Olympics 2024

He’s also the bitchiest commentator around too. Meouw

Rick terribly sorry, but rowing is an endurance sport, not a sprint. Race times.vsry from 5.30- 7+ minutes depending on boat class. So falls between 1500m and 3000m in running.

Like those sports, the athletes have an anaerobic budget to spend, and how they spend it varies over the course of a race. How much they have is athlete dependent.

No idea what you are talking about when it comes to technique. Suspect neither do other rowers. But on technique, some rowers are better at higher rates than others. Some better at starts, due to peak power available, or their height. Some are better able to handle rough conditions, which change over a course. Also factor in that the cost of a push varies depending on those conditions.

Psychology doesn't play a part in any sport does it Rick? Not at all a benefit to be in the lead, or to have momentum.

Why are you talking such nonsense then? And why are your views so out of kilter with people who have actually held an oar?

And I'm not talking about psychological differences. It's the interplay between physiology, conditions, technique and psychology. Bit like lots of sports.

Anyway, Brit women’s 4 get payback for the women’s quad success yesterday, and lose by a similar margin to the Dutch

In most sports a slight negative split is usually quickest as you can always produce a bit of an anaerobic sprint right at the end, but obviously if you do that at the start you'll be unable to hold threshold pace for the rest of the race as you'll be in oxygen debt. I guess there's also the psychological aspect if another team gets ahead of you as well.

I would assume GB had a race plan in that race which involved sprinting the last 4-500, I doubt they are doing this totally on the fly!

the highest even effort that does not result in a collapse before the finish. AMA

That’ll by why Kipchoge famously had a phalanx of runners to draft and a car with windbreak to follow for his 2hr effort.

And drafting is material on the Alp as they’re going at 20+kph. So again, the competitors around you affect your race and visa versa.

He had pace makers. Hard to say if the actual draft was significant, any more so than aerodynamic sunglasses. Since runners run side by side a lot when racing against each other, and don't stay in groups on flat courses until the final few metres, it kind of tells me that it's not that big a factor.

"Lane racing = no tactics" is inconsistent with reality, though not inconsistent with even pacing being the best strategy.

When W&G Junior made her competitive debut in the 200 freestyle aged 13, she got a bit carried away, and matched the fastest swimmer alongside her over the first 50m, before dying a horrible death from 125m onwards. She resolved to do her own thing from thereon. Her first 50 that day remains her fastest ever first 50, despite having improved by 10s+ overall at the distance.

All subsequent major races have followed the standard blueprint: Watch the opposition steam into the distance in the first 100m and then catch most of them up in the second half, simply by maintaining more speed than her rivals. The tricky part is judging how far to let key rivals get ahead before upping the effort levels.

Fairly obviously, I hope, to maintain a pace involves an increasing level of pain, the best proxy for effort level whilst swimming. Too far ahead, and you'll never catch up; too little ahead and you'll die with them in the second half. Equally obviously, I hope, you don't know how fast you're going in absolute terms (any form of pacing from poolside is against the rules) or what your best performance on the day might be. e.g. Junior's PB was 2:10, but on a good day, she could be anything between 2:11 and 2:13, which represents quite a difference in terms of lap times for optimum pacing strategy.

So there is no alternative but to base your pacing strategy on past experience and what's happening in real time in your race, which I think is "tactics" in long-winded form. Spectators' favourite races are in finals where someone in an outside lane "goes for it" in the hope they get so far ahead un-noticed that supposedly faster rivals in the middle don't pull them back. (It's apparently rare to know how you've done in a swimming race at the end other than relative to the lanes alongside - maybe 2 each side - until you've seen the scoreboard.)

Sometimes swimmers / relay teams will hold back in the heats to get an outside lane to benefit from this, so the race can start the day before the race!

All that said, at the higher ends of the swimming world, PBs for non-sprint distances i.e. 200m+ are pretty much all done via even pacing, with 2 seconds off the first length due to the dive. But not every race is a PB. Most times folk get things wrong, albeit by small margins, and go more slowly than perhaps they could have done, but top level sport depends very heavily on such "fine margins".

And obviously, the tactics in multi-lane racing are very much simpler than mass-start cycling or running races, but the tactics are still a key element of the race.

I've made the point a couple of times above that you can't know this in advance. Hence you can't go at your precise optimum pace from the start as a matter of choice.

For a few years in my early teens, our Scout group manned the start boats/pontoons at the Evesham Regatta. I recall a pretty high ratio of macho egos, and not all facing backwards. The older competitors, particularly single sculls tended to be much less dickish.

The rumour is the Turkish shooter is one of the world's top hitmen.

Trump would been dead if he'd been given the gig instead of the student.

Murray going out with a bang looking tough atm.

I am going to say this, and appreciate I am in a minority. I always thought Murray was more naturally talented than Djokovic and Nadal. I am not suggesting he was a better player, obviously the results speak for themselves.

Possibly, you could make an argument for. He did have a wonderful feel for the ball and was a brilliant defensive player but seemed to get better results when he was attack minded.

I grew up with the likes of Jeremy Bates and reaching the last 16 of Wimbledon once a year was a big deal. Murray was the real deal, I’ll miss him, a huge hole for British tennis to fill.