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Aside from doing grumpy postings like this one about them here, I am pretty much ignoring the Olympics. But today, while waiting for a BBC Radio 3 piano recital, I heard the BBC Radio 3 version of the news. And one of the big stories was that Lord Moynihan (he is some kind of British Olympic big cheese) was defending a gold medal winning Chinese swimmer against accusations of having been drugged. The margin of her victory in a swimming race was, according to a defeated American coach (so said Radio 3), “troubling”.
And there you have what is surely the fundamental problem of the Olympics.
I loath the Olympics for all sorts of reasons. The invading army of officious and corrupt imperialists telling me and my fellow Londoners how to run our own city, the costs that will be spread over lifetimes (including to those who have even less interest in the games than I do), the cock-ups caused by corruption, and by it being organised by a different bunch of organisers each time, the shameless statist propaganda in the opening ceremony (the entirety of which I have recording (sensing political rucki) but I have yet to watch the damn things and probably never will), etc. etc. etc.
But this drugs accusation, whether in this particular case true or baseless, gets to the heart of the problem with the Olympics.
I, and millions of others, just do not trust Olympic athletic victories any more. The wider the margin of them, the more we all distrust them.
After all, science and technology have progressed at a dizzying rate in recent decades, in all other areas where it has profited anybody to make such progress. Why not in athlete doping, in ways that doping detection cannot detect?
In Formula 1 car racing, everyone who pays attention knows that being and having the best driver is only half of the battle, if that. F1 is a struggle between engineers and designers, not just drivers. If your engineers fall behind, having the two best drivers on the planet driving your loser cars won’t win you the championship. Which is fine, because all of this is right out there in the open. No secret is made of any of this. One of the purposes of Formula 1 is to enable car makers to boast about their enthusiasm and excellence at technology, and maybe F1 even encourages regular car-making technology to get better.
In athletics, however, the collision between the idea of individuals racing, or throwing or jumping or whatever it is, and individuals being treated more like racing cars by teams of medical experts, is not nearly so happy. In fact it pretty much destroys the entire purpose of the exercise. I mean, what the hell is the point of winning a gold medal, or for that matter winning a bronze or coming seventh, if every second person you subsequently meet (even if too polite to say so to your face) reckons you probably cheated?
The problem is that whereas last year’s F1 cars are just scrap metal, or perhaps revered but still inanimate museum pieces, Olympic athletes have to spend several more decades actually living inside the bodies that were once mucked about with by Olympic doctors, so you probably can’t just allow the doctors to let rip, with any kind of biotechnology they can devise. Remember all those miserable ex-Soviet swimmers and gymnasts. But if you don’t allow this, or if you allow some biotechnology but not other kinds, you have to find some convincing way of policing it all. As of now, they are nowhere near to doing that convincingly.
And one thing’s for sure. None of these problems are going in any way to diminish, in the decades to come.
At present, my sport of choice, cricket, has no such doping problems, or if so they keep them very firmly under wraps. Not long ago, as I wrote about here, South Africa beat England at cricket. England didn’t just lose, they were humiliated, at home, in what everyone expected to be a very closely fought game. Yet nobody in cricket believes that this extraordinary South African triumph was caused by anything more complicated than the South African team playing much, much better than the England team did. Nobody called this result “troubling”, in the way that American coach meant it. Nobody is now suggesting that the South African team had been using illegal substances. They just batted far better and bowled far better, because … well, because they just did.
Cricket certainly has its cheating problems, but they are to do with people cheating by not trying hard enough, not by off-the-field medical wizards trying too hard.
