I was at the urinal next to Bob Costas once. It was at the 2010 Winter Olympics, just before the Closing Ceremony, during which Canada said goodbye to the world with a nightmarish glowing dreamscape of giant beavers and plaid-wearing lumberjacks and dancing Mounties and flying moose and looming table hockey players and William Shatner, among others. Pretty sure we, as a country, were drunk.
But Bob Costas was not drunk, because Costas is a sober and professional man who disapproves of you and your shenanigans, probably. Costas is among the great broadcasters of his generation, as witnessed most recently by his stellar on-camera interview with accused Penn State pedophile Jerry Sandusky. And despite some creases in his face, and perhaps a whisper of greying hair, Costas remains youthful, even boyish.
Like just about everything in television, however, that is at least partly a facade, as Costas’ monologue on Football Night in America on Sunday last week demonstrated. As if channeling Andy Rooney in 1978, Costas inferred that touchdown celebrations are basically ruining the minds of our children, with their iPhones and their pornography and their touchdown dances. If life is a football field, it is time to leave Bob Costas’s lawn.
Bruce Arthur, “NFL Picks, Week 13: NFL players can dance if they want to”, National Post, 2011-12-02
December 2, 2011
QotD: “Pretty sure we, as a country, were drunk”
July 1, 2011
Duleep Allirajah: “The Most Pointless Sporting Argument Ever”
He’s quite right: this has to be the nadir of international sporting debates:
Where do you stand on the controversial issue of a Great Britain football team? Disgusted that the British Olympic Association is threatening the independence and proud traditions of the home football nations? Angered that the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish associations are trying to thwart the Olympic dreams of their young players? Or, like me, do you want to be woken up when The Most Pointless Sporting Argument Ever is over?
If you’re wondering why the proposal for a unified British football team has caused such controversy, let me explain. There has never been a single UK football association. Instead, all four countries — England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — have their own football associations. Each country is recognised by FIFA as a separate entity even though they are not sovereign nations. It’s one of the residual privileges enjoyed by the nation that invented the game. Although the Brits have minimal influence within FIFA, as the 2018 World Cup bid and the farcical presidential election demonstrated, all four UK nations are represented on the eight-member International Football Association Board (IFAB), which is the sport’s law-making body. The home nations also retain the right to appoint a FIFA vice-president. Although the English FA is keen on fielding a British team in the 2012 Games, the other national associations fear that their independence and FIFA privileges will be jeopardised as a result.
The debate took a farcical twist this week when the British Olympic Association (BOA) announced that an ‘historic agreement’ had been reached with all the home nations to field a Great Britain team at the Olympics. However, no sooner had the BOA made its announcement than the Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland football associations angrily denied that any agreement had been reached. Oops!
June 3, 2011
The right software tool for the job: Excel is not a database
You know how some people, having mastered a particular software tool, keep trying to fit every task into the one tool they know even when it’s awkward to do? I’ve seen people using Microsoft Excel instead of Microsoft Word or another word processor to produce letters — and people using Word to do spreadsheet-like tasks. The old adage seems to still apply in the software world: when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
It’s apparently not just small companies that suffer from this sort of problem:
The London 2012 Olympics is set be a humanoid spectacle of the like never witnessed by the world’s population before. Or something. But disturbing information has reached us at Vulture Central that reveals the organisation’s entire cultural events database is stored in *gasp* Excel.
A job vacancy currently advertised on the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) website is offering a competitive salary to someone who can maintain and report on data held in Microsoft’s spreadsheet software.
Now, a small biz with few customer accounts might consider Excel to be fit for purpose. But surely housing an Olympic stadium-sized database on a standalone spreadsheet is bonkers, isn’t it?
That’s a mighty big nail for such a small hammer.
May 27, 2011
Badminton: moving against the tide
If they’d wanted to be sure that the sport got more media attention, they sure chose an effective way to do it:
In an attempt to revive flagging interest in women’s badminton as the 2012 London Olympics approach, officials governing the sport have decided that its female athletes need to appear more, how to put it, womanly.
To create a more “attractive presentation,” the Badminton World Federation has decreed that women must wear skirts or dresses to play at the elite level, beginning Wednesday. Many now compete in shorts or tracksuit pants. The dress code would make female players appear more feminine and appealing to fans and corporate sponsors, officials said.
