Complete lack of self-awareness.

From The Metro:

THE father of a Team GB snowboarder who died on her 18th birthday has said missing a flight to a training camp tipped her ‘over the edge’. Tony Soutter said Ellie had battled mental health problems and struggled with the pressure of top-level sport.

He said: "Unfortunately it all came about from missing a flight, which meant she didn’t go training with the GB squad. She felt she had let them down, she felt she had let me down. And tragically it just takes one silly little thing like that to tip somebody over the edge because there’s a lot of pressure on children...

"That was a lot to do with the fact that she wasn’t able to compete last season and do what she would have loved to have done through a total lack of funding. I have lost my best friend. She was my rock. I’ve done nothing but live for her for 18 years. Now I’ve got to start all over again really. If I didn’t she’d be mortified."

Wimbledon prize money doesn't go far these days...

From City AM:

Tennis stars are descending on Wimbledon ahead of the start of the tournament next week, but many might be disappointed to find that winning one of the most acclaimed sporting competitions in the world could not even buy them a detached house in the local area.

While winners of the men's and women's singles titles are set for a £2.25m windfall, the average cost of a detached home in Wimbledon's SW19 postcode is a far higher £2.9m.

There was another article in City AM last week explaining that lucky home owners in SW19 will earn more by renting out their homes during Wimbledon fortnight than will be paid out in prize money, but I can't track that one down.

"No sorry, the speed skating is not on for another two years..."

... says the German beach volleyball player politely, while making the international symbol for c**t behind her back.



Pic from BBC

If pedantry were an Olympic event...

It riles me that they all abbreviate "Rio de Janeiro" to "Rio". That's like abbreviating "New York" to "New" or "Sao Paolo" to "Sao". "Rio" is the least important part of the name!

As we all well know, "Rio" is the Portuguese/Spanish word for "River" (see also Rio Grande, Rio Tinto etc). Behindthename further informs us:

Its full name is Rio de Janeiro, which means "river of January", so named because the first explorers came to the harbour in January and mistakenly thought it was a river mouth.

Look on a map - Rio de Janeiro does not have a prominent river running through it (like London or Rome), so that makes abbreviating the name to Rio even more annoying.
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I couldn't avoid catching a few seconds of live coverage of something or other recently, the commentator solemnly announced that the competitor's time was "... seconds faster than the world record"

Bollocks. His or her time was precisely 0.0 seconds faster than the world record because be definition it is the world record.

"Maria Sharapova distances herself from Nike following 'sweat shop' rumours"

From the BBC:

Maria Sharipova has moved quickly to distance herself her sponsor Nike after rumours surfaced that the company's products are made in factories in Asia where child labour is common.

Ms Sharipova said she was "saddened and surprised" at the company's admission that even adult workers in those factories are paid less than $1 a day, meaning it would take them six months to earn enough to buy a pair of the overrated and overpriced shoes.

Nike said that they had been sub-contracting to sweat shops since 1996, on the advice of their accountants.

She is one of the highest paid female athletes with earnings of over $30m last year from winnings and endorsements, meaning she earns more money than every one of Nike's single sweat shop workers put together.

"Doctors urge schools to ban racquets in squash"

From the BBC:

More than 70 doctors and academics are calling for a ban on racquets in squash matches played in UK and Irish schools.

In an open letter to ministers, they say injuries from this "high-impact collision sport" can have lifelong consequences for children. They argue two thirds of injuries in youth squash are caused by contact with the opponent's racquet and urge schools to move to catching and throwing the ball instead.

Supporters say dodging your opponent's swings to avoid injury builds character and other forms are less challenging.

The concerns have been raised as a seven-year programme headed by England Squash is on target to introduce the game to a million children in state schools across England. The programme, which began in 2012 and is running until 2019, has so far reached 400 schools, with 350 to follow.

Fun Online Polls: Charity spending & Sports Lack Of Personality Of The Year Award

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

How much of their income do major UK charities actually spend on charitable causes?

Next to nothing - 21%
A quarter - 41%
Half - 25%
Three quarters - 8%
Nearly all - 5%

It appears that taking major UK 'charities' as a whole, 'about half' is the correct answer, some do worse, some do better.

I think there are two separate issues here. The people at the top - an army of trustees, directors, advisors, auditors and lawyers - just help themselves.

And then there is the issue of fund raising. See my earlier post. A charity ends up as a profit maximising organisation, so if they can spend £9 on fund raising to generate £10 in donations, they will do so. Little wonder that some charities spend most of their 'income' on fund raising.
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This week's Fun Online Poll...

It appears to me that most of the candidates in the BBC's list of finalists have not done anything remarkable this year and/or have a distinct lack of personality i.e. they will do or say nothing to upset their sponsors or The Establishment i.e. the BBC.

