Sport Recreation and Leisure Articles

The Magic of Believing

• To Golf Like the Pros, Pretend You're Using Their Clubs
  
  Houses where Shakespeare stayed. Shirts saints wore. Shoes worn by famous athletes. It's not very hard to convince people that something - beauty, saintliness, prowess - leaks from a famous person to the objects they used. But while magic is still not scientifically valid, you can apparently get something from such relics - if you believe.
  
  A new study reports that people who are told that the golf club they're using belonged to a pro athlete actually putt quite a bit better than people who are just told that the club is a nice one. The researchers split forty-one college students who had golf experience and had followed the PGA tour into two groups, and told one group that their putter had been used by pro golfer Ben Curtis. Out of 10 putts, those subjects sank 1.5 more putts than the control group, on average.
  
  How exactly this happens is an interesting question, and the researchers lay out several possibilities. They knew that people who picture themselves doing well on a task and being in control tend to do better than people who haven't, and it's possible that thinking of Curtis' achievements and perhaps putting themselves in his shoes before they putted did something similar. It could also be that talking about Curtis could have 'primed' the subjects to do better - priming is a psychological effect by which experiencing one stimulus can make you respond a certain way to later stimuli. (If you haven't heard of the hot coffee/cold coffee experiments, one of the canonical—and mind-bending - examples of priming, get thee here and here). "Priming students with the term; professor' activates the concept of intelligence, thereby enhancing performance on subsequent knowledge tests," the researchers points out. "Hence, believing that a professional used one's putter could have implicitly activated the concept of "skill" thereby improving putting performance."
  
  They point out that this looks similar to the placebo effect - fake drugs, procedures, surgeries, etc. can still provoke a response in people who don't know that they're fake. But the mind is a complicated thing, and what connection, if any, there might be between placebos and a golf club anointed with good vibes from a pro is not clear.
  
  Ah, you say, but what about the possibility that something really did move from Ben Curtis to his clubs? That's easily dispensed with: The researchers were fibbing.

The Lingerie Football League

A YEAR after the faltering arrival of the glitz-style girls' beauty pageant in Australia, we are soon to endure an attempt to import another sexist American spectacle to our shores. The Lingerie Football League is a women's seven-a-side gridiron league that began in 2009 after the success of the ''Lingerie Bowl'' pay-per-view event broadcast at half-time during the Super Bowl. The game is full-contact like the men's game, but the uniform of bra, panties and garters bears little resemblance to the male uniform, with the exception of shoulder padding.

The LFL will hold exhibition matches in Brisbane and Sydney from next week to generate hype for an anticipated season launch in 2013.

Sport Minister Kate Lundy has called the LFL a ''cheap, degrading perv'', while young Australian women unafraid of having their backsides exposed to millions have indicated their interest in taking to the field.

The US and Canadian ''games'' are largely orchestrated for cable television and the primary audience, according to LFL founder Mitch Mortaza, is young college men. The teams have names such as Los Angeles Temptation, Chicago Bliss and Orlando Fantasy, which are more sexually suggestive and less evocative of athletic prowess than the Broncos, Lions and Bombers.

The ''players'' effectively take to the field in underwear. Tackles and manoeuvres inevitably reveal even more buttock and breast. No wonder players must sign a contract that includes an ''accidental nudity'' clause.

The Lingerie Football League is little more than jelly wrestling repackaged for a mass television audience. Private viewing of porn or a strip show is different to selling the objectification of women as an innocuous ''sporting'' event. The LFL is damaging to all women in addition to making a mockery of women's sport.

We need to consider the effect of the movement of raunch culture out of adult venues and into the mainstream. LFL is not restricted in the same way as an exotic dance or a men's magazine, and so the upcoming Australian exhibition matches include ''family tickets'' that offer discount admission for children aged between two and 12. Women tackling each other wearing lingerie is being marketed as a family night out.

In a recent interview with Melinda Tankard Reist about the LFL, Derryn Hinch asked: ''What about male divers, they wear very brief shorts - will you ban them?'' Next time there is a male diving pay-per-view event, predominantly subscribed to by women, in which other men tread water poised to dislodge a competitor's Speedos, perhaps we should consider it. Other supporters propose that the LFL is a legitimate sporting event because many of the women who participate have played sports professionally. The truth is there are dedicated women footballers in the US in the Ladies Gridiron League but no one wants to promote or watch their games, in which players are clothed. The LFL selects women who look like centrefolds in their bra and panties, not muscular or stocky women who might be athletically most suited to football.

Female athletes are regularly undervalued for their sporting abilities, but rewarded for their appearance. This is why tennis player Anna Kournikova was often scheduled on centre court, while higher-ranked players without model looks were relegated to outer courts. It's why the prettiest female swimmers such as Giaan Rooney continue to receive endorsements after retirement, while equal or greater athletes who are not as photogenic aren't considered suitable for promoting products.

Olympics and Nationalism

We are about to enter that period, which occurs every four years, when Americans become passionate about athletes we have never heard of participating in games we do not follow trying to please judges we cannot see according to rules we do not know. The fullness of our ignorance never diminishes the pitch of our Olympic enthusiasm. Those cute girls with the ribbons - rhythmic gymnasts, that's what they're called - and the synchronized swimmers, mimicking one another's every move, like Harpo and Groucho in the mirror scene in Duck Soup, will briefly become as beloved as any Yankee shortstop or Celtics forward. "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" we chant, until the two weeks of games are over, and even the most prominent Olympians may find themselves making their way home from the top step of the podium to the bottom rung of the D-list. (Ask Bruce Jenner, once the world's greatest all-round athlete - with the medals to show for it - now playing for Team Kardashian.) This year, only one American rhythmic gymnast, the courageous Julie Zetlin, who came back from a serious meniscus injury, made the Olympic cut to carry the nation's hope upon her sequin-covered armbands.

Americans are not the only people to succumb to national Olympic hysteria, but we are, perhaps, the most consumed by it. We root for our kind in every sport we see, whereas most nations prudently limit the number of sports they follow to begin with. (Watch the Olympics in France, and you would think that they are essentially an international meet devoted to the odd duo of fencing and bicycle racing - the two summer sports in which the French most often excel.)

The nationalism at the heart of the Olympic ideal is part of its nature, its DNA. The modern games were born in the nineteenth century, and their guiding ideology was a mixture of amateurism and nationalism - the joint nineteenth - century faith that the nation-state was man's natural unit, and that the gentleman with time on his hands and a boxing helmet on his head was man's obvious leader.

A curious thing about the Olympics this year is that they are being held in London, a city that, for the past two decades, has been conducting perhaps the first extended experiment since the nineteenth century in sporting cosmopolitanism - that is, in international sports minus the overt nationalism. The major London football clubs have booted out all but the occasional Englishman - to the American eye, it sometimes seems as if only a few were allowed to take part in each game, like the last aristocrats in Chekhov's plays - and turned over their teams to foreign athletes and billionaires, even as their success or failure in international play matters more and more. The recent European Champions League final pitted Bayern Munich against West London's (and Roman Abramovich's) Chelsea, led by the superb Ivorian striker Didier Drogba, the great Czech goalkeeper Petr Cech, and the fine Italian coach Roberto Di Matteo - Russian money, African brilliance, Central European skill, and Italian dash working for the glory of the Fulham Road.

Our true values reveal themselves by the number of strangers we welcome to pursue them. More than forty years ago, Kenneth Clark marvelled at how, in the twelfth century, Canterbury Cathedral twice searched halfway across Europe to find the right person to be its archbishop. Clark said that when "some human activity is vital for us, internationalism is unhesitatingly accepted." The same thing would happen in his day, he added, only with a physics lab. Today, it happens with a soccer team.

You'd like to think that the triumph of cosmopolitan teams suggests that the old national fervor has diminished, and, indeed, not a few fans find those Champions League matches infinitely more diverting than the current truly national European Cup. But the triumph of foreign money and across-the-water skill doesn't demonstrate to the London football fan that tribalism is foolish; it demonstrates that West (or North, or East) London rules! We instantly induct the triumphant outsider into our local unit. Didier Drogba does not impress upon the Chelsea fan the wonders of the Ivory Coast; he impresses upon him the wonders of Chelsea.

And, in a way, this exposes the tricky double legacy of nationalism that the Olympics really celebrate. Nationalism certainly affirmed the superiority of our cheering gang over here to your cheering gang over there - a truth we think demonstrable by what our gang can do to yours on any field of conflict you choose, as big as Northern France or as small as a tennis court. But it also gave birth to the liberal ideal that anyone could become part of a nation simply by showing up and joining the team, submerging individual racial or ethnic particularity into a greater national whole. When Jesse Owens outran the Nazis in Berlin, in 1936, he showed American racists that American blacks were just as American as anyone else. For that matter, the victory of the French national team in the World Cup, back in 1998, was a similar kind of inclusiveness: all those "un-French" names and colors pulling together for France expanded the meaning of Frenchness.

So perhaps we need not feel too self-conscious rooting for the rhythmic gymnasts and the synchronized swimmers, along with all the more obvious heroes and heroines: the Michael Phelpses, the Carl Lewises, the Mary Lou Rettons. Although the relationship between having national virtue and being good at sports is much like the one that pertains at school recess between those who are strong and fast and those who are wise and kind, there is still something to be said for making a big coast-to-coast noise for the smaller sports.

Sports are about human character inasmuch, and only inasmuch, as they show that you can master anything with enough effort. Seen in this light, our urge to give the full measure of our national devotion to the synchronized swimmers - and the shot-putters and even the heel-and-toe walkers and the beach-volleyball women in their bikinis - is logical and even admirable. We are embracing the marginalized masters among us in order to make a team, as we have embraced once marginalized people to make a nation. So lead us, Julie Zetlin, at least for a week or two. And don't forget your ribbon.

Blade Runner

Runners who've faced off against Oscar Pistorius say they know when the South African is closing in on them from behind. They hear a distinctive clicking noise growing louder, like a pair of scissors slicing through the air - the sound of Pistorius's Flex-Foot Cheetah prosthetic legs.

It's those long, J-shaped, carbon-fiber lower legs - and the world-class race times that come with them—that have some people asking an unpopular question: Does Pistorius, the man who has overcome so much to be the first double amputee to run at an Olympic level, have an unfair advantage? Scientists are becoming entwined in a debate over whether Pistorius should be allowed to compete in the 2012 London Games.

Pistorius was born without fibulas, one of the two long bones in the lower leg. He was unable to walk as a baby, and at 11 months old both of his legs were amputated below the knee. But the growing child didn't let his disability slow him down. At age 12 he was playing rugby with the other boys, and in 2005, at age 18, he ran the 400-meter race in 47.34 seconds at the South African Championships, sixth best. Now 25, the man nicknamed the Blade Runner has qualified for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, just three weeks before the games were to begin. But should he be allowed to compete?

The question seems preposterous. How could someone without lower legs possibly have an advantage over athletes with natural legs? The debate took a scientific turn in 2007 when a German team reported that Pistorius used 25 percent less energy than natural runners. The conclusion was tied to the unusual prosthetic made by an Icelandic company called Ossur. The Flex-Foot Cheetah has become the go-to running prosthetic for Paralympic (and, potentially Olympic) athletes. "When the user is running, the prosthesis's J curve is compressed at impact, storing energy and absorbing high levels of stress that would otherwise be absorbed by a runner's ankle, knee, hip and lower back," explains Hilmar Janusson, executive vice president of research and development at Ossur. The Cheetah's carbon-fiber layers then rebound off the ground in response to the runner's strides.

After the German report was released, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) banned Pistorius from competing. Pistorius hired Jeffrey Kessler, a high-powered lawyer who's represented athletes from the National Basketball Association and National Football League. It soon became clear that the IAAF's study was very poorly designed, so when Pistorius's team asked for a new study they got it. Soon scientists gathered at Rice University to figure out just what was going on with Pistorius's body.

The scientific team included Peter Weyand, a physiologist at Southern Methodist University who had the treadmills needed to measure the forces involved in sprinting. Rodger Kram, at the University of Colorado at Boulder, was a track and field fan who studied biomechanics. Hugh Herr, a double amputee himself, was a renowned biophysicist. The trio, and other experts, measured Pistorius's oxygen consumption, his leg movements, the forces he exerted on the ground and his endurance. They also looked at leg-repositioning time - the amount of time it takes Pistorius to swing his leg from the back to the front.

After several months the team concluded in a paper for The Journal of Applied Physiology that Pistorius was "physiologically similar but mechanically dissimilar" to someone running with intact legs. He uses oxygen the same way natural-legged sprinters do, but he moves his body differently.

The results of the Rice University study - physiologically similar, mechanically different - were presented to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Switzerland in 2008, which decided that Pistorius should be allowed to run, revoking the IAAF's decision. He missed qualifying for the 2008 Beijing Olympics by 0.7 second.

But then scientific controversy arose. Members of the team that had published the paper began to express very different ideas about what, exactly, "mechanically different" meant. One group said that Pistorius's differences leave him on a level running field with all the other athletes. The other said that Pistorius is mechanically different in a way that confers a serious competitive advantage.

Weyand, the scientist with the treadmills, believes that Pistorius's prosthetics allow him to move in a way that no non-prosthetics wearer could, giving him an advantage. Kram, the biomechanics expert, believes that the Blade Runner's blades hinder him just as much as they help.

One of the biggest points of contention is limb-repositioning time. The average elite male sprinter moves his leg from back to front in 0.37 second. The five most recent world record holders in the 100-meter dash averaged 0.34 second. Pistorius swings his leg in 0.28 second, largely because his Cheetah's are lighter than a regular human leg. Pistorius's rivals are swinging a lower leg that weighs about 5.7 kilograms, whereas his lower leg only weighs 2.4 kilograms.

Kram and his researchers countered with a paper claiming to have measured Walter Dix, a 100-meter sprinter, swinging his leg faster than Pistorius. But they used television footage of Dix rather than the standard, high-speed research video generally used to make such measurements. "The differences here are relatively small, so doing it with TV video isn't going to cut it," says Jesus Dapena, a biomechanics researcher at Indiana University Bloomington who was not involved in the Rice study. High-speed footage for Dix from that same season does exist, Weyand says, and it shows the runner clearly repositioning his limbs at around the same rate as the average Olympic sprinter.

Swing time is important because it affects some central factors that determine how fast a person can run. Repositioning his legs faster means Pistorius can keep his foot on the ground longer than everyone else. It's a bit counterintuitive, but Weyand argues that a runner's speed is largely determined by how long he can keep his feet on the ground, rather than in the air. The longer a foot remains on the ground, the more time the person has to generate force that will propel him forward. More force generally means more speed.

Kram argues, however, that because the Cheetahs are made of carbon fiber, and are lighter, they can't transmit nearly as much force to the ground as a human leg can, creating less forward propulsion. So Pistorius has to push down harder than most people to get the same amount of force against the ground. Weyand counters that Pistorius simply doesn't need to push as hard to run just as fast.

Of course, other researchers have other theories about a possible advantage. Because Pistorius's Cheetah's don't tire, his lower leg stays springy throughout the entire race. For most 400-meter runners the second half of the race is where the real battle happens. Jim Matin, a researcher at the University of Utah, says that the lower leg is what weakens and slows runners. Martin thinks that if Pistorius ran in a competitive 600-meter race, Pistorius could set the world record.

Some of the arguing may be moot. The fact that Pistorius runs differently does not necessarily indicate an advantage, because even the most elite sprinters have their own running styles, says Jill McNitt-Gray, a researcher at the University of Southern California who wasn't involved in the Rice study. One sprinter might use his hips more than the next. Another may rely more on his arm thrust. Amputees develop ways to interact with their prosthetic that makes sense for them. "Your body is going to figure out how best to use [the prosthetic]," she says.

In many ways, studying Pistorius is difficult. There's only one of him, and only one good study that uses his specific physiology. There are no other Olympic-level double amputees, and single-leg amputees run totally differently. Imagine your right leg could swing 10 percent faster than your left; your left leg simply could not keep up. A person with one prosthetic and one intact leg can only go as fast as his slowest leg - generally the biological one.

To complicate matters further, science doesn't totally understand how running works. "We really don't know exactly the mechanics of running," Dapena says. They have a working idea, he says, but it's possible that the forces Weyand and Kram are debating aren't important. "It's a good logic," he says, "but it's not necessarily down pat that way."

Weyland will not say outright whether or not Pistorius should be allowed to run in the Olympics. Perhaps, he says, the sprinter represents something more important than the dispute over his light, springy legs. "I admire the heck out of him," he adds. "He's an excellent athlete who's worked like crazy and persevered and overcome."

For Kram, whether Pistorius should run comes down to power. "Oscar derives all of his power from what he had for breakfast." Athletes should be in a different race only when motors or alternate power sources are introduced, he says. "When you're tired you can't just twist the throttle. You have to find that desire or have that physiological ability to push. That's what makes the Olympics special." It's what makes Pistorius special, too, Kram says. He's pushed his whole life.

Now Pistorius will represent South Africa in the 400-meter race and the 4 x 400-meter relay. And if there's one thing everyone agrees on, it's that the races will be intriguing to watch.

What Counts As An Enhancement? ("Freaks and Tweaks")

The London Olympic Games and the Tour de France are on the horizon in Europe. Here in North America, the baseball season is under way, with football soon to follow. All of which means that around the world, in gleaming state-of-the-art facilities and dingy state-of-the-meth-lab basements, chemists are hard at work making molecules for athletes to swallow, snort, apply and inject into one another's butts.

Almost all sports fans decry the use of performance-enhancing drugs. It's cheating. It gives the user attributes he or she did not rightfully earn. It just feels wrong to most fans. It feels wrong to me. But I have a question that almost inevitably leads to heated arguments - which leads me to suspect that we're dealing with deep emotional issues as much as intellectual analysis.

My question is: Why is it not questionable for a Boston Red Sox team doctor to have surgically and temporarily stabilized Curt Schilling's peroneus brevis tendon by suturing it into deep connective tissue before Game 6 of the 2004 American League Championship Series against the New York Yankees? (The jerry-rigged nature of what is now called the "Schilling tendon procedure" begat the Beantown-blessed bloody sock.)

Okay, the question is usually worded more like this: "Sure, steroids are cheating, but why was it legal for them to sew Curt Schilling's ankle together for a few hours just so he could pitch?" If I, a Yankees fan, put the question to a Red Sox fan, I quickly add, over my shoulder, "Stop chasing me with that fireplace poker, I'm not saying it wasn't okay, I just wanna know why it was."

Barry Bonds, who allegedly used so many steroids that other hitters looking to beef up could just lick him, probably ruined his chances for admission to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Schilling's bloody sock is already on display there.

Pitcher Mordecai Brown mangled his hand in a piece of farming equipment, which earned him the nickname 'Three-Finger' but made his curveball better. Pitcher Antonio Alfonseca's hereditary polydactyly gave him six fingers per hand. Do we need a five-finger rule?

Furthermore, why is 'Tommy John surgery' okeydoke? When I was a boy, when a pitcher's arm fell off, he just pitched with his other arm. Sorry, I slipped into caricature-old-man mode for a second there. Let me try again.

When I was a kid, if a pitcher suffered damage to the ulnar collateral ligament of his elbow, he either kept trying to pitch through the pain, or he retired. But in 1974 orthopedic surgeon Frank Jobe replaced pitcher Tommy John's ligament with a tendon from John's arm. And John pitched in the major leagues until 1989. So many pitchers have performed so well after Tommy John surgery, some young pitchers have considered having it done electively.

The usual answer I get is that surgical procedures merely allow the athlete to return to his or her previous, natural condition. They do not enhance anybody's performance. Which seems reasonable - until I wonder whether it was natural for some athletes to break down under the stress when other athletes stay whole.

Speaking of what's natural, let's talk about my all-time favorite Olympic athlete, seven-time cross-country skiing medalist Eero Mantyranta. Because Mantyranta, who competed for Finland in the 1960s, was straight out of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters.

Mantyranta has a genetic condition that can bring about fantastic increases in red blood cells, hemoglobin and oxygen-carrying capacity. Which is a pretty terrific thing for an endurance athlete to have. (Much, much better than an extra finger on each hand.)

Actually it's blood doping, but natural. Well, it's natural if a mutation is natural. And although most world-class athletes probably won't have a single major Mantyranta-like mutation, I would bet they have a constellation of uncommon, performance-enhancing genetic constructs. So if users of performance-enhancing drugs are disqualified, should holders of performance-enhancing mutations be barred, too? Stop levitating the poker, Magneto, I'm just asking.

Sport and London Art

Wacky or wonderful, from football to rugby, (thanks to readers) our list of masterpieces about sport is longer than first thought

Last week I challenged readers to add to my list of artistic or literary masterpieces about sport - a list I rashly thought was pretty well comprehensive. In an attempt to appear 'on the ball' as London goes jockstrap-mad, I had already recalled such time-honoured classics as Peter Handke's impenetrably existential The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty, David Storey's rugby-league tragedy This Sporting Life and Claude Debussy's tennis-and-very-French-sex ballet Jeux. What more could be added?

The answer supplied by your torrent of e-mails and letters is clearly "lots". "What about Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch?" asks a frothing Brian Richards and about 200 other readers (most of them living suspiciously close to the Emirates Stadium, North London). Well, OK - but until I have objective corroboration from a Spurs fan that the Arsenal-saturated novel is a real masterpiece, I'll reserve judgment.

Staying with football, Francis Lloyd nominates The Cup - "a wonderful Tibetan/Indian film, set in a Buddhist monastery, about a group of boys trying to watch the World Cup". Several readers also mentioned Gregory's Girl, Bend it Like Beckham and Ken Loach's touching Kes. "Though sport isn't its subject," Valerie Passmore says, "the football match in it is one of the most entertaining depictions of sport on film ever. And I speak as a football loather."

Chloe Nelkin has a classical offering. "I imagine that everyone will suggest Discobolus to you," she writes. Actually, Chloe, nobody else has. But thanks for reminding us of this superb Ancient Greek sculpture, proving that neither discus-throwing nor homoeroticism has changed much in 2,500 years.

Several readers were kind enough to point out that, as a classical-music critic, I should have mentioned such sporty oeuvres as the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger's 1928 piece Rugby (which might make good background music while you read what Jenny Lee describes as the "epic account of a rugby international" in John Buchan's 1920s thriller Castle Gay) and William Schuman's opera The Mighty Casey, about a baseball player. Talking about baseball, Andrew Haynes offers a long list of films about American sports, including Damn Yankees!, White Men Can't Jump, Jerry Maguire and Field of Dreams. But he also raves about A River Runs Through it, which raises the deep philosophical question of whether fishing can be regarded as a sport, since only the fish get any exercise.

Many readers assert that, far from being weeds, plenty of artistic geniuses excelled at sport. "Samuel Beckett was a very good batsman and medium-pace bowler who played first-class cricket for Dublin university, and is thus the only Nobel laureate to have an entry in Wisden," Paul Spillane tells me. He also wonders whether Pozzo, the mysterious visitor in Beckett's Waiting for Godot, is anything to do with Vittorio Pozzo, the manager of Italy's football team in the 1930s. I sense a PhD thesis lurking somewhere here.

Jeremy Pound says he has a superb picture of Bela Lugosi, the ghoul-faced actor best known for playing Dracula, "keeping wicket in a cricket match in the United States". If he couldn't stump the batsmen, he presumably bit them in the neck. And Michael Grosvenor Myers, himself an ex-goalkeeper, is irked that I singled out Albert Camus as the only "interesting" goalie, when the lonely clan of those keeping guard between the posts also includes such varied luminaries as Vladimir Nabokov, Julio Iglesias, Che Guevara, Pope John Paul II, atomic physicist Niels Bohr and all of the Three Tenors. Wow. Pavarotti must have been unbeatable, since his body would surely have blocked out more or less the whole goalmouth.

Several readers suggest that the greatest artwork ever inspired by the Olympics themselves was, rather awkwardly, Leni Riefenstahl's 1938 movie Olympia - undoubtedly a brilliant piece of film-making, but regrettably designed to glorify Hitler. The 2012 Games are unlikely to inspire anything quite as chilling as that, even if Lord Coe's heavyhanded London 2012 officials do sometimes seem like candidates for the Thought Police in George Orwell's most famous novel. Indeed, my favourite piece of sporting art so far this summer is something so blissfully daft, slyly ironic and quintessentially British that it could only be created by ... a Czech. It's David Cerny's London Booster - the vintage London bus doing non-stop press-ups for the next three weeks outside the Business Design Centre in Islington, North London. Hilariously grandiose, pointless, repetitive and very silly, it may prove to be the perfect artistic counterpoint to the London Games.

Slavery and Athletics

IN HIS day, Michael Johnson ran with princely grace, as if he were separate from the race. Whatever memories you have of him in the 200m, 400m or relays there won't be one of him trying to overtake a rival.

Once asked if he had a pre-race ritual, he said only a post-race one. "I stand on the podium and have them put a gold medal round my neck." He had that experience five times at the Olympics. The single greatest performance was his 200m at Atlanta in 1996 when he lowered his own world record by more than three-tenths of a second: '19.32,' said bronze medallist Ato Bolden at the time, 'that's not a time. That sounds more like my dad's year of birth.'

It was easy to warm to the easy fluency of Johnson's quickness, not so simple to get a handle on the man. We know more now after Johnson's admirable attempt to explain the pre-eminence of black sprinters broadcast in a Channel 4 documentary on Thursday, Michael Johnson: The Survival of the Fastest.

Black athletes have run faster than white rivals for decades but to ask why was to invite criticism. In a speech to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1995, Sir Roger Bannister struck what many judged a discordant note when he said: "I am prepared to risk political incorrectness, drawing attention to the seemingly obvious but understressed fact that black sprinters and black athletes in general all seem to have certain natural anatomical advantages." The reaction to Bannister's point of view was mostly adversarial and for a time he was in the doghouse.

Black people and in particular black athletes were vulnerable to the false logic that physical prowess and intelligence were inversely proportional. It was a pernicious argument but it suited many white people to embrace it. There was also a less sinister but devaluing tendency to assign the success of black athletes solely to their 'natural athleticism' with the unspoken assumption that they didn't have to work so hard.

Emmanuel McDonald Bailey, a Trinidad-born sprinter who moved to London in 1939 at the age of 19, equalled Jesse Owens' 100m world record and competed for Britain at the 1948 and 1952 Olympics. He told a story in his autobiography of a conversation on a London bus home from training one evening. He had run for the bus and was out of breath as he sat down, something the man alongside noticed.

"You coloured boys can all run fast. Take that chap McDonald Bailey, he doesn't even have to train much and he's got all our boys licked." Bailey considered revealing his identity and how hard he trained but thought better of it. "Fancy that," he said instead.

Johnson had the courage to take on the subject in a documentary full of insight. He made clear his starting point: "All my life I believed I became an athlete through my own determination, but it's impossible to think that being descended from slaves hasn't left an imprint through the generations." He highlighted the fact that all eight 100m finalists at the Beijing Olympics were descended from slaves, six from the West Indies and two from the United States. This prompted the question that he explored through a compelling narrative.

The possibility of descendants of slaves in America and the Caribbean having a genetic advantage might seem far-fetched but Johnson made his case well. He showed how the appalling inhumanity that underpinned the slave trade meant most of those forced onto ships off the west Africa coast did not survive the journey and described how the brutality continued once the ships unloaded their human cargo in the US.

The people taken from Africa, and there were an estimated 20 million, were valued according to the price they fetched and their future owners would attempt to breed bigger and stronger slaves through inhuman selective reproduction. In describing what the slaves endured, Johnson left us in no doubt that only the most resilient could survive.

He went to a library in Austin, Texas, and discovered he, too, was descended from slaves. By then he knew enough to feel a strong connection with his forebears. "Difficult as it was to hear, slavery has benefited descendants like me. I believe there is a serious gene within me." This isn't just Johnson's opinion but the conclusion of Bill Amos, professor of evolutionary genetics at the University of Cambridge.

"I wouldn't be surprised if the survivors of the slave trade weren't cleaner in some sense," Amos said. "I don't mean anything particular by that other than that they've many potentially harmful mutations that everyone else has a bit more of." To many, this may seem an elaborate theory to explain something we always knew - that black men run faster. As Bannister said, they have the anatomical advantage. But if it was just a case of black athletes being superior, why can't Africa produce champion sprinters as they produce great runners over the longer distances?

Is it a coincidence that Britain's most recent winner of the men's 100m, Linford Christie, was born in Jamaica, that Canada's last winner, Donovan Bailey, was also born in Jamaica? It is inconceivable that this summer's Olympic 100m won't be won by a Jamaican or an American. This domination was, until now, something we could recognise but not begin to explain.

Money From Gold Medals

Vincent Hancock won gold in skeet shooting here this week, missing just 2 of 150 targets in the competition. It was an extraordinary performance and unprecedented, too. Hancock prevailed in the same event in Beijing in 2008, making him the first skeet shooter to successfully defend his Olympic title.

The man is a superstar in his sport. So what riches await this impeccably mannered, 23-year-old Army sergeant when he returns home? What companies are lining up to write sponsorship checks? What signs are there that his life is about to change?

"None, really," he said in an interview on Wednesday. "I'll try to go after some of the higher-profile companies in November, once I leave the military. But I'm not going to get greedy. I'll be thankful for anything I'm given."

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be skeet shooters. Or slalom canoers. Or judo fighters. Or, to be quite blunt about it, any sport that has an international audience only when the Olympics roll around. Not if you would like your babies to take long, post-glory media tours and pocket wads of cash.

The reality is that even competitors in popular sports are likely to find that life after gold is not very lucrative. There are always a handful of breakout stars in the Games, and the most compelling and accomplished will turn up on Wheaties boxes or in Adidas ads.

But such triumphs are the exception. Great, earsplitting ka-ching moments elude the overwhelming majority of Olympians.

"Just look at swimming," said Peter Carlisle of Octagon, a sports marketing firm in McLean, Va. "One of the most popular sports at the Olympics, and there are a lot of U.S. gold medals in swimming. If you're an American, you need to stand out, you need to be distinguishable. There's no way all the gold medal American swimmers will wind up in the mainstream market."

If even athletes in big-time sports have trouble getting paid in the United States, imagine the fate of winners of obscure gold in smaller countries. Michele Frangilli of Italy just beat all comers in men's archery. Let's just say that he is not expecting that his next car will be a Lamborghini.

