouâve gotta get out quickly, get up to race pace as quickly as possible and then get into your relaxation. Once you get up to a speed, it doesnât take that much to maintain that speed, but if youâre taking a very long time to build up to that speed, itâs taking more and more out of you.
âThatâs where the issue lies for her not running the first 200 quite as fast as Edrick wants. She feels like, âIf I run that fast, itâs going to take a lot out of me and thatâs going to take a toll on the back endâ. Every 400m runner knows that and you donât want that. The key is to be able to run that fast without it taking a toll because youâre not running it tight; youâre running it relaxed.â
Johnson has known Floreal since their days competing in the NCAA and says heâs a âfantastic coachâ. In March last year, he tweeted a video of Adeleke at the NCAA Indoors and wrote: âLook out when she learns to use those arms. Sheâs carrying them instead [of] using them to drive the legs. The difference is significant over 400. Helps increase speed and reduce fatigue.â What does he make of her technique now?
âSheâs certainly improved. Iâve read some of what âCoach Floâ has said. Heâs the coach for a reason and Iâm not a coach for a reason, so I wouldnât be able to say how close she is to the finished product.
âIt sounds like sheâs still not where he wants her to be, which is good because sheâs a young athlete. Thatâs another reason why thereâs a bright future ahead.â
Earlier this year, Johnson mentioned Adeleke as one of five names who will be the future of the sport, and when it comes to the direction athletics is taking, heâs actively trying to shape it.
Earlier this year he launched Grand Slam Track, a professional league that will start in April next year, featuring four meetings, each three days long, where the focus is on pitting the best against the best. The prize money is far above that of the Diamond League, with Johnson securing $30m in investment to get it off the ground.
In recent months he announced the first two of 48 contracted athletes who will compete at every event: US superstar Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and 1,500m world champion Josh Kerr.
What fuelled him to start the league?
âPut simply, youâll see millions of people watching Paris, great track and field, the best of the best competing head-to-head,â he says. âHigh stakes and itâs not about times. Itâs not about this being a stepping stone to something else. Itâs just about winning.
âPeople enjoy that and thatâs why they watch but we donât get to see this on a regular basis. Itâs something like 2.5 billion people around the world who either watch track or are running and thereâs nothing really for them.
âIf you ask those people: âHey, if this was available to you, what you just saw at the Paris Olympics, on a regular basis, would you watch?â. And they would say yeah. And then you say, âWell, did you know that it actually does exist?â. And they say, âNo, where would I find that?â. And theyâre not finding it because you donât have the best of the best athletes competing against each other on a regular basis. You canât build a fanbase with one significant competition a year but outside that, youâve got nothing.â
The investment in Grand Slam Track has been substantial, but will it return enough to be sustainable?
âItâs a great question,â he says. âLook, Iâve been an investor and entrepreneur since I finished my career as an athlete and Iâve been very fortunate to have a few successful ventures. None of those have ever been successful or profitable in year one. Investors donât invest to make a 10 per cent profit in year one or two.
âWe invest to get four times, five times, 10 times return in 10, 15 years. UFC took 20 years to become what it is. For the first 15 years they were losing money, so youâd have to ask yourself: âHow does an organisation thatâs losing money continue to operate and lose money for 15 years?â. Itâs because investors continue to put money into that organisation. Why does the investor put money into a company thatâs losing money? Because that company or organisation is growing their customer base.
âFor us, the most important thing is not to make money in the first few years. Weâre going to continue to pour money into this sport. The most important thing we have to do is grow the fanbase and as long as we do that, weâre on track to be successful.â
Turning the focus back to Paris, the event Johnson is most looking forward to is the menâs 100m.
âItâs always known historically as the most popular event in track and field but I havenât said itâs the event Iâm most looking forward to for 16 years,â he says.
âThe standard wasnât very high at the last Olympics. The womenâs 100m was way better. The three before that I always knew who was going to win â the Bolt era. This 100m, thereâs 10 people who could win medals and six have a chance to win gold.â
So, who takes it?
âTypically, I can give you an answer and Iâd be right 60 per cent of the time. This time I canât even give you an answer. Itâs that open, and at a high level.â
An Olympic final heaps nauseating pressure on participants, particularly in sprints where the margin for error is non-existent. Whatâs the key to handling the heat in that cauldron?