So let's do the decent thing and have a Sports Lack Of Personality Of The Year Award. Please vote for the candidate who has achieved least in the last twelve months; does not appear to utter anything apart from platitudes; and/or who appears most often in advertisements. Failing that, just vote for somebody you've never heard of (half of them, in my case).

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar. Just to lighten things up, you are allowed one vote per day if you feel that more than one person meets all those criteria.

"Petition for boxer to be removed from BBC Sports Lack Of Personality of the Year shortlist gains over 30,000 signatures"

From The Independent:

Campaigners are urging the BBC to pull Tyson Fury  from the Sports Lack of Personality of the Year (SLOPOTY) shortlist amid accusations that he does not simply spout platitudes but actually speaks his own odious mind after a petition reached over 30,000 signatures.

The heavyweight boxing champion was announced as one of the sports people shortlisted for the annual award after his victory over tri-lingual Ukrainian psychopath Wladimir Klitschko on Saturday.

Fury features on the list alongside athletes including the pleasant, inoffensive and otherwise thoroughly unremarkable Jessica Ennis-Hill, Mo Farah and Greg Rutherford. The final winner is chosen by a public vote on 20 December.

So I guess we're not all racists now

From Joseph Harker, 24th November

Yet somehow, it seems, the British public has not taken Hamilton to heart. In 2008, when he seemed a shoo-in for the British public’s vote as BBC sports personality of the year, he lost out to cyclist Chris Hoy. The preceding British F1 champions, Damon Hill and Nigel Mansell, had each won the viewers’ vote twice – including years when they hadn’t even won the title. This year Hamilton will definitely be in the shortlist of 10 to be announced tonight, but the chances are that he will ultimately miss the main award again, with golfer Rory McIlroy the odds-on favourite.

...

Ultimately, Lewis deserves recognition because his success goes far beyond sport itself. But if he never gains national acceptance through the sports personality vote, it will say more about Britain than about him.

From the BBC 14th December

Sport and Class

The Stigler's earlier post on sport in schools got me thinking, a bit.  Some of you may know that my particular sport (passion?) is motor sport.  And in many ways the development of UK motorsport, and its rise to international dominance - although declining a bit now - is interesting in how it reflects class, or perhaps wealth.

Before WW2 motor sport in the UK generally revolved around Brooklands.  The spectators and participants came from the 'right crowd and there was no crowding'.  But, by the late '30's a small number of impecunious enthusiasts were looking to see how they could also go racing, without basically any money. And out of that grew the 750 Motor Club which was started, by among others the notable Bill Boddy.

The immediate post war racing scene was dominated by generally the same marques as pre-war; Maserati, Alfa Romeo, Lancia and by the early 1950's Mercedes Benz.  And out of the Italian marques grew Ferrari. Ferrari built his business by selling to rich people and basic cronyism and political manipulation.

Meanwhile back in England the 750 Motor Club encouraged innovation among its relatively low wealth members who developed very ingenious, and low cost, methods of making cars go quickly.  People like Cooper, Chapman, Broadley, Duckworth and Costin and others drove forward development.  And pretty well none of them were in any way upper class or aristocratic. This was grass roots stuff.  There were also Jingoistic industrialists like Tony Vandervell (Vanwall - whose aerodynamics were sorted by Costin and suspension by Chapman) or Lyons (Jaguar) who sought to challenge the Continentals. By the late '50's other players like Lister and Connaught - run by the same sort of underfunded enthusiasts - were making a serious impact in what we now call Europe.

Other factors also helped UK motor sport.  Lots of disused aerodromes with excellent perimeter tracks just made for setting out as a circuit; Silverstone, Snetterton, Thruxton and Croft to name but four.  There were also a lot of adventurous, underemployed and technically trained individuals looking for new excitements or to make an excitement to replace the lost adrenaline rush of combat.

In short the UK was a hot house of development and opportunity, and most of it came from the bottom, not the top.  The very sport that one would think would be a rich man's game became the game of everyman. And what this 'free market' did was to innovate and out-develop every other country in the world.  No subsidies, no government help, no tax breaks, no 'special status' or development area grants.  Just the famous free for all of the free market, and a huge amount of ingenuity, and I think crucially, a shortage of money.

The car I race now was designed in 1963 by a bloke who is still alive and whom I know well.  He was part of the 750MC revolution and he maintains that by the early '60's 'we had sorted out all the issues with designing suspensions and chassis and engines'.  Taking that knowledge - worked out by the average bloke - he and others like Cooper, Chapman, Broadly and Derek Bennett went and totally stuffed all the grandee continental teams.

So perhaps using the example of one of the most expensive sports of all, it is not being born into or having wealth or being subsidised that drives success. It is ingenuity and determination, and liberty; the absence of bureaucratic constraints.

