Watching Australia v Ghana in the tandem pursuit. Two riders, the rear one is blind.
The race was an absolute joke. Both teams were hardly trying. The commentator explained that it’s because of weird rules about requiring athletes be in multiple events and these guys are mainly sprinters, not endurance athletes suited to the pursuit. I don’t really understand what the rule is or why it’s in place, but geez it looked bad.
GB v Ireland in the same event, same problem. They’re sprint teams forced into the pursuit by weird rules. Commentators really hoping the rules change before the next Paralympics. Me too.
Watching wheelchair rugby. Don’t really understand this sport, and it doesn’t look much like rugby at all. There’s forward passing, bouncing the ball in front of you (only occasionally, like European handball or AFL, not like basketball dribbling), screening like in basketball. A score seems incredibly easy to get in comparison to rugby tries. There seems to be no practical way to actually stop an attacker, to the point that when one player gets past they just let that player do circles in front of the try line for a while to run the clock down, rather than force him to go now.
It might be a sport that could be good once you get into it. But it bears so little resemblance to rugby the name feels very wrong.
As someone who doesn’t watch (or really get) rugby, this was actually pretty fun to watch. Apparently it was originally called murderball. Maybe they should have kept that name.
I can certainly see why they’d want to change the name of the sport to be more…socially acceptable. But yeah, rugby is just not the right name.
Volleyball was really fun!
Damn, I would have loved to have seen that. Must have been after I went to bed.