âYou have to spend just as much time as an athlete figuring out how you manage pressure best so when you get to an event like this, where you are under this immense pressure, itâs not a surprise to you,â he says.
âThe biggest mistake athletes make when they find themselves in a high-pressure situation [is] never having thought about how to deal with that pressure. If they havenât worked on it, the tendency then is to try ignore it and pretend itâs not there, but it is.
âThis is the Olympic Games, the thing you dreamed about as a kid, the thing you want most. Itâs here and you are either going to succeed or fail.â
And as for the womenâs 400m, who does he think will flourish in the final?
âThe best thing about that race is I canât tell you what weâre going to see,â he says. âYouâve got four or five people there, if not six, who can win it.â
When it comes to Adeleke, Johnson believes her time will come. But given the strength and depth in her event, he canât say if thatâll be in Paris.
âThe one thing that is likely is that sometime over these next three years: sheâs going to win a gold medal,â he says. âIf it doesnât happen here, itâll probably happen at some point. She has that kind of talent.â
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Starts at 10 and our lady at 10:19. Wiffen on at 11:05 in heat 3
Full schedule
Womenâs 50m Freestyle
Multiple rounds
Today, 10:00
Menâs 1500m Freestyle
Heats
Today, 10:30
Menâs 4x100m Medley Relay
Heats
Today, 11:40
Womenâs 4x100m Medley Relay
Heats
Today, 11:52
Menâs 100m Butterfly
Final
Today, 20:08
Womenâs 800m Freestyle
Final
Today, 20:28
Mixed 4x100m Medley Relay
Final
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Fairly putting his neck on the line there
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Iâve only just got around to watching the Daina Moorehouse fight over the last 15 minutes as it clashed with the gymnastics at the time.
Christ Iâm seething with a righteous sense of injustice. Iâm angry like Stuey Byrne. Moorehouse was superb. She is a beautiful, beautiful boxer and won that fight hands down. Her post fight interview was a credit to her as well.
The administration of amateur boxing stinks.
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Itâs all about the grift. Iâd wager the IBA had been in contact with Cariniâs camp beforehand too.
https://twitter.com/irishexaminer/status/1819647798410920074
That whole saga stinks to high heaven
The Italian boxer spent about 10 seconds actually practicing her sport, the rest of the time adjusting her head piece. She never had any intention of completing the round and it would have been more honourable to have just given a walkover from the start.
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Completely bent.
Two boxing judges with âhigh riskâ of corruption working at Olympics
Emil Gurbanaliyev and Sergei Krutasov failed integrity tests in 2021 and were removed from World Championships but have officiated more than 20 bouts at Paris 2024
exclusive
|
, Chief Sports Correspondent, Paris
Friday August 02 2024, 6.15pm BST, The Times
Krutasov, centre, refereed the bout between Nesthy Petecio of the Philippines and Indiaâs Jaismine Lamboria. He and Gurbanaliyev are officiating in Paris, despite having previously failed an integrity test
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Two boxing judges that were deemed to be at âhigh riskâ of manipulating bouts and were subsequently stood down in 2021 have officiated more than 20 fights combined so far at the Olympics.
The Times can reveal that Emil Gurbanaliyev and Sergei Krutasov were randomly selected for integrity testing by Professor Richard McLaren, who exposed state-sponsored doping in Russia, in October 2021. The pairâs answers pertaining to the corruption of bouts raised alarm and they were both removed from the referees and judges pool at the AIBA World Championships in Serbia that month. Neither has commented publicly on their removal.
However, Gurbanaliyev and Krutasov, who hail from Azerbaijan and Russia respectively, were both selected as technical officials by the 2024 Paris Boxing Unit (PBU) for these Games. The IOC said it was not privy to McLarenâs findings as the information was not publicly available, and that both judges had passed background checks and vetting processes.
The IOC has directly organised the boxing in Paris after the International Boxing Association (IBA, formerly AIBA) was stripped of its recognition last year amid concerns over its finances, governance, ethics, refereeing and judging. Yet contentious scorecards have continued to prompt outcry, with Team GB adamant four of their five first-round defeats were judged incorrectly.
Gurbanaliyev and Krutasov were not involved in those bouts but were two of the five judges of the fight between Irelandâs Daina Moorehouse and Franceâs Wassila Lkhadiri on Thursday evening, in which the latter was controversially declared the winner. âI donât know what the judges were looking at,â Moorehouse, the 22-year-old from Dublin, said after her defeat.