Sport in Schools

From the BBC

State sector head teachers need to stop treating competitive sport as an "optional extra", says Ofsted's chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw.(1)

In a report, commissioned after the 2012 Olympics, he argues too many top athletes are from private schools.(2)

Schools where pupils lack opportunities to excel in sport also tend to do worse academically, according to the report.(3)

But the National Union of Teachers said Ofsted's comparison between state and private school sport was "ridiculous".(4)

The report, Going the extra mile: Excellence in competitive school sport, was commissioned after the London games to explore why so many Team GB athletes had been educated in private rather than state schools.(5)

1. As a parent, I couldn't give two hoots about my kids doing competitive sport. I hated rugby and football at school and if my kids feel the same way, I couldn't care less. Some people just don't suit it, don't have the co-ordination for it and it's supposed to be fun, and if it isn't, kids shouldn't be doing it.

2. So, what? Sport is economically destructive, especially at the elite level of Olympic sport. People dedicate years of their lives, remortgage houses to pay for coaches, equipment and so forth so that their kid can win a gold medal and then maybe get a couple of years of not especially well paid endorsement opportunities afterwards. And the rewards are only for the winners, not the hundreds of kids who never make it. If the rich want to make themselves poorer playing with a hobby, let them.

3. Which is correlation, not causation. Well-funded schools fund both the lab and the rowing lake. They also generally have parents who've worked to get them into a good school and are committed to seeing them get good results.

4. True. I know someone who is the squash teacher at a private school in Gloucestershire. Squash.

5. Because the Olympic system of funding is rigged towards sports that we're most likely to win something at, which are either obscure sports that no-one cares about winning, including lots of sports with high equipment costs such as yachting, rowing and showjumping that mean you aren't competing with Africans, Jamaicans and Kazakhs. And the people who do things like rowing and showjumping often go to private schools.  The right thing to do would be to stop that on the basis that the state shouldn't fund people's hobbies, but government loves a bit of jingoism now and again, regardless of how worthless the baubles are, so won't stop doing it.

Celebrity horse attack

From The Daily Mail:

A polo player who taught Princes William and Harry has died in a freak accident in Florida after his horse fell on top of him when the animal was hit in the head with a mallet.

Mexican Carlos Gracida, often described as the Queen's favourite player, was a favourite instructor with celebs and royalty, giving lessons to Prince Charles and his sons as well as King Constantine II of Greece and actor Sylvester Stallone.

The 53-year-old dad-of-two won most of the world's major tournaments, including the US Open nine times and the British Open 10 times.

"Children's exercise policy is child cruelty"

From the BBC:

The national policy to get UK children to do more exercise amounts to mass "child cruelty", the British Journal of Electronic Games Retailers says.

An editorial in the magazine says successive governments have implemented a comprehensive national policy of forcing children to undertake physical activities which most find physically and emotionally painful, not to mention pointless.

By contrast, a sedentary lifestyle in front of a computer or TV screen hones hand to eye coordination, improves reaction times and helps children to bond closely with their friends and classmates by taking part in multi-player games online, it argues...

Co-author Dr Richard Weiler, a consultant in sport and exercise medicine at University College London and club doctor at West Ham football club said:

"You don't need to have been in my job for long to realise that sport is pretty much a guarantee of long term and irreversible damage to the body.

"Which is why animals left to their own devices don't play much sport.

"There has been a persistent failure from this government and former governments to meet children's basic physical and psychological needs."

Tokyo loses race to host Games

From the BBC

Tokyo has been chosen to waste billions on the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games ahead of Istanbul and Madrid.

The Japanese capital lost a final round of voting by International Olympic Committee (IOC) members in Buenos Aires to lose to Istanbul by 60 votes to 36.

The announcement was met with anger from taxpayers in Japan, as Tokyo prepares to host the event for the first time since 1964.

When IOC president Jacques Rogge - who will retire after 12 years in the role on Tuesday - announced the winning city, Madrid taxpayers jumped to their feet in celebration and waved the Spanish flag.

A number of them were overcome with emotion and wept, following two years of anxiety.

"I would like to thank everyone in the Olympic movement for giving the games to Tokyo" a delighted Istanbul taxi driver said.

A Spanish software developer added: "It is a great that Tokyo has been chosen. I'd like to thank them for picking up the tab for my entertainment. We really dodged a bullet there."

Sporting Participation

The head of Sport Wales is complaining that sporting participation is falling because of budget cuts (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-23409300) and sporting participation has fallen since the Olympics  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/10200815/What-has-been-London-2012s-legacy-for-the-Olympic-sports-a-year-after-the-Games.html).

