2016 Rio Summer Olympics....Go U.S.A.....Talk,Picks,Results,Videos,Pictures,Etc.

[Greenbacks]

Venus Williams clearly did not want to speak to media after the devastating 6-3, 6-4 loss in first round of Olympic doubles. She gave one non-answer and bolted. She and Serena were three-time defending gold medalists. Serena just a bit more talkative. Said they just didn't play well. Asked her, why not? Serena said she didn't know. She did not place any blame on Venus' recent illness.

 

[Greenbacks]

U.S.A. Duo Rajeev & Brian are ready for action.....Good luck guys!

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RIO DE JANEIRO — Dutch cyclist Annemiek van Vleuten sustained three small fractures to her spine and will remain hospitalized in intensive care after crashing Sunday during the women's Olympic road race.
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Van Vleuten was leading on the fast, slippery descent of Vista Chinesa when she appeared to lock up her brakes on the final corner. She tumbled onto the road and her bike went flying, and she remained on the edge of the pavement as the rest of the field swept past.
Teammate Anna van der Breggen went on to win the gold medal.

The Dutch team said van Vleuten was conscious when she was loaded into an ambulance, and Chef de Mission Maurits Hendriks and team doctors said she was stable and speaking Sunday night.
It was still not known when she would be released.

"It was horrendous crash," road race silver medalist Emma Johansson of Sweden said. "The peloton is so small and we all know each other very well. I just hope she's OK."
The road course of the Rio de Janeiro Olympics caused havoc to the men's field on Saturday, too.
Giro d' Italia winner Vincenzo Nibali and Colombian climber Sergio Henao were leading on the same final descent when they crashed. Geraint Thomas of Britain, Richie Porte of Australia and Nelson Oliviera of Portugal were involved in three other hard wrecks.

Nibali's coach, Davide Cassani, said that the Italian broke his collarbone in the fall. Porte broke his scapula, taking one of the time-trial favorites out of Wednesday's race.
"It's a difficult descent because you can go really fast but you also have to corner," van der Breggen said. "After the men's race I think we were all warned we needed to take care of the descent and we did. Of course, if you're riding in front, maybe you take too much risk."

The International Cycling Union defended the difficulty of the course, pointing to a test event and the numerous training opportunities that gave riders a chance to prepare for its twists and turns.
"Yesterday I spoke with Vincenzo and he told me the descent was very technical," said Italian rider Elisa Longo Borghini, who took bronze on Sunday. "I took care to be safe to avoid crashes. I had a very hard crash three years ago, so I know what that means."
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[Greenbacks]

Leader van Vleuten suffers terrifying crash in final push.

 

[Greenbacks]

Get to know Simone Biles.

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Simone Biles was too young to qualify for the 2012 Olympics, but the 4-foot-9 gymnast has completely dominated her sport since her senior debut in 2013. Not only is she the first female gymnast since 1974 to win four consecutive all-around titles at the U.S. national championships, but she’s also the first woman ever to be the all-around world champion three years in a row. Not to mention that she's won fourteen total world championships medals—the most ever won by an American woman.
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Simone Biles was born on March 14th, 1997 in Columbus, Ohio. By the time she was three, it was clear that her biological mother, who struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, was unable to take care of Biles and her younger sister Adria. Her maternal grandfather, Ron, and his second wife, Nellie, stepped in and brought the pair to Spring, Texas, a suburb of Houston—and sixteen years later, they’re simply “mom and dad” to their adopted daughters.<strike></strike>
Young Biles was fearless, teaching herself to do back flips off her family’s mailbox before she even took a gymnastics class. It was a daycare field trip to a gym that led her to the sport—the six-year-old saw the older girls flipping and twisting and immediately started copying them. She began her training, and a year later her talent caught the eye of Aimee Boorman.

Boorman had never coached an elite gymnast before, which Biles said was an asset as the pair moved up the ranks of gymnastics.
<strike></strike>Boorman is still by Biles’ side at every competition.
“I always say she’s like the second mom to me because she’s been there since I was like 8 years old, and so that’s 10 years that she’s always been by my side,” Biles said. “I’m very fortunate to have a coach that I got to stay with all this time. Every year the bond gets stronger and better and we understand each other more. And it’s like she can tell if I walk into the gym what kind of mood I’m in, what she has to fix for the practice I need or how I’m feeling. So it’s really nice to have someone that can just like read me just right off the bat when I walk in the gym.”

<strike></strike>After a catastrophic performance at the 2013 Secret U.S. Classic—falls and mistakes on the first three events left Biles so mentally rattled that she chose not to even attempt a vault—no one, not even Biles herself, considered her a favorite to win the 2013 P&G Championships.
“It was just going downhill from there,” Biles said of the 2013 Secret Classic, “and I just thought it was the end of the world. Nothing was really going right and we couldn't figure out why. I guess I just wasn't in a very good mental place. Then after [Classics] I went to see a sports psychologist and he helped me a lot.”