"Normally, this is a sport that is not existing for most people in Italy," Frangilli said on Thursday. "Only football. People know archery during the Olympics." Any nibbles since the victory? "At the moment, no," he said. "Maybe when I go home. But Giorgio Armani - you know who is Giorgio Armani? - he is a sponsor of the Italian Olympic Committee, so probably we will be in some kind of advertising. The whole team."

Urska Zolnir of Slovenia won a gold medal in women's judo on Wednesday. There will be a parade in honor of her and her teammates once the Games are over, in the capital city of Ljubljana, and she is expecting interviews with magazines and radio stations in the next couple of weeks. But sponsorships and enduring fame? No way. "I will not be rich," she said, with a smile, during an interview in the athletes' village. Which is just fine with her. The role model pressure, the performance anxiety of interviews - she could live without it. Her goal, she explained, is to get back to training with a minimum of intrusion. Or as she put it, "Just to be the same like was before the medal."

But if money does appeal, and there is a way to turn all that practice and toil into dollars, why not? Four years ago, Hancock was barred from accepting a couple of sponsorship offers because of military rules. He was, however, allowed to pocket a total of $105,000, from the United States Olympic Committee and the USA Shooting team. "It was enough for a down payment on a house," Hancock said. "Didn't pay for the whole house, by any means." In the immediate aftermath of his Beijing medal, he remembers, there were few requests for interviews. "Quite frankly, people weren't that interested in us," he said. The ever-simmering issue of gun control might have had something to do with it. "We aren't the most politically sound sport out there."

Once he returned to the United States, there was an appearance on Oprah Winfrey's show, in Chicago, though that was with medalists in a bunch of sports, so the stage was crowded. Hancock had a moment to say hello to Oprah and that was about it. There were a few radio interviews, and some other TV cameos. And then, nothing.For a while, Hancock decided to quit. The joy had gone out of skeet shooting, and he had achieved his ultimate goal, Olympic gold, at the age of 19. What do you do after that? Win it again, he ultimately decided. As made-for-television tales go, this one sounds pitchable: All-American type nearly retires, then returns and repeats his gold medal showing, in a sport in which that has never been done.

But there is a meta competition at the Olympics, a contest of personal narratives, and Hancock is a low seed in this tournament. The trick is to be introduced to the public before your event takes place, so that the public knows you pre-triumph. To qualify for that kind of TV time, you need a personal tale that wins the attention of NBC producers, who, courtesy of their broadcasting rights, are arguably the real king makers here. "Maybe your parents were working three jobs to pay for your training," said Brant Feldman, a sports agent. "Or maybe you were born in the U.S. but your parents are illegal immigrants. Marketers want to sell your gold medal attributes but they also need a back story to help them sell products to Middle America."

If the story is strong enough, the obscurity of the sport is no hindrance. Look at Rulon Gardner, the Greco-Roman wrestling gold medalist and sweet-tempered giant from the 2000 Sydney Games, who bested Russia's Aleksandr Karelin, a legend of the sport who hadn't lost in 13 years. It was a gentle-domestic-Goliath-versus-scary-foreign-Goliath story, and the gentle Goliath won.

Measured against that standard, Hancock and his achievements seem almost mundane, as loopy as that might sound. But in a few months, when he's left the military, he will make his first play for big-time sponsorships.

Lately, he has been shooting while wearing special Nike training glasses that use a strobe light to make it harder to see. The idea is that when you take the glasses off, your vision is even better.He can't call Nike yet. Perhaps come November, he will, either directly or through someone who is helping him train. Or just maybe, one day soon, his phone will ring. ?It'd be wonderful," he said, "if they called me."

Tour de France and Money

You do not have to be around the opposition teams in the Tour de France very long to gauge their respect for the formidable way in which Team Sky have controlled this race. They kind of puff their cheeks and roll their eyes and respect often blurs into envy. And, sooner or later, someone mentions the word 'budget'.

This was most clearly voiced a few weeks back when Team Sky were dominating another stage race, the Criterium du Dauphine. People asked how they were so good. An answer appeared on the Twitter feed of Jonathan Vaughters, the manager of Garmin-Sharp, a rival team. "They aren't doping," he said. "They are buying up all the talent! Sky has a big budget and they are executing very well. That's why they are winning."

The insinuation is clear. You have the most money, you buy the best riders; shop well and you can buy the yellow jersey. Sky, in other words, are the Manchester City of the peloton, the kings of chequebook cycling.

This would be fine if it were true. Sky would not reveal their budget, although The Times understands that there are five teams in the Tour this year who outspend them. The point was confirmed by Dave Brailsford, the principal of Team Sky, when he said: "Can you buy the yellow jersey? Yes, but if that was the case, why are the five teams with bigger budgets than Sky not leading the race?"

For a budget to compete on the Tour de France, you need to aim at around £11.8 million a year for a team - which is a lot, albeit that it is what you need for a single Manchester City player. The biggest spenders on the Tour are BMC, whose budget got their lead man, Cadel Evans, into Paris wearing the yellow jersey last year. Evans is paid about 2.5 million euros, which, The Times understands, is almost double what Bradley Wiggins, the man who now wears yellow, earns.

But Evans is not even the highest-paid rider on the Tour. The biggest salary goes to Philippe Gilbert, his team-mate, who is on 2.8 million euros - and Gilbert is a Classics rider who will never even be a challenger for the yellow jersey. And those boundaries will stretch farther next year, when Alberto Contador returns earning even more.

As Brailsford says, if Sky were simply shopping for success, they would have bought a Contador or another proven winner. He said: "When we originally set out, we said, 'We don't want to buy the winner. We want to take home-grown talent and grow our own performers.' That is why Bradley was overly important to us."

But where Sky have shopped well is with the team Wiggins has around him. You have to go back to Greg LeMond in 1989 to find a winner from a properly low-budget team. That was like Manchester City trying to win the league with just a single superstar striker.

What has been clear this past week is that Sky have assembled an entire team to grind their enemies into submission. When Brailsford started putting together Team Sky 3 years ago, he commissioned a company to research team structures and the requisite budget. "I got a breakdown of every team, rider salaries, how each team does it and the correlation between salaries and success," he said. "It's like going into the housing market in Belarus. What the hell do I know about that? But it won't take long to learn about it."

Most riders on the Tour this year will be earning 150-350,000 euros. From that stratum, Brailsford recruited his match-winning grinders. So if Sky are not paying significantly more than their opposition, and in some cases less, does money count at all? Here Brailsford is interesting. He says he just spends his money elsewhere.

Most teams are lean and efficient in that a vast percentage of budget goes on rider salaries and a thin slice on the operation that runs them. Brailsford, using the same methodology that he employed to build GB Cycling into a world-beating track team, spends a slimmer percentage on his riders and more on coaching, technology, sports science and high-performance support to squeeze the best out of them.

"I know I spend more in that area than any other team," he said. "We're probably spending a million on that, which other teams would be spending on salaries. Intellectual doping, that's what we're doing."

When Team Sky started, Brailsford was confident that this was where he could make his gains. "The one area that was underdeveloped was performance analysis," he said. "It's chronic." He now has a system whereby each Sky rider has his own personal coach. That sounds basic, but coaching on a comprehensive one-to-one level had not previously existed. And if he had more money to burn, he says, he would not splash it on the rider transfer market, he would invest in more of the same. He is very candid that one of the MVPs in his team is Tim Kerrison, his lead sports scientist; if he could spend more, he says, it would be in a support team for Kerrison.

Back to Vaughters. "Sky have got a good budget," he says, "and they are making the most of their investment, so chapeau." Nevertheless he points out that there is a danger in the money game: "Can you buy the yellow jersey? That's probably a step too far. But obviously the greater your budget, you can buy more talented guys."

He actually cites Manchester City as his fear: "To me, Premier League football is a horrible business model. It's an arms race for the best players. I guess it is my wish that cycling doesn't follow it." There are no checks and balances to stop it. In the past two days, the value of Chris Froome has shot through the roof and the top-five biggest budgets would no doubt like a share of him. Brailsford would no doubt answer that with a question: you might earn more elsewhere, but would you actually ride as well?

How Tech Transformed Sport

For millions of years, humans have used tools and technology to enhance the things we do. Throughout human evolution, our imaginative minds have invented games, which help us to learn useful physical and mental skills as well as have fun. It was inevitable, then, that technology and sport would eventually marry up, and sports engineering is the basis of that union. Any technology is considered fair game - as long as it is within the rules of sport - and sport is quicker than almost any other industry to take up new ideas. So what has shaped the engineering of sport up to now?

The birth of sports technology

The inaugural Olympic games was one of the key moments in human civilisation. It took place in ancient Olympia in 776 BC to honour the Greek god Zeus. There was only one event, the stadion - a foot race about 200 metres down a track and back again. Soon rules were established that included simple technological advances, such as a grooved sill for the starting block and poles to mark the track. The Greeks introduced a plethora of other sports in the 300 or so Olympiads that led up to the last ancient games in the 4th century AD. Chariot racing, running in armour and the javelin all had their own technological intricacies and sets of rules.

Fast-forward 15 centuries to Victorian Britain and the industrial revolution. Societal changes had as much to do with the rise of sport as the technological advances taking place at the time. Sport profited from the introduction of regular leisure time, the rise in the middle classes, increased levels of disposable income and cheaper sports equipment produced in large quantities.

Until then, sport had mostly used readily available materials such as wood and leather. But that changed in the 1850s when Thomas Hancock, Charles Goodyear and Charles Macintosh invented ways to produce vulcanised rubber on an industrial scale. By heating a mixture of rubber and sulphur, they transformed a naturally sticky substance into a durable material with superior mechanical properties.

This transformed modern ball sports in the mid to late 1800s. Rubber bladders replaced real animal bladders, so balls could be mass-produced with almost identical properties. Rubber was also used in shoes and clothing. The introduction of the pneumatic rubber tyre by John Dunlop in the 1880s led to more comfortable bicycles and the transition from the rather cumbersome penny-farthing to the modern safety bicycle.

As professionalism increased and competitors improved, techniques to monitor and measure performance became more important. The invention of photographic film in 1885 allowed Eadweard Muybridge to create his classic stop-motion technique for studying galloping horses. Flash photography and cine-film followed and sports coaches began to use high-speed film with rates of hundreds of frames per second to measure athletes' technique and improve their performance.

By the 1930s developments in timing allowed measurements to be made with an accuracy of 0.1 seconds. In the 1970s timing to 0.01 s became mandatory in athletics. By then it was possible to synchronise the starter's pistol with quartz timing and light beams crossing the finish line. One consequence was that athletes appeared to get slower by around 0.2 s because the slight pause as the timekeeper reacted to the gun and activated the watch was no longer a factor (see chart).

Material World

Sports equipment designers have to work out what materials might be best for a bicycle frame or a tennis racket. With such a vast range of materials available, where do they start? One valuable tool is a materials selection chart. Routinely used by engineers, these charts show combinations of properties plotted against each other, such as density versus stiffness. The result is a "material space" populated with blobs, each describing a class of materials, such as wood, polymers and metals (see chart).

In 1995 Ulrike Wegst and Michael Ashby, both then at the University of Cambridge, published the first paper showing how selection charts could be used to identify which materials would work best for sports.

With rowing, for instance, an oar must be able to withstand large forces during the stroke and yet must bend just the right amount to give the athlete the correct feel. An oar should also be as light as possible to minimise energy in accelerating its mass and also to keep the boat high in the water and to minimise drag. This points towards wood, glass fibre or carbon-fibre reinforced plastics.

Or consider the pole vault. The pole must be able to store large amounts of energy without breaking, while its mass is kept to the minimum. Bamboo comes out highly in the selection process, which explains why it was still in use in the 1950s. Today glass fibre and carbon fibre are the materials of choice because they are more flexible, store more energy and can be shaped to enhance performance further.

Elite Design

New materials have changed the design of traditional sports equipment. Graphite tennis rackets, for instance, made the wooden rackets used for more than a century obsolete within a few years. The stiffer graphite frame meant that rackets could be made longer and wider, increasing the hitting area and the size of the "sweet spot" where ball impact is most effective. It also shifted the frame's centre of mass away from the long axis through the handle, so that the racket was less likely to spin in the player's hand if the ball was off-centre. These new racket features made tennis easier for beginners to learn and, some argue, increased the speed of the elite game.

Graphite shafts are also popular in golf, and titanium has had a significant effect on the design of golf drivers. Being light, strong and corrosion-resistant, both materials are ideal for the new generation of large-headed drivers which, like tennis rackets, have a larger hitting area and peripheral weighting so that the club twists less in golfers' hands when they hit a ball off-centre.

Probably at the pinnacle of sports equipment design is British bicycle designer Mike Burrows. Working with engineering firm Lotus, he applied good design principles to create a bike with a carbon-fibre frame for Chris Boardman in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, on which he won the 4000 metres pursuit. Apart from the psychological effect of the bike's style and beauty, Burrows's design reduced mass and increased stiffness so that less energy was lost through bending of the frame. More importantly, it improved the aerodynamic efficiency and optimised the rider's position.

Technology and Rules

Most talks I give on sports engineering end with the question: don't state-of-the-art technologies amount to cheating? A cheat is someone who acts dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage. The crux, then, is to know what constitutes being dishonest from a technological point of view for a particular sport. Technology and its possibilities are grounded in Newton's laws and the manufacturing techniques of the day. The definition of dishonesty, on the other hand, is enshrined in the rather looser rules of sport. What cheating in sport amounts to, therefore, is the mismatch between what is possible with current technology and what the rules allow. Both of these change over time, so any sports ruling body has to be pretty sharp to ensure that their rules match the possibilities of the day.

Sometimes both sport and the rules evolve in unison, at other times they are out of sync. In tennis, for instance, no rule for the tennis racket existed before 1978 because wooden rackets had remained largely unchanged for over 100 years. But the development of the "spaghetti" racket that produced extraordinary amounts of spin threatened to change the game and it was duly banned. This was followed by successive rules to limit racket size as new materials allowed longer rackets.

An important turning point in athletics came in 1984 when Uwe Hohn of what was then East Germany threw the javelin an enormous 104.8 metres. One of the main issues with the javelin - apart from running out of space in the stadiums - was the ambiguous flat landings, where it was unclear if the javelin had landed tip first. A technological solution was found; the centre of mass was moved forwards by 4 centimetres to ensure the javelin tip always landed first. As a result javelins travel dramatically shorter distances, less than 100 metres and Hohn's record stands as the ultimate "old rules" javelin record.

More recently, the world governing body for swimming, FINA, banned the use of all-in-one polyurethane swimsuits. Athletes were breaking an unseemly number of world records because of the reduced drag and extra buoyancy the suits gave them. New rules were introduced limiting the size of suits to nothing above the navel or below the knee for men and nothing extending past the shoulder or below the knee for women. Their buoyancy is also limited to a maximum of 0.5 newtons (equivalent to the weight of a small coin). It remains to be seen if these rules will stop the rapid rise in performance.

Sports engineering and technology have an important role to play in sport. New technologies can keep a sport alive and relevant, but overuse can cause a sport to lose credibility. Whose job is it to keep the correct balance? The ruling bodies of sport have to step up to the mark. They need to keep an eye on current and future technologies and acquire the skills to understand the implications. If they don't, they will always be playing catch-up.

The Future of Sport Technology

Sport is an early adopter of technology and at the turn of the 21st century, better performances were characterised by new materials and cheaper manufacturing. The biggest change happens when a technology is introduced - for example, carbon fibre led to radical redesigns of bikes, boots and boats. But after a while there are diminishing returns with each new design.

What will be the next big thing to prompt a step change in performance? Mobile devices such as phones, cameras and gaming consoles are one of the fastest expanding markets. They are likely to enhance sport with their ability to measure an athlete's performance and analyse it. For the first time, we will be able to quantify and understand the effect of a piece of kit in action on the pitch or court. Buy a new tennis racket or set of football boots and they may have sensors in them that tell you not only how well you are playing, but how you can improve. Amassing data out in the field without interrupting play has long been the ultimate goal for sports engineers - the humble cellphone might just do the trick.

Force, motion, speed

Sports engineers develop new equipment and technology and then have to work out whether it actually makes a difference. One way is to give an athlete a new golf club, for example, or a pair of shoes and test them before and after to see what changes. The test usually involves measuring the position, speed, acceleration or force of both the athlete and their equipment.

For instance, divers jumping from a 10-metre platform are interested in the forces beneath their feet and how they translate into a high jump with more time to execute their complex twists and rotations. Runners tend to be obsessed with time and distance, so tracking their position is key. Archers must be stable when they release the arrow, so measuring how still they stay is important to them. Here are some of the techniques used, together with their pros and cons.

Motion tracking generally uses an array of digital speed cameras taking pictures at around 500 frames per second. For comparison, a standard camcorder takes 30 frames per second. Multiple cameras around a room can track reflective spherical markers attached to an athlete's body at joints such as the knee and key points such as the hands. The same motion-capture system was used in movies such as The Lord of the Rings to track actors and turn them into realistic avatars.

The results can be impressive, with immediate video replay of the athlete's skeleton in motion. The systems also give copious amounts of data for each marker. The flip side is the cost - often as much as $100,000 per session, plus the need for special lights and a lab setting. Computers can only keep track of a limited number of markers, and when they are covered by the athletes' movements, working out what is happening may take hours of tedious manual reconstruction.

Three-dimensional forces under the feet can be measured using sensitive plates sunk into the floor. The results are usually instantaneous and can be integrated with video or motion capture. But only ground reaction forces can be measured and it is difficult to make these measurements outside a lab. Again, the systems are relatively expensive.

Acceleration can be measured directly using body-mounted sensors. Accelerometers have shrunk in recent years with wireless devices becoming almost ubiquitous. However, speed and position are often more important to an athlete than force and acceleration. While it is possible to work out them out, it takes a trained eye to manipulate the data to avoid noise and errors creeping in.

So what would be the perfect system for sport? It would be cheap, but also able to measure position, speed, acceleration, physiology and be synchronised with 3D video. And ideally, markers or sensors would be unobtrusive or not necessary at all. Complex data analysis would be hidden from view and only the important pieces of information would be fed back, just as with TV replays.

iSport

When attached to the body, sensors such as 3D accelerometers, gyroscopes and GPS can provide a wealth of information about an athlete's position and orientation. Until recently they were so expensive that only university research departments and sport's ruling bodies could afford them. But all that has changed. Today's smartphones and gaming devices include such sensors, and this has driven down their price so much that commercial athlete tracking systems are readily available. Indeed, many football, rugby, hockey and rowing teams are using the technology.

There are now even portable wireless systems that can measure heart activity using electrocardiography, and muscle activity using electromyography. Air pressure and temperature measurements are there if athletes need them too. If it can be measured, it is being measured.

Just as the technology found in smartphones is helping elite athletes, now everyone with a smartphone can access the basics. There are already hundreds of sports apps for phones and many measure performance, mostly for outdoor pursuits. There are of course places where GPS doesn't work, such as a squash court or bowling alley, and other technologies that would be useful, such as integration with video. Here, the solutions are coming from the gaming industry...

Game on

Gaming and sport are moving ever closer. Nintendo's Wii console introduced a level of sporting activity into the home and uses accelerometers and gyroscopes to track the motion of the hand controller. The introduction of Microsoft's Kinect in 2010, however, has taken video capture to a whole new level. The Kinect is a 3D depth-sensing camera - it projects an infrared pattern of dots that bounce off an object or person and are picked up by an infrared camera. Complex algorithms convert the pattern into a depth field, while a standard video camera picks up colour images.

In effect, the Kinect does for less than $100 what complex motion-tracking systems do for a thousand times as much - albeit at only 30 times per second and with less accuracy so far. Initial testing shows that, without much modification, Kinect can measure the volume of a typical human torso to within a few per cent and knee angles to within 10 degrees. The beauty of the Kinect is that it tracks hundreds of thousands of points in each picture, giving a complete 3D image of the body.

It is early days yet, but already prototype systems have appeared that can track the centre of mass of badminton players, or can simply gather measurements such as the players' height and the length and width of their limbs. For now these systems are only available to those at the higher end of sport, but it will not be too long before Kinect-like derivatives are available in leisure centres or sports stores.

The implications of this are not hard to see. Before long there will be low-cost devices - possibly on our phones - with depth-sensing cameras to measure 3D motion in the field. This will solve the long-standing problem of tracking athletes cheaply in action, and without using any kind of marker. And it will be available to anyone, at any level, who just wants to perform a little bit better.

Train By Drone

JOGGERS who find it hard to set a steady pace could soon have a robot companion to help - a small, quad-rotor helicopter drone. The system, called Joggobot, is being developed by Floyd Mueller and Eberhard Grather at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia.

The duo plan to allow users to enter their preferred running speed into a smartphone app that controls the drone so it flies ahead of a jogger at just the right pace. Or it could be set to maintain a distance of a few metres no matter what pace a runner is going, just for fun.

They tested their idea using the foam-fendered AR Drone made by Parrot of Paris, France, programming it using custom software to follow a bright blue and orange pattern painted on a runner's T-shirt (pictured below). As soon as an on-board camera sees the shirt, the craft takes off and hovers about a metre off the ground. If it loses sight of the pattern, the drone lands automatically.

Mueller says he and Grather are tinkering with settings to test what motivates runners. "Should the robot be more like a coach or more like a pet?" he asks. "One might make the exercise more effective, but the other might make it more fun. Which one is 'better'? And is there a 'better'?"

Stair Racing

When you watch the video from the start of last February's Empire State Building Run-Up, an 86-story stair race, one man stands out. Thomas Dold, a 28-year-old German wearing Bib No. 1, is already a few inches ahead when the starting horn blasts. His shins are canting into a run, and with his left arm he's pushing at the chest of a runner to that side of him. A split second later, his right arm juts up to block more runners.

All around Dold, the racers are wincing, for what's coming is harsh. There are 1,576 steps ahead of them, 10 to 12 minutes of suffering. And before that, less than 10 yards from the start, there's a door to get through. It's standard size, 36 inches wide, and everyone, Dold especially, wants to be the first one there. The jockeying is desperate. In 2009, Suzy Walsham, an Australian, was shoved into the wall next to the door. "The impact was so great," she says, "that I initially thought I had broken my nose and lost teeth." She fell and was trampled before she rose and ran on to victory. "I get super nervous and anxious whenever I start" at the Empire State Building, says Walsham, who has won the women's division three times and will be one of about 650 competitors at this year's race, which takes place Feb. 6. "I really dread the start."

What the racers may dread even more, however, is the sight of Thomas Dold dashing up the stairs two at a time, yanking along on the railings. Dold has won Empire State (known as Esbru among the stair-racing community) a record seven consecutive times. He is the only person in the world who makes a living at stair racing (his sponsors include a German health care company), which makes him the lord of an obscure but nonetheless codified sport. According to the World Cup rankings on towerrunning.com, Dold finished 2012 in first place, with 1,158 points, 157 more than the runner-up, Piotr Lobodzinski of Poland. Four hundred of those points came from his victory at Esbru, tower racing's unofficial world championships, and its oldest contest, dating to 1978. Another 156 stair races, held in 25 nations, generate World Cup points as well.

Dold also sits atop the Vertical World Circuit, a championship tour of eight celebrated races - among them, Esbru - and he is a minor celebrity on YouTube. In one clip, you can see a smiling Dold sprinting stadium steps at a photo shoot for a print ad. In another video, from the Corrida Vertical, a 28-story dash in Sao Paulo, the announcer cracks, "A shortcut to win the race is break Dold's legs . . . or giving him some sleeping pills." Dold wins and, as he crosses the finish line, still running, peels off his plain white race jersey to reveal a sleek undershirt emblazoned with his Web address, run2sky.com.

In New York last year, Dold may have gotten away with a false start; the video is fairly incriminating. "I was moving before the start," he told me recently. But then, he said, he caught himself and stopped. So he was actually at a disadvantage, he said, "moving backward when the others are moving forward."

In interviews, Dold is chipper and exudes supreme confidence. "I can run backward faster than most people can run forward," he boasts. (He is in fact one of the world's premier backward runners, having completed a heels-first mile in 5:46, a world record.) At times, he lapses into the third person, like a major-sports star, or Donald Trump. "It's all about beating Dold," he told a German reporter not long ago, summing up the stair-racing world. "That's the goal for hundreds of participants."

Most of the important stair races happen in Europe and Asia. A tiny cadre of die-hards - roughly a dozen men and three or four women - travel the globe chasing minuscule cash prizes. The largest single prize, in Taipei, is less than $7,000. Esbru offers no prize money. The race sites are often architecturally significant: the Messeturm tower in Basel; the Palazzo Lombardia in Milan; the Swissotel in Singapore, designed by I. M. Pei. "There's something very elemental about climbing an iconic building," says Sproule Love, a New Yorker who has finished third at the Empire State Building three times. "You can survey the area and see how far you have come."

Still, the stair racers don't experience architecture so much as stairwells. I assumed their races are characterized by a mind-numbing sameness, but Walsham assured me I was wrong. "Some stairwells turn to the left," she said. "Some turn to the right. Sometimes the stairs are shallow, sometimes they're steep. And the number of floors always varies."

Walsham, who works in Singapore as a manager for a computer-security firm, spent about $12,000 traveling to races last year. In the United States, a small contingent of stair climbers are shelling out similar sums to get to the 100 or so American races offered each year. When I went to Los Angeles recently, for the 51-story Climb for Life race, I met Daniel Dill, who flew in from Texas, happy to pay the $50 entry fee and the requisite $100 donation to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation for a race that would take him less than 13 minutes. Dill, a large man dressed in articulated-toe sneakers, brought with him a special warm-up tool, an Elevation Training Mask. It was designed for Mixed Martial Arts fighters, he said. "It's supposed to stimulate red blood cells and open up the lungs."

Nearby was Zivadin Zivkovic, who came up from San Diego, more than two hours away. The drive was old hat for Zivkovic: twice a week he commutes to Los Angeles to train with the nation's premier stair-climbing squad, West Coast Labels, which doubles as a quasi family. Its 50 members call one another 'step siblings' and shower one another with high-stepping affection on a Facebook group, Stair Race Training Buds. At races, members will sometimes brace and push injured teammates up the stairs as they falter. After races, the step sibs like to go out for cigars.

That sense of hard-won camaraderie must be the draw, because running in an unventilated stairwell may be the least pleasant form of recreation ever conceived. The lungs are so taxed that climbers' cough' is a well-known affliction. Every climb is a redline endeavor, with the heart rate often topping 180 beats a minute.

But stair racing also has the appeal of newness. Most endurance sports are by now highly evolved, their training regimens a matter of science: if your goal is to become a world-class marathoner, for example, you will almost certainly run between 110 and 130 miles per week. Stair racing is guesswork, comparatively, and there is room for all sorts of experimentation - Dill's face mask, say, or choreography. One stair-climbing devotee, Stan Schwarz, a computer-systems administrator, publishes detailed charts enumerating the stair counts and riser heights for each racecourse. Flights that have an odd number of steps present special challenges, for good stair racers go two steps at a time, and in one recent Facebook thread a correspondent calling himself Stair Climblunatic bravely contemplated a building with 23-step staircases. "I'll be doing a triple step on every flight," Lunatic said.

At bottom, though, stair climbing's appeal may lie mostly in its simplicity. It is suffering distilled, and its practitioners embrace the agony with an almost religious ardor. On Stair Race Training Buds, there is a lyrical video of the elite stair climber Justin Stewart wending his way up the glass-encased stairwell of an eight-story parking garage at night. The stairway is bathed in amber light, and as we watch Stewart's lonely labors from a distance - from across a desolate stretch of asphalt - we see a monk in devotion.

On Facebook, there is also a photo of Schwarz lying facedown in a stairwell, almost dead from exhaustion, and an earnest post from one Nelson Quong: "Up at 4 a.m. to go climb the college stairs, then to the gym for an hour of intense physical therapy, then some weight training. Since meeting my wonderful step sibs, this never feels like a lonely workout."

Last March, I entered my first stair race. My father had just died of pulmonary fibrosis. The American Lung Association was staging a fund-raiser, a 34-story Tackle the Tower race, in my dad's hometown, Hartford, so my brother, Tim, and I put together a memorial team. We are both cross-country ski racers, and Tim, in fact, is one of the two top racers competing for the Manhattan Nordic Ski Club: the other is his training partner and best friend Sproule Love.

Love, 41, is a professional stair racer; last year, West Coast Labels paid him $500 for travel expenses. In other words, we had ringers, which meant we had a chance to defeat the Northeast's pre-eminent stair squad, a multistate team called the Tower Masters.

One star of Tower Masters is Alex Workman, a 36-year-old engineer based in Schenectady, N.Y., who arrived at the Hartford racecourse early to measure the riser height of the stairs (6.8 inches). Workman sometimes climbs with a metronome clipped to his shirt to regulate the pacing of his strides. When we met him in the elevator, he was exceedingly perky. But the vibe was tense - he was familiar with Love and my brother. Last year on his blog, Climbing to the Top, he titled one entry 'Schooled by Sproule' after a race at One Penn Plaza. A later entry, about another New York stair race, one at which my brother set a course record, was headed 'Schooled by Sproule's Friend at 30 Rock.'

After chatting briefly with Workman, we moved to a stairwell, and Love told me about his training, which takes place in his 40-story Manhattan apartment building. He used to climb with his young son, Mazin, strapped to his chest. "We started when Maz was 14 months old," Love said, "and at first he was cooperative. He'd sing; he'd sleep; he'd point to things on the stairs, to ask questions." For a few golden months, Mazin burbled, "Go, Baba, go," from his pouch. But then, Love said, "he got impatient, and one day, he just told me, 'I'm done, Baba.' " Love replaced him with sandbags. Carrying the weight upstairs, he said, is "miserable, masochistic."

But it paid off for Love, who works as a mortgage loan analyst. He won the Hartford race. Workman finished second and my brother third, and I managed to take seventh, out of more than 550 runners. Our team won, beating the Tower Masters - who were at less than full strength - as well as dozens of ad hoc squads, among them the Freeshipping.com All Stars. (Team finishes were determined by cumulative times.) Later, after the awards ceremony, as Love and I rode our bikes away in the rain, we were all but singing with joy. "It feels good!" Love exulted. "It feels good!"

In our giddiness, we began to dream of another upset. We wondered: Could Thomas Dold be beaten at Esbru 2013?