The rule has been roundly criticized as sexist, a hindrance to performance and offensive to Muslim women who play the sport in large numbers in Asian countries. Implementation has already been delayed by a month. Athletes’ representatives said they would seek to have the dress code scrapped, possibly as early as Saturday at a meeting of the world’s badminton-playing nations in Qingdao, China.
“This is a blatant attempt to sexualize women,” said Janice Forsyth, director of the International Centre for Olympic Studies at the University of Western Ontario. “It is amazing. You’d think at some point, somebody would have said: ‘Wait a minute. What are we doing?’ ”
There are about 85 players at my badminton club. Only two women regularly wear skirts to play. Despite this ruling, I doubt that many of our players will choose to switch.
March 1, 2011
Iran already threatening 2012 Olympic boycott
They’ve suddenly realized that the truth was staring them right in the face the whole time:
The 2012 London Olympics are more than a year away, but Iran already is threatening to boycott them. According to Bahram Afsharzadeh, secretary general of Iran’s National Olympic Committee, the 2012 Olympic logo secretly spells out the word “Zion,” which makes it “racist.” The Iranians also claim that use of the logo “is a disgracing action and against the Olympics’ valuable mottos.”
August 3, 2010
Badminton, as described by professional sports announcer
H/T to Mark Frauenfelder for the link.
May 19, 2010
March 3, 2010
March 2, 2010
Linking Olympic glory with jackbooted thugs?
Frequent commenter “Lickmuffin” responded to the post entitled SWAT forces now spend more time doing non-SWAT policing with a long comment tying together the Olympics and the omnipresent SWAT teams:
I have to say that I really don’t understand your views here.
Olympic fascist spectacle: A-OK!
The actual functional trappings of a police state: Boo, hiss!
You can’t have one without the other. As the man said, you have to break a few skulls to make Olympic Gold. Or something like that.
Lickmuffin then provided an extended discussion on the same theme:
It’s quite simple, really: if you want to host the Olympics, and you want to have a succesful national Olympic team, you have to have armed-to-the teeth SWAT teams.
To fund the Olympics and Olympians, you need to have confiscatory tax rates.
When you have confiscatory tax rates, you’re going to have people trying to avoid the taxes.
Some of those people are going to engage in dodgy and risky behaviour, such as importing, growing, manufacturing or just generally dealing with narcotics.
Some of those people are going to use violence to protect their businesses.
To deal with those guys, you need heavily armed and specially trained police.
Just three degrees of separation there, really, but it works out to something like this:
Publicly funded Olympics = SWAT teams on every corner.
What do we tell people whose family members are killed in no-knock raids where the cops had the wrong address? “Sorry about that, but that snowboarding dude needed a gold medal.”
It’s ironic that the first snowboarder to win a medal for the sport — a Canadian — tested positive for weed.
It’s not ironic at all that the same dude wants to become a Liberal MP. Snowboard boots, jackboots — same thing, really.
It really does cover all the ground, doesn’t it? Just lacking the obligatory German rendering of SWAT as Sturmabteilung, and we’re golden, as they say.
Those ominous parallels again
I originally just added this as a comment on this post, but it appears to have a bit more life in it.
Gil LeBreton made this pithy observation in his column about the Vancouver Olympics on the 28th of February:
After a spirited torch relay ignited pride in every corner of the country, the Olympic Games began and quickly galvanized the nation.
Flags were everywhere. The country’s national symbol hung from windows and was worn on nearly everyone’s clothing.
Fervent crowds cheered every victory by the host nation.
But enough about the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
I thought it was amusing, so I just added it to the comment thread, but I guess I wasn’t the only one to notice Mr. LeBreton’s insight:
So true. The parallels between Berlin 1936 and Vancouver 2010 are clear, if you just pay attention.
Not everyone has the perspicacity to discern the neo-Nazi threat north of America’s borders. Fortunately, Mr. LeBreton does. Because he’s more observant than most. He makes the cognitive connections others miss:
“For 17 days we were barraged with Canadian flags, rode buses and trains with people in sweatshirts and jerseys adorned with Canadian maple leafs, and were serenaded at venues by Canadian spectators, lustily cheering for Canadian athletes.”