Biles was a completely different gymnast at the P&G Championships. Still just sixteen years old and facing off against 2012 Olympian Kyla Ross, Biles showed the winning confidence, along with high-difficulty skills and faultless execution, that has become her competitive signature. She won the all-around gold medal and took silver medals on all four apparatuses: vault, uneven bars, balance beam and floor.
<strike></strike>Having proven herself as the best in the U.S., Biles starting building her reputation as the best in the world at the 2013 World Championships. Again outscoring Ross, along with 2012 Olympic bronze medalist Aliya Mustafina of Russia, Biles won the world all-around title by nearly a full point.

She also qualified for all four event finals, which no American has done since Shannon Miller in 1991. She took home a gold on floor, a silver on vault and a bronze on balance beam—four total medals.
“One of my proudest moments was probably 2013 Worlds,” Biles said, “because I proved to myself that I could do things that I didn’t think I could. I guess I didn’t really believe everyone when they told me how good I was, and so for me to go out there and [win] I kind of started to believe it… I proved to myself that I do have the confidence to go out there and hit it like I do in practice.”

At the next year's world championships, she won all-around gold again but earned a more viral kind of fame due to the awards ceremony. When she was standing on the podium, silver medalist Larisa Iordache pointed out that there was a bee in Biles' bouquet—and Biles is terrified of bugs.
<strike></strike>Biles has won every single all-around competition she’s entered since the 2013 P&G Championships—that’s 12 titles in a row with all-around scores over 62 points when only a handful of gymnasts are able to break 60.

At the 2015 World Championships, she wasn’t her usual model of perfection: she went out of bounds on floor exercise, came heart-stoppingly close to falling off the balance beam, and took a big hop forward on the landing of her vault. But her sky-high difficulty scores gave her a built-in cushion when her execution scores were slightly sub-par, and she still took gold over Gabby Douglas—the reigning Olympic all-around champion—by over a point.
<strike></strike>Biles was in top form in the team and apparatus finals, though, winning team gold with the U.S. women, gold in the floor and balance beam finals and a bronze on the vault. That brought her career world championships medal count to 14—the most ever for a U.S. female gymnast.<strike></strike>

Biles enjoyed a lighter competition schedule in 2016, only doing one all-around competition before the P&G Championships in late June. It was the last meet before the women’s Olympic Trials, and she proved for the umpteenth time that she’s ready to lead the U.S. women to gold in Rio—and claim more than a few gold medals for herself. She won her fourth all-around national title with a two-night combined score of 125.00, 3.90 points ahead of silver medalist Aly Raisman. Even more impressively, her winning total was better than her scores at the three previous national championships. She also earned gold medals on vault, balance beam and floor and finished fourth on the uneven bars, her “weakest” event.<strike></strike>

 

[ML Dog]

Great Page to Bookmark:

Minute by Minute Update of Medals Race, neat little Graphic showing who is where in the Medals Race:

http://www.nbcolympics.com/medals

Rickie Fowler and Justin Rose prior to the Opening Cermonies



Looks like Mens Golf tees off at 3:30am WestCoast 6:30 AM East Coast on Thursday



Both the men and women will play a 72-hole individual stroke play format, so it’s not much different than the week-to-week grind of the PGA and LPGA tours.


The Olympic course was built specifically for the Summer Games, constructed on a former sand quarry along saltwater marshes. The venue, which has the feel of some of Australia’s classic Sandbelt courses, was landscaped as part of an environmental recovery project and will be open to the public after the Olympic Games. It’s also home to the world’s largest rodent — the capybara — as well as a species of ground-nesting owl, caimans, boa constrictors, monkeys and three-toed sloths.

The top four men in the world rankings aren’t in the field. Jason Day, Dustin Johnson, Jordan Spieth and Rory McIlroy all pulled out over concerns about the mosquito-born Zika virus, poor security or a full competition schedule. In all, 21 eligible male golfers dropped out, with other top names including Adam Scott, Branden Grace, Louis Oosthuizen, Hideki Matsuyama and Charl Schwartzel. Only six eligible players on the women’s side withdrew, with Lee-Anne Pace the highest seed (39).

Henrik Stenson of Sweden is the top player in the men’s field, sitting fifth in the world ranking after his victory at the British Open. Bubba Watson (6) is next, followed by American teammate Rickie Fowler (7) and No. 9 Danny Willett of Britain, this year’s Masters champion.

On the women’s side, Lydia Ko of New Zealand is the top contender, followed by Brooke Henderson of Canada, Inbee Park of South Korea, and Lexi Thompson of the U.S. The host nation’s lone representative is Adilson da Silva, a professional who mostly plays on the second-tier Asian and Sunshine tours. In all, 18 of the 60 men’s players are members of the PGA Tour.