There are reasons to think so. In Taipei last summer, at a steep 91-story race, a onetime Australian mountain-running champion named Mark Bourne nipped Dold by four seconds. Dold would later say about that race: "I'd been training for a marathon. I'd been running long distances, rather than stairs." Nonetheless, Taipei offers evidence of Dold's vulnerability — as even last year's Esbru victory does. His winning time at the Empire State Building was his slowest ever: 10:28, almost a minute off the course record of 9:33.

That record was set in 2003 by an Australian cyclist named Paul Crake, who won Esbru five times. Crake, however, can no longer run - a 2006 mountain-bike crash rendered him a paraplegic - so who could beat Dold next week?

"A lot of guys could," says Rickey Gates, a professional mountain runner and onetime Esbru runner-up who writes for Trail Runner magazine. "I'm a hundred percent sure that if you offered a million-dollar purse at Esbru, the winning time would be in the low nines."

Who would win? Track runners? Three-thousand-meter specialists?

"No," Gates says. "They're probably too skinny. It's a sport that favors cyclists - they've got the sheer quad strength and the high lactic threshold it takes. Cross-country ski racers would do well, too, but you'd have a hard time convincing a world-class skier to run up the Empire State Building in the middle of February. And really, there's no incentive for anyone to do Esbru. There's no prize money, and you have to train specifically for the race - you have to run stairs. And the whole time you're thinking: Why am I doing this? To get my picture in the paper?"

Of the probable contestants at this year's Esbru, Gates himself looks like a favorite, as does Bourne. An Australian has won Esbru 11 times, making the country a kind of Kenya of stair racing.

I'm rooting for Love, though, and not just because he's a friend. No New Yorker has won the race since 1979, when Jim Rafferty prevailed, and this strikes me as sad, given that Esbru began as a stunt involving almost no one but New Yorkers. That first race was won by Gary Muhrcke, a retired New York City fireman. At the time, Muhrcke was receiving an annual tax-free disability pension of more than $11,000, because of a back injury. He was pilloried in the press - The Times editorialized that he should give firehouse Dalmatians a course in jogging - and he never entered Esbru again. But the race still bears the rough-and-tumble spirit of his era.

Consider the mass start. It is dangerous, and some voices within stair racing have pressed the New York Road Runners, which hosts Esbru, to start racers at intervals. The Road Runners club has made some concessions. It now pads the doorway, for instance, and last year began limiting the mass start to two heats. This year 21 top men will start en masse, as will 10 women. Everyone else will begin at intervals - and will most likely feel lucky even making it into the race. The Road Runners received 1,955 applications for 650 spots.

For these runners, sharp elbows will probably be a part of the experience. The director of the race, Peter Ciaccia, seems to regard physical contact as part of the Esbru brand. When I asked him about Dold's starting-line skirmishing, he chuckled and said: "We call that the Thomas Dold wingspan. Yeah, there's gamesmanship to this race." Ciacca went on, "A lot of that goes on in the stairwell - that's why stair racing is an extreme sport."

Even the Empire State stairs have some perverse charm. "It's grim in that stairwell," Love says fondly. "It's like the inside of a battleship. Everything is gunmetal gray. And the layout is crazy — on the early floors you'll have only 8 or 10 steps before a turn. Later, there's 20." Almost every racer I spoke to described the course in hallowed tones. "It's Fenway Park," Love says. "It's Wrigley Field."

Love is a long shot. His best Esbru finish time, 10:51, came back in 2006, when he was 34. Since then, he has all but given up running outside the stairwell, a concession to plantar fasciitis (pushing off stair steps on a flat foot, however, causes him no pain). He stopped competing for five years. In late 2011, however, he left his job as an energy consultant. Sparsely employed over the next six months, he spent nearly all his waking hours circling Central Park on wheeled roller skis with my brother. He did stair workouts - Mazin, then almost 2, watched from the family's apartment-door frame, slightly terrified by his dad's grimaces - and he went on a winning streak. In one five-month stretch, he won five successive North American stair races. He broke the course record at the world's longest stair race, at Willis Tower in Chicago, climbing 103 stories in just over 13 minutes.

"He came back out of nowhere, at the age of 40," Alex Workman says, marveling. "Ten years from now, even if he fell off the face of the earth again, I'm sure people would still be talking about Sproule Love"

Then in February 2012, fit and race-ready, he tore a calf muscle en route to Esbru while jogging through Midtown. "The Empire State Building was in plain view," he says. "That was one of my lowest moments as an athlete." But in June, having planned his family's spring break strategically, he showed up in Frankfurt and finished a solid fourth at a European Championship qualifier. Now he gets another chance at Esbru.

On Feb. 6, Sproule Love will be among the chosen 21 elite men to start the 35th running of Esbru, along with Thomas Dold. "In '02," he says, "I got to the door first. I led the race for the first 50 stories. Then I blew up - on the stairs, you can't recover. But you get smarter as you get older; you get a little bit wiser. This time, I'm going to start slow. I'll be the last one into the stairwell, probably. It's always a good idea to keep your powder dry."

Sports Stars Are Not Role Models

• The news from South Africa was shocking, but maybe it shouldn't be. Like too many other sports celebrities, he won by breaking the rules. Will we ever learn to cut this self-delusion?
  
  When I read the four-line alert on my iPad Thursday morning about the charge of murder against Oscar Pistorius, the 26-year-old South African who had become an Olympic-caliber runner despite the loss of both legs, I had a visceral reaction: "Holy shit."
  
  Pistorius's lower legs had been amputated as an infant because of malformation. But with the use of carbon-fiber prosthetic blades, he had overcome what seemed physically impossible to overcome. He competed in the 400-meter distance with the world's elite. Given his handicap, his speed seemed incomprehensible, a hero, yes a permanent hero that nothing and no one could ever bring down.
  
  So I was obviously shocked when I read that Pistorius had been arrested Thursday for killing his girlfriend, 30-year-old model Reeva Steenkamp, at his home in Pretoria with shots to the upper body and head. Hence the "holy shit."
  
  Until I came to my senses five seconds later and realized the whole notion of heroes in sports is absurd and always has been and we all have to stop the hyperventilated hyperventilation (see Aug. 27, 2012, Newsweek piece on Lance Armstrong by yours truly).
  
  I have said this before and it is time to say it again: we must put an end to self-delusion and judge gifted athletes for what is embedded within them beyond their skills - the selfish entitlement that comes with nonsensical idolatry and seals them in an airtight bubble regardless of their feigned ability to act humble in postgame interviews. Why do we so routinely fall for the "I'm just doing what's best for my team" line when one eye of the player is trained on the stands looking for the next dolled-up groupie to bed for the night.
  
  They are narcissistic men. They have to be, anybody has to be, in pursuit of greatness. They are also men for whom the ends always justify the means, seek any edge to give them the millimeter that separates the successful from those toiling in obscurity. Just go to the beginning rounds of the U.S. Open in tennis. Watch the 88th best player in the world serve and volley with exquisiteness and then watch one of the top seeds and ask yourself what the difference is except that tiny slice. If it means the difference between anonymity and fame, financial struggle and millions, who would not grab for that sliver by any means possible?
  
  Maybe if you were moral. Or upright. Or believe in rules. But athletes and coaches don't believe in rules, but breaking them without detection. Bountygate with the New Orleans Saints. Cameragate with Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots, fined for training a video camera on the opposing sidelines to pick up offensive and defensive signals. Relief pitchers in small parks, picking up signs from the opposing catcher because of clear sightlines, relaying them to batters with various hand movements. Steroids. Doping. Human growth hormone. Greenies. Now deer antler spray and magic underwear.
  
  The problem is not with the athletes, very few of whom desire role-model status (New York Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter is the only one I am confident of). Want to hear baseball players bitch? Listen to their put-upon groans when they have to go out on the field to sign autographs during fan appreciation day.
  
  The hero label still stuck despite behavior that continued to be disturbing.
  
  The problem is our endless mythologizing of the athlete, this notion that they stand for something special beyond the field of play. They don't, but that doesn't stop us from trying to make them equal to the image we insist on having for them. It goes back to the Greeks and the idea of sport as some sort of Herculean sacrifice without personal enrichment. The worst and most pernicious propagandist was the early 20th-century sportswriter Grantland Rice, with his endlessly inflated descriptions, such as comparing the backfield of Notre Dame to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in 1924. Epic writing yes, impressive under deadline, but biblical bullshit.
  
  When it comes to Pistorius, go back in the archives of The New York Times Magazine to January 18, 2012, and read the piece by Michael Sokolove, for my money the best long-form journalist on sports in the country.
  
  Sokolove clearly liked Pistorius. He also showed a side of the man that Sokolove ultimately dubbed as an 'adrenaline freak' (although an out-of-his-mind freakin' danger freak would have been more accurate): a penchant for driving cars 155 miles per hour on roads with standing water; the crash of his boat that required 172 stitches; a keen interest in guns and shooting, keeping dangerous animals as pets.
  
  Sokolove also went into detail on whether Pistorius's blades gave him an unfair advantage over runners with intact bodies. There has been a radical difference of opinion, but the soundest scientific voice in the piece came from Peter Weyand, a professor of applied psychology and biomechanics at Southern Methodist University. Weyand established that Pistorius's blades were very light, 5.4 pounds, as compared to 12.6 pounds for the leg and foot of a normal runner. According to Weyand, that gave Pistorius the ability to reposition his blades 20 percent more rapidly than a normal competitor.
  
  How much of a difference would that make?
  
  Weyand said it gave Pistorius an enormous 11.9-second advantage in the 400 meters. That would give Pistorius a time of roughly 57 seconds in the 400 meters, nowhere near the world's best and mediocre for even a high schooler. But Weyand has not wavered in the face of fierce criticism from other academics who have studied Pistorius. Nor does he have any axe to grind, describing Pistorius's efforts as still remarkable.
  
  Raising questions about the possibility of such an unfair competitive advantage just got in the way of the story. It also would have been seen as hideously politically incorrect. We wanted a myth so we created a myth: Pistorius not simply the Blade Runner, as he was nicknamed, but able to compete with the best of the best at the 2012 London Olympics. He arguably got more attention at the Olympics than any other athlete.
  
  He did win his first heat with those lightning-fast blades. But he finished last in the semifinals, a space capsule crashing back to earth. But the hero label still stuck despite behavior that continued to be disturbing.
  
  In the 2012 Paralympics T44 division, he finished second in the 200 meters to Brazil's Alan Olviera; instead of grace in defeat, he said that Olviera's blades were too long, something of an irony for a handicapped man accused of using unfair equipment to his competitive advantage. He kept a gun in his Pretoria home, not surprising given the level of violence in South Africa. But he also showed an inordinate interest in shooting and his prowess, going to the range at night when he could not sleep.
  
  Initial reports were that Pistorius might have shot Steenkamp because he believed a burglar had infiltrated his house, which was something he feared. There were the requisite comments of disbelief, including from Sokolove on a New York Times blog yesterday. "I can't imagine anything like that," said Sokolove, perhaps because most people usually don't confide the notion of blowing away their girlfriends, even to The New York Times.
  
  After the initial reports, police did confirm that there had been previous incidents at the house involving allegations of domestic violence. All sorts of instant theories will be floated. Finding out what happened may take weeks or months or years or never, since there were no witnesses to the shooting.
  
  But given what has been credibly written about him personally, Oscar Pistorius was transfixed by the dark side of the moon.

Michael Jordan

Michael Jordan turns 50 on Sunday and retrospectives of his career have been getting heavy airtime this week. The highlights include his six titles with the Chicago Bulls, his impact on athlete marketing and countless unforgettable moments on the court ('flu' game; switching hands driving the lane; the 'shot' versus the Cavs). Los Angeles Lakers forward Antawn Jamison opined last week that Jordan could still average double-digit points in the NBA. I think it is safe to say we've seen the last of MJ soaring above the rim after hitting the half-century mark with three retirements already under his belt. But Jordan the business? It is stronger than ever.

Jordan earned an estimated $80 million last year from corporate partners Nike, Gatorade, Hanes, Upper Deck, 2K Sports, Presbyterian Healthcare and Five Star Fragrances. Other Jordan assets include six restaurants, a North Carolina car dealership, a motorsports team and his 80-percent stake in the Charlotte Bobcats. Jordan out-earns almost every member of the world's highest-paid athletes 10 years after his last NBA game (Floyd Mayweather topped Forbes' June 2012 list with earnings of $85 million).

The Jordan Brand, a division of Nike, is responsible for the vast majority of MJ's earnings. Jordan partnered with Nike after being drafted by the Bulls out of North Carolina in 1984. The original five-year deal was worth $500,000 annually, plus royalties. The terms of Jordan's current deal with Nike are a closely guarded secret, but royalties now generate more than $60 million annually for MJ, according to sources.

Nearly 30 years later, the brand is still a marketing juggernaut. It controlled 58 percent of the basketball shoe market in 2012, according to research firm SportsOneSource. The Jordan Brand's parent Nike was second with a 34-percent share, while Adidas (5.5), Reebok (1.6) and Under Armour (0.6) divvied up the leftovers.

Nike signed up current NBA stars Carmelo Anthony, Blake Griffin and Chris Paul, as well as non-NBAers like Derek Jeter and NASCAR's Denny Hamlin for the Jordan Brand. But the star is still Jordan and the Air Jordan franchise.

Nike will release the Air Jordan XX8 this weekend to coincide with the NBA All-Star game. It is the 28th shoe in the Jordan franchise. The suggested retail price is $250. In addition to new Air Jordans, Nike continues to pump out retro versions of the franchise with an average selling price of $130 to $150.

The Jordan Brand is doing "exceptionally well," says Susquehanna Financial analyst Christopher Svezia. He estimates the brand grew 25 to 30 percent in 2012 and now generates more than $1.75 billion globally, including apparel. The U.S. Jordan Brand sneaker business alone had $1.25 billion in wholesale revenue in 2012, says Matt Powell, an analyst at SportsOneSource. LeBron James is the top seller among current NBA players with signature shoe deals, but Jordan outsold James by a 6 to 1 margin in 2012 in the U.S.

Gatorade, Hanes and Upper Deck are long-time Jordan sponsors. 2K Sports put Jordan on the cover of its NBA 2K11 and 2K12 video games. His latest deal is with Presbyterian Healthcare and its Winston-Salem parent, Novant Health. The agreement signed last year was part of a sponsorship renewal for the Bobcats franchise. It was the first time Jordan included himself as a carrot to close a team sponsorship deal. Jordan will appear in TV ads for the hospital system.

Jordan still resonates strongly with consumers. His 22 million Facebook fans rank fourth among athletes, behind only soccer icons Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and David Beckham. His Q score, which measures awareness and popularity, is 43 among sports fans. The next highest active athlete is Peyton Manning at 32. Jordan has had the top Q score among sports fans every year since 1987. The one exception was in 1990 when Joe Montana usurped him for a single year (Tiger Woods is the only athlete to top MJ's Q Score among the general population, which he did once in 2008).

"Jordan is unique in that he has been able to maintain that emotional connection with his consumer base for more than 25 years," says Henry Schafer, Executive Vice-President at the Q Score Company.

Jordan's net worth is estimated at $650 million thanks to years of endorsement checks and $90 million in salary from the Bulls. Jordan's net worth has the potential to surge through his 80-percent stake in the Bobcats. The team has been losing as much as $20 million annually and part of Jordan's ownership agreement included providing working capital to cover those losses. Those deficits will shrink under the NBA's new collective bargaining agreement, which triples the amount of revenue sharing from high-revenue to low-revenue teams. The Bobcats will be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the new plan and are expected to receive as much as $18 million annually by next season. The value of the Bobcats was up 14 percent to $315 million, including $150 million in debt, in Forbes' recent annual look at the business of basketball.

Happy birthday, Michael. It's been a memorable first half-century. Next stop: the Forbes billionaires list.

Attitude To Exercise

Are you a couch potato or an endorphin junkie? Sport science suggests exercise aversion may be genetically rooted.

Why is it a workout that is seen as invigorating by one person is the worst kind of physical and mental torment to another? If, try as you might, you never seem to hit that elusive runner's high when everyone else is raving about the euphoria they feel on a jog, there may be a simple reason. According to scientists who are looking at differing attitudes towards exercise, it could be that you are hardwired to hate it, that your brain is programmed to respond negatively the minute you break into a sweat. Your lack of enthusiasm for the gym might not be down to laziness at all, but deeply rooted in your body and brain chemistry.

In a series of recent studies, Associate Professor Panteleimon Ekkekakis, an exercise psychologist at Iowa State University, found that the way our brains interpret the body's responses to exercise - such as breathlessness, sweat and aching limbs - is closely linked to how much we enjoy it. In one of his experiments, Ekkekakis looked at the reactions from a group of people with similar levels of unfitness who were pushed to exercise to the point when they were puffing so hard they could barely talk - a level known as the 'ventilatory threshold'. Normally, this threshold is reached when people are working at 50-60 per cent of the maximum their bodies can cope with. Some elite athletes can work at 80 per cent of their body's upper capacity before they reach the threshold. But whoever you are, once you are beyond it, exercise starts to feel like hard work. As you wheeze and puff, the body struggles to take in enough oxygen but expels more carbon dioxide. Muscles accumulate acids. It begins to hurt.

What Ekkekakis found was that the reactions of his subjects varied considerably. For some, their responses suggested the harder they worked, the more they actually enjoyed the experience. For others, their mood plummeted as the severity of the workout increased, prompting them to throw in the towel early. It proves, he says, that our individual comfort zones vary not just according to our fitness levels. In fact, he thinks our tolerance for workout pain and the point at which we begin to feel bad is up to 50 per cent genetic. And, he says, since many people have a lower ventilatory threshold than they imagine, they soon push themselves over it. Elite athletes - dubbed 'benign masochists' by sports psychologists - are firmly in the group that deals well, even enjoys, throwing themselves through the pain barrier. At the lower extreme are chronically sedentary people who think they should be walking 10-20 minutes to get into shape. Often, even that is too much to start with. "As soon as they get up and take a few steps, they are above their threshold," Ekkekakis says. "People like to do things that make them feel better and avoid things that make them feel worse. So they stop."

Exercise scientists believe that we are each born with a psycho-biological 'inner voice' that helps us either to ignore physical discomfort or cave in to it. This is one of the factors that underpins the theory that some of us were not created to enjoy running or step aerobics. "We all have an innate voice that acts like a 'central executive' controlling our behaviour and tells us when to call it a day during exercise," says Dr Murray Griffin, a sports psychologist at the University of Essex. "It's basically there so that you don't let yourself keep going to the point where you destroy yourself." Committed exercisers develop both unconscious and deliberate coping strategies to ignore this nagging voice in their head. "A lot of training in top-level sport is focused on trying to block out the voice telling you to stop," Dr Griffin says. "To some extent you can control it, but there is a strong biological element. It's easier for some not to listen to it than others."

Your personality and mood can also influence your brain's decision-making process when it comes to sticking to your spinning class or running club. Earlier this year, psychologists at John Carroll University in Ohio found that people who are emotionally on an even keel are more likely to work out regularly. Being too happy or too sad was found to adversely influence a person's decision to exercise. Assistant Professor Jennifer Catellier, the lead researcher at the university, asked subjects to watch 8-10 minutes of a feel-good, sad or neutral film before completing a fitness questionnaire. She expected to find those who watched the happy film more likely to say they planned to work out. Instead, watching the upbeat film seemed to distract subjects into considering enjoyable less strenuous activities. "Feeling sad appeared to depress attitudes about the behaviour, meaning exercise didn't seem as beneficial," Catellier says. "So, ultimately, those people don't exercise."

Not that your brain has all the power - increasingly, experts think that you can fool it by overriding negative workout emotions, and they have discovered tactics that might help you stick at exercise for longer. Psychologists at the University of Essex looked at whether different-coloured images displayed during an indoor cycle ride had any effect on mood and perceived levels of effort. Surprisingly, they did. When the cyclists were shown pictures of green trees and open spaces, they felt happier and rated their exertion as less difficult than when they were presented with the same scenes in black, white and red colours. "Your surroundings can make a huge difference to the way your brain interprets the discomfort of exertion," Dr Griffin says. "Positive feedback from peers can also make you feel you are fitter than you really are. That is hugely motivational as it kicks in."

For some - but not all - listening to music helps to distract from the pain. "Music lowers your perception of effort," says Dr Costas Karageorghis, head of the Music in Sport research group at Brunel University. "It can trick your mind into feeling less tired during a workout, and also encourage positive thoughts." He adds that music helps to induce 'alpha-brainwave activity' leading to a state known as 'flow' or being 'in the zone', a motivational mindset in which you feel as if you are functioning on autopilot. As a result, Karageorghis has found, your perception of effort drops by as much as 10 per cent. You feel as if you are working less hard. "It can also make you feel more positive at a high-exercise workload, even up to the point of exhaustion," he says. Choose music that is upbeat. One trial at Liverpool John Moores University found that cyclists covered more mileage in the same time, produced more power with each pedal stroke and increased their pedalling speed simply by listening to a song with a faster tempo.

Ultimately, you can hurdle your hardwiring to some extent. "As a human race we were built to be physically active," Dr Griffin says. "There are big individual differences in the level to which people are drawn to exercise and it takes time for your brain to adjust to tolerating it. Don't be unrealistic about it. You are not going to change from an exercise-loather to a gym bunny in two weeks."

Jeremy Clarkson on Cyclists

If you selected a random group of British people and asked them to name everything that's wrong or odd about Germany, the answers would be many and varied. But when I once gathered together a group of Germans and asked them to name everything they didn't like about Britain, they were stumped. Only when pushed did one put his hand up and say, "Your taps."

The others nodded enthusiastically. "Yes," they all said. "Your taps. We don't like the way you have one for hot and one for cold. Why do you not have one that mixes hot and cold to make warm?"

Are you smarting? No. Thought not. So let me hit you with something that will sting a bit more. When I asked an Italian professor to name the thing he thought most strange about Britain, he said, "I once went to a pub which had a sign in the window that said, 'Children welcome'. I found that very odd."

It implies, of course, that there are establishments where children might not be welcome, and that to an Italian is just plain bonkers. Actually it's just plain bonkers, no matter where you're from. Last week, however, I saw a sign on a restaurant door that was even more mystifying: 'Cyclists welcome', it said.

I have nothing against those who ride bicycles. This week half my family and many of my friends will be cycling from Paris to London to raise money for wounded soldiers. I have a bicycle that I use for short distances of up to 100 metres in London. But I cannot see why because of this I should be more welcome at a restaurant than those who choose to go about their business on the bus.

What about people who play chess? The implication is that they are not particularly welcome. Nor are travelling salesmen, racing drivers and those who take part in dressage competitions. Why would there not be a sign saying, 'Teachers welcome'?

I'll tell you why. Because teachers are a specific group of people who teach stuff. 'Cyclists', on the other hand, does not refer to people who simply ride bicycles. These days the word means so much more than that.

You have those who ride a bike to work, and then you have cyclists who are very angry about everything and do not eat meat. By putting up a sign saying, 'Cyclists welcome', what the owner is actually saying is, "I have many vegetarian options on the menu and I pursue a fanatical anti-smoking policy. Also, I vote Labour."

Cycling used to be how you got about when you were poor. Then it became a pastime for children. Now, though, it has evolved into something more. It's gone beyond a way of life and become a political statement. A movement.

Its leaders even have a uniform. They wear skintight black leggings over which they put a pair of shorts. Yes, they actually wear their underpants on the outside of their trousers. There is no practical reason at all for doing this; it looks stupid. But that's the point. It tells everyone that they are not interested in capitalism's drive to make us all spend a fortune on fashion and looking good. It says, "I'm proud to look daft."

This also explains the cycling helmet. If you actually wanted to protect your head, you would wear the sort of thing that motorcyclists use, and if you wanted all-round visibility you would go to the people who supply the British Army. But instead cyclists choose to wear five hardened bananas on their bonce. It's the 21st-century equivalent of a British Leyland donkey jacket.

And often it is fitted with a GoPro video camera so that the shortcomings of van-driving painters and decorators can be uploaded to YouTube. It's all part of the workers' struggle against imperialism's self-employed foot soldiers. Humiliate Gary the plumber on the internet and pretty soon you'll bring down the stock exchange.

Twenty-five years ago we had cyclists, but back then they were called peace campaigners and they were chained to the fences at Greenham Common. Thirty years ago they were throwing rocks at policemen in Orgreave. And 180 years ago they were demanding the release of their brothers from Tolpuddle.

The Ramblers Association was born as an offshoot of the Young Communist League. It was designed to demonstrate that property is theft, and that the working man has a right to walk wherever and over whatever he sees fit. Well, today's cyclists are simply bringing that tradition to the nation's towns and cities.

As far as they are concerned the roads are theirs by right. And the pavements. They do not ride through red lights to make their journey quicker; they do it to show the Tories that they will not be enslaved by convention. It's political.

And now they are demanding that their ecological, high-visibility, fair-trade, non-nuclear, meat-free lifestyle be accommodated into the mainstream, with junctions designed to put the bicycle first. They want the car and the van banished. Today the Embankment. Tomorrow the Bank of England.

There's only one way they can be defeated. And that's for normal people to start riding bicycles. We need to swell their ranks with moderates, people who ride a bike because they've had a drink and because taxis are too expensive. Ordinary people who ride in jeans and T-shirts and with no stupid helmet.

People who will walk into a restaurant with a sign on the door saying, 'Cyclists welcome', and ask for meat, with extra meat.

I've started the ball rolling by buying a bike. And when I ride it I have a sign on the back of my jacket that says, "Motorists. Thank you for letting me use your roads."

Manners. That's what the Germans say they like best about Britain and the British. So let's use them to defeat extremism's latest attempt to upset the applecart.

Your Inner Chimp

The central idea now familiar to most British Olympians, the stars of Liverpool Football Club and Ronnie O'Sullivan, the mercurial snooker player, is that there is a chimp in your brain. The chimp is not exactly you. It is your primitive self. It has emotions, reacts quickly and impulsively, and is not logical in its thinking. It jumps to conclusions and makes assumptions.

The key to success - in life as well as in sport - is to be able to recognise the behaviour of this chimp and to manage it with the logical part of the brain. As Dr Steve Peters, the psychiatrist who invented the model and has written a bestselling book on the subject, puts it: "You have to put the chimp back in its box."

Peters is a very likeable Northerner. Within moments of meeting him at Google HQ in London, I can see why he has built such a strong rapport with Sir Chris Hoy, Craig Bellamy and the like. He has a bright face, a commonsense style and a way of making you think you are, for the time he is with you, at the centre of his universe.

Peters is also in demand. His chimp framework has made him one of the most influential people in sport. Peters is a psychiatrist - he trained as a doctor before taking up various hospital posts - but his principal work today is in the psychology of success. He wants people to maximise their potential and thinks that he can help them to do just that. "Ronnie O'Sullivan has been very open about his work with me," Peters says. "When he came to see me, the problem was that his chimp would try to sabotage him with anxious thoughts. This is what the chimp does. It frets about losing, or about not being able to pot the ball, and about how awful it would be not to win."

"But I explained to Ronnie that these thoughts were not coming from him. They were coming from his chimp. The key was for him to box his chimp. The rational part of his brain was perfectly able to recognise that losing doesn't define him. Snooker is not the be-all and end-all. Once he recognised this, and talked the chimp down, he could play without the negative emotional baggage."

Peters's methods have had strong results. O'Sullivan has won the World Championship twice since starting to work with him in 2011. Peters has also been central to the success of the Great Britain track cycling team, Team Sky and other Olympic sports, such as taekwondo and canoeing. He has been working with Liverpool since 2012.

"The key is to understand that everyone is an individual," Peters says. "We all have individual personalities and individual chimps. The way to box the chimp will vary from person to person, and from situation to situation. Sometimes a chimp needs to be reasoned with; sometimes it needs to be confronted. My job is to train people in the most effective method to use."

Peters does not only help athletes with particular problems; he also helps athletes to use their psychological tools more effectively. "Some people are already very robust emotionally when they come to see me," he says. "Chris Hoy, for example, was never unstable. There was a report in the press about him having panic attacks. I can tell you that never happened. He has never been on Valium in his life."

"What he did when he came to me was to say, 'I am in a great place mentally and physically, but I can get an advantage in physical terms by working with a specialist in strength and conditioning. And I believe I can get an advantage in emotional terms by working with someone who can help me understand how my mind works.' There was no dysfunction that I had to sort out; I was just adding to what he already had."

Much of Peters's work is to help athletes to gain a sense of perspective. The danger when walking out into an Olympic final is that an athlete will become overwhelmed with fear, or panic, or the yearning to run away. It is sometimes called the fight, flight, freeze response. The key to unlocking peak performance is to banish this 'chimp-like' reaction by introducing rationality.

As Peters puts it: "It is vital to remember that sport is just sport. You won't die if you lose. You will still be you. Victoria Pendleton once said to me, 'All I do is go round and round in a circle.' That is a great perspective to have because once you realise that sport is nonsense, you can give it everything without fear. I am not promoting being laid-back; I'm promoting perspective."

Are there any downsides of perspective, I wonder. It may be very useful when one is about to go into competition and might otherwise be seized by panic, but what about at the beginning of an Olympic cycle? Why would someone want to commit to four years of professional sport when she has just convinced herself that it is 'nonsense'?

"It is possible to want to win the medal, to commit to winning the medal, while still recognising that the sport is, in a sense, trivial," Peters says. "Some people may find that a difficult balance to strike, but others do it very well. It is all about the individual."

Occasionally, Peters has worked with athletes who just do not want to commit. The problem is not a reluctant chimp, keen to stay in a warm bed rather than do an early-morning run, but something more profound. You might call it a rational decision to say: "Sport isn't worth it."

"I have worked with two athletes who said, 'I don't want to do this,' " Peters says. "They were both great athletes who could have medalled. But they walked away, and I agreed with their decision. One wrote to me two years later and said, 'Thank you for giving me my life back. I don't want the medal and I don't want the lifestyle. I have made no error of judgment.' To me, that is fantastic. I don't want to force people to do something they don't want to."

Why would anyone want to host the Olympics?

