A friend sent me a meme about the gold-medal Olympic men’s hockey match between the U.S.A. and Canada. I include it here with no sense of endorsement. [1]

Dumb, crude, and inaccurate tweet

I wrote back,

That hockey game went like many hockey games go: the U.S. won against the overwhelming run of play. It happens.

Canada put on a clinic and anyone watching would have been humbled by the awesome and relentless power of the hockey that they played for long, long minutes at a time, non-stop. I had to keep checking the corner of the screen to be sure that they didn’t have a power play.

The U.S. got so lucky so many times. [2] They played well enough—especially in the first ten minutes—but, after that, it was Canada’s game to lose. And they lost on the scoreboard, but it wasn’t a victory for the U.S. to be bragging about. It was obvious to anyone who watched the game which team was actually better at hockey.

He wrote back,

“I started saying in the 2nd period that either Canada’s constant zone time was going to wear down the US or the US was going to hold tough and win on a freak breakout”

I wrote back,

I was in awe at Canada. Flat-out. That pressure was unreal. It was like watching the relentless Redwings playing against the Devils with Brodeur back in the 90s.

He riposted,

“Anyone playing Buffalo with Hasek in net”

This post is mostly nostalgia for anyone who watched a lot of hockey in the 1990s. Those who recognize the names, they know what we’re talking about.

Super Bowl LX, as a football game, was underwhelming. At 36 of 60 minutes played, Seattle had three field goals and the German moderators were wondering out loud whether a kicker had ever been MVP. “Naja, wenn er der einzige ist, der Punkte gezielt hat? [Yeah, but if he’s the only one who’s scored points?]” At this point, the Patriots had 4 first downs and had punted 7 times. That is either pathetic or a testament to the Seahawks’s defense.

The half-time show

Bad Bunny’s half-time show was amazing. It was a revolution. It was a masterpiece, equal to or possibly better than Prince’s masterpiece from 2007 (YouTube). It is not easy to make a show for such a huge arena. Bad Bunny put together a giant series of music videos with incredible sets. It was like a mini-musical. The vibe was a plea for love, not hate, but also a call for revolution.

It was a call for unity and an obvious call to fight for justice and equality. It was revolutionary in the sense that what it presented was so obviously a better alternative to the hateful, mean, and overarching military face we’ve seen lately. In a world determined increasingly by hate, preaching love is revolutionary.

The only Super Bowl half-time show opinion that matters

Big Bunny introduced himself a couple of times throughout by his real name—Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio—launching into his quick Spanish rapping as he wandered through a sugar-cane maze on a plantation. I’m not a big fan of this style of rapping but the man oozes charisma. He’s an incredible showman. This, despite his Spanish being nearly impenetrable for me. He sang only in Spanish except when he said “God bless the USA”.

They turned the whole football field into a celebration of Latin culture: there was a giant sugar-cane field, a taqueria, a piragua stand, a bodega (marqueta), a house, living rooms, a dance floor, all through which he wandered, singing and greeting people; there was a separate concert area on top of the bodega, from which Lady Gaga belted out a tune, accompanied by a huge Latin band.

Ricky Martin was there. He looked pretty good, if not amazing! It’s heartening to think of people reacting viscerally to his oozing machismo and good looks, thinking that he’s intent on stealing their wives, and whose wives would absolutely be packing their bags if they didn’t know that he’s as gay as the day is long. Which, like, 🤯 for just the right kind of benighted son-of-a-bitch.

This was a jubilant jab in the eye those sons-of-bitches but only because they’re such snowflakes that it has rendered them incapable of acknowledging game. It’s only offensive if you hold offensive opinions. This is a lesson in culture: This show is just as American as trucks and country music. It’s just as American as Kendrick Lamar and rap music. It’s just as American as Prince. None of those cultures are the one I personally know as an American, but it’s blindingly obvious that they all belong to the amalgam of America. It’s reductionist and racist to fight it. Just stop trying. You won’t win in the end. You’ll just cause a lot of needless misery to others and, ultimately, to yourself.

This was a call to stop the madness. It was anti-ICE without saying it was anti-ICE. It was only anti-ICE because ICE is for hate, not love. It was pro-U.S.-Latin culture, celebrating the details we all recognize. There was a giant truck in a field; there was a bodega; there was a barbershop; there was a dominoes game, a nail salon; there was an actual wedding; there were workers in the cane fields; there were workers on telephone poles; there were probably a dozen little things I didn’t even notice because it’s not my culture. [1] I barely understand Spanish.

It didn’t matter if you understood Spanish. It was clear that this all said: we are not who they say we are. We eat ice cream and fried foods. We get married. We sing. We dance. We drive trucks. We are you. You are us. We are the same. What the hell are we fighting about?

So much dancing. So much joy. Hundreds of joyous dancers and singers parading with all of the flags of South and Central America, with the U.S. flag in the lead, but only one of many, as Bad Bunny recited all of the country names. He holds out a football with “Together we are America” written on it. “The only thing more powerful than hate is love” is emblazoned all over the stadium. He took the opportunity with both hands and ran with it. The exuberance, joy, and revolution was palpable.

You’ll be able to tell whether someone’s a butt-hurt whiner if they start counting American flags, or if they point out that only Lady Gaga sang in English, or any of a dozen things that I am not even equipped to notice because my mind isn’t small enough. None of that matters—especially for someone from a country like Switzerland, where you’re expected to understand four languages when watching the Olympics—what matters is that (A) it was a hell of a show and (B) it was a hell of a message.

Even the haters from the other side [2]—who will complain that Bad Bunny couldn’t possibly deliver a revolutionary message from within the constraints of one of the most capitalist celebrations, the Super Bowl—should sit this one out. Bad Bunny says “toma mi cerveza”. Do not listen to them. Listen to this half-time show. Sway to the beat. Feel the joy. Reject the hate. Build your community. Join the revolution. It shouldn’t end here. This should be a beginning.

Bad Bunny, Lady Gaga, and Ricky Martin

The rest of the game

Back to the game. It’s the end of the third quarter. It’s still 12–0. Ten seconds left. Quarterback sack of Drake Maye—the 20th in this postseason, a record—and … a fumble, with Seattle recovering.

In the fourth quarter, we quickly get the first two touchdowns, one for Seattle, then a quick one for the Patriots. 19–7.

Maye makes up for this quick show of competence by throwing an embarrassing interception, which Seattle can’t quite capitalize on, but their kicker gets his fifth field goal, cementing, for me, his MVP pick for the game. He has 16 points! It’s a Super Bowl record!

Maye eats another huge sack but then makes a good, long pass to make up the ground again.

Another sack. Fumble. Touchdown Seattle. 26–7

Replay shows that it was actually an interception because the ball never touched the ground. The sacker deflected it, then another guy caught it on the fly and ran it into the end zone for a touchdown. Seven sacks. So far.

Another field goal for Seattle at some point. It’s now 29–7 with 4:27 left to play. The Patriots have collapsed.

They get one more touchdown with a no-look pass by Maye that’s so bad that the back catches it with his fingertips, a mere centimeter or two from the turf. The German moderators noted that they’ve never heard a touchdown celebrated less. 29–13 (they failed to make the two-point conversion, to no-one’s surprise).

The game peters out, ending largely in a defensive triumph for the Seahawks and a likely 48-hour suicide watch for Drake Maye. Yeesh. The guy had a bad night. To sum it up: Patriots’ Offensive Line Surprised To Learn Super Bowl Was Yesterday (Babylon Bee).

Real Fit Life (RFL) was a training program invented by a high-school friend that Kath and I did for years. I had forgotten the exact steps and exercises but then found that my past self had written everything down in a text file.

Warm-up Exercises

The warmup phase is timed. You should do each set of exercises above the same amount of time. You can also adjust the amount of time you pause between sets. If you’re just starting out or aren’t so fit, you should probably do: Sets of 30 seconds each, with 15 seconds pause between

This summer, you did sets of 1:00 or 1:15 (you did that once, with me) with no pauses.

1. Run in place
2. Jumping jacks
3. Squat thrusts
4. Step-ups (right leg first)
5. Step-ups (left leg first)
6. Mountain climbers

Main Exercises

The main exercises are split into groups of pairs/triads. Unlike the warmup, these are, for the most part, not timed. Instead, you select a number of exercises per set you want to do and do that for ALL of them. As with the warmup, you can adjust the amount of rest time you give yourself between exercises. A good starting point is to do 8 exercises per set and give yourself 15 seconds pause between sets.

This summer, you did sets of 10, 12 and 15 reps, depending on mood and energy level. We didn’t really take pauses between sets, except a few seconds to catch your breath if needed.

Group One

Peel-ups

Lie on your back, feet flat on the ground, shoulder-width apart; keep your hands at your sides, palm down, hovering a few inches off the floor. Slowly roll up into a crunch, with chin tucked and slowly roll back down. Alternate: keep your hands in front of your forehead, optionally with weights for extra strength.

Step-ups

One set with right leg first; then one set with the left leg first

Do three sets of the above triad of exercises.

Group Two

Plank

This one you do for time again; pick a time you can do and increase by 15 seconds for each set.

Squats

Eyes front, shoulders back, stomach in, knees over toes. Hold your hands out in front to encourage good form. You should almost feel like your toes are lifting a bit if you’re doing it right. Hold weights for a shoulder exercise as well.

Group Three

Push-ups

Do real push-ups; no going to the knees. If you can’t do enough of them, just practice holding your weight up and practice your form. Dip slightly at the shoulders in a “mini” push-up to slowly get there. I replace these with chin-ups instead.

Lunges

One set with the right leg in front; then one set with the left leg in front. Bring your knee to the floor – barely touching – and come back up. Alternate: hold your arms straight up over your head to train balance; hold weights to train strength.

Marco’s Additions

Push-up Hold

Whatever you did in the push-up set in group three (push-ups or chin-ups) get into position and hold for as long as you can, about a minute, if you can.

Side crunches

Whatever you were doing for the other sets, do that many side crunches for each side. Lie on your side, shoulders back, feet flexed and lifted off the ground. Top hand to the side of your head and slowly roll up and roll back down.

Jump rope

Jump rope as many times as you can without stopping. You should be able to get to fifty once you practice a bit. If you’re ambitious, throw in some double-unders: 15-25, if you can.

This video of the best moments in international table tennis in 2024 is nine minutes long and, if you’re a bit of a fan, it goes by in no time flat. Most of the segments are narrated in English and German.

Table Tennis Best Points Of 2024 by ttrio2016 (YouTube)

I learned that a behind-the-back shot is sometimes called a “Strawberry Shot”. I have no idea why. There’s also a “Snake Shot”, which is putting so much backspin on the shot from below the table that it winds its way back to your side of the table after briefly touching down on the other side.

I used to play a ton of table tennis when I was younger. My then-girlfriend and still-wife still likes to tell people, when they ask, that I did not have a lot of time for her in high school because I was always playing ping pong at my house with my friends. We would organize for six to eight of us to hang out and play singles, doubles, … just for hours. We played right through the winter, with mini electric heaters to warm up our hands. We’d leave them blasting on high, to try to get it warm enough, despite the deep sub-zero temperatures of Central New York State (CNY).

I had friends who were much better than I was at smash rallies. They were just incredibly consistent with low, flat smashes [1]. Another guy was the most incredible defensive player, never smashing, but putting so much spin with long, looping shots that it was almost impossible to control. [2]

In my senior year of high school, I had advanced math courses at a local college, so my schedule had a lot of free time in it—time that I spent playing table tennis for hours each day. I got so good that I could beat almost everyone handily, so I started training my left hand, with which I also got quite good. I would use that against the worse players, so they would feel like they had a fighting chance, and it was more interesting for me. Sometimes I lost, but I wouldn’t switch back. Fair’s fair.

I’ve done the behind-the-back shot before. It’s not as hard as it looks, but in competition…that’s ballsy. No-look shots and no-look serves were very popular with my crowd as well.

I do not recommend watching the video below. A friend of mine who thinks that I don’t appreciate Caitlin Clark enough sent me this video. It is pure clickbait. Caitlin Clark just finished up her rookie season in the WNBA. She put some of the best numbers the league has ever seen and has, nearly single-handedly, significantly boosted her not only her own team but the status of the WNBA, in general.