In 1980 the Olympics ceased to be what they had been for most of their modern history and even remained a little in Montreal in 1976, which was a great festival of amateur sport intimately linked to the grass roots of sport and became a curious combination of the Soviet and the commercial. Since then they have failed to fit either of the two justifiable models of modern games because they are neither amateur activity done for the love of it nor are they entertainment organised commercially. The overwhelming majority of Olympic sports have no spectator following of any substance and in the case of those which do (such as tennis, basketball and football) the event is peripheral and a nuisance to the normal calendar. Olympians are no longer the outsiders who make it in their own way – as Harold Abrahams was or Don Thompson who won a walking medal in 1960 training on his own, using his own methods. Nor are they genuinely commercial stars like Lewis Hamilton or Didier Drogba. They are Soviet-style, state-subsidised creatures, competing for the benefit of their political masters: “Team GB” with the PM as skipper.
– Lincoln Allison
Incoming from Michael J, drawing my attention to this video of the Mayor of London flagging up the Olympic Games in appropriately manic style, minus a great deal of piss that has been edited out of him, so to speak. The official grand opening is tomorrow.
Right at the end, in the one bit of Not Boris, someone shouts: “I hate Sebastian Coe!” This, if I am not mistaken, was Jeremy Paxman. I did not know he felt that way about Coe. (LATER: He doesn’t. Or not publicly. Not Paxman. See first comment.)
This sort of thing is the twenty first century’s version of pelting those who consider themselves Great and Good with vegetables.
Enjoy.
More on Boris Johnson here: here and here.
Yesterday, Michael Jennings fixed up for the two of us to take advantage of the relative cheapness of final day tickets for a test match in England. Accordingly, yesterday morning, we and the many others with the same idea made our way to the Oval, home of Surrey County Cricket Club (which I support) and just across the river from where I live, to watch the fifth and final day of the first test match, of a mere three this summer between England and South Africa.
And the big news, from the point of view of any cricket atheists reading this, is that it really is now summer, finally. Look at all the clouds in these pictures. That’s right, there aren’t any. Click on them for bigger versions with more sky. Sill no clouds:
On the left there is the view of the old pavilion and associated buildings and stands. On the right is a TV cameraman high up above the new stand, to our right as we sat.
And we sat, in the sun, for the two two hour sessions that it took for the game to end. I had thought of everything else. Camera: tick, obviously. Food: tick. Drink: tick. Binoculars, which I didn’t use, but: tick. But, sunhat: not tick. “Sunblocker”: not tick. Today, the day after (similarly hot and cloudless) my face is very red and feels like it has been punched just below my left eye. My right hand has also had a good sandpapering.
But it was a fine day out nevertheless, given that I had my camera with me. I know I keep saying this in various blog postings, but I can hardly find words to communicate how much more I enjoy days out like this, now that I can take a digital camera with me and concoct a photo essay about it all later, and then, much later, look back through the photo archives, or maybe read again a blog posting like this one, and relive it all again. What’s a touch of the sun when set beside that? → Continue reading: A sunny day at the Oval
It is inevitable. The day after Bradley Wiggins (about whom Patrick Crozier wrote here) rode to victory in the Tour de France, becoming the first British winner of this famously brutal event, London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, took hold of this feat, and the upcoming Olympics, to make some points about what might appear to be a very different issue: the UK economy:
“As you listen, you realise that these performances were the result not just of physical genius, but also of colossal intellectual and emotional effort — years of self-discipline. The Olympics, in other words, is about character. It’s about the will. Of course, as Baron de Coubertin was at pains to point out, it is not all about winning. But if you want to win, then you need to work. That is the basic message of the Olympics.”
There is a problem here. Sport – so long as it does not involve cheating the rules (key qualification) is a strict meritocracy, and effort and reward hopefully are closely aligned, although that doesn’t allow for the blessings of inborn physical and mental capabilities, nor that of simple luck. There is, in my view, a danger in supposing that the qualities that are good in sport can be easily carried across into other fields. One thing that Boris J. probably understands better than some of his fellow Conservatives is that with sport, it is, at least as far as competitors are concerned, zero sum. If Bradley Wiggins wins the Tour, that means someone else doesn’t, and so on. It is not of course zero sum for the spectators and fans who get a vicarious sense of enjoyment from watching it all. But in a free economy, there is a positive-sum game: everyone “wins” as the economic pie expands as more efficient and effective ways of delivering goods and services are arrived at. And to do that, requires, not some sort of endless preaching about the need for hard work and conquest of pain, but about allowing free men and women to interact how they want, subject to as few impediments as possible from the State.