  TO TRIUMPHANT shouts of 'banzai!' it was announced on September 7th that Tokyo would host the 2020 Olympic games. The city fended off not-especially-stiff competition from Madrid, whose chances were damaged by Spain's sickly economy, and Istanbul, whose image was tarnished when its police spent the summer practising for the 100-metre baton-charge. It was not the strongest field of candidate cities in Olympic history. But the contest demonstrated the lengths that countries will go to for the privilege of hosting the world's biggest sporting bash. Shinzo Abe (pictured above, third from right), Mariano Rajoy and Recep Tayyip Erdogan all flew to Buenos Aires, where the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was voting, to make the official case for their respective countries. Tokyo had previously bid unsuccessfully for the 2016 games; Madrid had bid for both 2016 and 2012. Poor Istanbul has now been rejected five times. Why are cities so keen to host the Olympics?

On the face of it, throwing the world's biggest party - and paying for it - is not especially appealing. The cost used to be fairly modest: London's 1948 Olympics cost £732,268, or about £20m ($30m) in today's money. Nowadays hosting the games is a different business. The 2008 Beijing games, the priciest ever, are reckoned to have cost about $40 billion. That is likely to be eclipsed next year by the Sochi winter games, which are on course to cost $50 billion. Tourism may help to offset the expense, but a spike in arrivals is not guaranteed: Beijing saw a drop in hotel bookings during its Olympic summer. And the chance to spruce up a city sometimes ends up creating eyesores instead. Some of Greece's costly stadiums now look as run-down as the Parthenon (and have fewer visitors).

The main reason cities want to host the Olympics is that, perhaps against the odds, they are wildly popular with the voters who foot the bill. The IOC found that public support for hosting the games was around 70% in Tokyo, 76% in Madrid and 83% in Istanbul. Londoners, sometimes a cynical bunch, were in favour of the 2012 games, in spite of dissent from some quarters (including this newspaper, which recommended leaving it to Paris). At the end of last year, with the crowds departed, eight out of ten said it was worth the extraordinary cost, even as cuts to public services began to bite. Popularity aside, Olympic bids often have other agendas. The Beijing games were intended to show off China's spending and organisational power. London's games were a means of bringing back to life a poor part of the capital at a speed that defied normal budgets and planning regulations. Tokyo hopes the 2020 games can gee up Japan's lacklustre economy.

It is a high-risk game. Rio's hosting of the 2016 games had strong local support during the bidding process, but has since become a focus of those protesting against government waste (they also rage against the World Cup, which Brazil will host next year). Politicians can be left looking ridiculous, or worse: Mexico's 1968 Olympics are remembered as much for the massacre of student protesters ten days before the games as for the sporting events themselves. Even if it goes well, the seven-year gap between bidding for the games and staging them means that the politicians who shepherd the bid through are seldom around when the fun begins. The Labour government and Labour mayor of London who helped to win the bid for Britain were long gone by 2012. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is no longer Brazil's president (though some wonder if he might just try to make a comeback). Shinzo Abe faces no term limits as Japan's prime minister, so could, in theory, still be around to open the Tokyo games in 2020. More likely, though, someone else will be there to take the credit - or the blame.

Talent

One of the great things about science is that it has taught us to be sceptical about surface appearances. The world seems flat, but it is, in fact, round. Tiger Woods looks like he was born to play golf - but was he really? The idea that Woods was genetically predisposed to hit balls seems, on the surface, self-evident. You only have to look at the way he swings a club to realise that genius was encoded in his DNA. A similar analysis might be applied to the free-kick taking of David Beckham or the tennis playing of Roger Federer.

In Bounce, my 2010 book, I challenged this view, following in the steps of authors such as Malcolm Gladwell. Much of the intellectual ballast for the book was provided by the work of Herbert Simon, a cognitive scientist who won the Nobel Prize in 1978, and Anders Ericsson, of Florida State University. According to this approach, what looks like talent is, in fact, the consequence of years of practice. Hence, the idea that 10,000 hours is what it takes to attain expertise.

Woods, for example, started playing golf at the age of 1, played his first pitch-and-putt round at 2, and had practised many thousands of hours by the age of 10. When he became the youngest winner of the Masters in 1997 and was acclaimed by pundits as having been born with a gift, Woods laughed. "It looks like a gift, but that is because you haven't seen the years of dedication that went into the performance," a colleague said. This is the danger of surface appearance.

Recently, the debate on nature versus nurture has ignited again. The Sports Gene, a book by David Epstein, has sought to elevate the role of genetics in the analysis of success. It is well written, and many of the examples about running, jumping and other 'simple' sports are uncontroversial. There is little doubt that it helps to have fast-twitch muscle fibres if you want to be a sprinter. Similarly, a long Achilles tendon is helpful if you aspire to be a high jumper. The anatomical advantages enjoyed by many top athletes in simple sports are often caused by genetic differences.

But the 10,000-hour notion was supposed to apply only to complex areas of sport, and life. Take the case of reaction speed in sport. For a long time, it was thought that those, such as Federer, who could react to a serve delivered at more than 150mph, were blessed with superior genes. The idea was that Federer was born with instincts that gave him the capacity to react to a fast-moving ball, where most people would see a blur.

Federer's speed is, according to this analysis, a bit like Usain Bolt's fast-twitch fibres: encoded in DNA.

This turned out to be quite wrong. On standard tests of reaction, top tennis players are no faster on average than the rest of us. What they possess is not superior reactions but superior anticipation. They are able to read the movement of their opponent (the torso, the lower part of the arm, the orientation of the shoulders) and thus move into position earlier than non-elite players. In fact, they are able to infer where the ball is going a full tenth of a second before it has been hit. This is a complex skill encoded in the brain through years of practice; not an inherited trait.

One of the reasons why practice is so important is because it transforms the neural architecture of the brain. To take one simple example, the area of the brain involved in spatial navigation - the posterior hippocampus - is much bigger in London black cab drivers than the rest of us. But, crucially, they were not born with this; it grew in direct proportion to years on the job.

Proponents of talent tend to respond by saying: "Are you seriously saying that talent counts for nothing?" Well, that depends on what is meant by talent. The problem is that different notions are used interchangeably. What does it mean to say that Jonny is more talented than Jamie at, say, tennis? Does it mean that Jonny is better at the moment? Or that Jonny is improving faster? What if Jamie starts to improve faster than Jonny? Is Jamie now more talented than Jonny? In many fields, it has been found that those who start off below average (who might be said to lack talent) improve, over time, faster than average. In others, those who start out learning faster continue to accelerate. In one study of American pianists, those who would go on to achieve greatness were not standing out from their peers even when they had been studying intensively for six years.

At what point do we decide who is talented? After a week, a month, ten years? The answer may be different depending on the time-span chosen, not to mention the level of motivation and the quality of coaching brought to each hour of practice. In the studies cited by Epstein, these variables are rarely taken into account. What this shows, I think, is that a simple notion of talent (which still rules much of the world) is misleading. Complex skills are not hardwired like height, and neither is the disposition to learn.

Many of the differences in the world today when it comes to sporting prowess are determined not by genetic differences, but by differences in the quality of practice. Brazil once had the top team in football because of highly efficient training techniques. Instead of learning from them, English coaches, obsessed with talent, said: "Brazilians are born with superlative skill; our players could never do that".

The consequence was that we didn't teach technical competence to our youngsters. Our 11-year-olds continued to play on full-size pitches, hoofing the ball up to the front man, and touching the ball infrequently. No wonder we went backwards. Spain superseded Brazil because they found a way of accelerating skill-acquisition beyond their competitors.

I would have no problem with the notion of talent if it was amended to incorporate the complexity in human performance. The problem with the simplistic notion prevalent today is that it can destroy resilience, as many studies have shown. After all, if you are struggling with an activity, doesn't that mean you lack talent? Shouldn't you give up and try something else?

It is worth remembering that SF, a famous volunteer from memory literature, went from below average to world-class level in memory skill with two years of training. Was he talented? Ultimately, it depends on how you conceive of talent. What is clear is that the present notion is deeply misleading. The power of practice, on the other hand, remains vastly underrated.

60 Second Workouts

How many hours you put in at the gym was once considered a measure of fitness. The more you did, the better the outcome for inches lost and muscle-tone gained. That was the truth many clung to in the pursuit of fat-shedding. That theory has been turned on its head by fitness scientists who have shown it's not the duration of a workout that matters, but the effort you are prepared to make while doing it. Cue a rush for micro workouts that promise results in as little as twelve, seven and even three minutes - barely the time it takes to lace up your trainers. And last week, a new level of fitness minimalism was reached when University of Utah researchers reported that a single minute of exercise is all you need to do to lose weight.

How can a mere 60 seconds of sweaty effort every day make any difference to your fitness, you might ask. It's certainly a far cry from the 150 minutes of moderate exercise that the Government recommends we aim for each week. Yet according to lead researcher Jessie Fan, a professor of family and consumer studies, a one-minute workout can make a huge impact on health. When it comes to shedding unwanted pounds, what matters, she says, is not the duration of exercise, but how hard you work your heart and lungs. Monitoring the activity levels of 4,500 adults, Professor Fan and her team found that regular 60-second bursts of effort trumped lengthy but less frequent gym workouts overall. Indeed, they showed that for women in the study, just one minute a day spent doing high-intensity activity - and that could mean climbing the stairs or taking a fast walk - offset the calorie equivalent of 0.41lb in weight. That, the scientists explained, would mean that a 5ft 5in woman who used the stairs at work would weigh almost 0.5lb less than a woman who took the lift.

Results, published in the American Journal of Health Promotion , were similar for men and, over time, the micro approach was shown to have a potentially significant effect on weight. Every daily minute of exercise effort was linked to a 0.07 decrease in Body Mass Index in female subjects and obesity odds decreased by 5 per cent among women and 2 per cent among men. "Knowing that even short bouts of brisk activity can add up to a positive effect is an encouraging message for promoting better health," Professor Fan says. It's not the first time that scientists have suggested 60 seconds is an optimal workout time. Last year, exercise scientists at the University of Abertay Dundee reported that participants who were asked to sprint all out for six seconds on a bike then rest for one minute, repeating the cycle ten times, three times a week, improved their fitness levels by as much as 10 per cent in two weeks.

But how does such a micro-workout produce such staggering results? Exercise scientists have long known that pushing yourself outside your comfort zone, albeit for short periods, is key to fitness progression. When it comes to weight loss, your body expends more calories powering along than it does ambling. Back in 2005, studies at McMaster University in Ontario showed that 30-second bike sprints for a total of two minutes led to the same muscle cell adaptations as two hours of long, steady bike riding. Since then dozens of research papers have concluded that a few minutes of strenuous activity is enough to improve various measures of fitness. "Your body responds and adapts to overload," says John Brewer, professor of sport at the University of Bedfordshire. "So, your fitness improvements are directly related to how hard your muscles work and the intensity of the exercise you are doing as well as the demands on your cardiovascular system. You don't have to spend hours slogging away to get results if you increase the intensity of your activity."

Dr John Babraj from the University of Abertay's School of Social and Health Sciences and author of The High Intensity Workout , says one of the reasons for the dramatic improvement in fitness levels after the 60-second bike sprint sessions performed in his study is the effect the intense exercise has on the body's ability to use fuel, particularly a substance called lactate. Although it used to be considered a waste product produced during exercise, lactate is in fact "an exceptionally important fuel during activity", he says, and high- intensity training seems "to improve the efficiency with which the body uses not just lactate but a range of other fuel sources".

To date, most studies on short, high- intensity exercise have been small and carried out predominantly on young men. However, Dr Babraj has just submitted for publication a paper on the effects of just two of the 60-second workouts a week on a group of middle-aged people. His results showed that, on average, people lost 1kg of fat over the two-month trial even though the subjects were asked not to change their usual diet or activity habits.

Measures of blood sugar control showed improvements almost matching those of younger people doing more of the same exercise, and the middle-aged subjects also had significantly better cardiovascular function, an important marker of heart disease, after eight weeks. "We were really excited to find that the group's functional fitness in tasks such as climbing stairs and getting out of a chair also improved dramatically," Babraj says. "This opens up the possibility of one-minute exercise sessions having real importance in older people's lives."

Other researchers have shown that devoting just minutes a week to high- intensity exercise can improve blood pressure and boost endurance capacity. There are more subtle benefits, too. Whereas many people find they are ravenously hungry after a lengthy run or cycle, short, sharp workouts seem to stem appetite. A study published this summer in International Journal of Obesity proved this is the case by allowing men to eat as much as they liked after high or very high intensity workouts , moderate exercise or rest. Fewest calories were consumed after the high (621 calories) and very high (594 calories) intensity workouts compared to the times when they rested (764 extra calories) or did moderate exercise (710 calories).

Eating less is undoubtedly one of the positive side-effects of micro-training, says Graeme Marsh, personal trainer director of The Foundry gym in London, but it's not all good news. Marsh says too many people think of abbreviated workouts as a magic pill to do virtually nothing when it is not necessarily an easy option. "A lot of the studies on short workouts are based on super high-intensity levels of training that are simply not achievable by the average person," he says. "In fact, that kind of extreme exertion can be problematic, particularly if you have done an inadequate warm up." Professor Brewer agrees, suggesting the downfall is often that "people need a decent level of fitness to attempt the kind of intensity that is really going to get results". Critics of the minimalist approach also point to the fact that long-term effects on weight, health and fitness of consistently reduced workout durations are, as yet, unknown. It is one of the reasons that Dr Babraj is extending his next study to 16 weeks.

What all experts agree, however, is that a one-minute workout is more beneficial than doing nothing at all. Even for those who hate exercise, it is a manageable dose, particularly if they take the Utah study approach of incorporating one-minute bursts of stair climbing or brisk walking to their daily routine. That, coupled with the kind of incidental activity that is now thought to be crucial for health - gardening, washing the car, housework - will produce substantial improvements in health and fitness for the previously inactive. From there, says Dr Baraj, progress to more intense 60-second bursts, three times a week and your fitness could be transformed. "One minute of hard effort two or three times a week," he says. "And you really could be much fitter and healthier in only a fortnight."

Lego

Earlier this year, Lego overtook Hasbro to become the world's second-largest toymaker, after Mattel. It was more than just one company outperforming another - it was Lego's one brand generating more revenue than Hasbro's sixty-eight brands, which include G.I. Joe, Transformers, and Mr. Potato Head. While Hasbro and Mattel have grown by creating and acquiring a diverse array of toys, Lego has adopted the opposite strategy: focus on the one, iconic product, but get more kids to play with it. There is little room left for Lego to grow in the United States, where it already controls eighty-five per cent of the construction-toy sector, besting imitators like Mattel's Mega Bloks and has-beens such as Lincoln Logs and Erector sets. Lego's revenue of nearly two billion dollars in the first half of 2013 - compared with $1.43 billion for Hasbro - was boosted in large part by its growth of seventy per cent in China. That country, where parents are increasingly seeking out educational toys, has become the world's second-largest toy market. The Asia-Pacific region will likely overtake North America as the largest regional toy market sometime next year.

Lego's success in Asia wasn't inevitable. In the nineteen-nineties, the company tried to follow the lead of its rivals by rampantly diversifying: the products that came out of that included apparel, video games, and theme parks - all since spun off. The strategy failed, and in 2004 the company nearly went bankrupt. Afterward, though, Lego made significant changes to its design staff, as David Robertson and Bill Breen recount in Brick by Brick: How Lego Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry. Lego put a manager named Per Hjuler in charge of the Concept Lab, where workers think up Lego's new products; Hjuler found that the Lab's staff consisted solely of designers, most of them Danish men, who were deft at conjuring clever concepts. But they didn't understand the competitive environments that shaped the many markets LEGO targeted, Robertson and Breen write. Hjuler created a marketing team within the Concept Lab, and deliberately hired a number of non-Danish designers, including several from India and Japan. Since then, the company has painstakingly climbed back to the top by expanding not its product line but its geographic reach.

Like most toys, Legos facilitate what David Whitebread, a Cambridge University psychologist, calls 'pretense play' - the invention of original narratives such as sending Barbie to rescue Batman from under a soccer ball. But Lego also promotes 'construction play' not found in dolls or board games, which calls upon the child to be creative in a very literal sense: she must create the toy with which she wants to play. Whereas a Transformer changes only from humanoid to vehicle and back again, a pile of Lego bricks can transform into anything a child imagines. The combination of construction play and pretense play represent, in Whitebread's view, a "powerful context supporting the development of thinking skills, problem-solving and creativity" all the way into young adulthood; Cambridge's engineering department, for example, makes extensive use of Lego as a teaching tool.

Lego acknowledges the educational value of its marquee products, but is careful not to let it overshadow Lego's appeal as a source of diversion. "Of course we believe in the educational values that are inherent in any Lego product," said Roar Rude Trangbek, a Lego spokesman. But "if it's educational, that's a side effect for the child. It's just as important that a child has fun."

James Button, a senior manager at the Shanghai-based consultancy SmithStreet, told me that many Chinese parents have been attracted to Lego's capacity to develop children's creativity and independence. "These areas of development are increasingly important in China's economy, but are not well addressed through China's education system," he said. Parents have "lost faith in the ability of the Chinese education system to develop these critical skills in their children."

Trends in the Asian toy market seem to support this. Sales of educational toys in China have more than doubled in the past five years, compared with a thirty-eight-per-cent drop in the United States over the same period, according to Euromonitor International. In South Korea, the demand for educational and construction toys is so strong that Lego has accrued a greater market share there than anywhere else, including its native Denmark.

Parents' drive to see their children succeed is strong enough that, in Button's eyes, Lego is competing not so much with other toymakers as with after-school extracurricular activities. Fortunately for Lego, it long ago made itself an extracurricular activity in the form of a division called Lego Education. The program, more than thirty years old, adapts Lego products to the classroom - encouraging children to use gears to learn about ratios, for example, or to program Lego robots, or to physically build the worlds they have written stories about - and it caters to students from preschool all the way through university. The program is in seventy countries so far. "It's attempting to teach parents the value of playtime, and at the same time it's building awareness of Lego," Button said. Separately, the nonprofit Lego Foundation has, in the past three years, donated Lego sets to schools in China that serve more than a hundred thousand children - a small number for China, but one that makes for a revealing initiative nonetheless.

Here's the thing: both Lego Education and the Lego Foundation promote learning, but these efforts probably also help Lego win over new customers. Spokespeople for both Lego Group and Lego Education downplayed Education's impact on retail sales, and the Lego Foundation didn't respond to requests for comment, but Jennifer Stein, the C.E.O. of the media-and-education consulting firm Always In Entertainment, told me, "With all of these young children playing with Lego in school, there has to be sales. The teachers are basically putting their stamp of approval on it." Implicit recommendations from schools, along with explicit recommendations from experienced parents, are invaluable for toy marketers in China, since the one-child policy means that many parents may be shopping for toys for the first time.

In theory, Lego's greatest weakness worldwide should be that the last of its core patents expired in 1988, which has left it vulnerable for the past several years to competitors selling nearly identical bricks at lower prices. Mattel has its Mega Bloks, Hasbro has Kre-O, and China is home to at least a dozen imitators, including the brazenly named Ligao. But SmithStreet's Button believes that the price and quality of Lego's products and those of its imitators are so far apart that they are not competing for the same customers. If anything, Button said, the more affordable knockoffs serve as an entry point to playing with Lego-style bricks, from which a family might later upgrade to the real thing.

Indeed, authentic Legos are an upgrade: manufactured with an extremely high degree of precision, they can flex just a thousandth of a millimeter. The result is that they hold together so a child can actually play with the things he builds without them crumbling in his hands. Many Lego imitators make their bricks more cheaply, on the logic that lower prices will make up for looser bricks; I recently tested a rival set of blocks, and the difference was immediately noticeable.

Lego has a second weakness in Asia: its high prices. Sets cost up to twice as much in China as they do in the U.S., because of import and distribution costs. The company recently said it will build a factory in Jiaxing, an industrial town near Shanghai, which should be up and running by 2017. Button guessed that local manufacturing could cut Lego's prices by as much as twenty per cent. In the meantime, entrepreneurs in New York have been known to ship Lego sets in bulk from the U.S. to China, illegally not paying duties, so that they can sell them in China and undercut Lego's own prices.

Despite its recent arrival in much of Asia, Lego has managed to pick up more than eighty thousand registered Adult Fans of Lego in the region, and the company has made some gestures to acknowledge them. Japanese Lego fans had access to Cuusoo, an online tool that allows users to design their own Lego sets, a full three years ahead of the service's worldwide launch in 2011. And Lego's new Architecture series, the first Lego product line designed specifically for adults, is sold on a limited basis in Asia and so far includes two Asian landmarks: Seoul's Sungnyemun gate and Tokyo's Imperial Hotel. As for its younger customers, Lego designs products that it hopes will be attractive to children everywhere, but this year it made a small exception when it adapted an existing dinosaur set and repackaged it as a commemorative Year of the Snake special edition. Tellingly, it was sold only in China.

All Blacks

 

New Zealand has long been acknowledged for its enact ability to produce world-class rugby players.

What isn't often acknowledged is how far behind the rest of the rugby world really is in terms of development and the extent to which New Zealand rugby's rising stars are put through their paces from an early age.

Former England No 8 Dean Ryan says he attributes his club rugby stint in New Zealand as an eye-opener toward Kiwi rugby's dominance on the world stage.

"After two broken arms in two seasons with Wasps, I was desperate for rugby and my club coach, Mark Taylor, a former All Black, had pointed the way to Ngongotaha rugby club in Rotorua,'' Ryan wrote in the Guardian. "New Zealand rugby changed me and that's the point.

"It was pretty stiff competition and more to the point it was pretty lively.''

But his initial reaction to the stringent nature of New Zealand's club rugby scene left him a little taken aback.

"From school to club to All Blacks is a natural progression,'' Ryan said of New Zealand's rigid rugby development pathway.

After slogging out a season for Ngongotaha, Ryan became a different man to the one who first decided upon a leisurely season abroad playing club rugby.

"After three or four weeks I was prepared to call it a day. Six months of finishing each weekend black and blue was not what I wanted,'' Ryan said.

Despite his shaky introduction, Ryan's perseverance proved prudent as he soon found himself playing provincial rugby for Bay of Plenty.

"Bay of Plenty heard about the Brit with Ngongotaha, one of about 36 quality clubs in the region and a season with the NPC followed,'' Ryan said.

This was the catalyst for Ryan's career as he soon learned his time abroad had moulded him into a world-class player. His playing days on New Zealand soil gave him a push toward a successful career in which he represented London Wasps, Newcastle Falcons, Bristol and, ultimately, England.

"The guy who left England for New Zealand might not have coped, whereas the 21-year-old who had played six months with Bay of Plenty knew what it was about,'' he said.

"[In England] it's tough at the top, but only at the top. Below the professional ranks attitudes and expectations are distinctly amateur. True, there are thousands upon thousands playing rugby, but it's not the rugby played the New Zealand way.

"When did we last see a [Brodie] Retallick or a Charles Piutau, a product of Pakuranga in Auckland, burst on to the scene and look so immediately comfortable in test conditions?

"True, we have the biggest rugby-playing population in the world, but the base of the pyramid which leads to test rugby feels a whole lot narrower than it did in Ngongotaha.''      

 

 

YOU might think of match-fixing in sport as a new phenomenon, encouraged by the advent of online betting and controlled by Asian gambling syndicates with unlimited sums to wager on trivial events. But that's not the full story. Just as important, but much less appreciated, is that the betting industry is mounting a high-tech fightback.

Sporting history is, in fact, littered with tales of match-fixing. There are any number of reasons why people attempt to rig the outcomes of contests, including politics, personal pride and for the competitors' mutual benefit. In the 1897 English football season, for example, the teams Stoke and Burnley intentionally drew so that both would qualify for the first division the following season. Athletes in the ancient Olympics bribed their rivals to let them win. Allegations persist that Peru conveniently lost 6-0 to Argentina in the 1978 football World Cup in return for an aid package.

These days match-fixing, especially in soccer, is heavily linked to betting. It has affected most nations, from Australia to Zimbabwe. So it's no surprise to see the subject hit the headlines again with the arrest of several footballers in the UK.

Bookmakers are now striving to give punters ever more events to bet on and ways to bet, for example online and when matches are already under way. This makes betting's scope international and reduces the time in which bookies can react to suspicious activity – a risky situation for the firms, which traditionally heavily restrict or even close the accounts of those who either dare to beat them or simply do not lose enough to them. So how vulnerable are bookmakers to illegal betting syndicates in South-East Asia, the focus of current concerns?

The mainstream industry takes bets on hundreds of football leagues around the world, often during matches. Much of the trading and risk management is automated: complex algorithms generate odds based on the state of the game (as updated live by a network of industry scouts), and software tracks incoming bets and the account status of those who are trying to place them.

Recent match-fixing arrests in the UK have so far focused on leagues in which the clubs are, at best, semi-professional. This means the players still rely significantly on day jobs, which in turn means that it might not take a lot of money to manipulate some of them. They may be at the end of their careers, frustrated that their club isn't paying what they thought they were promised. Or they may simply be out to make as much as they can from a brief career that never reached the heights they dreamed of.

Bookmakers are aware of this, and now have sophisticated methods of spotting anomalies that might signal something is amiss. They use complex mathematical models that analyse vast sets of statistics, coupled with close monitoring of competitors and customers, to set the odds offered and the size and nature of bets they will take.

As punters become more sophisticated, betting agencies have invested large sums in technology to keep their profits steadily ticking over. Alarm bells will ring inside a bookmaker's trading room at any one of a number of possible signals of corruption: a £2 punter suddenly wanting to place £200 bets on obscure events; a series of bets in quick succession on something which would normally be lucky to elicit two bets an hour; a marked group of accounts all betting maximum sums on the same outcome (often the bookmaker will prefer to keep these accounts open as an early warning that something may be amiss); other betting firms sharply changing the odds or even suspending betting on an event; a series of new accounts all backing the same selection. The list goes on.

The upshot is that if you want to bet big on amateur or otherwise obscure football matches through regulated betting channels, you'll be out of luck. "Recreational money only, thank you" is the message from bookies.

Additionally, most licensed bookmakers will report suspicious matches to an industry body for further investigation. In July 2012, the Norwegian Football Association postponed a match between teams Ull/Kisa and HamKam in the country's second division, as a result of intelligence from their national betting monopoly, Norsk Tipping.

Technology aids sporting authorities as well. Surveillance firms such as Sportradar monitor betting odds and activity around the world – including activity in South-East Asia – for organisations like UEFA, football's European governing body.

It is in-match betting from east Asia which causes most concern. It is less easy to detect and can involve spot-fixing: the rigging of minor events in a match, such as a soccer player receiving a yellow card for committing a foul. What is worrying about spot-fixing is not so much the minor events themselves, but that such incidents might be a signal to a fixer that their plan to rig the overall result can proceed.

Spot-fixing is not confined to football nor, of course, to regions where bookmakers are regulated. But any suggestion that responsible firms should tackle the problem by not offering a wide variety of betting options will only force illegal activity further into the unregulated sector where it might go undetected – which would be the worst result for everyone.

The cat is out of the bag with globalisation and the ability to bet on almost anything, anywhere, online. It will do no good for the authorities to put their heads in the sand.

At least we have cause to be reassured: technology helped create the current problem, but equally technology can be the solution.      

 

A Better Olympic System

 

(Seth Godin)

I'll confess that I don't watch the Olympics, but you'd have to be living under a rock to be unaware of the corruption and the expense. An amorphous organization with no transparency, unclear lines of responsibility, huge amounts of politics and a great deal of unearned power.

I wonder what it would take to create an alternative?

Ford, Nike and Netflix each put up a hundred million dollars or so. The games would be held two years before each corresponding Olympics, benefitting both athletes (who can't always wait four more years) as well as curling-starved fans (not to mention advertisers). (Ted Turner tried this a long time ago, but I think it's time to try again in a post-broadcast economy).

To reflect a world that actually has electronic communications at its disposal, the games would be held in ten cities at the same time, not one, reusing existing facilities from previous games. With multiple time zones, the games could be held round the clock, and the logistical challenges of rebuilding a different city every time go away.

And to reflect a world engaged in social media, the games would be focused on abundance, on sharing, on permission, as opposed to straining to build a legal wall around what goes on.

(And in a Rollerball-like, post-sovereign twist, perhaps the teams are sponsored not by countries, but by companies, fraternal organizations and organized fans).

We'd need a new song, sure, and a name that over time would somehow gain ridiculous trademark rights, but hey, you need to start somewhere.

(Seth Godin has interesting ideas on a wide range of topics - see more here )      

 

Leisure Time?

 

In the winter of 1928, John Maynard Keynes composed a short essay that took the long view. It was titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” and in it Keynes imagined what the world would look like a century hence. By 2028, he predicted, the “standard of life” in Europe and the United States would be so improved that no one would need to worry about making money. “Our grandchildren,” Keynes reckoned, would work about three hours a day, and even this reduced schedule would represent more labor than was actually necessary.

Keynes delivered an early version of “Economic Possibilities” as a lecture at a boys’ school in Hampshire. He was still at work revising and refining the essay when, in the fall of 1929, the stock market crashed. Some might have taken this as a bad sign; Keynes was undeterred. Though he quickly recognized the gravity of the situation—the crash, he wrote in early 1930, had produced a “slump which will take its place in history amongst the most acute ever experienced”—over the long run this would prove to be just a minor interruption in a much larger, more munificent trend. In the final version of “Economic Possibilities,” published in 1931, Keynes urged readers to look beyond this “temporary phase of maladjustment” and into the rosy beyond.

According to Keynes, the nineteenth century had unleashed such a torrent of technological innovation—“electricity, petrol, steel, rubber, cotton, the chemical industries, automatic machinery and the methods of mass production”—that further growth was inevitable. The size of the global economy, he forecast, would increase sevenfold in the following century, and this, in concert with ever greater “technical improvements,” would usher in the fifteen-hour week.

To Keynes, the coming age of abundance, while welcome, would pose a new and in some ways even bigger challenge. With so little need for labor, people would have to figure out what to do with themselves: “For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won.” The example offered by the idle rich was, he observed, “very depressing”; most of them had “failed disastrously” to find satisfying pastimes. In particular, he pointed to the “wives of the well-to-do classes” in the United States and England, who, “deprived by their wealth” of traditional occupations, like cooking, were “quite unable to find anything more amusing” to do. As a greater and greater proportion of the population found themselves liberated from work, Keynes worried that society might suffer from a sort of generalized “nervous breakdown.” It was those who could appreciate “the art of life itself,” he wrote, who would “be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.”