But what everyone seems to miss is that the sports that people play the most are the sports that kids can easily play. And "easy" means:

1. minimal equipment
2. no fixed minimum number of players
3. simple surfaces
4. little maintenance required
5. no judges
6. no supervision, low risk of injury

Football is the most popular sport in the world, because it's small boys in the park/scrubland/favela, jumpers for goalposts, go out with a ball, play until teatime. A kid can get up, grab the equipment to play the game, carry it, call on a friend, go somewhere and play it, when they fancy playing it.

If you look the sports that are the most popular in each country, they fit the same pattern.

1) Football. See above.

2) Basketball. You need a ball, a hard surface, a hoop and a couple of mates

3) Cricket. You need a tree in a park (or in India, portable stumps), a bat, a ball, some flat ground and half a dozen mates.

4) Baseball. A ball, some jumpers, some mates, a park and a glove

So, the answer isn't to spend £9 bn on a massive 3 week sporting bondoogle. It's to spend a fraction of that on leaving people with open spaces, and the council sending out a cleaning team to pick up any drug needles, condoms or other unsavoury items.

Whatever next?

From The Age:

The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, has defended the government's intervention in gambling advertising during live sports broadcasts, declaring it has balanced community concerns with the economic needs of broadcasters.

Ms Gillard formally announced the government's demand that TV and radio networks ban the promotion of live odds and restrict gambling advertisements during sporting matches in a press conference at Kirribilli on Sunday afternoon.

In other news:

Adverts for kids' toys and fast food to be banned from children's TV; adverts for cars to be banned from repeats of Top Gear on Dave; adverts for food and supermarkets to be banned from cookery programmes (that's Food Network down the tubes, eh?); adverts for DIY superstores to be banned from home makeover shows; adverts for cosmetics and perfume to be banned from Loose Women etc etc etc.

Youth Sports Trust chief executive is either a liar or a moron: shock

From The Evening Standard:

Pupils who do not get involved in sport will "hit a ceiling" academically, the head of the Youth Sport Trust warned today.

Chief executive John Steele said physical activity was essential to improving grades, and warned that schools that did not promote sport or PE would not be able to maximise their exam results.

He said: "If we don’t develop the body, the mind will hit a ceiling. Sport should not be seen as an extra. It is a part of a child’s education and if we fail to provide that we are setting up problems for future years."

The Youth Sport Trust is just another fake charity, of course.

Thirty-five back flips

Some things just make me proud to be an American... even though I'm not an American.

"Sixty-one million Brits stay away from London's biggest ever street party"

From The Daily Mail:

Sir Chris Hoy got a ‘little bit emotional’ once more on Monday as the vast bulk of the UK population stayed away from the streets of central London to get on with their lives instead saluting Great Britain’s Olympic and Paralympic teams.

Mind you, the tedious concoction of sport we have been beaten about the head with this summer has a habit of turning all of us off. Olympic long jump champion Greg Rutherford - who, frankly, can go take a running jump - was ‘teary’ and David Weir - the apparent hard man who won four Paralympic gold medals, well, they call them gold they're just iron painted to look gold - admitted he, too, had a ‘good cry’ after winning the T54 marathon on Sunday. He'd be no match for a T-900, I tell you.

Monday's parade of athletes was hopefully our last chance to see Britain’s Olympians and Paralympians side by side, given the killing their performances have merited over the last six weeks.

It was about ignoring the rather feeble achievements of ‘the best athletes that have ever put on a British vest’, I mean, they can run quickly, throw lumps of metal and jump in sand pits, so what, saying ‘thank you’ for the £13 billion which the affair seems to have cost us so far.

It was also an opportunity for the team to be faced with the stark fact that the vast majority of the UK had no ‘joy on their faces’, as Hoy put it. But it was more like a mutual appreciation society as they and the flag-waving British public licked each other's windows in some pointless spiral of adulation; the mugs who worked for free as Games Makers, the ever-smiling volunteers who lined The Mall and the servicemen and women, police and security staff who had kept them marginally less safe than they would have been if the Olympics had been held elsewhere.

Hoy, who won two gold medals, like I said, not gold at all really, scrap value £4 I've heard, in London to become the most successful British Olympian of all time, said:

"You looked at the sheer volume of people who stayed at home, in school or at work and it was our chance, as athletes, to wonder where it all went wrong. There’s an amazing response that these little worthless lumps of metal, the medals, have with them. It is a surreal thing to experience when you see hundreds of thousands of people ignoring you, taking part in a much larger common celebration that it was finally - hopefully - all over.

"I honestly thought four years ago it couldn’t get any bigger when over a billion Chinese stayed away from the Beijing Olympics, and this was on a different scale, with only just over sixty-million Brits staying away. When you looked down a side street you could see a mass of people hurriedly disappearing into the distance when they realised we were coming. This is another day that will stay burned in my memory when I'm crying myself to sleep."

Yes, enough with the f-ing Olympics and Paralympics already, sheesh