Sports 2021

[CTG]

One of the best female handplay players of the '00s / early '10s, Anita Görbicz retired today. She won 5 EHF Champions League and 13 Hungarian championship titles with Györi ETO KC, became IHF World Player of the Year in 2005, top scorer of Champions League in 2012 and 2014. Despite of her skinny physique, her shots were deadly strong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzyDH8jElQk

From now on, I won't follow female handball anymore.

[Akoss Poo a.k.a. Zorromeister]

She was a true world class player, probably the best female player on the world in her early and mid twenties, she was a true leader of the Hungarian team.

Later she was rather a burden for the national team (in Györ, the world class foreign players saved her from this status). Her performance declined, still, she was treated like a goddess, which was a big mistake. As a chain-smoker, a community destroyer, with his distorted-becoming face, I started to dislike her more and more. Despite the tons of promising young players (including former youth and junior World and European Champions in the past few years), the performance of the national team became miserable. The play relied too much on her, and even after retiring from playing in the NT, it was a mistake to keep her close to the fire. I truly hope that she will NOT do any coaching, managing, supporting etc. activities from now on, but my fear is that this won't happen and as a consequene, the Hungarian female NT won't return to the world elite despite teeming with true talents...

For comparison: despite having less talented players and less young talents, the men's NT is often performing better than the women's...

As this topic is created and active, maybe I'll post later about most interesting sports news.

[dreadnaut]

Is handball big in Hungary?

[CTG]

Is handball big in Hungary?

It's quite popular here.

Btw Akoss Poo clearly hates the handball goddess of my hometown.

[CTG]

Tokyo "2020" is clearly a disaster for Hungary so far. Although we have 2-1-2 on the medal table, most of our participants performs a lot worse than expected (female handball team, male waterpolo team, Katinka Hosszú, some other swimmers, sport shooters, etc).

[Daniel3D]

The Netherlands do reasonably well but I'm still disappointed. The ones that were expected to succeed didn't.

[alanrotoi]

Also Argentina no gold so far...

[Daniel3D]

The Netherlands do reasonably well but I'm still disappointed. The ones that were expected to succeed didn't.

I owe my country a rectification on this post.
After my post, they started to do really well. Not on the events we scored high in 2016 but on many new disciplines.

In the end, the Netherlands ended on the 7th place.
Which is incredible considering the fact that it's a very small country.

• it's the 67th country in a list based on population
• and 134th in a list based pure by size

So there are 66 countries that have potentially more athletes and 133 countries that are bigger, so more space for sports?

But the Netherlands is also in the top 20 riches countries (18th) so more funding capabilities for athletes?

Don't know, Just guessing.

Just a bit impressed after all. 

[Cas]

The Netherlands is important in many sports indeed!  I don't know much about sports, but that's what I've heard. I guess when a country gets good at one thing, then the next time, more resources are invested in that same thing to keep it going. Initially, it can be funds, but then sports will still be very supported because they're already important there. Thus, Argentina was once very rich and maybe it was then that it started to develop in sports. Now it's been a poor country for about 80 years, but still, of the little funds it counts on, a considerable amount ends on sports. On the other hand, one curious thing about Argentina is that (guys, tell me if I'm wrong, as I'm not the one to give educated opinions on sports), it appears, to me, at least, that it has been diversifying in sports. Getting weaker in football, that was initially its strongest, but somewhat better at a number of other sports on which it wasn't so noticed before. I wouldn't call Argentina a "power" in sports, but it definitely is above average.

[alanrotoi]

Well what defined "rich" to Argentina wasn't about the people but only few rich families that controlled the business and exportation from the country. That's not a rich country from a point of view when the wealth is controlled by few and the 90% of the population lives in poverty and invisible.

[Cas]

Well, of course at the time, the population of Argentina was very small. The country went to many different times since it was formed and the level of poverty did go up and down at different points. It probably was higher during the 1930s, when the whole world was affected by huge economic problems. But it was a rich country still in the sense that it was able to compete well in the world's economy.

I would say that during the 1930s, the situation probably was like you describe. 90% is too large a number, but probably half the population were not living in good conditions even though the country itself was strong. But during most of the time since independence until the 1940s, most people did live very comfortably. Of course, the fact that the population wasn't too large did help in this regard. Some of the governments in the early days were really hated by people and very authoritarian, like that of Juárez Celman, but others were very good or at least, didn't do anything bad and manage to keep the status quo and people didn't complain. What I mean is that, it wasn't that people had been hoping for a change all those years.

Also, the times when poverty was highest, it was also the times when huge waves of immigrants had come to the country and they were poor because they had arrived poor. With the years, they started to build their opportunities and nowadays, I'd say more than half of Argentine families are descendant from Italians and poor people today don't tend to have a surname of any particular origin. That is, when there were many poor people, it wasn't because the government was making them poor.

Please note that I'm concentrating on defending the positive aspects of the past, not criticising the negative aspects of what came after. I do this because there's plenty of written evidence of what I say and this way, we can be objective. If I begin talking about times after the 40s, it becomes much more difficult because there are books that say one thing and others that say quite the contrary. You know this well. Unfortunately, we live in a land with "two histories", ha, ha. I really don't want one of them to be true more than the other. I just one whichever is true to one day be undoubtedly true. I guess we all want the same, just believe different things. Don't you think?