Four-fifths of the way through Keynes’s century, half of his vision has been realized. Since “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” was published, the U.S. gross domestic product has grown, in real terms, by a factor of sixteen, and G.D.P. per capita by a factor of six. And what holds for the United States goes for the rest of the world, too: in the past eighty years, the global economy has grown at a similar rate.

But if we have become, in aggregate, as rich as Keynes imagined, this wealth has not translated into leisure. (When was the last time someone you know complained about having too little to do?) In terms of economic theory, this is puzzling. In terms of everyday life, it’s enough to, well, induce a nervous breakdown.

Brigid Schulte, a reporter for the Washington Post, is the latest author to tackle the question—very loosely speaking—of where Keynes went wrong. In “Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time” (Sarah Crichton Books), she explores why it is that twenty-first-century Americans feel so swamped.

Schulte begins “Overwhelmed” by trying to measure her own leisure, or lack thereof. She enlists the help of John Robinson, a sociologist at the University of Maryland who’s an expert on time use. Robinson instructs Schulte to keep a time diary and provides her with a handy Excel template. But Schulte finds that her time is too “unruly” to fit the template’s neat little rectangles, so instead she decides to record her days in little black notebooks. One afternoon, when she is eating lunch at her desk while waiting on hold with the pharmacy that supplies her son’s EpiPens and searching the Web to figure out how to obtain a death certificate for her brother-in-law, who has died in China, she calls Robinson to ask him how to classify this sort of activity. Robinson tells her just to keep filling in her diary and he will sort things out. When she presents him with her pile of little black notebooks, however, he balks. They’re impossible to read, much less analyze. “What’s this word?” he asks, pointing to an entry from 2 a.m. on September 16th.

“Panic,” Schulte tells him. “ ‘Wake in a panic.’ ”

With the question of her own leisure left unresolved, Schulte decides to head to Paris for the annual meeting of the International Association for Time Use Research. (“There’s great interest in trying to understand why time pressure is increasing,” a sociologist from Oxford tells her. “This is the hot topic in time research right now.”) She visits the Yale Stress Center, in New Haven; meets with overstressed mothers in Portland, Oregon; and sits in on a focus group in Fargo, North Dakota. “Life is stressful in Fargo,” the organizer of the group says. Ostensibly in an effort to reduce her own stress, Schulte attends a trapeze academy and leaps off a platform twenty feet high. Along the way, she discusses various possible explanations for what she likes to call “the overwhelm,” as if it were something outside of us, like the Arctic or the Amazon.

One theory she entertains early on is that busyness has acquired social status. The busier you are the more important you seem; thus, people compete to be—or, at least, to appear to be—harried. A researcher she consults at the University of North Dakota, Ann Burnett, has collected five decades’ worth of holiday letters and found that they’ve come to dwell less and less on the blessings of the season and more and more on how jam-packed the previous year has been. Based on this archive, Burnett has concluded that keeping up with the Joneses now means trying to outschedule them. (In one recent letter, a mother boasts of schlepping her kids to so many activities that she drives “a hundred miles a day.”) “There’s a real ‘busier than thou’ attitude,” Burnett says.

A second theory that Schulte considers is that “the overwhelm” is a function not so much of how many things Americans have to do but of how much time they spend thinking about how many things they have to do. A doctor who’s running through the list of groceries she needs to pick up on the way home is not actually any busier than one who’s concentrating on the task at hand, but she may feel more beleaguered. Conversely, a lawyer playing with his kids is technically at leisure, but if all the while he’s checking his phone for texts from the office he may feel that he hasn’t had any time off. Schulte terms this the “mental tape-loop phenomenon,” and she argues that it’s sapping our precious energies, so that we can’t even “decide what to think about, worrying about home stuff at work and work stuff at home.”

But neither of these explanations fully satisfies Schulte, and she keeps on searching. After a while, she fixes on the same culprit so many women before her have: men. Most American women today work; more than two-thirds of mothers with school-age kids are employed outside the home. Many now outearn their husbands; in dual-income couples, about a third of wives are better paid than their spouses. Even so, studies show, women do the lion’s—or, better yet, the lioness’s—share of the housework: between seventy and eighty per cent. If they have children, the bulk of the child care also falls to them. “Though men today certainly spend more time caring for their children and doing more chores,” Schulte writes, “it is still about half of what women routinely do.” Small wonder, she concludes, that women are more likely than men to report “chronic stress and the feeling that life is out of control.”

Schulte singles out for censure two men in particular. These are Pat Buchanan, who, as an adviser to Richard Nixon in the early nineteen-seventies, persuaded the President to veto a comprehensive child-care bill, and her own husband, who’s referred to only as Tom (but who a quick Google search reveals is the NPR correspondent Tom Bowman). Tom doesn’t even know where their kids’ dentist’s office is. He almost never takes them to the pediatrician. He is “supposed to do the grocery shopping” (the italics are not mine), but he refuses to take a list and often returns having forgotten such useful items as toilet paper. One Thanksgiving morning, when Schulte is preparing a multicourse dinner for eighteen, Tom grabs a six-pack of beer from the refrigerator and heads over to his friend Peter’s house. This holiday fecklessness triggers a crisis, which Schulte claims is therapeutic and eventually leads to a more equitable distribution of household chores. As for why, deep in “the overwhelm,” she has chosen to cook an elaborate dinner for eighteen, she never really explains.

Eighty years after Keynes first composed “Economic Possibilities,” a pair of Italian economists, Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga, got to chatting about it. How could “a man of Keynes’s intelligence,” they wondered, have been “so right in predicting a future of economic growth and improving living standards” and so wrong about the future of leisure? They decided to pose this question to colleagues in Europe and the United States. Perhaps some of those they asked were women; in any event, all those who responded were men. The result, “Revisiting Keynes” (2008), suggests that Nobel Prize-winning economists, too, are perplexed by “the overwhelm.”

Several contributors to the volume attribute Keynes’s error to a misreading of human nature. Keynes assumed that people work in order to earn enough to buy what they need. And so, he reasoned, as incomes rose, those needs could be fulfilled in ever fewer hours. Workers would knock off earlier and earlier, until eventually they’d be going home by lunchtime.

But that isn’t what people are like. Instead of quitting early, they find new things to need. Many of the new things they’ve found weren’t even around when Keynes was writing—laptops, microwaves, Xboxes, smartphones, smart watches, smart refrigerators, Prada totes, True Religion jeans, battery-powered meat thermometers, those gizmos you stick in the freezer and then into your beer to keep it cold as you drink it.

“Most types of material consumption are strongly habit-forming,” Gary Becker and Luis Rayo observe in their contribution to “Revisiting Keynes.” (Becker, who died earlier this month, spent his career at the University of Chicago; Rayo is now at the London School of Economics.) “After an initial period of excitement, the average consumer grows accustomed to what he has purchased and . . . rapidly aspires to own the next product in line,” they write. By Becker and Rayo’s account, this insatiability is hardwired into us. Human beings evolved “so that they have reference points that adjust upwards as their circumstances improve.”

Joseph Stiglitz, of Columbia University, by contrast, takes a constructivist approach. People’s choices, he argues, are molded by society and, over time, become self-reinforcing. We “learn how to consume by consuming,” he writes, and how to “enjoy leisure by enjoying leisure.”

In support of this position, Stiglitz cites the contrasting experiences of Europeans and Americans. In the nineteen-seventies, the British, the French, and the Germans—though notably not the Italians—put in just as many hours at work as Americans. But then, à la Keynes, the Europeans began trading income for leisure. The average employed American now works roughly a hundred and forty hours more per year than the average Englishman and three hundred hours more than the average Frenchman. (Current French law mandates that workers get thirty paid vacation days per year, British law twenty-eight; the corresponding figure in the U.S. is zero.) Stiglitz predicts that Europeans will further reduce their working hours and become even more skilled at taking time off, while Americans, having become such masterful consumers, will continue to work long hours and to buy more stuff. TVs, he notes, “can be put in every room and in both the front and the back of automobiles.”

A third group of economists challenges the Keynesian presumption that leisure is preferable to labor. Work may not set us free, but it lends meaning to our days, and without it we’d be lost. In the view of Edward Phelps, of Columbia University, a career provides “most, if not all, of the attainable self-realization in modern societies.” Richard Freeman, of Harvard, is, if possible, more emphatic. “Hard work is the only way forward,” he writes. “There is so much to learn and produce and improve that we should not spend more than a dribble of time living as if we were in Eden. Grandchildren, keep trucking.”

The average worker is, of course, an abstraction; what matters is not the mathematical mean but the experience of real individuals trying to make real livings while raising real kids. And these experiences are likely to be very different depending on whether the individual is employed, say, as a stock clerk at Walmart or as a manager at a hedge fund. Over the past twenty years, as real incomes for the top one per cent—especially the top tenth of one per cent—have soared, they’ve basically stagnated for everyone else.

Could the widening income gap explain the Keynesian enigma? Intuitively, this would seem to make sense. The new wealth is so highly concentrated that only a very few people have the wherewithal to stop and smell the roses, which have been flown in at great expense from Ecuador.

But the facts, it turns out, are recalcitrant. As the income gap in the U.S. has widened, it’s actually lower-wage workers who have ended up with the most leisure. And it’s high earners who report feeling the most time pressure. This is true even for couples in which only one spouse works outside the home. Daniel Hamermesh, of the University of Texas at Austin, and Jungmin Lee, of Sogang University, in Seoul, are economists who have studied this phenomenon, and what Schulte calls “the overwhelm” they refer to, rather less sympathetically, as “yuppie kvetching.”

Why would yuppies work so much and then kvetch about it? Here, once again, there are several possibilities. One is that this is the defining condition of yuppiedom. In a “winner take all” economy, there’s a strong incentive to make sure you’re on the winning side, and one way to do this is to outstay your rivals at the office. Suggestively, what’s come to be known as the “long-hours premium” - the return that salaried employees effectively receive for each hour of work they put in beyond the usual forty—has more than doubled in the past thirty years.

High pay is highly rewarding, which presents another possible explanation. Suppose that a Walmart clerk and a hedge-fund manager both decide to take the afternoon off to attend their kids’ baseball game. For the clerk, a half-day’s forfeited pay could come to less than forty dollars. For the hedge-fund manager, an afternoon’s worth of lost trades may cost millions, which is a lot to give up to watch little Billy strike out looking. And what goes for the baseball diamond also applies to the school play, the anniversary dinner, even the annual family skiing trip to Vail; the disproportionately compensated have a disproportionate motive to keep on working.

Or perhaps the affluent feel time-pressed precisely because they are affluent. Back in 1970, a Swedish economist named Staffan B. Linder coined the phrase “the harried leisure class.” Linder argued that as people became wealthier they would inevitably feel more squeezed, because they would feel compelled to consume more and more goods per unit of free time. One way they’d accomplish this, he predicted, is through an increase in “simultaneous consumption.” Linder envisioned his harried protagonist “drinking Brazilian coffee” while “smoking a Dutch cigar, sipping a French cognac, reading The New York Times, listening to a Brandenburg Concerto and entertaining his Swedish wife.” Today, our multitasker might be nursing a Belgian craft beer while nibbling on sushi, reading The Economist, listening to Lorde, and booking tickets to visit his girlfriend in Stockholm, but you get the picture.

One of Keynes’s biographers, Robert Skidelsky, has called “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” a summation of “many of the ambivalences” in Keynes’s thinking. Keynes was an economist who made fun of economics, a savvy investor who disdained moneymaking, a brilliant and hardheaded analyst given to airy flights of fancy. Perhaps more than anything else he wrote, “Economic Possibilities” expresses Keynes’s utopianism: not only would people solve the problem of fulfilling their material needs; they’d also solve the problem of how to take advantage of having solved the problem.

In the future, Keynes imagined, the fruits of capitalism would redeem capitalism. “All kinds of social customs and economic practices . . . which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard,” he wrote.

It is, to say the least, disappointing that things haven’t turned out that way - that inequality has grown, that leisure is scarce, that even the rich complain of being overwhelmed. And yet so much of what we do, collectively and individually, suggests that we still believe more wealth is the answer. Reëxamining this belief would probably be a good idea—that is, if anyone had the time for it.      

 

Where The All Blacks Come From

 

Whenever there's a British rugby journalist in sight, you're only ever a few paragraphs from a line about New Zealand being rugby colonists, pilfering the best Pacific Island talent for themselves and leaving the rest behind.

Aside from the irony - Manu Tuilagi, the Vunipolas, Dylan Hartley et al - and the sheer ignorance of the third Wave of New Zealand immigration, it is questionable as to how much talent pillaging has actually occurred.

The numbers suggest it is probably lower than most would expect.

Of the 1133 men who have represented the All Blacks (in matches as well as tests), just 32 were born in the islands - Samoa, Tonga, Fiji and American Samoa.

Of those four archipelagos, Samoa is the dominant nation. They have produced 13 All Blacks who have played a total of 396 tests. That figure puts Samoa on a par with Nelson and Masterton.

Tonga's nine All Blacks have played a comparatively meagre 53 tests, Fiji's eight have played 138, while Jerome Kaino and Frank Solomon, born in American Samoa, have accumulated 53.

That's 640 tests of value the All Blacks have got out of Pacific Island-born players.

Of those players, Mils Muliaina (Salelesi, Samoa, 100 tests), Joe Rokocoko (Nadi, Fiji, 68), Rodney So'oialo (Moto'otua, Samoa, 62), Olo Brown (Apia, Samoa, 56) and Jerome Kaino (Tutuila, American Samoa, 50 not out) have played 50 tests.

What we do not demonstrate here is players of Pacific Island lineage, like Auckland-born All Black great Bryan Williams, Frank Bunce, Sonny Bill Williams and many, many more.

But take that point to its extreme and neither do we count the lineage of United Kingdom and Irish families. Aside from Maori, we're all from somewhere else, some more recently than others.

Including the Pacific Islands, the All Blacks have featured 83 players born in foreign lands. Many of them were in the nascent days of New Zealand rugby and came from far-flung places like Calcutta, now known as Kolkata - Henry Braddon (played 1884) and Maurice Herrold (1893).

Australia is the single nation that has produced the most (22), the most recent being halfback Tawera Kerr-Barlow, who was born in AFL stonghold Melbourne in 1990.

Britain comes next, with 18 split between Scotland (10) and England. Scotland. Ireland has produced four, including captain of the Originals, Dave Gallaher, who was born in Ramelton, County Donegal.

India (3), South Africa (2), Hong Kong (1) and Singapore (1) round out the rest.

Four players are registered as Unknown, New Zealand.      

 

The Crisis of the Olympics

 

THE Olympic movement is descending into a slow-motion crisis. Fewer and fewer cities are game for the Games.

Bidder enthusiasm for the 2022 Winter Olympics has fizzled, with voters in Krakow, Munich, Stockholm and Switzerland overwhelmingly rejecting the Games. Unrest in Ukraine forced Lviv to abandon its bid, leaving just Oslo, where public support is thin, together with Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan — neither a bastion of democracy.

Prospects for the Summer Games are hardly rosier. In the four American cities shortlisted for the 2024 Olympics — Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington — interest is tepid. More than 30 others, including New York and Philadelphia, passed on the opportunity.

In their heyday, the International Olympic Committee and FIFA, the much-criticized overseer of soccer’s World Cup, could trot out cookie-cutter promises about tourism, jobs and economic growth. But in recent years, those assurances have been debunked as a marketing scam. Even as he backed Boston’s bid, Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts who helped the scandal-racked 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics limp across the finish line, cautioned that “it’s really not a moneymaking opportunity.”

A serious rethink is overdue, and the timing is right. Last year, the I.O.C. elected a new president, Thomas Bach of Germany. For too long, host cities have worked in service of the Olympics. Mr. Bach can ensure that the Olympics start to work in service of host cities.

Controlling the ever vaulting cost of hosting the Games is the place to start. In the 1990s, I.O.C. officials fretted about the threat of “gigantism”: the transformation of the Olympics into an unwieldy spectacle with an exorbitant price tag. Today, “gigantism” is the new normal.

Lowballing cost estimates to help secure a bid has almost become an Olympic sport in itself. London’s officials claimed that the 2012 Games would cost $3.8 billion, but spending topped $18 billion. Priced at $12 billion, the Sochi Olympics spiraled to $51 billion, more than all the previous Winter Games combined. The Etch A Sketch economics have to stop.

The Games are plagued by inept economic impact studies enabling fiscal fantasies of kick-started investment and growth that never materialize. These in turn allow ambitious politicians to push prestige projects ripe for corruption.

The Games cost too much, and host populations derive insufficient benefit because Olympic development is often disconnected from city and regional planning. The I.O.C. should create an independent body comprising respected sports economists, urban planners and political scholars who can objectively assess whether bids’ construction plans fulfill long-view development strategies.

The Olympic Charter already allows for outside experts to assist with evaluating bids. This panel — let’s call it the Independent Bid Review Board — would meticulously analyze host cities’ filings and make recommendations to the I.O.C.’s key decision-making body, the Evaluation Commission.

I.O.C. members are notoriously capricious, ignoring technical reports and voting for the bid with the shiniest promises. The I.O.C. should publish the records of voting members, so that there’s transparency about who is siding with the expert evidence and who is not.

Ballooning Olympic costs can cripple host cities. In the case of Athens, the debt incurred for the 2004 Games has even been blamed for stoking Greece’s near default. Venues are in ruins, decrepit monuments to misspending.

In the wake of the Games, taxes that might have paid for infrastructure projects to benefit the whole community must go instead to service debt. Meanwhile, the I.O.C. jets off to the next venue. An independent panel could reverse this trend by ensuring that spending goes to real needs like public transportation, and especially, sustainable systems like subways, light-rail and bus networks.

Every two years, Olympic boosters channel their inner Al Gore, claiming the mantle of “the greenest Games ever.” Sadly, the reality has not matched the P.R. London’s organizers created a sustainability commission to monitor environmental activities, but it was a toothless body. When officials brought on board “sustainability partners” like BP, it turned out that the only selection criterion was having deep pockets.

Rather than a pay-to-play program that reeks of greenwashing, the Olympics needs independent monitors to keep the local organizing committee in check. This watchdog must have the power to enforce sustainability promises and impose penalties if need be. Another innovation to reduce the Olympics’ ecological footprint would be to encourage creative bids from multiple cities and even neighboring countries, sharing the burden and requiring less construction.

Finally, the I.O.C. needs to align its host city selections with the lofty principles of the Olympic Charter: Human rights violators should not host the Olympics. When Beijing was awarded the 2008 Summer Games, I.O.C. members hailed the decision as a lever that would force China to improve its record. Nothing of the sort happened.

It is in the off years between Olympics that the pressure is relaxed and the opportunity arises for some clearheaded reforms. As with FIFA and the World Cup, the ground has shifted beneath the Games. With a new president, the I.O.C. must act — or face a future in which it can’t find a reputable host.      

 

Cutting Down on Exercise

 

If ever there was a woman who epitomised the “all guns firing” approach to workouts that have been the preserve of female celebrities over the past ten years, then it was Jennifer Aniston. Here was someone who was known for not just packing her yoga mat when she went on her travels but her yoga instructor too. Just reading about her regimen could leave you exhausted. By her own admission she worked out “almost every day”, doing “40 minutes of cardio: spinning, running, the elliptical, or a combination of all three”. In addition to her daily asanas, she did Pilates. And weights. We envied her body, but not the effort it took to achieve it. Still, along with the likes of Madonna, Gwyneth Paltrow and Cameron Diaz, she helped to sell the idea that exercise was about relentless effort and an elite level of dedication to a generation of women.

Now, though, at the age of 45, the former Friends star appears to have changed her tune. Of course you should keep active, she said in a recent interview, “but also take some time off and don’t do anything and enjoy your life — I’ve eased up for sure in the last couple of years”. It has come to something when Aniston says she is cutting back on her exercise, but she isn’t the only member of the fitterati to have done so. Last week, Gwen Stefani also announced that she was downsizing: “This past year, I kind of stopped working out,” the 44-year-old admitted. “I think my body just needed a break. And so I did that and focused more on feeling good as opposed to beating myself up.”

It is not a U-turn that entirely sets them apart from their peers. Whether it is the fact that the middle years bring new perspective to what exercise means or whether it is simply that they are too knackered to continue full-pelt, there is a distinct upsurge in forty and fiftysomethings who are starting to place less emphasis on frequency and more on recovery. A less-is-more philosophy also seems evident in trends for mass running events. Last week the Wall Street Journal reported how mile-long races are usurping marathons as the foot-race of choice among those who no longer have the time or inclination to slog out the miles. I’ve seen it first hand among friends who no longer seek to push themselves to the point of endurance exhaustion in marathons and Tough Mudder events.

From a health perspective, this is understandable. Running shorter distances, for instance, may be as much of a benefit as doing half marathons, triathlons and the classic 26.2 mile marathon. Last month, researchers reported in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology on a study of 55,137 adults, which found that those who ran for less than an hour a week fought off mortality as effectively as runners who were out for three hours a week — with each group out-living non-runners by an average of three years.

Many of the generation that raised the bar in terms of fitness achievements are familiar with the side-effects of “overtraining” — or pushing too hard for too long. It’s a problem that leaves them vulnerable not only to aches and joint pains but susceptibility to illnesses and viruses. The psychological impact of obsessively working out can also be damaging. “Too much activity can be a big source of stress,” says Dr Ian Drever, a consultant psychiatrist for the Priory Group of Hospitals, “particularly if it’s accompanied by thought processes such as ‘I have to do this’, ‘I must achieve this’ in order to look better, feel better, perform better. Over the years, these thought distortions can place a huge psychological load on people.” It’s particularly evident in the middle decades of life because other stresses multiply: work, family, finances. “If an exercise routine is shoehorned into an already busy schedule, it makes life feel even more stretched than normal. Exercise is vital for good physical and psychological health, but it needs to be comfortably integrated into our daily lives, rather than something that is forced.”

Many reach a point when they don’t want “to beat themselves up” about working out any more. “It is increasingly common to find that someone who has trained and exercised at a high level suddenly reaches a time when they want to ease off and for that point to be in their late 30s or early 40s,” explains John Brewer, a professor of sport at the University of Bedfordshire. “It’s mentally draining to apply your mind to grinding exercise indefinitely, but physically the wear and tear on the body can also make it harder to keep up the regularity and intensity.”

Often it’s motivation that takes a nosedive first. Sports scientists at Butler University found that depression, irritability and low self-esteem all increase in people who set themselves too challenging a workout schedule. Chronic muscle fatigue, disturbed sleep patterns and gastrointestinal disturbances are among other common side-effects. “What a lot of people don’t realise is that the older you get, the more recovery your body needs from any exercise,” Brewer says. “Resting after an intense workout is more crucial than ever as the body takes longer than it did in your twenties to adapt to the stimulus of training and to repair any minor damage that may have occurred to muscles.”

Sometimes, Brewer says, taking your foot off the pedal for a while can allow your mojo to return. “By removing the pressure, doing less, it helps you see why you enjoyed exercise in the first place,” he explains. “You enjoy it more because you don’t dread doing it.” He adds that lowering your goals, making a departure from your workout norm and trying something completely different can also refresh your motivation. If not, it’s OK to have a workout holiday once in a while and to schedule in recovery days. If Aniston says she sometimes does “nothing at all”, then that’s good enough for the rest of us.      

 

The 2 Hour Marathon

 

No one is going to run this Sunday’s New York Marathon in two hours; the course, with its five bridges, is much too hilly for that. If or when that fabled record is set — something academics and running nerds alike have been waiting for decades to see — it will be because many different kinds of running stars have aligned: It’ll have to be just the right weather, on just the right course, at just the right altitude.

But long-distance running is as much about mental fitness as it is physical. Round numbers, in particular, work as powerful motivators for marathon runners, according to a recent study that showed most finish times seem to cluster around even-numbered goals: 4:30, 4:00, 3:30, and so on. So what will it take, psychologically speaking, for an elite athlete to push himself to run that fast?

For one, a tantalizing cash prize wouldn’t exactly hurt the elite runners’ motivation, said Dr. Michael Joyner, a professor at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine. He believes today’s runners are likely physically capable of finishing the 26.2 miles in 2:02 or 2:01, if not quite two hours yet. (The current world record is 2:02:57, set at the Berlin Marathon just last month by Kenyan Dennis Kimetto.) “Twenty years ago, I wrote that a two-hour marathon was physically possible,” Joyner said. “People thought I was nuts. Now they don’t think I’m as crazy.”

When we’re talking about the psychological challenges of the marathon — how are those different for elite athletes as compared to your average recreational runner?

The mental barriers, it’s really interesting you bring that up. Because the elite athlete — the elite endurance athlete — the way they approach things like this is very, very different from the person who’s trying to finish a marathon in four hours to, you know, get a medal and go home.

The elite endurance athletes are able to push themselves and get right at the physiological red line. The elite athlete uses his suffering to monitor how he feels. The non-elites tend to disassociate, to try to distract themselves. But the elite athletes tend to consciously focus on how they’re doing: what their legs are doing, how much the muscles in their legs are burning, how fast they’re running. So all these physiological signals that the average person would consider uncomfortable or painful, the elite athlete uses these to monitor himself.

I don’t know if we’re supposed to talk about Lance Armstrong like this at this point, but he said something very interesting; he said something like, You have to learn to manage your suffering. You have to learn how to get right on the edge and use the information you’re getting from your body, and to not interpret it as painful and not be afraid of it. You have to learn to use it, and at the same time, you have to just relax and keep doing it. Because what the elite performer is able to do is to push themselves maximally and relax at the same time.

So how might an elite athlete use those cues to psych himself up in order to get to that two-hour mark?

Well, I think someone can probably run it in 2:01 or 2:02 right now. A couple things have to happen. People can run faster if the surface is just right. If someone would build a five- or eight-kilometer loop, so that it’s just a perfect surface, a completely flat 5K loop, I think someone could do it, if not right now, then relatively soon. Of course, that’d be about eight loops, but that wouldn’t bother those guys. If I had the money, I’d go out in the woods and find some place in a nice cool, dry area that’s at sea level, and build a completely flat 5K loop out of a perfect surface with no sharp turns. And I’d make sure it’s the right time of year; no wind, 40, 45 degrees, cool.

But, back to the psychological, the mental question. I think the thing to do is to have some kind of prize-money scheme that would encourage everybody to work together til the very end. So everybody who runs the first half in under an hour and 30 seconds splits $100,000, and everyone who runs 30K within a certain time gets $200,000, that kind of thing.

Because the thing to remember here — this is not golf. These people can’t compete every week. These guys have a limited number of big paydays per year. Really, it’s about two chances per year, and their careers, at their peak, only last about five to six years. At the London Olympics, you saw lots of guys dropping out when it became clear they weren’t going to win. They wanted to race in NYC or Berlin, and they wanted to save their legs for those races.

So if you did this thing where you basically guaranteed everyone who was going to go for it would get a big payday, I think that could do it. The key thing would be to get as many people a far as possible. I think then they could draft a bit. It doesn’t help as much as it does in cycling, but it does help a bit. And I think, psychologically, if one person didn’t have to carry the pace the whole way, it might be a little easier for them. One of the things runners want to do is establish a rhythm, and if two or three of them are running together, it gets easier.

The New York City Marathon is this weekend, of course, so I want to ask — though I think I know the answer — this record won’t likely be broken in New York, right?

No, it’s not going to happen in New York. The places where the records get set, the courses are more like drag strips, like in Berlin. In New York, you’re going over all those bridges! There’s been a couple of fast years. But the times are usually quite stable, around 2:08 or 2:09.

How soon do you see a two-hour marathon happening?

The record, since the 1990s, it’s fallen about four minutes. By our projections, it should happen sometime in the next ten to 20 years, somewhere in the late 2020s or even late 2030s.

To get under two hours would be about a 2 percent improvement. And the number of times someone has broken a distance-running world record by more than 2 percent — let’s just say, it doesn’t happen very often. Typically, people break these things by a very small fraction; 20 seconds here, 20 seconds there. I mean, you think, Oh, it’s just 2 percent — but at the speed these guys are going, that’s finishing more than a half mile ahead of someone running at the current record pace.

I think these guys are plenty mentally tough enough to do it. I think it’s just a matter of the right surface, the right day, the right weather — and, as I said, the right prize-money scheme.

The thing is, if you look at the 5K and 10K records — the current world records suggest somebody should be able to run under 2:02. The marathon record is actually a bit soft compared to the 5K and 10K records. Though that’s easy for me to say; I’m not the one trying to run 2:02!

Really, I think getting somebody at the 2:01 or 2:02 mark is relatively straightforward. And then the fun begins. It’ll be fun to see how fast it goes after that.      

 

Rugby Head Injuries

 

When those images of Saracens players wearing what looked like a jumbo-sized plaster underneath their right earlobes against London Irish were broadcast last week, the initial reaction was bemusement: what is it? And what does it do? We quickly discovered it had a name: the x-Patch, created by the Seattle-based company X2 Biosystems, to monitor the force of blows to the head. Yet for some the bemusement has lingered.

How else to explain why the Saracens chief executive, Edward Griffiths, felt compelled to respond to accusations the device was a “gimmick” a few days ago? As Griffiths made clear, Saracens are trying to rake deeper into the potential dangers of head trauma to provide a greater duty of care to their staff. As he put it: “I don’t want to be visiting these players in 20 or 25 years time in a hospital where they are suffering from dementia or some other neurological condition.”

How great are those dangers? Well, in the past fortnight the first study into the frequency and magnitude of head impacts in rugby union has been published and the results emphatically reinforce Griffiths’ concerns.

The research, conducted by the Auckland University of Technology and published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine, examined every hit sustained by a single amateur rugby union team in New Zealand during the 2013 season by using a high-tech X2 mouthguard. This enabled the academics to monitor not only direct impacts to the head (measured by G-force) but also rotational acceleration of the brain after a hit (ie how much the brain spins measured in radians per second squared).

To put it simply, imagine a car going from 0-60mph in a straight line. That is a form of linear acceleration. A child spinning a top is an example of rotational acceleration. The technology also let researchers see where every hit landed on the head and how long it lasted.

So what did the study find? Across the 19-match season, the premier-level squad experienced 20,687 impacts to the head greater than 10g which is roughly the impact of a light punch (the hits ranged from 10g to 164.9g). That works out an average of 77 impacts to the head per player-position per match or 1,379 per season.