My God. It’s spine-chilling.
The rest of the world was lulled into complacency and Olympic fever. But the Star-Telegram’s crack reporter wasn’t fooled by the crafty Canucks. Their display of patriotism reminded him of something. Something terrifying.
“I didn’t attend the ’36 Olympics, but I’ve seen the pictures. Swastikas everywhere.”
You see? Maple leaf flag equals swastika. Damn you, Canada.
He’s so right. Connect the dots! Look it up, sheeple!
March 1, 2010
Russia expects . . . the coaches to fall on their swords now
Apparently, the Russian government is taking the relatively poor showing by the country’s Olympic team very seriously. The “fat cats” who were responsible for training the athletes have been ordered to resign or “we will help them”:
President Medvedev said those who trained the Russian team before the Vancouver games should “have the courage to step down” as a result of Russia’s woeful medals tally. If they refused to resign “we will help them”, he said bluntly.
Over the weekend Medvedev abruptly cancelled a scheduled visit to last night’s closing ceremony, apparently in disgust. “We must drastically change the training of our athletes . . . We have been living on Soviet resources for a long time. But that is over now,” Medvedev told the ruling United Russia Party.
He added: “Unprecedented investments are being made in sports in Russia. But money is not everything. We should think about changing the training methods. The new training system must focus on athletes rather than on fat cats.”
Opposition politicians demanded the sacking of the sports minister, Vitaly Mutko, and Russian Olympic committee president Leonid Tyagachyev, both close allies of Putin. The pair were antiheroes, the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper said, ridiculing Tyagachyev’s Panglossian prediction Russia would finish in the top three.
It would probably be wise for the so-called “fat cats” to get out while they can. An embarassed Russian government will probably not be acting with grace or tact.
QotD: The game
It may not have been the most important hockey game in Canadian history; the 1972 Summit Series has a pretty good argument, and does the 1987 Canada Cup. There were no political implications here, just sporting ones.
Nation-stopping sporting ones, true. If you ever wanted to knock off a bank in Lloydminster, Sask., this was probably a good day to try.
The game was played with a desperate ferocity, and at eye-watering speed. Every goal-mouth scrum was the fall of Saigon; bodies were being thrown around as if everyone involved forgot there is a quarter of the NHL season left to play. Every puck mattered; every play mattered. Everything mattered.
And there was hostility but no fighting; hitting but no headshots; talent so rich that when the NHL starts again today, it will look like a pale shadow of what the game can be.
“I think both teams are winners,” said Wilson. “And maybe more than anything, hockey in general.”
Bruce Arthur, “Crosby makes leap from superstar to legend”, CBC Vancouver Now, 2010-02-28
February 27, 2010
Podium odium: Canada’s Olympic shame according to British journalists
I’ve mentioned Fleet Street’s disdain for the Vancouver Olympics before. It’s become its own little side-story to the coverage of the games. But it’s not just the Brits.
After the exit of their men’s hockey team from the games, Russian opinions were channelled by that staunch Slav Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey in Pravda:
We all knew it weeks before the game started, with accusations about doping being levelled at Russian athletes, and we all saw it on day one of the games, with the death of a Georgian athlete on a corner which miraculously was elevated the following day. Vancouver is not fit to hold the Winter Olympics.
[. . .]
We all know Canada has problems with the future lines drawn on Arctic maps and we all know Canada lives in the shadow of its larger neighbour to the south. The abject cruelty shown by Canadian soldiers in international conflicts is scantily referred to, as indeed is the utter incapacity of this county to host a major international event, due to its inferiority complex, born of a trauma being the skinny and weakling bro to a beefy United States and a colonial outpost to the United Kingdom, whose Queen smiles happily from Canadian postage stamps.
Maybe it is this which makes the Canadians so…retentive, or cowardly.
[. . .]
Everybody who knows anything about Olympic skating, Winter Olympic sports and international politics will infer from the pitiful and dangerous conditions provided by the Canadian authorities, which already caused one death, that Vancouver is mutton dressed as lamb. Take off the outer veneer and the stench is horrific.
