I only follow the Olympics cursorily, consisting mostly of scanning the headlines in the news sites that I read. Within those, I am mostly interested in the track and field events and the stories that grab me are those of athletes from small countries that have next to no infrastructure to produce top athletes and almost never win medals.
And boy, did these games produce such a story!
Julien Alfred from St. Lucia, a tiny country in the eastern Caribbean islands that has a population of just 180,000 and had never produced any medal winner before, ran away from the competition to win the 100m gold medal, the most prestigious of the track events. (Click on the ‘Watch on YouTube’ link.)
When Julien Alfred was a young girl in St Lucia, she was asked who she wanted to be when she grew up. “The next Usain Bolt,” she replied. It was the boldest of ambitions, given that her tiny country had never won an Olympic medal and barely had any facilities. Yet on a delirious night in Paris, the 23-year-old delivered in the manner of the greatest sprinter of all-time: by powering away from US superstar Sha’Carri Richardson to claim Olympic gold.
…But this was a night all about Alfred – and her extraordinary journey from a small Caribbean island with a population of around 180,000 to track and field’s newest superstar.
“Growing up I used to be on the field struggling with no shoes, running barefoot, running in my school uniform, running all over the place,” she explained. “We barely have the right facilities. The stadium is not fixed. I hope this gold medal will help St Lucia build a new stadium, to help the sport grow.”
One never achieves such heights alone and she was fortunate that there were people who spotted her talent early and urged her to stick with it.
Alfred’s track and field career began when was first spotted at the age of six or seven by her PE teacher, who told her to race the boys in her year. She was soon beating them and honing her talents at a local club. Yet there were several bumps on the way too, most notably when she quit the sport at 12 after her father died.
But she was encouraged to return by her coach, and such was her ambition that she left for Jamaica by herself at 14.
She is also competing in the 200m event.
There is no “Watch on Youtube” link, and indeed only a bare link to the YT main page (no video ID in the URL). It’s broken, broken, broken.
In fairness to it, my TV isn’t faring much better. Its attention seems to wander. I mean it has one job, show whatever channel it’s set to until such time as someone tells it to change channel (or turns it off). And every few hours I stop hearing the talking heads updating me on what’s happening in the games and start hearing zilch, and when I go to investigate nearly always it’s gone to some channel with a silent slideshow of what looks like ads for movies, TV shows, and services like Netflix. I hit “prev channel” on the remote and it works properly again for a while, and then it happens again. And once in a while it does worse than that, getting stuck displaying text that says “Welcome. Bienvenido. Welcome.” and the guide, etc. buttons all don’t work — just the power button seems to do anything. Off and back on again eventually seems to fix this but it seems to take several tries, somehow, and typically two or three full minutes to get it back to operating normally.
Pain in the butt.
Meanwhile it’s a slow political news day. Maybe the games have everyone’s attention? Or everyone is waiting for Harris’s VP nom to drop …
BB, for you:
#1
Let me guess, it’s a ‘smart’ TV.
And that isn’t even the biggest story of a little country’s success in this year’s Olympics. I guess you missed Thea LaFond in the women’s triple jump.
Personally I always look at the weighted per-capita medal table, and not only because it makes NZ look good 😉. Otherwise you might be forgiven for thinking that the people in China are just better than the rest of us.*
https://www.medalspercapita.com/#weighted-per-capita:2024
* but I do wonder why India always do so poorly
It is insane how fast there are. I also caught the triple jump yesterday (which my wife did fifty-odd years ago.
I’ve also been enjoying the volleyball (my own sport). Great venue for the beach games -- right beside the Eiffel Tower. Once again, the issue of the women’s beach outfit measurements has become contentious.
file thirteen @#4,
Thanks for informing me about Thea LaFond and also the weighted medal table. That was very interesting.
I agree with Mano File Thirteen that was a cool chart, thank you.
Just saw that a Sri Lankan runner qualified for the men’s 400 m.
@2: Your embed is defective in exactly the same way.
Either something’s broken with YT embedding in this blog, or something’s broken at YT itself with this particular video.
@4: site doesn’t seem to work, at least not without allowing it to run scripts on my machine.
@all: some complete unknown from … Algeria, was it? … just took the gold in uneven bars.
It’s you for sure, BB.
Perhaps check any script or domain blockers you are running; I myself run NoScript and UBlock and have to whitelist various domains.
The embedding on this blog works just fine, I just played some of the video I linked.
It’s your end.
[OT]
Right now, I’m allowing 6 domains, one of which is
youtube.com, and blocking 7, one of which will never ever ever be allowed on my box (doubleclick which is purely advertising).Ukraine added three medals yesterday: gold and bronze in women’s high jump, and bronze in men’s hammer.
I have the same extensions, on Firefox, and have exceptions for YT for scripts. YT embeds work fine elsewhere. YT videos work fine on the YT site itself. The embeds that don’t work just seem to be Mano’s and yours … the common denominator appears to be this blog, rather than me or YT. Even YT embeds on other FTB blogs seem to work normally for me, with the same exact settings for browser and extensions.
“[…] the common denominator appears to be this blog, rather than me or YT.”
Well then, simple. Copypaste the URL and put it into your address bar.
I mean, the URL is but a text string. Can’t really fuck that up.
[I’m also running Firefox: 128.0.3 (64-bit)]
I can’t even get the URL. It comes up as just “www.youtube.com” without anything specifying a particular video … apparently, someone can really fuck that up … for everybody else. 😛
Interesting.
[protocol]//
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrYvKzw9a78is the link.It’s you.
—
Right?
Protocol is
https:Hypertext protocol/secure.
Domain is
www.youtube.com, right?Parameters are
watch?v=PrYvKzw9a78It’s really rather simple.
Call is ‘watch”, video is “PrYvKzw9a78”.
If you honestly can’t get that, well…
I can help you no more.
And that doesn’t work. You just can’t succeed for failing, it seems! I get what looks like a YT page with a thumbnail that looks relevant, for about 3 seconds, then something hijacks my browser and redirects me to a page that just has a black box saying “This video is not available”. I can’t seem to forestall the redirect with the stop button or by hitting “play” before it triggers, either.
But hey, maybe the fourth try will be the charm. Or the fifth, or the sixth …