As the researchers noted, while the majority of these impacts were in what they called “the low injury impact severity limit” (less than 66g and less than 4600 rads2), there were 181 impacts greater than 95g and 4,452 impacts greater than 5,500 rads2, figures that were “above the injury-risk limit”.

This is virgin territory and only a few sports have undergone similar scrutiny. But as Doug King, one of four academics involved in the study, told me: “The research shows there are repetitive sub-concussive impacts to the head in rugby union and when compared with American football, in some cases these are higher in frequency.” And we all know the dangers of American football.

High school American footballers suffer around 16 to 29 impacts per game which is far fewer than those experienced by rugby players in the study. And the average impact of a hit in the rugby study – 22g – is similar to research into high school football too.

Remember also that academics examined amateur rugby union players. We don’t know exactly what level of damage the bigger, stronger and faster professionals would cause but it would undoubtedly be greater.

Which is why Saracens’ approach is so refreshing. As Biosystems’ chief executive, John Ralston, told me, the team are wearing it in practice as well as matches and will shortly be able to use wireless technology which will enable coaches to immediately scrutinise the size, severity, and location on the head of every hit.

The device is already in the NFL and NHL and, as of the coming season, will also be used by all 20 Major League Soccer teams. As Dr Matt Matava of the NFL Physician Society explained last year, the technology “has allowed us to accurately diagnose concussions immediately following an injury [about six-eight minutes after a hit]. The software also allows us to compare the players’ injury date to their baseline in order to objectively assess changes in mental status”.

The device works both ways, too. It not only protects players from harm, it can also tell officials that someone is fit to continue. Intriguingly, it also allows coaches to trigger an alert if a player suffers a particularly big hit or if a player suffers a number of sub-concussive impacts over a game or practice session.

Because that’s the thing with head injuries. It’s not only the highlight-film smashes we should fear: it’s the series of minor hits that can make a player more susceptible to lasting brain damage; more susceptible to motor function and memory issues; more susceptible to impaired co-ordination, vision and speech; and more susceptible to emotional and behavioural changes, including depression and anxiety.      

 

Selection Rejection

 

Geoff Scott has seen up close and personal the damage that rejection can cause aspiring young footballers. The chief executive of XPRO, a charity set up to offer support, help and advice to former professionals and those who never got that far, he is well versed in the game’s bottomless pit of hard luck stories.

Yet one tale seems, momentarily, to stop even him in his tracks. Visiting a former Liverpool academy player who had ended up in prison after his dream of winning a professional contract with the club was shattered, Scott’s offer of assistance was met with a chilling response. “Geoff, thanks very much for your help but let me tell you I’m just going to become a bigger and better drug dealer than the guy that got sentenced,” the prisoner said.

It is an extreme example of the life that can lie in store for many who are washed up, in a football sense, at 15, 16, 17 or 18, the ages when players discover if they have won a scholarship or professional contract. Yet ensuring that those who fail to make the grade do not become a generation of lost causes, isolated, depressed, consumed by a sense of failure and in some cases driven to self-destruction, is a pressing issue with which the game is wrestling as it attempts to produce more English talent.

A new study by Teesside University has established that young footballers whose careers are cut short go on to suffer clinical levels of psychological distress. The research, by Dr David Blakelock, a clinical psychologist who was on the books of Newcastle United and Nottingham Forest as a youngster, involved questioning almost 100 youth players aged between 15 and 18 at clubs across England and Scotland at three different points: before selection procedures, seven days after and 21 days after.

Of those who were released, 54.5 per cent were experiencing levels of psychological distress at 21 days compared with 35.7 per cent at seven days, which suggests that young players may find it increasingly difficult to cope when they are suddenly cut adrift from a world in which they had been immersed.

“The results suggest that, in the first month after release, a sizeable proportion of players can experience a range of psychological problems, namely depression, anxiety, a loss of confidence and impairment in everyday functioning,” Blakelock said.

For those in and around the game, this should not come as a surprise. The prospects of success are slim, rejection is rife, the pressure immense, both on players and the parents who experience their own rollercoaster ride of emotions. The fallout rates are frightening. XPRO says that, of those signed by English clubs at 16, 96 per cent will not play again from the age of 18. Of those who do earn contracts, only 2 per cent will still be playing professionally past 21. At present, XPRO is trying to help about 60 footballers under 20 suffering from depression and in the process of visiting about 250 released players who are in young offenders’ institutions.

James Scowcroft, who made almost 600 career appearances as a striker for a host of clubs, including Ipswich Town, Leicester City and Crystal Palace, still recalls vividly the crestfallen look on the faces of peers who were rejected. His best friend, Carl Kessler, was not awarded Youth Training Scheme terms at 16, when Scowcroft was. A few years later Kessler was dead, the coroner returning an open verdict. “I lost touch with Carl and the next thing I knew I was at his funeral,” Scowcroft said.

Now an under-15 coach at Ipswich, Scowcroft has strong opinions on a subject that has become a huge talking point inside the game but requires a much wider public debate.

“We’ve got to look at the 98 per cent who don’t make it and ask, ‘Are we doing enough for them?’ ” Scowcroft said. “I don’t think we are. At a time when they’re going through so much in their lives — physical and emotional change and entering GCSE years — the demands are huge. “You’ll see kids who up to 13 were superstars. Then they’ll suddenly stop growing and the psychological impact of that is frightening. They can become bitter, resentful. The danger if you get released is you see yourself as a failure when you’re not. You’ve achieved a lot more than you have failed.”

The Times will explore in depth tomorrow the wider issues at play and the efforts to which the authorities, from the Premier League, Football League, FA and PFA, plus clubs and independent bodies, are going to ensure that young players have the life skills, qualifications, advice and support network to fall back on if rejected.

At present, players can sign for a club in their under-nine year. Scowcroft, like many, believes this is too young. “Most think of life after football at 35 or so but for some it can be 11,” he said. “In my view, children should not be experiencing that sort of rejection at that age.” Danny Higginbotham, the former Derby County, Southampton and Stoke City defender who started his career at Manchester United, agrees. He was vehemently opposed to his son, Jak, joining Crewe Alexandra’s academy at such a young age in the belief that it was too much, too soon. A late developer, Higginbotham, under the old rules, had not been allowed to join United until he was 14. Under the present system, would he already have been written off?

“If you’re telling a kid at 11 or 12 he’s not good enough for you there’s a grave risk of killing players’ love of the game,” Higginbotham said. “An affiliation with a club at eight or nine is fine but let them go play with their mates, have as normal a childhood as possible.”

Peter Morrison played professionally for Bolton Wanderers and Scunthorpe United but his career was cut short by injury at 20. Now a successful football agent, he believes he is well placed to help counsel developing players on the game’s pitfalls. Just over three years ago, Morrison learnt that one of his contemporaries at Bolton, Lee Pryers, had committed suicide aged 31. The last time Morrison had seen Pryers he was working as a window cleaner. “I don’t think we’ll ever know the reasons behind it but I’ve wondered if in different circumstances Lee’s life would not have ended so tragically,” Morrison said.

“From a young age players can be in a very small bubble now and that’s all they see. Is it any surprise then when they are rejected that they don’t know which way to turn?”

96 Percentage of scholars signed at 16 will not play again from the age of 18

98 Percentage of players signed as professionals who will not play again from the age of 21

56 Percentage of apprentices at Football League clubs between 2012 and 2014 who failed to win a professional contract

76 Percentage of scholars leaving Premier League academies in 2013-14 awarded professional contracts at theirs or another English club

60 Footballers under 20 and suffering from depression whom XPRO is at present trying to help      

 

Age of Gonzo Innovation Is Coming

 

Last month, the Sacramento Kings fired their coach, Mike Malone, after he’d spent only a year and a half on the job. This was a shocking move for myriad reasons, most of all because the Kings were off to one of their best starts in recent memory and had only fallen into a slump because DeMarcus Cousins, the team’s first All Star–caliber player in years, had missed two weeks owing to viral meningitis. No other club would have fired Malone, let alone for the reason owner Vivek Ranadivé seems to have: because Malone refused to coach basketball like a lunatic.

Sure, Ranadivé and Malone had the normal contretemps that cause personnel fissures, but a tipping point, according to reporting right after the firing by Yahoo’s Adrian Wojnarowski, was that Ranadivé had a crazy idea that Malone wouldn’t get down with. The idea is four-on-five basketball — “cherry-picking,” as they might call it in middle-school ball. This is especially notable because, if you knew anything about Ranadivé before, it probably had to do with middle-school basketball. Middle-school girls’ basketball. Ranadivé is a Silicon Valley giant, but to the rest of the country he is most famous for his appearance in a Malcolm Gladwell magazine story, in which Ranadivé takes over coaching duties of his daughter’s not particularly talented youth basketball team, installs an insanely ferocious full-court-press defense (in which 12-year-old girls harass the other team like Rick Pitino’s college teams) and rides the strategy all the way to the national tournament.

Now Ranadivé’s the owner of the Kings. And he had a new idea. That idea is that one player, after his team scores, stays on his side of the court while his four teammates play defense against the other team’s five players. The defensive disadvantage of four-on-five, theoretically, would be overcome by what would happen if the offensive team missed: The defensive team would simply have to throw the rebound to the wide-open player and boom: instant basket. (And if that player is a wing, it could be an instant three points.)

It is difficult to overstate how insane a notion this would be in the NBA. NBA offenses are so advanced that it’s hard to stop them five-on-five; four-on-five would lead to easy (and violent) dunks and layups every time down the court, and even if a player happened to miss one, having one fewer defender to block out would make it more likely they’d get the rebound anyway. I’m fairly certain an NBA team deploying it for a full game could easily lose by 100 points. It is a horrible idea.

Which is probably why Malone — a college and NBA assistant for 20 years before finally getting his first head gig with the Kings — could not abide it. But the truly crazy thing may be that he’s still on the wrong side of history here. Pro sports are about to get disrupted by just this kind of throw-everything-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks thinking. If you look in the right places, they already are.

Ranadivé, perhaps inevitably, is a product of tech culture. He earned his money to buy the Kings from a technology company he founded in the ’80s and from Tibco, a software company he sold in a deal worth $4.3 billion earlier this year. He’s the sort of person who fits perfectly in a Gladwellian world, where wonkish experts come in from the outside, without all the baggage and institutional bias, and Think Different. Ranadivé has other ideas for the Kings too, and they’re of the similarly off-the-wall variety. As coach of the Kings’ development-league team the Reno Bighorns, for instance, Ranadivé brought in David Arseneault Jr., the 28-year-old son of the Grinnell College coach famous for the high-speed “Grinnell System,” which posits that the first shot is the best shot and employs a “designated shooter.” (This is why Grinnell has had individual players score more than 100 points in a game.) In Silicon Valley parlance, Ranadivé, since taking over, has decided, well, to break shit.

And, loopy as it sounds, this is the direction everything in sports is going. In each of the three major sports, innovative owners and executives are in the process of dramatically reshaping how the sports you love are played. In many ways, this is the next logical progression of the Moneyball revolution of advanced statistics and analytics. Sabermetrics changed how people evaluated players and looked at and analyzed the games, but it didn’t change the way the sport was actually played. Now that the market has been saturated with stats — now that everybody has access to the same information about player performance — everyone’s looking for the next edge. And that edge may be found in strategic lunacy.

Last year, MLB Advanced Media introduced StatCast, a video tracking technology that allows you to see exactly, down to the millimeter, where a player is positioned, how far he has run to catch a ball, even the trajectory and the angle of the batted ball. This technology, combined with historical databases of every hitter’s tendencies, has already led to something totally unique in baseball history: The fielders are moving all over the place, not just in marginal adjustments to the familiar even array across infield and outfield, but in wholesale defensive-strategy redesigns that place the third baseman between first and second (say).

And those defensive shifts are considered one of the main reasons, along with the increasing strikeout rate, that run scoring has fallen lower than it has in a generation. It’s bizarre, when you think about it, that we ever place fielders in set positions in the first place: Putting the shortstop where he is, and the outfielders where they are, is a generalist maneuver in an increasingly specific world. These shifts are just the beginning. In the future, it is not difficult to imagine defensive positioning looking more like it does in football — not players just trotting out to preestablished positions on the field but adapting dynamically, play by play, to the particular dynamic of an at-bat (maybe even a particular pitch). Against certain hitters, in certain situations, wouldn’t it make sense to have six fielders on one side of the field and one on the other? Or to have five outfielders? The baseball world is just starting to understand the possibilities. Though it’s still ahead of basketball, where a similar all-seeing video system promises to reshape the way teams do everything from defensive positioning to rebounding and shot distribution (and is already making the mid-range jumper, possibly the least efficient shot a player can take, seem like a relic from an earlier generation).

The NFL has always had fad innovations, from the “46 defense” to the “wildcat” to the “read-option.” But even more than other sports, it has learned from the wild experimentation of the college game in recent years. This is largely thanks to coach Chip Kelly, who nearly won a national championship at Oregon before heading to the Philadelphia Eagles to turn a moribund franchise deep in a rebuilding process into one of the most thrilling offenses in the game. Kelly’s innovation, to oversimplify, is to run plays at ludicrous speed — incredibly complex formations, with 11 people doing 11 different jobs but all working together at the same time. The idea is that if you can be more organized and more streamlined than the defense — if you can get ready quicker than they can get ready — you have an advantage that overwhelms talent or inherent skill.

Of course, with all this innovation, sometimes it’s helpful to remember one’s history. Five years ago, Kelly was criticized throughout college football for having a “gimmick” offense … before everyone copied it. This year, that criticism has been directed at Georgia Tech coach Paul Johnson, whose Yellow Jackets nearly won the ACC this season playing the ­“triple-option” offense, which features the quarterback running the ball himself or giving it to one of his running backs.

Sound radical? This is a version of the most basic offense in all of football: the T formation. You could argue that it is in fact as old as football itself. Only two or three college football teams use it. Everyone else considers it a gimmick.      

 

Olympic Cities - the Winner's Curse

 

“The average cost overrun since 1976 for the Summer Olympics is 252 percent.”

Smith College economist Andrew Zimbalist, who specializes in sports economics.

“So on average if you bid $5 billion you’re going to end up spending somewhere in the neighborhood of $17.5.”

Zimbalist spoke February 5th at the Bergino Baseball Clubhouse in Manhattan about issues he addresses in his new book Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup.

“I think that the countries that have hosted those events, with two exceptions—Los Angeles in 1984 and Barcelona in 1992—have not benefited economically, and some of them have been significantly hurt.”

Boston hopes to host the 2024 Summer Olympics. Zimbalist thinks that the city is probably better off losing their bid.

“Both in the case of the World Cup and the Olympics there’s a monopolist seller of the rights to host the games. And what they do is basically they orchestrate an international competition. That process where you have one seller and multiple competitors is one that leads to something that economists call a “winner’s curse.” That is, most of the bidders will agree with each other, more or less, that it makes sense to spend only so much on the games and there will be one bidder that’s an outlier. So the one that is the outlier and bids the most is the one that ends up winning. And that outlier is the one that thinks that the Olympics is worth more than everybody else. And so that usually leads to winner’s curse.”      

 

The Future of Gridiron (According to the Economist)

 

BY THE time it is over, more than half a billion chickens will have given their lives so that their wings might be dipped in barbecue sauce. Enough avocados will be eaten, mashed into guacamole, to lay a trail from Seattle to Boston and back, four times. Even those who think sport is silly must pause to acknowledge the Super Bowl. The ten most watched television broadcasts in American history have all been Super Bowls, as have the next ten. By a conservative estimate, 112m Americans watched it last year. The number who will see the game between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots on February 1st is slightly more than the number who say they attend church once a week. Many churches have given up competing and instead throw Super Bowl parties as a way of expanding the flock.

This year’s contest has many subplots that have required the intervention of politicians. Joe Biden, the vice-president, was asked to comment about the underinflated balls used in the semi-final by the Patriots (“Deflategate”). He revealed that he too prefers a softer ball. Serious people questioned whether it was good politics for Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey and aspiring candidate for the White House, to be photographed hugging the owner of the Dallas Cowboys. All this is frivolous, but it cuts through to voters in a way that budget maths does not.

The mingling of football and politics stretches back to the turn of the century, when Theodore Roosevelt, who worried that a fondness for billiards had made the country’s ruling class soft, brokered a deal to make football safer. The three most recent Republican presidents were all cheerleaders, before that activity came to be considered girlie. Hunter S. Thompson once spent most of an hour talking football with Richard Nixon. “Whatever else might be said about Nixon—and there is still serious doubt in my mind that he could pass for human,” wrote Thompson, “he is a goddam stone fanatic on every facet of pro football.”

Though it may not seem like it, the days of politicians using football to relate to ordinary Americans are numbered. This Super Bowl has an extra edge because it is the first since actuaries for the NFL, which runs the professional game, estimated that a third of ex-pros may eventually suffer brain damage. Put another way, 35 men on the pitch in Phoenix can be expected to endure early-onset Alzheimer’s or dementia pugilistica for the entertainment of everyone else. (The NFL agreed to set up a fund to compensate players with brain injuries in 2013.)

Because football is so widely followed, it is also a starting point for bigger arguments about America. When Ray Rice, a running back for the Baltimore Ravens, was filmed punching his girlfriend unconscious in a lift, the incident sparked debate about whether football rewards violence; about domestic abuse; about the rewards for inept executives (Roger Goodell, who bungled the NFL’s response, was paid $35m in 2013); and about the oddities of tort law (Mr Rice won millions for wrongful dismissal after the Ravens fired him). The discovery of a manual issued to cheerleaders for the Buffalo Bills, known as the Jills—filled with rules for everything from etiquette (“Do not be overly opinionated”) to advice on how to care for “intimate areas”—prompted a debate about whether cheerleading is demeaning and whether the pompom-wavers should be paid. Some, amazingly, are not.

Many of the charges thrown at football are bogus. The link between the sport and violence off the pitch is spurious: violent crime has been declining since the early 1990s, since when football has become even more popular. The notion that the sport is racist because the players risking injury are mostly black and the fans mostly white ignores the fact that the game is the only one followed with equal fanaticism by black and white America, or the possibility that adoring a player of a different race might be a more powerful force for good than any number of affirmative-action initiatives. As for the Jills, some of their manual is practical and, in parts—“never use words/ phrases such as: like, I seen it, you’s guys, dude, them guys, pee and ain’t”—interchangeable with The Economist’s rules for its journalists.

Crunch time

The maiming of so many of football’s professional players is different, because it is an objection to the game itself. The NFL players’ union says that the average length of a professional career is just under three and a half years. Watching a big hit on a player now comes with the same twinge of guilt as watching clips of Muhammad Ali being pummelled. Though high-school players are less likely to suffer brain damage, some school teams were forced to end their seasons early last year because so many children had been injured. Almost half of parents say they would not allow their sons to play the game, a feeling shared by Barack Obama. Nor is it easy to see how the rules could be changed to reduce the risk of brain damage in the professional game to an acceptable level.

Yet the sport will not continue to be both as popular as it is now and as dangerous. Those who dismiss football-bashers like Malcolm Gladwell, who compared the sport to dog-fighting in the New Yorker, as elitist east-coast types should remember that football began as a form of organised riot on the campuses of elitist east-coast colleges. Changes in taste can trickle down as well as bubble up. During the second half of the 20th century boxing went from being a sport watched together by fathers and sons to something that dwells among the hookers and slot machines of Nevada. Hollywood’s output of Westerns peaked in the late 1960s, after which the appeal of spending a couple of hours watching tight-lipped gunslingers in pursuit of an ethnic minority waned. Football will go the same way.      

 

Joe Schmidt

 

Stuart Barnes says that the Ireland coach not being wedded to a strategy is what makes him successful.

It is a tough call to decide which one poses a greater threat to England, Joe Schmidt or Jonathan Sexton. The fly half is the man around whom Ireland revolve. He is Schmidt’s emissary on earth, Irish rugby’s pontiff. Schmidt though, is the higher power. There’s little Sexton does that is not dictated in the great schemer’s rugby bible.

In Joe, Ireland trust and with good reason. Since he has taken charge they have risen to third in the world rankings, beating South Africa and Australia last November. They won the RBS Six Nations Championship at his first attempt and went within seconds of beating the All Blacks for the first time.

There is no doubt that Schmidt is one of the world’s leading coaches. The only pertinent question is what the hell is he thinking right now? He moves in mysterious ways. “Efficiency” is the primary word that springs to mind when Ireland’s 2015 form is analysed. Their ability to retain the ball, slow down the opposition and dominate the territorial game has been ruthlessly executed. It has been impossible not to admire their capacity to grind out the wins. It is also impossible to fall in love with the brutal functionality of it all.

Ireland signed a head coach whose teams played like poets, and now Ireland perform like a nation of number-crunchers. Has Schmidt undergone a Damascene conversion and seen some sort of light that has blinded him to his former brilliant attacking ways? I would suggest not. Rather, the smoothness with which his side have radically downgraded their game from the poetic passing and offloading of the Leinster team he led so effectively, marks a man at the very peak of his career.

In theory, a head coach holds dear to his deepest-held set of beliefs. In practice, the best will work with whatever tools happen to be to hand. My criticism of England for much of the autumn was not their ambitious and expansive style of play. It was their crazy attempt to play beyond the ability of that crop of players until they tightened and played territory against Australia.

What Schmidt is doing with Ireland — what he has done throughout his coaching stint with Clermont Auvergne (as No2 to Vern Cotter) and, more famously, Leinster — is maximise the potential of his players.

Clermont had a fly half who passed as well as any No10 I have seen. There were mental flaws in Brock James’s game, but the man could sure throw a pass. On the wing were a stack of giant, hard and fast-running men, all of them clever rugby players too. So Clermont went wide, with the rest of France nothing but narrow and forward-obsessed. They won their first Top 14 title.

In Leinster, he had the genius of Brian O’Driscoll and the icy brain of Sexton. Throw in the subtlety of Isa Nacewa and there was a back line that could cut teams to pieces through the middle of the field. The little loops became legendary, moves that, alas, no longer work for Leinster because the present personnel are inferior to O’Driscoll and Co.

Schmidt also had time to mine the intricacies unavailable to an international coach. With less time together, less time on the ball and less quality at his command, is it any surprise that the midfield magic has temporarily deserted Ireland? The other area of Leinster’s game crucial to their success was their brutality on the gain-line and at the breakdown. In his prime, Sean O’Brien was Europe’s best ball-carrier, with Jamie Heaslip not far behind. Their gain-line mastery provided front-foot ball, and with it the options required for Sexton to manipulate the match.

This season, O’Brien’s injuries have hampered Ireland’s edge where inches matter most. It has slowed down the quality of phase ball. Tardy ball from inside and no O’Driscoll outside, the tools are a bit blunter than once they were.

An ideologist sticks by his principles and takes everyone down with him. A strategist changes his game. Now Schmidt’s team wear opponents down. Here, the efficient retention of ball comes into its own.

It has been slower and steadier than Schmidt acolytes like, but it is successful. The New Zealander’s first desire is to win games. There has been confusion over his tactics, because people confuse the nature of how his teams have played in the past with the very nature of what Schmidt desires as a coach.

His previous teams have played in various styles. The only consistent element that runs through all his teams has been their winning nature. What Ireland revealed against France and Italy may not be what they show on Sunday. Schmidt is a chameleon of a coach. Not for him some fancy philosophy, rather a readiness to assess the powers at his disposal against the forces arrayed against them. In Joe, Ireland trusts.      

 

Fast Food or Energy Drink?

 

Most runners and cyclists will know the dilemma. After a burst of exercise, your head tells you to eat an energy bar, but your stomach yearns for fish and chips.

Rest easy: it does not matter which you choose because a study has found fast food to be marginally better than sports supplements at helping athletes to recover after exercise.

Michael Cramer, of the University of Montana, persuaded 11 men in peak condition to fast for 12 hours before a demanding 90-minute workout. After the exercise, half the athletes were fed energy drinks, power bars and a brand of “energy chew” cubes. Two hours later, they ate more power bars and some protein powder.

The other half scoffed pancakes, hash browns and orange juice, followed by hamburgers, chips and Coca Cola.

After two more hours the athletes were put on exercise bikes and told to ride 20km (12.4 miles) as fast as they could. The fast food and sports supplement groups then swapped diets and did the same tasks a week later.

The men tended to do equally well in the time trials, regardless of what they had consumed. Moreover, the levels of energy in their muscles were slightly higher after fast food. Mr Cramer stressed that his small sample size limited the significance of his results, and they did not show fast food was good for athletes — only that it had a similar effect on recovery levels to sports supplements. “These data are novel in demonstrating effective glycogen recovery benefits from fast food comparable to products often advertised to enhance recovery,” he wrote in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism.

The findings come after a British study this week that found it was best for teenagers to do a brief burst of strenuous exercise before having a meal rich in fats.

Scientists at the University of Exeter compared the effects of eight minutes of high-intensity cycling to 25 minutes of gentler pedalling before a fatty meal. Writing in the American Journal of Physiology, they said that the young people’s blood vessels functioned better after the shorter but harder exercise.

Alan Barker, from the university’s children’s health and exercise research centre, said: “Considering that few adolescents currently achieve the recommended minimum of one hour of at least moderate-intensity exercise per day, smaller amounts of exercise performed at a higher intensity might offer an attractive alternative.”      

 

Why Sharks Attack

 

It is called the mistaken identity theory and it has long been offered as the reason large sharks attack humans — especially those on surfboards. Australia’s surfers have suffered a 300 per cent increase in shark attacks in the past 15 years. Now, research from a zoo in Sydney is showing how sharks see —from below — their preferred meal of seal and how they see a surfer. It goes some way to explaining why they seem to confuse their quarry. Researchers at Taronga zoo have embarked on a series of experiments this month to help understanding of what causes a shark to attack.

They are mimicking what sharks see underwater by filming the movements of the zoo’s seals and sea lions, and comparing this with people on surfboards. They use computer software to interpret the images as sharks — which are visually impaired compared with humans — would see them.

The researchers hope to devise new ways to repel sharks, such as equipping surfboards with lights, a feature they will test on South Africa’s white pointer shark population later this year.

“We know their visual system isn’t as good as ours,” said Nathan Hart, a neuroscientist at the University of Western Australia and the lead researcher. Sharks are colour blind but have very sensitive eyes. This makes them accomplished at finding objects in low contrast but they also have poor spatial acuity, which means that their vision is more blurred than that of humans.

“If you now imagine blurring those images, you can see how there’d be even more similarity between them because the details of the arms and the legs get hidden,” Dr Hart said. “You can see quite easily how that mistaken identity might come about.”

The study is part of a project funded by the Western Australian government looking at shark attack deterrents. Data published in the Australian Shark Attack File has found that most people are surfing when attacked by a shark. “If we can come up with a directed solution for surfers in particular, hopefully we can make an impact,” Dr Hart said.

Researchers believe a large part of the surge in shark attacks is because the number of recreational swimmers, surfers and scuba divers is increasing, thanks to Australia’s expanding population and a flood of retiring but very active baby-boomers.      

 

The Long Tail of Sports

 

Isat next to a man called Charles at a dinner on Saturday night. He had spent his life working in the youth sector and in retirement has got involved in table tennis. Last year, he travelled to Auckland to play in the World Seniors Championships and, to his great delight, won the silver medal in the over-85 doubles.

“It was one of the best experiences of my life,” he said. “My wife and I turned it into a six-week holiday around New Zealand and Australia, but the table tennis was the highlight. I play most of the senior competitions. It is an amazing community and it keeps me fit, too.”

Seniors’ table tennis may seem like a niche activity, but it is part of a wider phenomenon that is slowly changing sport. Niche activities are growing: every week I am bumping into people who have found a new, unsung, almost subterranean activity, and have become hooked.

The son of my doctor is one of the world’s best in bouldering (a form of rock climbing performed without ropes or harnesses). A neighbour is an expert in Ultimate Frisbee. Last week, I was introduced to a man who is in the UK top ten in Racketlon (competitors play a single game to 21 in each of badminton, tennis, squash and table tennis, with the winner scoring the highest on aggregate).

In his book, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson looked at how our culture and consciousness are being increasingly shaped by niche phenomena. Much of his argument is based on the retail sector, where in the past it was only the blockbuster DVDs and books that ended up in the local store because it was only the big hits that justified the financial cost of shelf space.

Today, that has changed. Unlimited space at online stores such as Amazon, coupled with algorithms that lead consumers deeper into the labyrinth of niche products, means that the non-hit market has grown to a vast size. Virtual communities are devoted to fringe bands. Online video companies do a roaring trade in black and white Swedish movies. Each niche product may not get many hits, but the cumulative number devoted to the sector is expanding.

Sport is experiencing an echo of these deeper, perhaps inexorable trends. Two factors are in play, the most important being that the internet can enable cohesive fringe sport communities to blossom. In the past, the few hundred people interested in over-85 table tennis were so dispersed geographically that they never felt connected to a larger network, let alone a genuine subculture.

Today, there are online forums and web pages, run by volunteers and used by the wider community. At dinner on Saturday, Charles talked to me about his rivals from China, Spain, Thailand and France, all of whom he is virtually connected to. The tournaments seem to have a deeper meaning as a result: when the community comes together, they are not attending a reunion, but developing a relationship.

If you cannot get to the competition, you can watch it online — a second factor driving niche sports. In the past, it cost about £20,000 to hire a TV crew to broadcast for a day. Today, you can stream a tournament for little more than the cost of a video camera and an internet connection.

Over recent years, I have watched the National Table Tennis Championships final online (with live commentary). For international events, the same applies, with the International Table Tennis Federation streaming many of its top competitions. The virtual community is not merely connecting participants, but spectators, too.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing is that niche sports are themselves fragmenting. Table tennis used to be a game with a clear governance structure and set of rules. Today, it is solely a name for a family of sports that all share a resemblance, but which have their own overlapping communities.

Hardbat table tennis is played with pimples-out rackets, a throwback to the 1940s. Then there is Ping-Pong, a game with its own governing body and rulebook, and which has its own World Championships each year at Alexandra Palace under the promotional wing of Barry Hearn. Matches are played with sandpaper bats and a different scoring system.

Large sports will doubtless continue to dominate conventional mediums (television, newspapers, radio). The 80:20 rule associated with Vilfredo Pareto, the economist, whereby 80 per cent of the money and prestige of a sector is dominated by 20 per cent of the participants, will remain intact.

