Wars have actually been started over less…
On one widely-read all-topics discussion group (Metafilter*) recently, there was a debate about a new wrinkle being added to the rules for baseball as it is being played in the Beijing Olympics. Under the new rule, if the game has gone on for ten innings with no winner, the 11th inning will begin with runners already placed on first and second bases, and both teams will be free to run through their batting line-up in whatever order they want.
The rationale, of course, is to hasten the process of determining a clear winner, mostly because the stadium would have been booked for other events based on the anticipated time of the baseball game’s ending.
All of which is a long-winded introduction to this delightful comment in the discussion thread that followed the posting on news of the rule change:
“You know, being British and even watching Field of Dreams several times I've got no idea at all what this is means. Still that’s what I like about the Olympics, being able to check out the minor novelty sports...”
* As a footnote, MetaFilter is a huge amount of fun to read. It’s a blog that is updated several, sometimes dozens of times per day and its topics really do range all over the map. If you’re looking for a fascinating site to visit, it’s here. (Everything appearing in yellow is a hot link that takes you somewhere else in cyberspace.)
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Which leads me to my biennial rant.
(Cue the Cowardly Lion: “If I Were King of the Forest”)
If I were in charge of the world, I would ban all judged sports – every last one of them – from the Olympics, and compel the Games to live more simply, adhering strictly to its own motto: Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger) OK, I’d maybe add, “Score More Goals” to accommodate soccer, hockey and water polo, but that’s it.
My point is that I would exclude any sport whose final score is determined not by some objective device like a clock or measuring tape, but rather has to await the judges’ tally, which typically is based on a combination of their wholly subjective personal evaluations of the competitor's “style” and “execution”.
(And I hasten to add that, unlike some people, I am not disputing the “athleticism” of sports such as the pool events with the adjective “synchronized” in front of them. Nope, I’m not even going there. Lord knows that synchronized swimmers in fact are probably some of the fittest athletes on the face of the earth. They have to be. After all, they not only have to push themselves to some unbelievable exertions, they have to do so without the immediate access to oxygen that other open-air competitors have. Try gasping for breath while you’re suspended upside-down and spinning in 12 feet of water if you don’t believe me.)
No, my complaint with judged sports is that the determination of who mounts the medal podium inevitably comes down to a gang of politically motivated scorekeepers, many of whom have already been shown in the past to be unashamedly amenable to accepting “considerations” in exchange for more favourable marks for one competitor or nation or, conversely, fewer marks.
My first remembered experience with a controversy surrounding the bias that dominates judged sports goes back to the 1972 Winter Olympics when an Austrian figure skater with the happily elfin name of Trixie Schuba won gold, despite freestyle performances by competitors – especially her main competition, American skater Janet Lynn – that were almost unanimously characterized as having shown more passion and fewer errors than Schuba’s merely competent skate. I still remember reading one commentator who railed that the fix, clearly, was in, and who wrote further that Schuba really had only to show up, roll over three times and belch in the general direction of the judges’ table to secure the gold medal. Who that acerbic columnist was has probably been lost to the annals of history, but it occurs to me he would’ve made a great blogger!
Canada’s contribution to the history of the travesty that is judged Olympic competition is, of course, the appalling story of skaters David Pelletier and Jamie Salé, who were beaten by the judges in the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. Here’s how Wikipedia, in their bio of Salé, sums up what eventually became a full-blown scandal:
“The next day, the French judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne admitted she had been pressured into awarding the long program to the Russians in exchange for a first-place vote for the French ice dancing team of Marina Anissina and Gwendal Peizerat, and a judging controversy quickly blew up. The scandal ultimately resulted in the suspension of several judges and officials, and Le Gougne's vote was discarded, leaving the long program a tie. Salé and Pelletier were awarded gold medals in a special ceremony later in the week.”
And already there have been intimations of some sort of “Get Canada” under-the-table agreements in some of the Beijing gymnastics events. This, for example, appeared in a Globe and Mail story (online edition, August 9) about what many felt were undeservedly low marks given to Canadian gymnast Kyle Shewfelt for his floor exercises:
“Two Canadian men's team coaches both slammed the marks given their athletes in the all-important qualification round Saturday that determines which individuals and what teams move on. While both Tony Smith and head coach Edouard Iarov suggested the fix was in, the most direct allegations came from Mr. Iarov, who pointed the finger at a official from FIG, the international gymnastics federation, and accused him of calling a judge during the actual competition in order to ‘push out Canada’ and favor Spain.”