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McLaren led the damning investigation into boxing at the 2016 Olympics that found widespread evidence of âcorruption, bribery and the manipulation of sporting resultsâ, the first part of which was published in September 2021.
Retained in a consultancy role as the head of integrity for the IBA as it sought to restore its reputation, McLarenâs team attended the World Championships in Belgrade the following month and used a test, with an âefficacy of about 97 per centâ, to divide judges into three categories: high, medium and low risk of being susceptible to corruption.
The British team have complained about the judging, including during Delicious Orieâs defeat by Armeniaâs Davit Chaloyan. Gurbanaliyev and Krutasov were not involved in any of the GB fights
JOHN WALTON/PA WIRE
âWe have a tool called Protect Sport that works using voice analytics. Emil Gurbanaliyev was tested in October 2021 in Belgrade and he returned three high-risk scores to pertinent questions we asked about match manipulation. We use that tool and then follow up by questioning the person,â McLaren told The Times.
âWe werenât satisfied with his responses and he was stood down from those World Championships. Sergei Krutasov was also tested. I was present and saw this going on. He also rated high risk on all three responses to our questions.â
Protect Sport uses questions such as âHave you ever cheated during a boxing event?â and measures a subjectâs cognitive functions through their responses. It works in two phases, with background research conducted on officials weeks prior to a tournament using military-approved cyber technology, along with investigating social media profiles, business interests and other potential red flags.
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The second phase is conducted in person through follow-up interviews with McLarenâs team. Both officials, who had not previously been named publicly, were removed from the judging pool before the competition started.
âThe issues were around the scoring of particular rounds to particular countryâs boxers,â McLaren said. âThe main motivation was for success so the federations could get more funding from their governments.â
McLaren said that neither Gurbanaliyev nor Krutasov have been used in international competition since by the IBA, but their exclusion was not binding and does not encompass other amateur boxing federations, and the pair re-emerged at the Pan American Games in Chile in October 2023, where 30 places were on offer for Paris.
They judged more than 25 bouts each in Santiago and Gurbanaliyev has since officiated at several European Boxing Confederation tournaments, while Krutasov was a judge at the final Olympic qualifying event in Thailand in June.
Gurbanaliyev and Krutasov were two of the five judges of the fight between Irelandâs Moorehouse and Franceâs Lkhadiri on Thursday
MOHD RASFAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
McLaren said his team âhad conversations with the ethics chief at the IOC about our tool â and our findings â as recently as this year, but at no point have they asked us for our information and at no point have we sent itâ. He added: âItâs possible they didnât know about Gurbanaliyev and Krutasov. What I would have liked to have done is gone through these tests that we run [with them].â
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The IOC first appointed its Boxing Task Force to oversee competitions in 2019 before the Tokyo Olympics after the IBAâs recognition was initially suspended. All referees and judges selected for Paris were assessed on performance criteria and required to complete online courses on the prevention of competition manipulation and the PBUâs code of conduct, followed by compulsory tests, with failure or suspicious behaviour prompting an official process of removal.
They are assigned to bouts by software that randomly allocates positions on predefined filter settings to ensure no individual can influence the combination for any single bout and and their performances are evaluated afterwards.
The IOC has made clear that it will not directly organise boxing again at LA 2028 and that failure to find a reliable federation to partner with will mean the sport is dropped from the Games. The IBA lost its appeal against the IOCâs decision to strip its recognition in April, with World Boxing, a new breakaway organisation, established with the aim of rescuing the sportâs Olympic future.
Team GB and Team USA joined it from the outset and have boycotted IBA events, but the civil war remains bitter and amateur boxing seemingly cannot escape controversy and scandal.
That was my takeaway too. Itâs not like this Algerian one is laying waste to the other competitors at 60kg like a young Ivan Drago.
Hard not to be anything other than cynical about her motives and performance- the punch to the face didnât exactly look like a bone rattler that she had never felt before
This boy is no daw
Paul OâDonovan: The Olympic history-maker with a relentless work ethic
In his parallel life on the riverbank OâDonovan trained first as a physiotherapist and then turned his attention to medicine
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Irelandâs Paul OâDonovan taking a selfie with supporters after receiving his gold medal. Photograph: Morgan Treacy/Inpho
Sat Aug 03 2024 - 06:00
When Paul OâDonovan and his brother Gary were small boys and ripe for wonder, their father Teddy used take them to the national championships on Inniscarra Lake and other regattas where Skibbereen crews were going into battle. In their eyes the oarsmen were giants.