But the long tail will nevertheless continue to grow. I recently received an email from the association of Muggle Quidditch, in which two teams of seven players mounted on broomsticks play on an ice hockey rink-sized pitch. It has more than a dozen national associations.

For a long time, I worried about cultural fragmentation, not just in sport but beyond. Regular readers will know that I am a believer in unifying institutions. The monarchy played this role, as did the BBC and the England football team. My fear about proliferation is that we may lose our sense of solidarity. If we are all involved in our own niche interests, where is the wider sense of identity? I have come to realise, though, that this is a naive position, not least because the social and technological dynamics of the long tail cannot easily be resisted.

Talking to Charles made me realise that fragmentation is an expression of individualism. Instead of our interests being dictated by the editorial decisions of the person who chooses which DVDs to stock at HMV or which sports to air on the BBC, we can make our own choices.

We have become the curators of our own lives, the editors of our own destinies. We can play and watch football, if we choose, but we can also take a deep dive into an astonishing plethora of activities and sports that exist in our world, each nurtured by volunteers and each with a unique subculture. The long tail is here to stay. We should probably embrace it.      

 

Is Bridge A Sport?

 

AN ORGANISATION that represents bridge players hopes it has been dealt a winning hand by a judge who has ruled it can challenge a decision that the card game is not a sport.

At a High Court hearing last week Mr Justice Mostyn gave English Bridge Union (EBU) leave to mount a full judicial review of a ruling by Sport England that bridge is not a sport and therefore ineligible for lottery funding.

Mostyn said that despite a lack of physical activity the game is “arguably” a sport, adding: “The brain is a muscle.”

EBU wants bridge to be recognised as a “mind sport” so that it can apply for public funding. Sport England says it is no more a sporting activity than “sitting at home reading a book”.

The ruling may have implications for other games and Mostyn, who admitted he had on occasion played bridge, directed that Fide, the world chess federation, be informed of his decision.

Richard Clayton QC, representing the EBU, said bridge was already recognised as a sport by several European Union countries and by the International Olympic Committee.

Setting out Sport England’s case, Kate Gallafent QC said: “The starting point of the definition of sport is physical activity. Bridge cannot ever satisfy this definition.”

In his ruling, Mostyn said: “If the brain is a muscle, it does [satisfy the definition]. You are doing more physical activity playing bridge, with all that dealing and playing, than in rifle shooting.”

He added: “I do not conclude that this case is completely unarguable or that this challenge is vexatious or frivolous.”      

 

Developing An Athlete

 

Less than 10 per cent of those who play in NRL under-20s will graduate to first-grade football.

It's a sobering thought. A fraction of those who attend world youth athletics championships will represent New Zealand at a senior champs or Olympics.

It is why people like Rob Nichol of the Players' Association and former high-profile athlete manager Roger Mortimer see self-identity as one of the hot-button issues in sport today.

Mortimer believes too many sports programmes - whether run by franchises, clubs, schools or academies - did nothing for the development of the athlete outside of sport.

"The whole sense of identity of the boy or girl, their identity and ego, is around performance in sport," he says. "They only see themselves as a rugby player, cricketer, netballer, triathlete.

"Sports franchises in general do not give a shit about what happens to the athlete post-career. The scariest thing I see is we have a bunch of kids coming through who see themselves as nothing but rugby players."

Holistic development is seen as crucial, but here's the rub: in research done by Steve Hollings, a former Olympian, on which athletes made the leap from youth to senior ranks, a common factor was a 'single identity'.

"Those athletes who successfully transitioned admitted that it was difficult to try and manage education, work and training, and chose to make sacrifices in other life domains," Hollings wrote in a paper titled Why Some Do, Why Others Don't.

The lesson here is there is no silver bullet to sporting stardom, that much is obvious, but in a wider sense there is no absolute right way and plenty of wrong ways of trying to get there.

Craig Harrison is director of athlete development at AUT Millennium and is trying to change the paradigm on how we identify and develop talent.

"Most people get it wrong," he says. "They are selecting 'talent', which is often biased by Relative Age Effect and maturity levels.

"Once they're in that team or programme, they spend their season working towards outcome goals, not development goals. That season ends, the next one rolls around and they're selected again.

"What we need is multiple entry and exit points along the way, but that's difficult because of the way our systems are set up and coaches chase the 'win' rather than focusing on the development of their athletes and instilling great habits."

Harrison, who is married to Silver Ferns defender Anna Harrison, says he feels sorry for parents, who are often placed in difficult situations.

"They see decisions based on outcomes all the time. If they were to say, 'No, we want the programme to be based more around our child's development than winning', they would be going against the norm."

He said one solution for parents would be to ask schools in particular what their sporting philosophy is and what they can expect their child to have achieved by the time they leave.

"If most of them are honest, they'll say, 'Your son will be part of a 1st XV that wins a championship because that's what is important to us'. The parents might like that philosophy, or they might want their child to go to a school or club where they aim to use sport to develop the person rather than the short-term 'we'll win on Saturday'."

The old cliché is that sport builds character. That's wrong Harrison says, unless the programme allows it.

***************************

It is often pointed out what a fickle industry sport is; how the difference between success and failure can be one selector's opinion or an unlucky industry. Indeed, questions are asked all the time as to whether national sporting organisations should do more to protect their vulnerable.

Perhaps surprisingly, Mortimer does not believe so. In many respects, being a sportsperson is no different from being, say, a recording artist. One minute you might be flavour of the month, the next, for reasons that are not entirely explicable, nobody thinks you're cool any more.

But athletes, he says, should not view the end of their playing or competing careers as a scrapheap. There's coaching, media, personal training or any number of strands to this ever-growing, intensely complex, entertaining, enriching and frustrating 'industry' we call sport.

"It's the nature of sport," he says. "Athletes who don't make it can still have good careers in the industry."

Relative age effect

(See following article)

On day one, we discussed birthdates and how being born at a certain time of year, with three months of age-group eligibility cut-offs, could provide inherent advantages.

In analysing why so few athletes progressed from the IAAF World Youth Championships to Junior World Champions to senior world champs, Dr Steve Hollings, a statistician with Athletics NZ, discovered RAE at work.

Of the 120 athletes (66 women, 54 men) who had competed at the WYC between 1999-2013, just 28 progressed to the world junior champs. Of that 120, just 10 have represented New Zealand at senior level.

"The marked relative-age effects in athletics exclude talented younger athletes from youth and junior championships and presumably discourage some younger athletes from continuing to the open championships. The consequences are a lower overall standard of performance and termination of the athletes' involvement in athletics before realising their full potential," Hollings wrote in a research paper.

"The RAE in athletics is based on the fact that the [WYC and WJC] championships cover two-year age ranges and are held in alternate years. The WJC are for men and women 19 years and under on December 31 in the year of competition, with a minimum age of 16 years. The WYC are for boys and girls 16 or 17 years old. Owing to the way the championships are scheduled, an athlete at the younger end of the age group at the WYC is disadvantaged, but has an age advantage when subsequently competing at the WJC."      

 

Relative age effect

 

If your own international rugby dreams have been thwarted but you want your son to one day pull on the All Black jersey, plan ahead and try for a January baby.

Boys born in the first three months of the year have more chance of making it to rugby's biggest stage, the Herald can reveal.

Of the 173 men who have debuted for the All Blacks since rugby turned professional in 1996, more than one-third (60) were born in the first three months of the year.

The next closest quarter is the third, July to September, when 39 were born.

The stats give credence to the theory of Relative Age, highlighted in Malcolm Gladwell's book about talent, Outliers. The theory is that those born closer to age-group eligibility cut-offs have an inherent advantage. They're picked for age-group teams not necessarily because they're more talented, but because they're older and usually bigger. This foot-in-the-door gives them access to better coaching and gives them exposure, so they improve.

Examples of January babies who debuted for the All Blacks during the professional era are Reuben Thorne, Aaron Cruden, Sam Cane and Luke Whitelock. Richie McCaw, born on December 31, has defied convention.

Relative age has a bigger effect in contact sports, but there is still a correlation in other sports.

The age-group eligibility cut-off for cricket is September 1. In the same 1996 timeframe, the biggest test-producing quarter is September-November, with 20 of the 67 test players being born in these three months. September Black Caps include Nathan Astle, Craig McMillan, Brendon McCullum, Martin Guptill and Jimmy Neesham.

The months to avoid if you want your progeny to chase glory? Only 10 May babies have become All Blacks since 1996, and just four have become test Black Caps.      

 

Drones For Anglers

 

If you still believe that angling is a “genteel recreation” that provides an escape from the hustle and bustle of the modern world, think again.

The Scottish author Moray McLaren relied on traditional methods to catch trout in the Water of Leith in 1954. Modern anglers now use gadgets including drones as they try to outwit fish.

The latest bit of kit for carp fishermen is a drone equipped with an underwater camera that can locate the largest fish in the lake and drop a baited hook in front of it.

The days when anglers whiled away the hours chewing grass stalks and counting the stars have long gone. Among the biggest-selling accessories are power packs to enable them to watch movies or television on their tablets while waiting for an alarm on one of their half-dozen carbon fibre rods to alert them to a bite.

Remote control boats equipped with fish sensors and loaded with up to a kilogram of bait are also in regular use on British fishing lakes. But a drone with an underwater camera that spots a fish and does everything apart from insert the hook into its open mouth is a step too far for traditionalists.

The device developed by Roger Borre of Dronexpert is expected to go on sale next year, making the art of casting a line redundant.

Instead of drawing on years of skill and experience to land the baited hook in exactly the right place, the angler flies it to the chosen spot up to 300m away. The drone then lands on the water and lowers a waterproof video camera that sends live images to the user’s smartphone.

If there are too many weeds, the drone can take off again to search for a more suitable spot, or if the camera detects a fish it can release the baited hook before flying back to base.

Thom Airs, editor of UK Carp Magazine, says that drones are becoming an increasingly common sight over angling lakes. “A lot of people are posting videos to YouTube showing the best spots,” he said. “Carp fishermen have always climbed trees to get an aerial view and this is a natural development. Some people don’t like them because the noise they make can scare the fish.”

Remote control bait boats, some the size of a small dingy and costing as much as £1,000, have also become common in recent years. Mr Airs said that bait boats were not allowed for angling competitions but that “there are places where you are at a disadvantage if you don’t use one”.

The boats have become such a familiar sight on some lakes that swans and other wild fowl try to plunder the tasty cargo before it reaches its destination. Some models will also take the hook, line and sinker and drop it at a suitable spot.

The drone developed by Mr Borre and his team of five based in Bentelo, Netherlands, goes one step further. Mr Borre said: “This idea comes from the underwater camera-winch we made for a fish-finder bait boat. We thought it could also be done by a drone to speed up the process.

“You can see exactly where your bait is on the bottom and if it’s free of weeds or other obstacles. A lot of carp fishermen complain they are not sure if their bait is hanging in weed. Now they can see where their rig is situated. Drones could be the future of fishing.”

Not everyone favours the use of modern technology. Martin Salter, campaigns manager at the Angling Trust, said that the innovation went against the ideals set out in Izaak Walton’s 1653 book The Compleat Angler. “Obviously people are free to fish how they like within the rules, but some of these high tech gizmos have now taken the ‘contemplative man’s pursuit’ to almost absurd levels,” he said.

“Personally, I think fishing should be about the skill of presenting a bait or lure to the fish by your own endeavour rather than by some sort of radiocontrolled monstrosity.”

Other anglers vented on the use of drones on the Angling Times’s Facebook page. Richie Martin wrote: “Watercraft turns into aircraft! This is such an uncultured, unskilful and desperate development to our sport! Strikes me that ‘anglers’ who would use this method of baiting are fishing for the wrong reasons! Where is the satisfaction or sense of achievement?”      

 

Onfield Monitoring

 

IN THE late 1990s Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, a baseball club, made a radical change to the club’s recruiting methods: he decided to apply some science to them. Instead of relying on the instincts of scouts, he and his deputy Paul DePodesta, a statistically astute Harvard economics graduate, crunched candidate players’ numbers. Baseball is awash with such numbers, and the two men applied simple statistics to them to identify valuable players whom scouts had rejected, and who could thus be hired cheaply. The result transformed the club’s performance. Despite having one of the league’s lowest payrolls, it qualified for the post-season tournament run by Major League Baseball (MLB), the professional game’s organiser, for four years running.

This success, which was the subject of a book (and later a film) called “Moneyball”, caused others to copy the method. Before long, teams had extracted all the information they could from the game’s traditional statistics. To produce even more accurate predictions, they would need better data. And the means to gather those numbers have now arrived, in the form of a system called Statcast developed specifically for baseball by MLB.

Statcast can, pretty much, follow and record everything that happens in a baseball game. It builds on earlier game-tracking technology, such as the Hawk-Eye system used in cricket, but is far more sophisticated. It constantly logs the position of the ball and of every player on the field. It calculates the speed and curvature of a pitch, how rapidly the ball spins and around what axis, and how much faster or slower than reality that pitch appears to be to the hitter, based on the length of the pitcher’s stride. When the ball is hit, the system measures how quickly it leaves the bat and how its path is affected by atmospheric conditions. It then tracks how long fielders take to react before moving, and the efficiency of their routes to the ball’s eventual landing spot. And it takes just 15 seconds to crunch these numbers and integrate them with video recordings.

Statcast captures the information it needs by fusing data from two pieces of equipment. One follows the players. The other follows the ball. The player-following system is a stereoscopic camera array developed by ChyronHego, an American graphics company. This sits behind third base and takes 30 snapshots a second. It cannot, however, track the ball as reliably as it tracks the players, for baseballs (which are white) are hard to see when they fly in front of similarly coloured backgrounds. To follow the ball, including measuring its spin using the Doppler effect (which causes the radar beam’s frequency to rise when it bounces off part of the ball that is spinning towards the detector, and fall when it returns from part that is spinning away), the MLB therefore turned to TrackMan, a Danish radar firm. Their system had a hiccup when it turned out that the giant video screens without which no major-league baseball ground is complete were jamming it. But that has now been resolved.

In theory, following the players and following the ball in this way should provide all the data needed for statistical purposes. But Statcast is designed, in part, for television, and for that purpose yet another camera needs to be added to the mix. This watches the field as a whole, providing co-ordinates that map the radar and optical data onto broadcasters’ video feeds. And the result does indeed make for compelling TV. It permits commentators to illustrate replays with dazzling visual displays. It was used this way for the first time on April 21st, by MLB Network, the sport’s proprietary cable channel.

It is, though, the trove of information Statcast’s all-seeing eye delivers about how players play that most interests teams. They can use such data to make players better—for example, by telling a pitcher who cannot impart sufficient backspin to try a different grip—and to allocate resources more efficiently, such as moving a fielder with lightning-quick reflexes to third base, a position where such people are particularly valuable.

Teams can also use Statcast to help with recruitment. In 2013, for example, the Houston Astros employed an analysis based on the TrackMan system to acquire an unaccomplished pitcher called Collin McHugh, because of his fast-spinning curveball. They then told him to throw that pitch far more often during the next season, and he blossomed into a star.

Who will have the opportunity to dig into Statcast’s numbers does, though, remain to be decided. When a prototype version was launched in 2007, MLB allowed anyone to download the raw data. That open-source approach led to a flurry of discoveries, many of which have become accepted wisdom. It also helped teams identify and hire promising analysts. Now, those teams with good analysts have an incentive to pull up the ladder. They fear weaker rivals will free-ride on the work of the next generation of amateurs, reducing the edge that employing professionals gives. Rob Manfred, MLB’s commissioner, has promised fans “very good access” to Statcast. What that actually means remains to be seen.      

 

Everesting

 

Even the hardiest of sherpas would balk at the idea of scaling Mount Everest on a bicycle, but a group of ultra-competitive cyclists have set their sights on conquering 29,029ft on two wheels.

Luckily for them, they will not have to book tickets for Nepal, but can complete the challenge in their own neighbourhood — all they need is a local hill, a tracking app and a lot of stamina.

For those without the time to cycle the entire Tour de France route or spend a year biking around the world, “Everesting” is the ultimate endurance test, where cyclists perform multiple ascents of a single hill until they have accumulated a total elevation equivalent to the height of Mount Everest.

The rules are simple — it must be undertaken on a single stretch of road, it must be completed in one ride with only short breaks and no sleeping allowed, and it must be uploaded and verified online through Strava, the tracking app and site.

The challenge was first undertaken in 1994 by George Mallory, whose grandfather, the British explorer also called George, vanished on the slopes of Mount Everest in 1924 on an expedition to become the first person to scale the world’s highest peak.

Exactly 70 years later, Mallory Jr was training for his own successful ascent of Everest and completed ten ascents of Mount Donna Buang in Australia to make up the equivalent height. Inspired by the feat, Andy van Bergen from Melbourne, and his Hells 500 group set out to emulate Mallory and wrote the rules for Everesting, completing the first ride in February last year.

This month a cyclist from California set a world record by ascending 95,623ft — equivalent to more than three times the height of Everest — in 48 hours, burning 30,000 calories in the process.

Closer to home, Jase Weston, 44, who works in the chemical industry in Chester, completed his own Everesting challenge by scaling the Horseshoe Pass in Wales 26 times this month, taking 35 minutes on each ascent and four or five minutes to coast down and start again. The challenge took just over 17 hours. “It could be done on someone’s culde-sac, as long as they are willing to go up and down it enough times,” he said. “You can do it on your doorstep and don’t have to go to an Alpine pass.”

He said it was the challenge for the “normal, everyday cyclist”, adding: “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, purely because of the monotony of it.” John Shaw, 37, completed 72 ascents of Box Hill in Surrey last month. “In the office, there was a general reaction of ‘You must be a lunatic’, but I’m really pleased I did it. Fewer than 700 people worldwide have done it [a total of 683 verified completions], so I’m pleased to be part of that group,” he said.

“As a solo effort it is really tough, mentally as well as physical. It was 22 hours of riding. I took a five to tenminute break every hour or so. The hardest part was at night — I had friends in the car park at the top, but cycling through the dark becomes tiring and difficult with no one to talk to and with cars coming up past you.”      

 

Walking Rugby

 

It is the ultimate contact sport, but you do not have to be a 20-year-old muscular hulk to play rugby any more. A new version of the game has been developed for the over-55s with no running, no tackling and no scrums.

Walking rugby will be launched at hotels run by the Warner Leisure group this weekend after demand from guests for the fun and excitement of a team sport. Martin Corry, the former England forward, was approached to develop a game that would be safe and slow enough for guests aged up to 80, but still capture the essence and excitement of rugby.

Under the rules, players have to pass the ball within three seconds and cannot walk further than 10m in possession. A try is scored by carrying the ball over a line. There are no posts and passes cannot be higher than shoulder height. The game lasts 40 minutes and is split into quarters. The ball can be kicked but at a low level only. At pilot sessions earlier this year, walking rugby was so popular with guests that they refused to leave at the final whistle.

Corry said that the game was a breakthrough and perfect for older people who wanted the elements of the game but without the frantic pace. “I’ve seen various types of rugby in the form of touch and veteran, but the carefully adapted rules in walking rugby mean that even those who would never have thought to play the game are now able to enjoy it,” he said. “As people get older, it seems that team sports like rugby are not as available as they used to be. It’s a huge shame.”

Keen sportsmen and women often bemoan the lack of opportunities to continue with their game as they age, and often feel bowls and golf are all they can do once they slow down. In terms of rugby, touch and tag are alternatives to the traditional game but even though tackles are not permitted, the games are fast and furious and designed for children rather than pensioners. Veteran rugby is often highly technical even if the pace is slower.

There is a problem of older people having the opportunities to stay fit. Despite the ageing population, most sports are targeted at younger people. Even when fitness equipment is available, it can be set in an intimidating environment where over-50s are outnumbered by fitter, younger individuals. Research by Warner found that four out of five over-50s had not been to a gym in the past year, if ever, although a third said that they liked to stay fit.      

 

Invasive Fish

 

I recently read a remarkable story of research done by people right at my home university at the University of Nevada, Reno. Thirty minutes from where we live is Lake Tahoe, which is a large lake which is half in Nevada, half in California. Like with many lakes, one of the largest threats to Lake Tahoe is invasive species, brought in either intentionally or unintentionally by boats, bait buckets and aquaria releases. Invasive species are a problem for any lake, as they generally out-compete the native organisms, disrupting the ecosystem.

Now, some researchers have come up with an innovative way of removing the invasive fish and not letting them go to waste. Christine Ngai and colleagues used an ‘electrofishing’ device which stuns fish temporarily, usually used in research for inspecting or sampling fishes. Once the fish are stunned, the researchers remove the invasive fish and return the native fish to the water (where they recover in a few minutes). In the past 3 years they have removed 51,000 fish.

This by itself is pretty impressive, but the researchers then gave all the larger edible fish like bass (55 pounds worth) to St Vincent’s food panty which provides food for poor and homeless people in the area.

Smaller fish that aren’t suitable for filleting are then given to a wildlife shelter where they feed two bears. The even smaller leftovers are composted and used to fertilize the lawns of the University.

Of course, the best-case scenario would be no invasive fish in the lake at all, but given the problem, these researchers have demonstrated an innovative and waste-free solution to dealing with it.      

 

Marginal gains

 

This is the concept that lies at the heart of a revolution in British sport. It is behind the world-beating success of our cyclists, both on the track and the road, and has been co-opted by many of the Olympics teams that had stunning success in London 2012.

But what is it? How does the marginal gains method work in practice? And can it be wielded to transform performance not just in sport, but in businesses, schools, and beyond?

Let us start with Sir Dave Brailsford, the man most closely associated with the idea. When he became the Performance Director of British Cycling, in 2003, he could have said: “I am an expert. I know what needs to be done”. This is often the way that leaders operate. They have huge faith in their own judgment and see their job as persuading others of their wisdom.

But Brailsford took a different approach. He had strong ideas, of course, and tremendous self-confidence. He had spent a lifetime in cycling and had developed a number of intuitions about how to improve performance. But he also had an even deeper awareness that however much he knew about cycling, he didn’t know everything. There was always a chance to learn more.

And so instead of parading his vision, he started to look for weaknesses, just as his predecessor, Peter Keen, had done: weaknesses in his assumptions, latent problems, inefficiencies that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. By using a wind tunnel, he isolated aerodynamic problems with the existing bike design. By creating algorithms that deconstructed performance, he noted key deficiencies in the training regimes.

Whenhe became general manager of Team Sky, he continued to question the conventional wisdom. He started transporting the riders’ mattresses from hotel to hotel, to improve sleep quality. He had riders and staff use antibacterial hand gel to cut down on infections. He pioneered the use of warm-downs after each stage. Each was a marginal gain.

But this was just the start. At a higher level of resolution, it was clear that there were untested assumptions lurking everywhere. Diet is an obvious factor in determining success, which is why most teams have a nutritionist. But Team Sky went further. They experimented with different foods, at different times, and measured the precise effect on cadence and power output. Instead of trusting expertise, they conducted controlled experiments into the dynamic relationships between all the relevant variables.

And this is why marginal gains is so powerful. At a big-picture level, there is always the possibility for bluff. If a cyclist loses, the nutritionist could say: “It wasn’t my fault, it was the coach”. The coach could say: “It wasn’t my fault, it was the bike designer”. The bike designer could say: “It wasn’t me, it was a bad diet”. But by deconstructing a performance into all of its component parts, bluff no longer works. By isolating the specific impact of bike design, you can tell whether one design is better than another. By systematically probing the impact of diet on riders, while controlling for other variables, you can tell which kind of carbohydrate is the most effective. To put it simply, marginal gains is the world’s most effective BS detector.

Now, let’s look at the wider implications. Take third-world poverty, one of the most pressing problems today. Economists have different views of how to solve it. For many, like the academic Jeffrey Sachs, we need to give more money to the poor. If only we made a bigger financial contribution, poverty could be eradicated. For others, like William Easterly at New York University, giving money is making the situation worse by destroying incentives.

This argument has being going on for decades and, at the macro level, it is unresolvable. There are so many variables that affect the prosperity of a region, and so many statistics that can be used to justify one side of the debate or the other, that the dispute could continue indefinitely. And this is precisely why a group of crusading economists have adopted a marginal gains approach.

Instead of debating at a high level, they have broken the problem down into its component parts. They look at each single programme (like, say, a malaria programme in Sudan, or an educational project in Kenya), and then run an empirical test to see if it is actually working. Controlled experiment is possible at this, more focused level.

These economists immediately discovered that some development programmes were having no impact at all, despite glossy brochures and celebrity supporters. This was not taken as a disaster, however, but as a crucial opportunity to adapt the programme, and create a marginal gain. They also discovered that some programmes were working well, which was an opportunity to roll them out more widely, while testing for new improvements. Today, they are running even more experiments, and learning with every one.

Now, let us go back to sport, because perhaps the most impressive application of marginal gains comes from Formula One, a sport that combines a scientific approach with a questioning mindset. “When I first started in F1, we recorded eight channels of data,” Paddy Lowe, the technical leader of Mercedes F1, told me. “Now we have 16,000 from every single parameter on the car. And we derive another 50,000 channels from that data.”

Take the pit stop. This is one of thousands of different components which, collectively, determine whether an F1 team is successful or not. But every tiny assumption is constantly being tested and adapted. “We have eight sensors on every single one of the wheel-nut guns in order to access the most systematic data,” James Vowles, head of strategy, said. “Just by looking at this data I can ascertain exactly what has happened on each pit stop. “When the gun operator initially connected to the wheel nut, I can tell that they, say, connected 20 degrees off the optimum angle. Whenthey start rotating the gun, I can tell how long it has taken for the nut to loosen all its preloaded torque and for the wheel to start moving off the axle . . . the precision of this information helps us to create an optimisation loop. It shows us how to improve every time-sensitive aspect.” In other words, lots of marginal gains.

Marginal gains is just one of the approaches being used by innovative organisations to beat the competition, and change the world. Google, for example, carries out 12,000 data-driven experiments every year. The aviation industry learns from thousands of near-miss events by analysing the data contained in the black boxes to systematically improve system safety. The underlying idea is thoroughly scientific: learning from errors and failures. We could call it black box thinking.

In the world today, people are threatened by their mistakes or the gaps in their knowledge. They are seen as a threat to ego and reputation, and are often covered up. Brailsford and Vowles see weaknesses with a different set of eyes. Every error, every flaw, every failure, however small, is a marginal gain in disguise. This information is regarded not as a threat but as an opportunity. Indeed, after losing the 2014 Tour de France, Brailsford hired a sports scientist called Simon Jones, whose job was to question aspects of the strategy that had become “part of the furniture”.

Now consider our political and social institutions. They are staffed by often brilliant people, but many contain vast numbers of inefficiencies. Think of the literally thousands of marginal gains waiting to be accumulated in healthcare, in politics, in local authorities. With a new mindset and method, these organisations could be revolutionised.

One final example: speed eating. This is now a large “sport” with sizeable prize money. The biggest competition is the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, which takes place every Fourth of July in New York. You have to eat as many hot dogs as you can in 12 minutes, which most people do by stuffing their mouths as greedily as possible.

But in 2005, a Japanese student called Takeru Kobayashi approached the contest with a marginal-gains mindset. Instead of eating the hot dog whole, he tried breaking it in half. He found that it gave him more options for chewing, and freed his hands to improve loading. It was a marginal gain. Then he experimented with eating the dog and the bread separately. Then he experimented by dipping the buns in water, then with water sprinkled with vegetable oil, then he videotaped his training sessions, and tested different ways of chewing, swallowing and various “wriggles” that manipulated the space in his stomach in order to avoid vomiting. When he arrived in New York, he was a rank outsider. He was slight and short, unlike his supersized competitors. But he smashed the competition, eating an incredible 50 hot dogs, almost doubling the world record. That is marginal gains in action. And if it can be applied to eating salty tubes of sandwiched meat, it can be applied to almost anything.      

 

The Messiah Complex

 

The sacking, appointing and parading of new managers has nothing to do with winning matches.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could change reality in a flash? A new appointment, a new broom, a new prime minister, a new CEO and, hey presto, we are on the sunlit pathways to Utopia. To a New Jerusalem. Or, in the case of Liverpool, in sight of an elusive first Premier League title.

They call it the Messiah Complex up on Merseyside, but this is not a phenomenon limited to the northwest. Almost every group of fans invests irrational quantities of belief in a new appointment, hoping that renewed dressing-room chemistry will have an instant impact on the pitch, followed by a visionary rebuilding exercise that will, over time, deliver the results that the club, their fans, and their history, “deserve”.

The psychology is fascinating but let us first deal with its essential silliness. At a purely logical level, football is a zero sum game. If one club lose, then another must win. So if every club changed manager, and each really did spark a change in chemistry, it wouldn’t alter the fact that there would still be only one Premier League champion. In other words, while Liverpool are hoping that Jürgen Klopp is the messiah, Manchester United are hoping that this turns out to be Louis van Gaal, and Spurs are clinging to the hope that it is Mauricio Pochettino. The thesis is, to put it mildly, internally flawed.

But if we are to understand fully the underlying basis of the Messiah Complex, we have to take a step away from logic, and even from football, and take a closer look at anthropology. In particular, we need to examine the concept of the “temporary king” as discussed by Sir James George Frazer in his endlessly fascinating (although endlessly long) masterpiece, The Golden Bough.

Frazer chronicles various tribes and mythologies who invest all power and authority in this “temporary king”. He is to have power over the crops, the sun, the rain, the wind, and over the material basis of the lives of the tribe. And yet his real role is not about power, but about hope. He is the vehicle of dreams, the receptacle of communal longing and angst. He is the focal point of atavistic impulses that might otherwise rage out of control.

In the early months, he is revered. Any uplift in the circumstances of the tribe is attributed to his divine capacities. Anything that militates against the crops is attributed to malign outside forces. But at some moment, the tipping point arrives, and the temporary king is abandoned. He is sacrificed, so that a new temporary king can emerge, thus bringing a new cycle of hope, betrayal and, ultimately, redemption.

Watch almost any football club and you see this primal rite re-enacted, as Simon Barnes, the sportswriter, has pointed out. There were quasi-religious banners of Klopp’s face at White Hart Lane replete with slogans such as “We Believe” and “In Jürgen we Trust”. Even commentators got caught up in the “messiahfication” of the temporary king, wondering whether he could trigger an uplift in fortunes, and, as one put it, “take fans to heaven”. The German, incidentally, is a bespectacled 48-year-old with a diploma in sports science who had been involved in training at Liverpool for three days.