The late Robert Nozick once criticized the notion that inheritance of wealth is unfair by pointing to how people who say this often liken their ideal society to a sort of athletics race, where there is a track of fixed length, a fixed starting point and end, and a set quantity of runners seeking to acquire a pre-determined prize. A free, open society is very different. It is, as he said in Anarchy, State and Utopia, about people exchanging different things with one another without worrying about any set starting point or finishing line.
Like Boris Johnson, I agree we can and should be inspired by the courage and determination of people such as Bradley Wiggins and other athletes. Let’s not, however, confuse a sadistic 3-week peloton through the French countryside with what needs to happen to revive an over-regulated and over-taxed economy.
In the meantime, well done to Wiggins. Fantastic achievement, and he appears to be a likeable bloke as well. I hope he can cope with some of the fame and hangers-on who will be attracted to his presumed new wealth.
At some point in the next 24 hours* a Briton clad in figure-hugging lycra the colour of a canary, wearing sideburns the size of a département and sporting the logo of the MSM’s least favourite organisation will cross a line on the Champs Elysées in Paris and become the winner of the Tour de France. It will be the greatest achievement in British sporting history.
I say “greatest achievement” because there is nothing to compare with the Tour de France. It is by far the toughest event in sport. Just to complete the course is an achievement – three weeks of aching legs plus burning lungs plus crashes plus saddle sores plus mountains thins out the densest of fields. It towers above other events in cycling. Sure, the sport may have a World Champion (a Briton, as it happens) and Olympic champions (including many Britons) but the winners of those competitions would give their eye teeth (plus molars, incisors and anything else they could find in their mouths) to win the Tour.
Up until recently Britons had never been particularly good at cycling and awful at the Tour de France. Prior to the 1990s only one Briton had ever worn the leader’s yellow jersey. In the 1960s the British team – it was run on national lines in those days – had to pad itself out with anyone who could get a passport. This included one rider, Michael Wright, who despite being born in England with an impeccably English name could barely speak the language.
So, what happened? Reading between the lines of an ITV4 documentary the other night the answer would seem to be ruthless professionalism. Team Sky, Wiggins’s employers, building (loathe as I am to admit it) on state-funded Olympic success have left almost nothing to chance. Wiggins’s training has combined significant weight loss (so he can climb faster) with special exercises to strengthen his lower back (so that his torso has greater rigidity which creates less drag so making him time trial faster). His highly-talented team mates have had to sacrifice their own ambitions for that of the team. Twice, mountain specialist Chris Froome (who will be runner-up tomorrow and may well go on to win the Tour in years to come) has had to wait for Wiggins when a stage victory was there for the taking. Meanwhile, Mark Cavendish, the greatest sprinter in the world, has spent large parts of the tour as little more than a water bottle carrier.
By the way, I can’t help notice that the team’s sponsor, Wiggins’s coach, his late father and a couple of the riders are/were Australians. So, Australia’s greatest ever sporting achievement then, if it wasn’t for the fact that an Australian won it last year? Oh, and the fact that they count test cricket as a sport.
* Barring a truly bizarre set of events or a positive dope test. (It will not, not, not be to do with someone riding faster than him.)
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.
– T. E. Lawrence
Quoted – I kid you not – near the end of this video interview by South African cricketer A. B. de Villiers. The three match series between England and South Africa, featuring six of the world’s top ten Test bowlers and eight of the top seventeen Test batsmen and which will will decide which team is ranked No 1 in the world, begins today at the Oval.
