Ian Duggan
12-22-2006, 02:06 PM
Just saw this for the first time tonight on Channel five (in the UK obviously enough).
Had a couple of events that I'd never seen before. A kind of combination yoke / Conan's Wheel at 400kgs or so that looked hellish (although Terry Hollands made it looks easy) and a 1 on 1 tug o' war, which frankly looked pretty dumb.
In the one match up that they showed us, Glenn Ross took the rope and leant forwards, Terry Hollands tried to pull but couldn't shift all that body weight, and Glen Ross won the event for being a few inches further forward, I think just by leaning over even further. I mean he was literally 20 degrees off parallel with the ground at one point, with his feet flat on the ground. Not sure where the strength test was in that.
All in all, whilst it looked like a good competition, the TV coverage was pretty awful. They did the usual trick of only showing the athletes that had come in the first 3 or so for each event, but they didn't give any table after each event to show where everybody else had finished. About half way through the events I don't think we'd seen nor heard any mention of about half the athletes. One of the Scottish competitors Stuart Murray, made it to the end of the 2nd (of 3) day. Did we even see a brief list of how he'd done in any of the events he'd done? No.
They also didn't show the events in chronological order, showing the final day first, then breaking off twice to show what had happened on the first two days which were used as qualifying days. No real point to that other than to confuse those that aren't familiar with how most major 3 day comps work.
And as usual on UK TV, the commentating was awful. I heard the phrase "picked that up as if they were shopping bags" three separate times. Even the "expert" didn't seem to know what was going on half the time, and the interviewer was asking some painful questions. The short interview with Dale Norris was amusing mainly due to the look on Dale's face after each question. A kind of "what?! what the hell kind of question is that?" type look...
And Dale, when you fell over backwards trying that 435kg Silver Dollar Deadlift I nearly fell off my chair with you. Talk about putting everything you've got into a lift...
:mag:
Great work by all the competitors though, even watching it and moaning in my head constantly it really made me want to go lift something. Hopefully make it to next years comp.
(Watching of course. Watching.)
Had a couple of events that I'd never seen before. A kind of combination yoke / Conan's Wheel at 400kgs or so that looked hellish (although Terry Hollands made it looks easy) and a 1 on 1 tug o' war, which frankly looked pretty dumb.
In the one match up that they showed us, Glenn Ross took the rope and leant forwards, Terry Hollands tried to pull but couldn't shift all that body weight, and Glen Ross won the event for being a few inches further forward, I think just by leaning over even further. I mean he was literally 20 degrees off parallel with the ground at one point, with his feet flat on the ground. Not sure where the strength test was in that.
All in all, whilst it looked like a good competition, the TV coverage was pretty awful. They did the usual trick of only showing the athletes that had come in the first 3 or so for each event, but they didn't give any table after each event to show where everybody else had finished. About half way through the events I don't think we'd seen nor heard any mention of about half the athletes. One of the Scottish competitors Stuart Murray, made it to the end of the 2nd (of 3) day. Did we even see a brief list of how he'd done in any of the events he'd done? No.
They also didn't show the events in chronological order, showing the final day first, then breaking off twice to show what had happened on the first two days which were used as qualifying days. No real point to that other than to confuse those that aren't familiar with how most major 3 day comps work.
And as usual on UK TV, the commentating was awful. I heard the phrase "picked that up as if they were shopping bags" three separate times. Even the "expert" didn't seem to know what was going on half the time, and the interviewer was asking some painful questions. The short interview with Dale Norris was amusing mainly due to the look on Dale's face after each question. A kind of "what?! what the hell kind of question is that?" type look...
And Dale, when you fell over backwards trying that 435kg Silver Dollar Deadlift I nearly fell off my chair with you. Talk about putting everything you've got into a lift...
:mag:
Great work by all the competitors though, even watching it and moaning in my head constantly it really made me want to go lift something. Hopefully make it to next years comp.
(Watching of course. Watching.)