The cycle of divinification, hope, sacrifice and renewal has a different tempo at different clubs, as among ancient tribes. At Newcastle United, it is probably fair to say, it all happens rather fast. Frazer would have found it fascinating that when Alan Shearer was appointed to “save” Newcastle from relegation in 2009 (I was dispatched to cover his first press conference), the fans didn’t just chant his name, but took off their shoes and waved them in the air. I can’t be sure, but I had the feeling that this curious symbolism was about fans wanting to be barefooted, like the early Christian disciples. Newcastle, incidentally, were relegated a few weeks later.

The sacking, appointing and parading of managers, then, has nothing to do with winning matches. On any sane analysis, it undermines stability, costs a great deal in managerial buyout clauses, and generally causes disruption. If this wasn’t already obvious, it should be crystal clear from the fact that it is essentially the same group of middle-aged men passing from club to club, and back again, within the Premier League, and beyond. Clubs are not buying new talent or knowledge, they are recycling chaps who have long been in the market and have, often, been sacked elsewhere.

No, this isn’t about football or logic: it is about us. What clubs are indulging when they sign on the dotted line with a fresh-faced manager, bearded or otherwise, is their fans’ irrational need for hope. And when they sack a manager, they are reflecting the instinct for ritualised immolation.

Newspapers mirror this process (building the new man up, only to chop him down) because they know it reflects the instincts of readers. It is the closest thing that we have to 21st-century paganism.

That is not to say that managers don’t impact on results. Clearly, a great manager can help a football club, but such influence is generally felt over a long period, notably (but not exclusively) in the transfer market. It took Sir Alex Ferguson years to turn around United.

Miracle catalysts associated with new managers are, when you step back and observe the totality of such appointments, little more than statistical anomalies: noteworthy, but in no sense replicable. It is just that every club, and every fanbase, thinks that the next miracle will happen to them.

It took Harry Redknapp, no stranger to the phenomenon of the temporary king, to cut through the mysticism during the pre-match build-up on Saturday. “He has only had them for training for a few days,” he said, almost despairingly, of Klopp. “You can’t do anything in that time.” But nobody was listening. All eyes were on the German messiah, standing on the touchline, working his magic, while the red banners of the faithful fluttered in the north London breeze.      

 

Quirky Mini-Golf Course

 

Link      

 

Sports Stars Are Not Role Models

 

John Terry has had a superb career. He has won more than a dozen trophies, demonstrated a ferocious work ethic and delivered some of his finest performances for Chelsea in key matches. Little wonder that fans of the London club are distraught that he is likely to leave this summer.

But Terry has also made his fair share of what are euphemistically called “mistakes”. He racially abused an opponent, urinated on the floor of a nightclub (a recurring problem), abused American tourists after 9/11, gave an undercover journalist tours of the Chelsea training ground in return for envelopes stuffed with cash — most of which he said was destined for charity — and had a string of affairs, including a dalliance in the back of a car with a 17-year-old autograph-hunter.

What are we to make of this juxtaposition between the sporting titan and the serial miscreant? There ought to be nothing terribly surprising about it, given that there is no obvious connection between how well a man kicks a football and how well he conducts his personal life. Footballing prowess may tell us a great deal about a person’s co-ordination, resilience and perceptual acuity, but it tells us little about their personal values or integrity.

But there remains a nagging belief, at least in some quarters, that sportsmen are role models. To this day, there is shock when sportsmen fall short, the sense that they have (as the chairman of Augusta National put it in the context of Tiger Woods) “disappointed our kids and grandkids”. We would never say that of Mick Jagger, even if he slept with a thousand pancake waitresses and drove into a dozen fire hydrants. It is with sportsmen, almost uniquely, that we expect standards in one field to be consistent with standards in another.

Could the vocabulary of sport be partly to blame for what has become a stubborn nonsequitur? Consider, for a moment, that Phil Taylor is described as “brave” for hitting a double in a high-pressure leg and that Roger Federer is hailed as “courageous” for coming from behind in a deciding set. Note, too, that the same terms are used to describe the bystander who protects an innocent victim from an attacker or a German who sheltered Jews during the Holocaust.

In the latter case, people are acting out of moral conviction and at direct personal risk. In the former case, however, there is nothing morally significant happening at all. When Taylor hits a double, he is not displaying moral force, but the capacity to slot an arrow into a small aperture. Isn’t “nerve” a more appropriate term?

It is a bit like being able to complete the fairground challenge of navigating a small hoop around a winding wire without tripping the alarm. It doesn’t imply that one is more likely to save a child from a burning building, or be a good father.

The moral vocabulary of sport has deep roots. Words such as “courage” pepper the sporting texts of the Victorian age, along with “integrity” and “honour”. The idea back then was that sport “builds character”. These invented games were supposed to lead enthusiasts along the one, true path. It never had any basis, of course — top amateur sportsmen were as likely to cheat and fall short as the wider population — but it didn’t half sound good to early educators, grounded in the ideals of “muscular Christianity”. A strong body was supposed to be more adept at resisting temptation.

If anything, the modern age has added momentum to this mythology, not least because athletes trade on it.

The agents of Woods, for example, arranged soft-focus photoshoots with his wife and kids; made sure that interviewers asked questions about his relationship with his father; and more generally constructed an image that, to all intents and purposes, made him appear like a secular saint. Woods was, in many ways, the ultimate projection of the Victorian sporting ideal. Terry’s agents used the same ruse, albeit with less sophistication. In promotional materials, they trumpeted his triumph as Daddies Sauces Dad of the Year, proclaiming that this went to the heart of the player’s image and character. Resolute as a defender; resolute as a father. Willing to make a last-ditch challenge; willing to go the extra mile with his children. Dependable on the pitch; dependable as a husband. Again, this was leveraging the notion that a top sportsman is, almost by definition, muscularly virtuous. And, for a while, it was highly lucrative for the Chelsea player.

Again and again, with only minor variations, we see this sleight of hand at work. We see it in the positioning of Lance Armstrong, Marion Jones and Alex Rodriguez, to name a few.      

 

LT Eulogy For Brendon McCullum

 

How many of us can say we truly leave an imprint? Aims are mostly modest: make the best of whatever talent you’re given; earn respect from team-mates, the opposition and those watching. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Brendon McCullum, who finishes this week as an international cricketer, if not a roving T20 cricketer, did rather more than that. He left an indelible imprint; a leonine trail on the previously soft earth that was New Zealand cricket. He was someone who, through the transformative nature of leadership, changed perceptions of himself, his team, his country and the game as well. As such he ranks among the most significant of modern captains.

There cannot have been a more fitting farewell than blitzing the fastest hundred in Test cricket, as McCullum did this weekend off 54 balls, beating a record that had been set thunderously 30 years ago by Viv Richards, risen to fever pitch on his home ground and equalled later by the unlikely, lumbering figure of Misbah-ul-Haq. A Kiwi holding the record for the fastest hundred and the most sixes in Tests? From this land of grafters and grinders, dibblers and dobbers? A bit like discovering Hay-on-Wye has suddenly become the spiritual home of hip-hop.

Here was a green pitch — a typical New Zealand green top — that once upon a time would have had old sweats worrying and fretting about hard hands and playing on the up, and countering movement with nose-to-the-grindstone grittiness. Instead, McCullum responded by having a merry dip. He has been at the vanguard of this step-change in how Test cricket is approached and his innings at the weekend was the latest, most compelling demonstration of it.

Before you knew it the field had scattered. Suddenly, there was a fly slip, a fly gully, men in the deep and bowlers, previously on top, were now worried about how they were going to stop the flow of runs. Australia’s errors mounted. Forced errors. He had changed the situation in the blink of an eye, a microcosm of the broader impact that he has had as New Zealand’s finest captain.

The path is rarely smooth for those who threaten the established order of things. It is worth remembering the criticism that flowed when McCullum took over the national captaincy from Ross Taylor in 2013. This was New Zealand’s Kevin Pietersen moment: there were calls for Mike Hesson, the coach who made the decision, to resign; former players were indignant on Taylor’s behalf, blazers burnt and a petition signed. In his first Test in charge, his team were bundled out before lunch. We noticed the change last summer, when New Zealand’s visit — in an Ashes summer, remember — was the high point, as a previously monochrome team played Technicolor cricket. But even then, there was an editorial in The New Zealand Herald complaining about the way McCullum had taken its cricket by the scruff, shaken it about and changed its image. “We’re being played for fools,” it said, accusing McCullum of burnishing his own PR at the expense of his team’s performances.

The money quote was this after the defeat at Lord’s: “C’mon, we’re still that respectable, overachieving little cricket nation with a couple of world-class players who must scratch and claw and fight. Cheering attacking cricket, playing to the crowd, is not a legitimate defence. They’ve invented a game with that mindset — it’s called Twenty20. Real cricket is more complex and compelling than that.” A lament that boring old New Zealand had become, for a short time, the Calypso Kings. Such were the forces of tradition in his way.

But that is exactly what New Zealand became under McCullum: swashbuckling and buccaneering, a team to be enjoyed rather than endured. Players responded: Trent Boult walked a little taller, bowled a little quicker, swung the ball a little more; Tim Southee became the bowler he had threatened to become; Martin Guptill emerged as a contender. Kane Williamson, you suspect, would have inched his way to greatness no matter who was leading the team, rather it was the potential underachievers who grew in stature.

How did this happen? First came honest assessment. In those early difficult days off captaincy, McCullum and Hesson sat down and appraised how the team were perceived. Overpaid and underachieving by common consent — and that included McCullum, who was regarded as a Twenty20 master but was almost a decade into a Test career without much to show for it. Time to change.

If he then changed perceptions of himself, from chancer to statesman, he did it without sacrificing his essential attitude to the game, which is to have a go and play to win, no matter the situation. For a country that had played essentially risk-free, conservative cricket for most of its history it was quite a transformation. The 50-over game proved to be ripe for reinvention. A game that administrators had to tinker with endlessly because it had become so formulaic and, frankly, boring, returned to its attacking roots in the last World Cup, driven by New Zealand, the co-hosts. One example — England’s humiliation in Wellington — will suffice. On a largely blameless surface, McCullum posted so many slips and gullys that England batsmen were conned into thinking that the ball must have been swinging lavishly for Southee. It is a truism that a captain is useless without good bowlers, but here was an example of a captain fooling the opposition that his bowlers were better than they were. England were blown away. New Zealand could not quite go all thet way, but they won hearts and minds and refreshed a format that, until then, had been slowly dying.

If it was an attitude that was transferred to the longer form of the game, it also had an impact on the opposition. For all the reasons given for England’s renaissance in 2015, none perhaps was more important than the visit of the Black Caps in early summer. New Zealand were uninhibited, seemingly unconcerned about defeat and visibly enjoying the game, and Alastair Cook looked across at McCullum and saw something that he envied: a dynamic professional in cavalier’s costume. Since then, he and England have been noticeably more relaxed.

Captains who change something fundamental about their team and their country’s cricket are rare breeds. In the modern game, think of Clive Lloyd, uniting the Caribbean; think of Imran Khan, too, ridding Pakistan of an inferiority complex and tearing them away from the stupefying cricket of the 1960s and early 1970s. And think of McCullum: the man who, for a short while, challenged rugby’s preeminence and gave New Zealand an entertaining bite.      

 

How To Train For A Marathon

 

From hill sprints to sickly gel packs, training for a marathon has become a complicated business. And that, according to scientists from the University of Cambridge, is where we have been going wrong.

Their advice is simple: run lots of miles, slowly, while wearing three layers of clothing. Christof Schwiening will argue in a talk at the Cambridge science festival next month that the focus on speed work is “rubbish”.

The study began five years ago when an Italian researcher devised a straightforward but reliable formula for calculating marathon times based on an athlete’s weekly distance and average speed over eight weeks of training. “My first thought was there was no way it could be true,” Dr Schwiening said. “Then I ran through my own data and it seemed to be really accurate.”

The scientist has two golden theories. The first is about consistency: running 50 miles a week at various paces does not give the body enough practice for the rigours of a 26-mile race. Cover 80 or 100 miles at a gentler speed, however, and your circulation will naturally adapt to the demands of a marathon.

The second has more to do with sweat. Dr Schwiening said many amateur runners felt exhausted two thirds of the way through a marathon because they had sweated out so much salt. The way around this barrier is to make yourself sweat as much as possible when you train by wearing layers of clothes. This deepens the sweat glands, allowing runners to reabsorb more salt.

The 22 researchers have put their legs where their mouths are. Over the past 18 months Dr Schwiening has been running an average of 21 miles a day at seven or eight minutes a mile, with two running jackets on top of his shirt. In a few months he cut his best time by almost a quarter of an hour to two hours and 45 minutes, just outside the official threshold for elite runners.

The only drawback is that the university running club, the Cambridge Hare and Hounds, has resolutely ignored Dr Schwiening’s method. “I’m not going to tell them what to do,” he said. “I’m a scientist, not a coach.”      

 

Skarping

 

Every day in the summer, my dad woke up at the crack of dawn, started up the engine of what seemed like his sixth different “new” boat and set his rod out on the waters of Lake Nissipping in Canada. “I do it for the thrill of it,” he told me recently, describing the difficulty of picking the perfect bait, depth and location to land a big one. “That’s why they call it fishing, not catching.” But most of us in the entertain-me generation require something a bit more … stimulating. Now what if you could combine the rush of waterskiing with the satisfaction of the hunt? That’s skarping, a bizzaro form of fishing that promises more catching — and a whole lot less yawning.

First, head to the Illinois River. It’s infested with Asian carp, a species of fish known for its thick noggin and tendency to jump eight to 10 feet in the air when startled. The best way to get them hopping? “Two-stroke motors and aluminum boats,” says Peoria Carp Hunters’ Nathan Wallick, who invented skarping with friends from his bowfishing business in Peoria, Illinois. “Their heads are solid bone,” he adds, so you’ll need a football helmet and a padded life jacket for protection. From there, you just start skiing or waterboarding, pull out a fishing net and, preferably, toss your catches into a floating basketball hoop (which you drag alongside you in a tube, of course). And, yes, this patchwork chimera of sports looks as crazy as it sounds.

Skarping came to fruition after Wallick grew tired of dodging the flying carp and decided to “make them pay.” His early iterations were decidedly more medieval: He and his buddies first used pointed garden tools and spears. Wallick still takes people out on bowfishing trips, charging $140 per hour per group, but he doesn’t bring customers skarping anymore because he couldn’t get insurance for, well, pretty obvious reasons. Adventurous solo-ers will have the best luck at making the fish jump between June and mid-October, especially in warm, shallow water.

One drawback: Non-local fishermen will have to travel to get their skarping fix. In North America, Asian carp are almost solely found in the Mississippi, Missouri and Illinois rivers. Abroad, they’re most common in Southeast Asia. Also, the intrinsically violent nature of the sport has some animal advocates crying foul. “ Fish suffer anytime they’re yanked out of the water,” says Ashley Byrne, a PETA campaign specialist. If thrown into a bag and dragged by a boat, “they’re going to suffocate, which is miserable.” Wallick insists that he eats the fish he catches, or uses them for fertilizer.

Wildlife officials could use “sonic and light deterrents,” Byrne says, as well as physical walls, to keep the population at a manageable level. But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has already erected an electric barrier to keep them from spreading even more, and local fishermen see carp fishing as their contribution. “Plus, it’s just good wholesome fun to watch people impale fish while waterskiing,” Wallick says.      

 

Drone Racing

 

A group of men will gather beneath Kentucky this month to race drones through an underground cave complex.

Glowing blue hoops, through which their drones must fly, will be positioned over the 1,400ft course, and a long, glowing LED rope will run along the floor, like the thread that guided Theseus out of the labyrinth.

These are the first rounds of a burgeoning new activity that is halfway between a sport and a video game.

The Mega Drone X contest is one of the qualifying events for the US national drone racing championships. Contestants have been gathering in fields, sports stadiums and arenas all over America, wearing wrap-around goggles that show them the world as seen from the camera on their drone.

In August the winners of these contests will compete in New York City against the best drone pilots in the world for a $50,000 prize. That will be followed by the official world drone racing championship, in a private nature reserve in Hawaii in October, with $200,000 at stake.

Some say that drone racing resembles a scene from Star Wars — specifically the pod-racing contest in The Phantom Menace. Others say that it is rather like watching hummingbirds flitting about a backyard. The drones are not much larger than a shoebox and travel at up to 70mph, meaning that it can be hard to tell what they are doing.

The pilots, often self-proclaimed nerds, clutch remote controls like those in a video game. In their wrap-around goggles they look rather like Geordi La Forge, the blind commander from Star Trek: The Next Generation, had he dressed more like a skateboarder. Yet the very elements that may make it hard for drone racing to pack stadiums are already drawing large crowds online. The emerging heroes of the new sport gain tens of thousands of views online for their videos of manoeuvres beneath motorway underpasses and in multistorey car parks.

In one of the most popular, Carlos Puertolas, known as Charpu, flies his drone through an abandoned hospital, diving through glassless portholes and along graffiti-strewn corridors. It has been viewed one and a half million times on YouTube. “It’s like flying in a dream,” a pilot named Steele Davis told CBS. He said he did not quite stretch his arms out like Superman as he flew, but he acknowledged sometimes wanting to.

The first national championship was in California last summer. The victor was Chad Nowak, an Australian. After his victory he moved to America, hoping to become a professional drone racer. “I’m testing the waters and seeing what’s available and if there’s a future for me over here,” he told ABC in Australia. “It’s an exciting time.”      

 

Marathons Are Pointless

 

Have we devised any greater waste of time and energy than the running of the marathon? I’m asking for a friend.

This friend will soon be training for the New York City Marathon, and he’ll be going at it for a span of 20 weeks. When he’s finished all his workouts, iced his injuries and prepped his body for the brutal course, he’ll be ready to achieve a goal that has no meaning in itself and offers benefits to no one. Like half a million others in this country every year, he’ll have put in at least 100 hours (and maybe more) to an unpaid part-time job, just so he can lope across an arbitrary distance set a century ago to please an arbitrary power. Twenty-six miles and 385 yards: the span between the window of the royal nursery at Windsor Castle and the royal box at Shepherd’s Bush.

Some will read this as a #slatepitch, and say it’s just a way for me to troll for clicks, as if calling runners foolish were like saying pie is overrated or that constellations suck. But the logic goes the other way: It’s the runners who have gone against the grain; it’s the runners who have tried to make a virtue of their quirky point of view; it’s the runners who demand attention for all the time they spend on worthless locomotion; it’s the runners who are trolling all the rest of us. The marathon must be the biggest #slatepitch of all time.

The case against the marathon—and for people to do something better with their time—is so apparent that one really shouldn’t have to give it voice. In a world that’s just and sane, the burden of proof would fall the other way, on all the maniacs who are draining so much effort in this risky, fruitless hobby. Figure that some 550,000 Americans will be running one this year, training up to five or six days per week for five or six months. That means they’ll have devoted something like 100 million hours to this dash away from common sense. Put another way, they’ll have spent 11,000 years, and 150 human lifetimes.

Consider all the other things we could accomplish in those hours spent in training. Half a million Americans could speak a little Arabic. Half a million Americans could learn computer programming, maybe well enough to start a new career. Half a million Americans could devote themselves to helping out in soup kitchens, or fortifying dikes, or memorizing sonnets, or playing Google Image Labeler. Half a million Americans could do something truly beneficial for themselves or for their neighbors or for the country as a whole.

Instead they run and run and run, and then they run some more.

Why do they run? I have no idea.

I hope it’s not that people run in marathons to improve their health. All the evidence goes the other way: Getting ready for a 26-mile run breaks your body down. “Use your non-running days to rest and recover,” advises one training website. “Ice down any soreness, particularly in knees or shins (most common) four times per day. … Injuries often sneak up without warning.” That sounds more like self-abuse than self-improvement.

Indeed a vast, disturbing literature has now accumulated on the ill effects of running marathons. Studies find that up to 1 in 12 participants end up seeking medical help during the race. (At hot-weather events, runners can end up “dropping like flies.”) As many as four-fifths report having gastrointestinal problems such as bloating, cramps, vomiting, diarrhea, and fecal incontinence while on the course. Some runners suffer from blood poisoning. Others must endure a blitz of dermatological conditions: sore nipples (affecting up to 1 in 6 on race day); chafing (another 1 in 6); blisters (1 in 3); and jogger’s toe (1 in 40). Given all the risks, it’s no wonder that some marathon organizers have asked doctors to embed as race participants so they can quickly tend to runners who collapse.

When researchers consider all the injuries that accrue during the period of training—and not just on the day of the marathon itself—they find even greater cause for alarm. One study looked at 255 participants in an extended, 32-week marathon training program and found that 90 of them—that’s 35 percent—experienced “overuse” injuries. (Among the most common training ailments are anterior knee pain, Achilles tendinitis, shin splints, and stress fractures.) Another research group surveyed 725 men who raced in the 2005 Rotterdam Marathon, and found that more than half of them had sustained a running injury over the course of the year. Among those who sustained a new injury during the month leading up to the race, one-quarter were still suffering, to some extent, three months later.

Deaths do occur during the marathon, but I’m glad to say they’re very, very rare. Most runners’ ailments will be temporary; then again, most runners won’t have any benefits to weigh against those modest costs. Even if they don’t ruin their knees, twist their ankles, or bang their toes while training, their weekly hobby won’t do much to help their health. Marathoners fail to lose weight, as a rule, and while aerobic exercise may be good for the heart, doing a huge amount of aerobic exercise brings at best diminishing returns.

The sport isn’t merely dangerous; it’s extravagant. It costs more than $250 just to enter the New York City Marathon and to have the chance to chafe your nipples alongside 50,000 other people. Meanwhile, humanity’s oldest form of exercise has spawned a multibillion-dollar industry in footwear. Even efforts to pare down the sport to fundamentals have been absorbed into this marketing, such that there now exists a set of high-priced products known, improbably enough, as “barefoot running shoes.”

I get the feeling that marathoners think of themselves as gritty, motivated types, who would rather train and get things done than sit around watching videos on Facebook. Indeed, they’ll often note the fact of their accomplishment (we might think of this as “showing off”) on social media. For them, the pursuit of running 26 miles may have less to do with any functional reward than merely having gone through training in the first place. It’s an exercise of will, not one of purpose; the marathoner views achievement as a virtue of its own—like climbing Everest because it’s there.

It’s telling that this monomania gets rewarded—every single time, with cheering crowds and Facebook likes—despite its lack of substance. (At least Everest has a view!) I guess the form itself excites us: We’re so starved for ways to show self-discipline, and to regiment our time, that any goal will do, even one so imbecilic as the marathon. This only calls attention to the wasted opportunity: If we want to celebrate the act of building up to something hard—if we’re ready to devote ourselves, for at least 100 hours, to regimented training—then we should strive for something better. Instead of spending all that time purely for the sake of having spent it, let’s pursue a goal that has some meaning in itself.      

 

Kabaddi

AT 6PM on a sweltering weekday evening, a street junction in Ahmedabad in western India is abuzz. On a footpath outside a big stadium, a hawker peddles colourful jerseys and wrist bands as young men line up to have the country’s flag painted on their faces. Selfies abound. A long queue snakes around the stadium’s corner, waiting for its gates to be opened. Tilak Patel, an engineering student, has driven six hours with his friends to reach the venue. “It’s worth it,” he says on a day when India is set to take on England—not in a game of cricket, but in the 12-nation World Cup tournament of Kabaddi, an ancient Indian contact sport that has gripped the country. The hometown fans were duly rewarded for their dedication: after two invigorating weeks, India successfully defended its title in the final on October 22nd.

Kabaddi is a cross between freestyle wrestling and rugby that tests speed, agility and power. Two teams of seven players each take turns in dispatching an attacker, known as a “raider”, onto the defender’s turf. To earn points, he must tag an opponent while mumbling “Kabaddi kabaddi” in one long breath, and then hop back in his half. If the raider is wrestled and pinned down by any of the defenders, he is suspended from the game temporarily, until his team wins him back by tackling the opposition’s attacker. Needing only a patch of earth and no equipment, the sport has flourished in the boondocks since time immemorial, but had little backing to become a national phenomenon.

Enter the Pro Kabaddi League (PKL), a glitzy version of the village sport played indoors under disco lights, loud music and cheering fans. Inaugurated in 2014, the PKL is modeled along the lines of the wildly popular Indian Premier League (IPL), the world’s most lucrative cricket circuit. Backed by celebrity owners and corporate honchos, every team must field at least three foreign players in an attempt to glaze the league with an international shine. During its inaugural season, 430m viewers tuned in to watch on television, second only to the IPL’s 552m.

Kabaddi’s rise in India is in part because other sports have failed to impress. Field hockey, formerly India’s national sport, is in an abysmal state. The erstwhile world-beaters that won six consecutive Olympic Gold medals between 1928 and 1956 failed to qualify for the Olympics at Beijing in 2008, and finished last in the London edition. In Rio de Janeiro this year, India at least reached the knock-out stage—for the first time in 36 years. Football’s “Indian Super League”, launched in 2013, is only moderately successful. The sport is devoid of homegrown superstars, and the popular ones in the league are retired international players. Finally, the country appears to show signs of suffering from peak cricket. The recently concluded Test series against New Zealand attracted paltry crowds, at least when compared with the packed stadiums when Australia toured India in 2001.

Facing such a sporting vacuum, Kabaddi has rushed in to fill the void. The game is fast-paced and lively; teams are docked points if they are too defensive, and the winner is declared within 40 minutes, less than that of an episode of popular soap operas in India. The game’s international reputation is not bad either. According to some estimates, it is played in over 65 countries. Its fledgling presence in small pockets across the globe is down to India’s large migrant population. For instance, in England, in the late 1980s, the sport was televised on Channel 4. Two decades after it was introduced in Japan, over 1,000 men play for 30 clubs in Tokyo and Hiroshima. Earlier this month, a few thousand spectators assembled in Fresno County, California, for the “2016 Kabaddi Cup”, now in its 22nd year.

Kabaddi’s ability to borrow skills from other sports easily has helped to broaden its appeal. In South Korea, which upset India in the tournament-opener, Kabaddi is a natural extension of judo and taekwondo. Iran, famous for its achievements in wrestling, took to the sport more easily than others, and is now the second-best side in the world. The sport also has some resemblance to British Bulldog, a tag-based game popular in some circles in England. The current Australian Kabaddi team consists mainly of butch ex-Australian-rules football players, who know a thing or two about tackling and charging.

For all its overnight success, however, the turning point for formalising the game came during the 1990 Asian Games, when Kabaddi moved indoors. Interest spiked in the 2006 event at Doha, when it attracted baying fans in a packed stadium. That was when Charu Sharma, a cricket presenter and the former boss of an IPL cricket team, got the idea of starting a league of his own, convinced owners to buy teams, kept ticket prices low and let the games begin.

A hallmark of the PKL was that it did not only target the best players from across the world. That would have meant having a sport dominated by India, Pakistan and Iran—much like cricket appears to have reached a saturation point with India, England and Australian boards calling the shots. Instead, the PKL sought to recruit rookie players from countries where the sport had a small following. For instance, America’s World Cup team is a motley crew of dreadlocked rappers. Other teams have an engineer, a fisherman, a monk and a shopkeeper among them. Most are still learning the ropes. Kenya’s side learned the game via YouTube, and trained for over two years on athletic turfs. Argentina played its first major competitive match earlier this month.

Still, this bodes well for the internationalisation of the game—at least when compared with the American and Canadian cricket teams, which are flush with members of the Indian diaspora. In honour of the Kenyan team’s spirited performance, their players earned a meeting with the country’s president, and a promise to obtain synthetic mats for training upon their return. Domestic leagues in other countries are taking shape, too. Mauritius, Zimbabwe and Kenya have kicked off their own versions of the PKL, and Pakistan’s Super Kabaddi League is slated to start sometime next month.

The trade-off implicit in this inclusive approach is that matches will continue to be one-sided until the rest of the world starts to catch up. India has won seven consecutive medals at the Asian Games, as well as every edition of the Kabaddi World Cup. But the presence of such a Goliath figure can create irresistible narratives when they eventually fall—witness the 2004 Olympics, in which America’s vaunted basketball team had to settle for a mere bronze. And although India did eventually triumph in the 2016 World Cup, there was plenty of drama along the way. Thailand, Japan and Kenya were in contention for a semi-final slot until the last game of the round-robin stage, and Poland managed to stun the formidable Iranians. In turn, Iran fought remarkably in a thrilling final, and led after the first half before succumbing to the hosts.

The sport, too, has evolved from the rough-and-tumble of the schoolyard version, making it easier to sell to an international audience. Mud has given way to mats, and bare feet to fancy footwear. The rule to disqualify raiders if they draw fresh breath has been scrapped. Instead, a 30-second countdown goes up on a big screen as the attacker sallies forth chanting “Kabaddi Kabaddi”. The revamped rules make purists nervous: whereas the mud pit provides a cushion for players to use as a springboard to outwit defenders, such stunts could cause injuries on synthetic mats. Moreover, teams these days also tend to “play safe” and do not try difficult manoeuvres, grumbles Ramachandra Jadhav, a former player and coach with over 35 years in the game. Nonetheless, Kabaddi continues to retain its essence of rewarding wit and deception over brute force. “If it was all about winning by power, we would have taken the trophy”, says Laventa Oguta, Kenya’s head coach. But she was stymied by a “street-smart” Indian team that “doesn’t let you use your strength.”

Kabaddi has built a strong economic foundation for continued growth. Top players in the PKL earn up to 4m-5m rupees a year ($60,000-$75,000), a hefty sum for players who might otherwise be tilling fields or working in mills. Mr Jadhav reckons that students from over 120 schools grapple in Mumbai’s maidans (fields), up from around 40-50 two years ago. “Even English medium schools have started participating”, he says, illustrating the resurgence of a poor man’s sport. Outside India, the tournament was broadcast live in over 120 countries. Back in Ahmedabad, however, the locals have no use for television. “It’s nothing compared to TV,” says Akshay Patel, a teenager queuing up to enter. “Watching it from inside the stadium is the real thing.”      

 

     

 

     

 

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