Whether Beijing yields another judging scandal or not, my point is that as long as the end result is determined by people other than the athletes, there will always be doubts about whether or not a gold medalist truly “won” his or her event, or whether it was just Whateveristan’s turn for a place on the podium.
Oh, and a rant PS, I would also bar professional athletes from the Games. I find it especially galling that someone like Rafe Nadal can earn over a million dollars winning Wimbledon one week and show up to vie for Olympic gold a few weeks later against players who don’t have logo-festooned, colour co-ordinated personal-label fashions created especially by Nike. That’s not “amateur sport” to me and I would leave the field exclusively to those who truly are amateurs.
Olympic heroes for me are people like Jesse Owens, who in one fell swoop (and no fewer than four gold-medal blurred streaks of black skin) at the Berlin Games in 1936 blasted the Nazis’ belief in the superiority of the Aryan race; Paavo (“The Flying Finn”) Nurmi, winner of nine gold medals and three silvers, all for running, in three separate summer games, spanning 1920 to 1928; Abebe Bikila, a barefoot Ethiopian runner who parleyed the humblest beginnings imaginable into Olympic Marathon gold in Rome in 1960 and, astonishingly, repeated as the Marathon gold medalist in Tokyo in 1964.
So probably it’s a good thing I’m not in charge of things. Someone has to assemble all those Nike shoes the athletes wear and were the field to be de-populated to the extent I would have it, there are a lot of third world countries with Nike factories whose 12-year old chief breadwinners would likely be thrown out of work.
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Things to recommend:
Movies:
"21": (Recommended by a BD regular – Thanks, Nat) Great summer movie. Granted, its fairly well-telegraphed plot twists probably don’t actually surprise as much as the director might perhaps have hoped. The plot – loosely based on a true story – is about a small group of young MIT mathematical geniuses who manage to turn their own take on “card-counting” into a money-earning run at Las Vegas blackjack tables. In film form, it is fast-paced and believably acted. It’s also given a tensely sinister boost in the casting of Laurence Fishburne as a big, mean hotel security chief who sees his career and his abilities more and more under the threat of extinction as computerization moves inexorably into the casino security business in place of human intuition. “21” owes much to caper flicks like “The Sting”, “Fitzwilly” and even “Risky Business”, and Kevin Spacey, clearly, is hugely enjoying himself playing the students’ professor and ringleader. (And guys, for those very few moments when you’d really prefer they hurry the plot along, you get freshly-scrubbed Kate Bosworth to ease the pain.) As an added bonus, the final credits roll over a fabulous mash-up of the Rolling Stones’ classic, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” with a thumping electronic overdub laid down by someone (someones? something?) named Soulwax. It’s can’t-stay-still infectious and has already found itself in a much-played spot on my iPod.
"El Orfanato / The Orphanage": Another gut churner from the dark mind of Spanish director Guillermo (“Pan’s Labyrinth”) del Toro. I confess I know only two del Toro films – these two mentioned here – but I am already convinced that he finds his most profound terror in placing children in threatening situations, and then forcing the adults – whether those in the film or those in the audience – to deal with the psychological fallout of that malevolence. What the hell am I talking about, you ask? Check either or both of these films out. Trust me, you’ll understand. They’re not “horror" movies, as we understand the term in North American film-making. But both are singularly terrifying. This one ("The Orphanage") tells the story of a young couple who have decided to convert their home – previously an orphanage – into a care centre for children with mental disabilities. (She of the couple was herself a resident of the house when it was an orphanage.) The house has its memories, it seems, just as she has hers. Don’t watch this one alone.
(After recently hearing that del Toro has been given “The Hobbit” to direct, I’m seriously wondering if we’re going to see what is essentially a children’s story come out with a parental advisory!)
"Amazing Grace": Excellent! At first glance, reading that someone has made a movie about William Wilberforce, the British MP who in the late 18th century was the relentless and at times near-solitary crusader behind the abolition of the slave trade in that country, might seem yawn-inducing. But the story – Wilberforce’s David vs the period’s Caribbean plantation sugar-baron Goliaths – is a compelling one and the cast is flawless. Highly recommended.
