Gold Schmold and DFL
At some point [OE 2/22: see this post] I'm going to blog about the Daily Bulletin writer who referred to an "anti-Olympic moment" when someone messed up and got a silver medal instead of a gold medal. I'm sorry, but an "anti-Olympic moment" is when terrorists kill people in Munich or when a bomb goes off in Atlanta.
Those who think that silver medals are stupid will not appreciate DFL, "Celebrating last-place finishes at the Olympics. Because they're there, and you're not." (Incidentally, this is by the same guy that does The Map Room.)
Here are excerpts from the most recent entry:
Bobsled: In the women's bobsled, the Japanese team of Manami Hino, 26, and Chisato Nagaoka, 29, finished 15th with a time of 3:57.49 -- seven and a half seconds behind the gold medallists and a bit more than two seconds behind the next-to-last-place-finishing Austrians....
Speed Skating: 22-year-old Li Changyu of China was 40th in the men's 1,500-metre; his time of 1:53.32 was 7.35 seconds behind the gold medallist's....
Here's part of a more philosophical post:
In a nutshell, mishaps are more dangerous in winter events. Samantha Retrosi suffered a concussion during the women's luge and had to be carried off in a stretcher. Melo Imai suffered a lower back injury during her snowboarding event and had to be airlifted to the hospital....But that's not as bad as it can get: Ulrike Maier was killed during a World Cup downhill race in Garmisch-Partenkirschen in 1994....
But there's something to at least some of these crashes and falls: something that came out in the results, when speed skaters fall, crash, and make a point of getting back up and finishing the race, even if they're 30 seconds off the pace. Or when Chinese figure skater Zhang Dan fell during an attempted throw quadruple Salchow, and fell hard enough to stop the program, but managed to get back on the ice and nail the routine enough to get a silver medal. Or when Slovenian skier Andrej Sporn missed a gate during his second slalom run in the men's combined, but instead of skiing off the course as a DNF, herringboned back up the slope and re-skied the gate. He went from 2nd place to 33rd place, but he finished. I wonder how many other skiers would have bothered.
There's something to be said about getting back up and putting in a finish even when all hope of a respectable result is lost. For many athletes, finishing matters. Better DFL than DNF. Not that it's possible in every event: a crash in alpine skiing or luge is almost always a DNF, and there's nothing you can do about it. But there's something important being expressed whenever somebody crosses the line after hitting the ground, long after everyone else has finished.
In case you're wondering about the acronym:
What does DFL stand for?
Good question. It's athlete's slang for coming in last. The D stands for "dead", the L stands for "last", and the F is, well, obvious.
Comments
By the way, DFL now has early results for Wednesday, February 22. Although I'm more interested in the small Olympic teams for purposes of my future research, I should note that Armenia is "leading" based on the way that DFL measures things.