The men’s competition features 34 nations, from Argentina to Venezuela. Of those 23 have two competitors, while 10 countries have one Olympic participant. (The U.S. leads the way with four: Bubba Watson, Rickie Fowler, Patrick Reed and Matt Kuchar) The women’s tournament also has players from 34 nations. South Korea has the best representation, with four players, followed by the U.S. with three. Twenty-three countries have two female Olympians.

Rickie Fowler arrives with the U.S. contingent during the Olympics’ opening ceremony. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)


The American team may have the most players, but the U.S. isn’t the favorite to strike gold in Brazil. The favorite coming in is Stenson, who has 9-2 odds of following up his win at the season’s final major championship with Olympic glory. Sergio Garcia of Spain is the second pick at 7-1, according to the Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook.

Watson, Fowler and England’s Justin Rose all have 12-1 odds of winning the men’s individual title.

 

[Greenbacks]

Dana is swimming in the 100m Butterfly FINAL in 15 minutes.

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The Joker is on the court tonight.....Everybody loves the Joker.

 

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If Carlos Balderas wins a medal who will he dedicate it to?

RIO DE JANEIRO – Olympic boxer Gary Russell already knows what he’s going to do with his light welterweight gold medal if he wins it: he’s going to dedicate it to Muhammad Ali.
Ali was many things to many people. He was a boxer, an activist, a humanitarian and much more. He also made an impact on Team USA’s boxers, who shared their thoughts on Ali ahead of an Olympics without “The Greatest.” He died of septic shock on June 3, 2016, at 74.

“We all have an expiration date,” Russell said. “I believe that he conditioned many of us to be great. He wanted us to walk in his footsteps because he was a great person. Truly speaking from my soul, I would dedicate this gold medal to him.”
Middleweight Claressa Shields, who won gold at the London Games in 2012, met Ali once. He had already been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. His death, she said, made Shields feel like “a huge part of me had left.”

“I just remember when I met him I felt this sense of pride,” Shields said. “Coming up, he was the first African-American to actually sit out there and tell you, back when they said that blacks were ugly, he said, ‘I’m black and I’m pretty, and I can fight.’ He gave that belief that you are beautiful, that you are pretty.”
Shields continued: “The way that he brought people together by showing his love for the world, he wanted to bring people together and have us help each other. That’s one of the biggest things I think that he left for me. If you wanted to continue his legacy, it’s not just with boxing.

He wanted you to bring people together … and help each other. I hope I can do him justice when I speak about him and also when I fight. Nobody will ever be known as great as Muhammad Ali, ever. But at least I can try to get close.”
For Antonio Vargas, it was Ali who motivated and inspired him as a young boxer.

Before a distinguished pro career, Ali won a gold medal in the light heavyweight division at the 1960 Olympics in Rome. Then known as Cassius Clay, he won all four of his fights in his only Olympic Games appearance at 18. His role in Olympic history extended to Atlanta in 1996, when he held the torch that lit the Olympic Flame.
Like Ali, middleweight boxer Charles Conwell is 18 and just out of high school. He’s the youngest of the eight Team USA boxers.

“Muhammad Ali coming straight out of high school, going to the Olympics, and me doing the same thing,” Conwell said, “it’s a big inspiration and motivation for me to go get the gold medal, fight even harder and live up to his legacy.”
The United States has not won a gold medal in men’s boxing since Andre Ward in 2004 in the light heavyweight division. The boxing competition began on Saturday.
“Bringing home the gold medal,” said lightweight Carlos Balderas, “it would honor Muhammad Ali a lot.”

 

[ML Dog]

Leader van Vleuten suffers terrifying crash in final push.

JUst saw this on NBC, it was awful. I hope that she is OK.

 

[Greenbacks]

When was the last time we were decent in Boxing?

I`ll answer that.....30 years ago....lol

Good luck to our team.....Go Carlos and Nico :toast:

 

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JUst saw this on NBC, it was awful. I hope that she is OK.

Busted up some ribs.....Losing the Gold medal I`m sure hurts more then those Ribs though.

 

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Dana took the Bronze.....Congrats!

These foreign girls don`t play around in the pool.....They`re pretty damn good.

 

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[JamesHat]

GB2, an amazing thread... Thanks very much

 

[Greenbacks]

GB2, an amazing thread... Thanks very much

Thank you James!

 

[Greenbacks]

American Dana Vollmer, the defending 100 fly Olympic champion who returned to the sport after giving birth to her son Arlen in March of 2015, won bronze in the 100 fly on Sunday night by nine-hundredths of a second 56.63). Vollmer couldn't catch Sweden's Sarah Sjostrom, who broke Vollmer's world record in the event in 2015 and won gold Sunday night by breaking her own world mark with a time of :55.48.