RedLeaf said:
So crowning a champion among competing countries only apllies to hockey for you? A couple of quebecois skiers doesn't count because you don't follow skiing? That's basically what you've said in this thread. I have no problem with that had you not blasted me for asking how to determine which country is leading the medal tally.
I think you're labouring under a couple of pretty fundamental errors about the things I've said. The way I "blasted you" was saying that by giving consideration to the idea of one country being the Olympic "champion" or "winner" you're missing the point of the Olympics as a whole and that the reason that there is no formula for determining such a thing is that the Olympics, by design, does not recognize such a thing. It is contrary to the stated goals of the IOC.
Which, again, has nothing to do with recognizing winners in individual sports. Lots of sports at the Olympics, and other sporting competitions, recognize champions by country(Curling, for instance) and all of those champions are crowned with equal legitimacy in my eyes. I don't have the same personal investment or rooting interest in those things because, shockingly, your rooting interest in a sport corresponds to your general interest in a sport but I have at no point said that the accomplishments of any athletes "doesn't count". In fact, all I said about the Dufour-Lapointes is that if
you want to take some sort of national pride from what they did you're free to but that I don't attach any sense of national identity or weight to something that I don't follow/know about/think represents Canada in any larger sense.
But still, you're not really keeping your arguments straight. When I say I have a nationalistic rooting interest in the hockey tournament, it's not the same thing as saying it's a source of national pride. When Canada won the gold medal in hockey in 2002 or 2010 the enjoyment I took from it wasn't in beating the Americans or as a demonstration of Canada's mighty hockey superiority over anyone else. If anything, the opposite is true. I love the tournament and the quality of play that's generated by the fact that so many other countries can field teams that can play with Canada's best on a relatively equal footing(which, by the way, is why I'm not super onboard with the women's tournament yet. I get nothing from Canada's best beating the tar out of a much less well funded or experienced program)
The truth is, a short tournament like this with a bunch of single elimination games isn't really the greatest format for determining anything like that with any real accuracy. I still think Canada had the best team in '98, the Swedes in '02 but the Medals didn't shake out that way because goalies got hot, goalies got cold. Stuff happens.
To take real enjoyment out of this tournament there has to be something beyond that sort of "neener, neener, we're better than you" because this isn't really a good yardstick for that. It's too random. So while, all things being equal, I'd like to see Canada win but if the USA won by virtue of Kessel scoring a dozen or so goals I'd think that was pretty neat also.
