dwenius: (Default)
This past weekend at the Olympic trials, Chris Colwill, a springboard and platform diver, pulled off a reverse 2.5 somersault with 2.5 twists.

Degree of difficulty: 3.9

Nobody else in the competition tried anything with a DD higher than 3.5 (reverse 3.5, forward 3.5 pike, etc.). For comparison, a forward 4.5 somersault, tuck, which AFAIK has only been attempted by a handful of people in history, is only a 3.5 DD. For those not familiar with the intricacies of diving scoring, DD is a multiplier on the average of the judges individual scores. The only technique I know of with a higher DD is an inward 4.5 somersault (i.e., stand backwards and throw your head towards the board/platform at full speed), which has only been tried once, by a very young and skinny Chinese diver who pancaked badly and handed Louganis his last Olympic gold.

Colwill apparently ripped his gainer and pocketed the .4x "balls of steel" bonus. Kudos.
dwenius: (Default)
Big Brown may win the Triple Crown this weekend. He is a fine, beautiful animal with a nice bag of racing tricks (and unfortunately, like his trainer, a history of drug use). but people, be real now, Big Brown is simply not that fast. He was two full seconds off Secretariat's Derby record, 1.4 seconds slower than the Preakness record.

This year's crop of horses is, as they say, "not so grate, akshually". Winning a Triple Crown is very hard and I'd like to be more excited about it but I'm just not.

This has no relation to my longstanding and well-deserved institutional hatred of UPS.

Profile

dwenius: (Default)
dwenius

October 2011

S M T W T F S
      1
2345678
9101112131415
1617181920 2122
232425 262728 29
3031     

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 29th, 2025 03:46 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios