Anyone here into sports? I have been following the Six Nations rugby and the F1 testing recently. Picrel a tackle involving Ange Capuozzo, one of my favourite players in world rugby right now. As for F1, I'm thinking another Verstappen title is on the cards... What sports have you been watching or playing recently?
The arenas and whole ceremonial thing surrounding it are cool. Not enough to get me to watch regularly but those wacky Japies sure know how to keep up decorum.
>>1276 Lot of Tongans and Samoans and Hawaiians too. Also, some wildcards, my favorite is a Bulgarian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koto%C5%8Dsh%C5%AB_Katsunori
>>1289 I play rugby and I sometimes think about how contingent the game is on the players having learnt to tackle at a young age when the energy involved is pretty low and it doesn't hurt (that much). It's a difficult and bruising thing to acquire in adulthood with pretty severe consequences if you get it wrong.
>>1306 it's not an either/or at all. there's a reason people take the piss out of this cartoon, because ultimately staying in shape does not take an enormous amount of time. with certain very specific exceptions all young people have enough time to do schoolwork as well as exercise
It was different in the 1990s.
Pretty good Grand Prix this morning, McLaren looking somewhat comfortable as the quickest team for the first part of the season, Norris brake issue notwithstanding. Antonelli as Driver of the Day was a bit laughable. For me it's Ocon. Strong drive over-all and the bravest bit of driving all weekend to overtake Antonelli on the dirt. Disaster from RB with the two-stop strategy, but in their defense it was shocking how good the hards were compared to the mediums. Lawson is in serious trouble at Red Bull. If he does not finish in the points at Suzuka he will lose his seat. Finally would say that someone needs to sit Doohan down and tell him to stop driving like he's in Formula Regional. Came close to causing two big accidents with Hadjar.
I've started rock climbing recently. I'm particularly blessed to live near a stunningly beautiful mountain, so I'm really looking forward to getting out of the gym and onto the rock. My fingers are absolutely shredded though - you really do have to train your ligaments as it seems like it's really easy to injure your hands.
>>1382 A good friend of mine is a serious rock climber. Not a pro but somewhere near the level of amateur where you start getting given shit for free. It's very impressive to see how strong and skilled he has gotten in the six odd years he's been doing the sport. It sounds kinda like a nightmare though, he just wants to climb but he lives in a permanent loop of rehabbing soft tissue injuries to his fingers, finally getting them back to the point where he can climb hard again, only to pick up new injuries. Maybe he is susceptible but from what I've heard this is a common story for people climbing at a high level.
>>1409 Ok, so Ferrari are the most famous team in F1, being the only team who has been involved since the first season of the World Championship in 1950, and a heritage going back to before the Second World War. They are also one of the best funded teams and so usually have one of the better cars. However, they have not won a drivers' championship since 2007 (Raikkonen) or a constructors' championship since 2008. Since then they have varied between being pretty uncompetitive (2009, 2014, 2020) and being close to victory (Alonso in 2010 and 2012, Vettel to a lesser extent in 2017 and 2018). The thing about Ferrari is that they have a reputation for competent engineering but poor management, race strategy, and trackside operations. Which means that they often seem to find themselves shooting themselves in the foot or otherwise bungling wins that by rights should have been theirs. In any case, for this season they have made a star signing. Lewis Hamilton, the joint most successful F1 driver of all time and still considered in the top three or four fastest drivers on the grid, has moved to them from Mercedes, the team with which he took six of his seven championships. They are only the third team he has raced for in F1, and if he can win a championship with them it will make him inarguably the most successful driver in history (eight titles with three teams versus Schumacher's seven titles with two). Come the first race of the season in Australia. The strongest team are McLaren. Ferrari is not especially quick and Hamilton struggles with the car, finishing 10th, behind his team-mate Leclerc. The circus moves on Shanghai. Remarkably, Ferrari is looking much more competitive in practice, and Hamilton is more comfortable in the car. He takes pole position for the shorter Saturday 'sprint' race and goes on to win it, securing eight championship points. Suddenly it looks like he might be a title contender! Immensely exciting for Ferrari fans, Hamilton fans, and neutrals alike. But then things start to go wrong. Qualifying for the main race is less successful for Hamilton and Leclerc, placing 5th and 6th. And in the race itself, they struggle for pace relative to the McLarens, the Mercedes of George Russell, and the Red Bull of reigning champion Max Verstappen. Leclerc is the quicker of the two Ferrari drivers, despite damaging his front wing on the first lap. A disappointing outcome. Then, the final insult. After the race, technical checks find both cars to be illegal. Leclerc's car is a kilogram below the weight limit. Meanwhile, Hamilton's car is deemed to have run too close to the ground, which is determined by the level of wear on a sacrificial strip of wood on the underside. Both of these errors are cause for slam dunk disqualifications; and both cars are summarily disqualified. This is apparently the only time in the history of the sport that both Ferrari cars have been disqualified from the same race - disqualifications of any kind are unusual, double disqualifications far more so. Ultimately the whole episode seems to show that Ferrari are still in their era of making continual unforced errors, making the likelihood of either Hamilton or Leclerc challenging for the drivers title seem quite remote. If this goes on, Hamilton will join Fernando Alonso and Sebastian Vettel in the lineage of world champions who have moved to Ferrari with the ambition to win in red, only to become frustrated and disillusioned.
>>1411 Ouch, that is frustrating indeed. Thank you for the recap. I will now know why some people I know get so agitated when they talk about F1. Side-note, this is what KF should be about. I'd love a clear recap of current issues in pockets of the world I do not know. Reddit used to spam me with F1 subreddits for months, I didn't learn anything, except that Hamilton knows how to dress.
>>1412 What do you mean by KF? KiwiFarms? But yes /r/F1 has been very bad for a long time. Back when I was a teenager I used to be a power-poster there, but now I never read it. It's basically just FauxMoi if FauxMoi only talked about half a dozen pretty boys with underwear model girlfriends.
Again, see comment