Here:
Beijing Olympics officials approached the 2008 Games as an opportunity to host the world’s biggest sporting event, not to create infrastructure of permanent importance. Now Beijing is left with a post-Olympics landscape that better suits the taste of ruin porn aficionados than urban development officials. Its a story that should serve as a warning not only to London but future cities that have their sights set on investing billions into new infrastructure for a two-and-a-half week event.
I do wish people would be less free with that word “invest”, when what they actually mean is “spend”. But you can’t blame this particular guy, for our entire Keynes-soaked culture is saturated with such confusion. The modern Olympics are a gigantic exercise in digging huge Keynesian holes, running about in them, and then filling them in.
Ruin porn pictures follow.
I’m actually a tad more optimistic about London’s Olympic “infrastructure”. Our Olympic clutter will cost us many arms and many legs, for little immediate benefit or longer term benefit. And presumably, in the short run, our Olympic leftovers will suffer some disrepair and delapidation. But most of it is in a part of not-outer London that will be simply too valuable to be left to rot indefinitely. Also, our media will sneer too much if what now appears to be happening in China were to happen here. In China, media sneering is, I presume, less of a problem.
My guess is that the Dome is more of a guide to what will happen to London’s Olympic stuff. There was much faffing about in the immediate aftermath of the Millenium, but eventually, a meaningful use was found for it. Likewise, London Olympic remains will either be used or done away with and built over.
Meanwhile here are a couple more Olympic snaps I took recently. Both are of the Olympic rings now hanging from Tower Bridge. First, before they were swung down into place:
And second, after:
For further fun, you can enjoy a recent Chinese homage to Tower Bridge. It’s twice as good as the original, because it has twice the original number of towers!
Right about now, Henry IV Part 1 was supposed to start on BBC2 television, and I had my TV hard disc timed to gobble it all up. But luckily, I did not actually go out, and have thus been able to learn that Henry IV Part 1 has been postponed, until such time as the Wimbledon Men’s Doubles Final reaches its conclusion. Final set, and a Danish bloke and – get this – an English bloke – are leading 4-2. This is not a movie. This is the real thing. Even weirder, the English bloke reads like a spelling mistake. He’s called Johnny Marray. Like all of England that ever pays any attention to tennis, I am saying, who is he? And: how about that for a funny name, just one letter away from the Scottish bloke. Marray is now serving. For the match. 0-15. Pity the poor commentators.
Tomorrow, that same Scottish bloke, Andy Murray, has the seemingly hopeless task of defeating the titanic Roger Federer, in the Men’s Final.
15 all.
30-15.
Strange how the long awaited Great Hope of British tennis is now, following years of Henmaniacal disappointment, Scottish. For Andy Murray is indeed the first Brit to get to the Wimbledon Final, apart from Paul Bettany, since King James 1 lost in four sets in 1607.
30 all. 40-30. Match point.
I’m kidding, but the last British finalist was called “Bunny”, and he lost his final long before most of us around here were born. He was a shorts pioneer, apparently. Blog and learn.
In 1932 he decided that the traditional tennis attire, cricket flannels, weighed him down too much. He suffered from jaundice and was handicapped by the weight of his sweat-soaked long trousers in hot weather.
“They’ve done it!” So. One down. One to go? For a Brit like me, tomorrow is a win win. If Murray follows Marray’s example and wins against Federer, hurrah! If he loses, then it’s: Oh yes, that was when Scottish Murray lost and English Marray won. For a Scotsman, imagine the horror if Murray loses, as I fear he will. Already, I imagine they are cursing Marray for pissing in their soup.