However, not to be outdone by a mere “Russian” journalist, the mighty Times of London weighs in with their more nuanced condemnation of Canada and the Vancouver Olympics:
The idea was for Canada to emerge as gracious hosts of the Winter Olympics and glorious winners as well. Alas, the Canadians have come across as a bunch of mean-spirited, chippy, unsporting losers.
Things have come to a pretty pass when you find yourself rooting for the United States. But I really have been cheering for stars and stripes rather than maple leaves. The Canadian shenanigans in Vancouver have alienated the entire world.
[. . .]
The Canadians have taken an aggressive line towards any criticism. This kneejerk reaction is both small-minded and small-nation. It is not hostile to point out an error, particularly when the error is rudely thrust in your face.
It is customary at the Olympics to say that the nation holding them has “come of age”. China “came of age” in 2008; Australia “came of age” with the Sydney Games of 2000. In fact, Australia also “came of age” with the Melbourne Games of 1956; that’s because this observation has become an Olympic custom.
But Canada has not come of age in Vancouver 2010. Canada has regressed into a sneering but ultimately impotent adolescence. It’s been — well, rather unattractive on the whole.
So, there you go, Canada. Aren’t you ashamed? Don’t you feel properly dressed down by your betters? Or, like Simon Barnes’ “adolescent”, do you feel like telling him to STFU and GTFO?
February 26, 2010
IOC to investigate scandal in women’s hockey: celebration
Well, I’m sure the IOC will quickly move to quash the scandalous behaviour of those hooligans on the Canadian women’s hockey team:
The International Olympic Committee will investigate the behaviour of the Canadian women’s hockey players who celebrated their gold medal at the Vancouver Games by drinking alcohol on the ice.
Several Canadian players returned to the ice surface at Canada Hockey Place roughly 30 minutes after their 2-0 win over the U.S. on Thursday night.
The players drank cans of beer and bottles of champagne, and smoked cigars with their gold medals draped around their necks.
Imagine that! Celebrating after winning a gold medal against their arch-rivals. And drinking alcohol, too. And to compound the outrage, they did it on the ice!!!
I’m sure the IOC will do the sensible thing and strip them of their medals. It’s the only logical thing to do, after all. And totally in proportion to the heinousness of their crime.
Even worse, they contributed to the delinquency of a minor:
Among those drinking were Marie-Philip Poulin of Quebec City, the youngest player on Team Canada and its fourth-line centre, who scored twice in the first period. The 18-year-old Poulin turns 19 next month, but right now she would be under the legal drinking age in B.C.
Because nobody in the entire history of the province of British Columbia has ever had the temptation to have a drink before the legal age. Even though in Quebec, “the legal drinking age is just a suggestion”.
Photos of the celebrations below the fold:
February 25, 2010
Canadian women beat US women for the hockey gold medal
A very hard-fought game, where Canada triumphed by the score of 2-0 to take the gold. Although the only goals were scored by Marie-Philip Poulin, for my money the star of the game was goalie Shannon Szabados:
The Canadian women’s hockey team defended the gold medals won at the 2002 and 2006 Olympic Games with a 2-0 win over archrival U.S. on Thursday at Canada Hockey Place.
Marie-Philip Poulin of Beauceville, Que., the youngest player on the Canadian team at 18, scored a pair of goals in the first period, showing off her soft hands and quick release. Edmonton goaltender Shannon Szabados stopped all 28 shots for the shutout.
Szabados was an intriguing choice in net for her first start in an Olympic or world championship final. Davidson went with the 23-year-old from Edmonton over veterans Charline Labonte, the winning goalie in the 2006 Olympic final, and Kim St. Pierre, the starter in the 2002 championship game.
Szabados showed no rookie nerves to start the game, however. She came out of her net to play the puck and made glove saves with confidence. She kept the Americans off the scoreboard during five-on-three chances at the start of both the first and second periods. U.S. goalie Jessie Vetter made 27 saves.
Centre Meghan Agosta of Ruthven, Ont., was named tournament MVP.
Photo by Alex Livesey/Getty Images
With this gold medal, Canada has now earned more gold than in any previous Winter Olympics (8, with the previous highs being 7 at both 2006 and 2002 games).
