British won't attend opening ceremony? Dumb move.

[Grace]

British athletes may skip London Opening Ceremony - Fourth-Place Medal - Olympics Blog - Yahoo! Sports

Very bad idea.

 

[rightwinger]

What are they thinking?

 

[FuelRod]

Yea like they have a shot at anything anyway?

 

[Grace]

If they go ahead with this, there will be a helluvalot of people that will never forget it.

 

[blastoff]

Yea like they have a shot at anything anyway?

According to a story in Sports Illustrated about 5 years ago, they actually have a plan for winning gold medals in the games.

It's a bit convoluted but here it is. Someone in the Brit Olympic hierarchy figured there were three countries likely to dominate the golds. The U.S. was one of them but not sure now about the other two, think it was China and Russia though. Anyway, conceding the top three gold winners the thinking went it would be humiliating for the host country Brits to come in any lower than 4th in the gold tally, so they hatched a plan so that hopefully when all was said and done their fans in the stands could chant, "We're number 4...We're number 4..."

So, they zeroed in on some of the lesser known Olympic events to concentrate on in order to build their gold reserves. These would be events that they didn't necessarily have Brits who even competed in them, so they set out to begin training athletes to master the needed skills. To do so, they invited a bunch of good athletes - regardless of what sport they were known for - from throughout the British Empire to a confab and explained the 4th-place plan. Then they held tryouts with them in the various obscure events and those that did well enough in a particular one were then invited to spend the next 5-6 years in training so they could get good enough at it to bring home the wanted gold medals.

One event I remember reading about was something I'd never heard of...flat-bottomed canoe racing. And it was sort of funny when the story quoted one athlete who was giving learning how to race one a try. He said it took him a few days to even be able to get into one without tipping it over. Talk about starting from square one, huh?

Well, guess we'll see in a year if the plan works.