[Akoss Poo a.k.a. Zorromeister]

Tokyo "2020" is clearly a disaster for Hungary so far. Although we have 2-1-2 on the medal table, most of our participants performs a lot worse than expected (female handball team, male waterpolo team, Katinka Hosszú, some other swimmers, sport shooters, etc).

It wasn't disaster at that time, and it isn't disaster in the end. 6 gold, 7 silver, 7 bronze - 20 in total, 15th place for Hungary. Before the Games, I would have accepted this without any hesitation. A bit poorer performance from the swimmers and the shooters, but good combat sport medal production and also great results in kayak. Both the men's and women's water polo teams earned a medal, women's handball 7th place- not bad.

There are too much processes which are against Hungarian olympic performance:
- less traditional sports
- more fashionable, hobby sports
- the trend that the richest (and maybe also the largest) countries has the best opportunity to develop the best athletes (maybe best medical possibilities also)
- in the communist era, in Hungary, sports remained one of the few possibilities to break-out from the society...  now it is not true, in Europe, the world is open, people rather focus on studying, having children, moving to Western Europe, many talented sportsmen/women discontinue professional sports activity and choose career or family instead

So despite these factor, still we had 20 medals, out of which 6 were gold, 15th place in the medal table - I can be delighted.

Apart from these, Hungarian sport doesn't have a bad year:
- Attila Valter, Giro d'Italia overall 14th place, wearing the maglia rosa for some stages
- junior women's handball team, European Champion
- junior men's handball team, European Championship, 9th place
- women's volleyball ECH, reached last 16
- football team good performance during Euro 2020
- Ferencváros football team in Europa League group stage
- ice hockey women's team Pool A World Championships - 9th place
- ice hockey men's team started well, losing 3-5 against much better French team in Riga during the Olympic Qualification final stage
- U19 women's basketball team World Championship: bronze medal
- good medal performance at Aquatics ECH, Budapest
- Márton Fucsovics, our best tennis player, ATP 500 final in Rotterdam, Wimbledon QF
- Attila Tassi winning a WTCR race in the shadow of former world champion Norbert Michelisz
- Szombathelyi Haladás qualified for futsal European Champions' League main round (group stage)
- etc.

[dreadnaut]

- the trend that the richest (and maybe also the largest) countries

Money and population definitely make a difference: those countries have a larger pool of people who could be athletes, who also have better chances to dedicate their time to sports, instead of having to find another job.

An Italian newspaper showed a medal table "adjusted" for income and population. The math is unclear, but it shows some smaller countries (like Hungary, "Ungheria" in Italian) clearly higher up on the scoreboard.

[Akoss Poo a.k.a. Zorromeister]

- the trend that the richest (and maybe also the largest) countries

Money and population definitely make a difference: those countries have a larger pool of people who could be athletes, who also have better chances to dedicate their time to sports, instead of having to find another job.

An Italian newspaper showed a medal table "adjusted" for income and population. The math is unclear, but it shows some smaller countries (like Hungary, "Ungheria" in Italian) clearly higher up on the scoreboard.

Yes, it seems Hungary is still a good example for being a successful Olympic nation despite being a small country. But I tried to emphasize in my last post that this difference was even bigger earlier, Hungary was even more successful decades ago despite being such a small country. Look at the all-time summer Olympic medal table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-time_Olympic_Games_medal_table#Top_ten_medal_rankings_(combined_NOCs) . Hungary is by far the smallest country in the top 10.
So I think the influence of money and country size has increased recently. The reasons I mentioned are true:
a.) In the Eastern European region, after the communist era, sports became less popular. Look at the earlier medal tables, not only Hungary, also Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria etc. were more successful than now. I can barely mention a sport in which Hungary improved after the regime change in 1989-90. Maybe ice hockey and short track speed skating, but they are winter sports. Maybe road cycling.
b.) the traditional sports play a smaller role now (e.g. less weight categories in combat sports, less kayak/canoe events, less fencing events, less players available in a water polo team, no modern pentathlon team event etc.), instead, there are some ridiculous new sports in the programme. Skateboarding, surfing, sport climbing and karate - totally cannot be understood (by me at least) why such sports are included now...
c.) Bigger and richer countries learned some sports. They borrowed coaches from abroad and slowly they has become successful as well. For example in fencing... I've never thought that we will have to be afraid of Korean fencers... but now it's the case, not only French, Italian and Russian fencers, the Koreans are also big opponents for Hungarians. Or in water polo. I've never thought that once we will play the Olympic final against the USA... but it happened in 2008...

[dreadnaut]

Yeah, I see what you mean. Definitely "spreading" over more sports (instead of fewer sports with more categories) could be an advantage to countries with more resources. And countries with older schools in specific fields (I can think of fencing, gymnastics, canoe/kayak in Italy) bring home fewer medals.

I think time passing might also make a difference though. Italy had the same successful athletes or small teams compete over three, sometimes four editions. That's 16 years! Once they retire, they leave a hole and what was "normal" (say winning many canoe events) suddenly is gone.

I don't follow sports that much, so I don't have a strong opinions about new entries in the Olympics. Some are pretty odd, agreed, but maybe the variety would bring interest in younger people? Definitely for things like skateboarding or snowboarding (this, I actually enjoyed watch during the last winter games), you end up attracting teenagers who are otherwise bored by anything without rockets and guns and high speed chases

Can't wait for Stunts to become an Olympic competition though — Or maybe we should organise our own Olympics every four years, and convince those old pipsqueaks to participate...