In extreme contrast, the Scots seem entirely to have lost the knack of playing football. Like all English people who have not been actively and successfully dodging the news, I know that England won the World Cup in 1966. (I remember it well. I watched it live on television, in Finland, while on a bicycle trip.) But what I also remember is that in, I think, about 1967 (yes), Scotland famously beat England at football, and it was that same World Cup winning side that they defeated. Names like Denis Law and Jim Baxter are still remembered, and not only in Scotland. Only weeks after that, Glasgow Celtic became the first British club to win the European Cup, the direct precursor of the the current European Championship. And remember that this was the time when if the name of the club was “Glasgow” Celtic, that meant that most of the people in the team were, if not actually from Glasgow, at least from very close to it. Which is not how it is now at all. (Scroll down to the bottom there to see the names of the Chelsea team who beat Bayern Munich in the final of the Euro Cup this year.)
Man U (also featuring Dennis Law, I seem to recall) won the European Cup a year later, but it was Celtic that won it first.
But now, look at the Great Britain Olympic soccer team. Not one Scotsman in it. And no matter how many foreigners they have in their teams now, neither Celtic nor Rangers seem ever to get far in the Euro Cup these days.
Henry 4/1 will now start at 10pm, exactly one hour later than advertised.
Taking refuge from having to think about the Surrey cricket team, who yesterday had another nightmare day in the county championship, I instead turned to a piece about the extreme effectiveness of Tim Bresnan as a member of the currently very effective England cricket team, who begin their third of three test matches against the West Indies today.
England is now the top rated test team, but they haven’t won every recent game they have played by any means. However, every one of the thirteen five-day-long test matches that Bresnan has so far played as a member of the England team has been won by England. What, asks Ed Smith (a writer whom we have already noted and quoted here), is the secret of Bresnan’s mysterious contribution? Until the second game against the West Indies in which he took eight wickets, Bresnan’s numbers haven’t been that great, yet whenever he plays, England win. (Let’s hope that in the South Africa tests later this summer, that continues to be true.)
Smith links to another piece, by Michael Lewis, about a basketball player whose personal numbers seem to be even worse that Bresnan’s, yet who likewise seems always to make the team he plays in twice the team it would have been without him, a basketball player called Shane Battier.
Smith picks out this paragraph by Lewis about Battier, as do I:
Here we have a basketball mystery: a player is widely regarded inside the N.B.A. as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win.
And, as Michael Lewis also explains, lost that ability as soon as Battier, whether because of being sold on or because of injury, stopped playing for them.
At this point, I had, as in my custom in many of postings here about sport, intended to end with a brief but profound Samizdata point, pertaining in some way or another to the desirability of the private ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, as illustrated by the thoughts alluded to above. What that point was going to be, I did not know, but I would, I felt sure, think of something. Instead I found myself speculating, more pertinently if in a rather less Samizdata-ish way, about what exactly the Bresnan Battier effect might consist of, or at any rate part of what it might consist of. → Continue reading: On how Tim Bresnan and Shane Battier make winning teams
…Was invented by me today while we ate our supper with the patio doors wide open to admit the glorious sunshine. Unfortunately we also admitted an insanely persistent fly. Somebody really needs to miniaturise yet further a quadrotor, equip it with a little vacuum cleaner sucky mouth and an incinerator inside, fix it up to a remote control system with a joystick and send it out like a tiny hawk to swoop upon the critters and suck them to their fiery doom, preferably with a satisfying actinic flash and a buzz like the noise a lightsabre makes in Star Wars. As a by- product, the chemicals harvested from the flies’ little frazzled bodies could power the “predator drone”, as I think I might call it, unless that name is taken.
This would not be an efficient means of killing flies, nor even of using quadrotors to kill flies. To do that you would have to give the quadrotors echolocation and probably rejig them as Von Neumann machines. Inevitably they would start to evolve independently and develop a taste for human flesh, so perhaps we should stick with having a human at the controls. In future years, when the cry of tally-ho is a familiar refrain at every barbecue and picnic, raise a glass to me and send me some money.
Only it would not actually be a blood sport. Insects do not have blood, they have something called hemolymph sloshing about inside them instead. Not ichor, that was Greek gods and other sundry immortals. Hunting Greek gods with quadrotors doesn’t work, ‘cos they’re immortal.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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