"WALL-E": Erm… Not so much. It’s not often that an animated movie leaves you longing for a human character just to (“Please GOD!!”) let you aurally grab onto something other than robotic squeaks and electronic vocal mimicry, but both Leslie and I found that halfway through this movie, we were really hoping some actual people-type characters would appear. That said, it’s a superbly animated story of a little robot who has been happily (well, is any robot truly happy?) carrying out his mission of compacting and stacking garbage – for some 700 years (!) as the movie opens – when he encounters another remote probe sent from somewhere else. “Other probe” (This is PIXAR, after all) is decidedly female and, while we don’t actually see anything so crass as WALL-E’s floppy become a hard drive, clearly he’s taken with “EVE” (for “Extra Vehicular Explorer” or some other equally fortuitous girl acronym-enabled name). The presence of towers of garbage and the absence of people is obviously intended to be a subtle message for those of us watching in 2008. Actually, I kid; it’s not the least damned bit subtle. (Alright already, where’s my Blue Box? Geez!) In hindsight, I would give this one a pass in the wallet-bleeding setting of a theatre, but it’ll quite capably serve as a more than worthy diversion on the home screen when it comes out on DVD.
Books:
"The Man Who Loved China" is the story of a Cambridge professor – Joseph Needham – who not only loved China, he loved it to the point of being blinded by its paranoid communist politics once the nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek lost out to Chou En-Lai and Mao Tse-Tung. Despite the occasional not-entirely-favourable impact of his politics on his academic career, Needham produced what is generally held to be the most comprehensive work on China ever produced by a Westerner. “Science and Civilization in China” made a singular contribution to our understanding of China in its documented revelations of just how many inventions and innovations – routinely attributed to scientists in the West – in some cases were not only invented, but perfected and put into routine use in China sometimes centuries before they appeared in Europe or the Americas. And the work goes on. By the time of his death in 1995, his “masterwork” had grown to 18 volumes. His copious notes and meticulously well-organized archives continue to this day to yield new volumes, written by his collaborators, from the Cambridge University Press. (I’ve since read several references that suggest the end point seems intended to be a 24-volume set.) Written by Simon Winchester, it’s a popularly-readable (it revels in its academic settings, but doesn’t drown you in them) story about an amazing man.
And finally… Cycle Babble
Continuing with my previous entry’s theme of things I probably don’t want to hear as I begin my journey of a thousand miles with my own first step on the path leading to becoming a biker:
Recently, I was treated to a “walkaround” of my new bike by a technician from the Ottawa Good Time Centre’s maintenance team. It’s a routine, and very much appreciated, introduction they give to every purchaser of one of their machines. Every model of bike, apparently, comes with its own idiosyncrasies and the Triumph America is no exception. But after he guided me about the various handlebar instrument and function controls, we moved down to the wheels. With not even a scuff mark, they fairly gleamed. “Give it a touch,” he said. I ran my hand along the rubber arc of the front tyre (It’s a Triumph, remember, and in Britain they’re spelled “tyres”) and was surprised by what I felt. “It feels a little slippery,” I told him.
“It is,” he replied. “Every new tire (unlike the bike, he’s Canadian, hence "tire") is given a light rub of oil. It helps keep any pre-sale scuffing from permanently marking the rubber and it also keeps the tires from drying out when they’re put on the store tire rack for sale.” He pointed to a nearby multi-shelf rack that held dozens of new bike tires in a wide variety of sizes.
“But of course,” he added, “what this means is that until you’ve put a few miles on them, your bike will corner as if…” (he paused…) “you’re on glare ice. So don’t corner too quickly the moment you take a new tire out on the road. I’ve seen guys pull out of our shop with their new tires installed, turn out of our driveway onto the street and wham! They’re right over on the road.”
The moral of the story, apparently, is to take your first few corners slowly so you don’t actually have to lean the bike over as far as you do when cornering at street speed.
“They actually OIL the tires??” I said, wrapping up the whole little lecture. “Right,” he said. “So you’ll want to wait a few miles before doing anything too aggressive.”
(Not to worry, I’m thinking, because the few “things” I will wait before getting “aggressive” will be units less like “miles” and more like “years”. If ever.)
A la next time (when hopefully I’ll be writing as a newly-minted, wholly unaggressive M-2. So consider this fair warning – any of you who are bike-bored. The next post is probably gonna be somewhat bike-heavy.)