They badgered their father to take them out on the water until one day he relented. Paul reckons that he was seven and Gary was eight. With nobody around to help, Teddy wrestled a boat into the Ilen river. In they jumped.
âMyself and Gary were only small boyeens at the time, we had no strength,â said OâDonovan years later. âSo he [Teddy] was dragging this big boat down the slip himself and threw it on the water. We thought we were the beeâs knees going out. Iâd say we were awful but we loved it.â
It wasnât a passing infatuation, they plunged through the surface and immersed themselves. As soon as the internet reached their home in Lisheen they scoured YouTube for old Olympic races and World Championship regattas.
READ MORE
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How must Daniel Wiffenâs success make Derry OâRourkeâs victims feel?
Rhys McClenaghan: âPerfection isnât attainable - but weâll tryâ
OâDonovan reckons he was 12 when he decided he would row at the London Olympics, six years later. Others from Skibbereen had been Olympians and that gave flesh to the dream. The 2012 Games came too soon but the Olympics would be the canvass for his glorious talent and his endless ambition.
OâDonovan is 30 now and showing no signs of slowing down. He pays a lot of attention to the science of his sport and his physiology, and before the Olympics the numbers told him that he had never been fitter.
On Friday he became not just the greatest Irish Olympian of all time, with two gold medals and one silver at three different Games, but one of the greatest rowers in the history of the Olympics. There was a Croatian crew this week, though, who reached the podium for the fourth time at the Olympics and Steve Redgrave did it in Sydney in 2000. Matching that achievement must be the next summit.
This was the last Olympics for lightweight rowing and OâDonovan has already dipped his toe in the open weight division, racing in the single at the European Championships earlier this year; he finished eighth. The only alternative is to quit. In his mind thatâs not an option.
âWe could put on a few kilos of weight,â he said before the Games, âbut we probably wouldnât put on a huge amount anyway. Even at the minute weâre not too far off the pace of the [Irish heavyweight] double. Theyâre up there consistently winning medals [Daire Lynch and Philip Doyle] and its kind of 50/50 between us who wins the pieces in the training sessions.â
OâDonovanâs haul of medals at major championships is staggering. At the latest count he has two Olympic golds, one Olympic silver, six world titles and three European titles. This yearâs World Championships take place in Canada in a couple of weeks and the programme is made up entirely of non-Olympic events. OâDonovan would have been entitled to a rest but instead he is the only one of the Olympic team to commit to an event; he will line up in the lightweight single scull.
In recent years OâDonovan has often been described as the best âpound for poundâ rower in the world. These assertions are always impossible to prove. His stamina, though, and his desire have been extraordinary. At elite level the treadmill never stops. In full training OâDonovan and McCarthy would be on the water at least six days a week. The other day might only involve a gym session but it wouldnât be a day off.
In his parallel life on the riverbank OâDonovan trained first as a physiotherapist and then turned his attention to medicine, qualifying with first class honours from UCC earlier this year. Juggling his academic life with the relentless demands of elite rowing was a remarkable feat.
In the mixed zone after Fridayâs race OâDonovan was asked if he thought he could get better still?
âI think maybe a little bit. I mean, not much. A small bit, yeah. I think over a period of time Iâll be looking to get into the open weight squad for LA, for sure.â
No end in sight.
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Mens Cycling Road Race on today. Ben Healy rated as a medal possibility but Iâd be surprised. I think Wout Van Aert will wiin it.
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Absolutely. Track gold is the pinnacle. As is swimming. Your boxing and rowing and cycling lower down. Rugby and football barely count.
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Her interview after was remarkably dignified under the circumstances. I wouldnât have blamed her in the slightest if she did a Michael Conlan and fucked the whole lot of them out of it.
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You need a lot of strenght while keeping weight down. There is a correlation to be made with rowers and musicians in keeping in tempo with the team/band. Every rower i know also plays some form of music. Lived with a fella who used to row with NUIG, he could eat like a horse and not but on weight even after he stopped rowing. Could play any instrument he picked up