The video breathlessly speculates whether she will come back for another season.

I kid you not: that’s the hypothesis that they start with. For two long minutes, they talk about her social media feeds being “silent” while the world waited to find out whether a tremendously successful, 22-year–old athlete is going to retire from basketball or whether she will “try another sport.”

Caitlin Clark FINALLY SPEAKS And REVEALS Her WNBA Future – THIS Is HUGE! by Basketball Top Stories (YouTube)

This is the trash that people spend their time on. The video is 17½ minutes long. I didn’t listen past the first two minutes because I couldn’t stand it anymore. It’s just hot garbage, just noise posing as information. They make up a facially ludicrous proposition, get their listeners invested in the tragedy of it, then dispel it, providing relief from a notion that they hadn’t believed in five minutes before. It’s pure dopamine-manipulation.

It worked on my friend, who’s more than a little susceptible.

The video linked below is a great 1-hour documentary [1] about one guy—Karel Sabbe—who finished the Barkley Marathon (Wikipedia), which is,

“[…] an ultramarathon trail race held each year in Frozen Head State Park in Morgan County, Tennessee, United States. The course, which varies from year to year, consists of five loops of the 20+ mile, off-trail course for a total of 100 miles.”

The video is named #17 because he’s only the 17th person to have finished the race in its 40-year history. And people aren’t necessarily getting better at it: In 2022, for example, no-one finished.

#17 − To finish the Barkley Marathons by Karel Sabbe (YouTube)

People swear that the loops are more like 25 miles long, not 20+ miles. You have to run all five loops in 60 hours or less. There are about 20,000m of incline/decline as well. Also, you run at night and day. Also, you have to run each lap in the opposite direction of the previous one. Jasmin-Paris-2024-Barkley-Marathons-winnerAlso, you can’t use a GPS (that’s why no-one knows how long the loops are). Also, you have to collect 13 pages from 13 books along the way on each loop. You have to get the right pages. Also, it’s cold. Also, it’s sometimes hot. Also, you only pay a $1.60 registration fee. If it’s your first time, you have to bring a license plate from your home state and/or country. Only 40 people are invited to run each year. Doing only three loops is called the “fun run”.

There’s a longer documentary called The Barkley Marathons: The race that eats its young. It used to be on Netflix, but of course it’s not there anymore—because why should you be able to re-watch something on a service like Netflix?

Anyway, in this year’s race, the winner of the French version of the Barkley, the Chartreuse Terminorum, which is also 5 loops, but of 60km each, Sébastien Raichon didn’t even make it four loops this year. Beware: even if you can read French, the web site is nearly unnavigable—probably deliberately so. Chartreuse Terminorum (Wikipedia) has more information, but also only in French,

“La course se déroule du vendredi au lundi. Le parcours comporte cinq boucles de 60 km pour un total de 25 000 mètres de dénivelé.”

It also has books and, like the Barkley, is designed to have as few finishers as possible. It also costs only €3 (1 cent per kilometer). Each entrant must bring, instead of a license plate, a bottle of alcohol from their home region.

The article Israel and Russia Have No Place in the 2024 Paris Olympics by Jules Boykoff & Dave Zirin (Jacobin) writes,

“In November, an IOC spokesperson insisted that Russia presented “a unique situation and cannot be compared to any other war or conflict in the world.” The statement beggars belief. Both Russia and Israel are engaged in asymmetrical warfare, attacking civic infrastructure and private residences and leaving a long trail of civilian deaths and casualties.”

The authors’ statements beggar belief. Did they write this with only the NYT as a source? The Russian and Israeli conflicts are not in any way comparable as far as targeting civilians goes. The Russian conflict is grinding and illegal, but it has killed far, far fewer civilians than Israel’s conflict in Gaza, which seems to have the intent of killing civilians until the others run away. All wars are horrible, but some wars are worse than others. No invasion is justified, but why is the Russian one invasion the only one that causes people to think about banning the invading country’s athletes? Is it because it’s easy?

“At all costs, IOC president Thomas Bach does not want to offend the United States, which is scheduled to host the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and is all but certain to host the 2034 Winter Games in Salt Lake City.”

They write this as if that statement doesn’t completely obviate all of the rest of their reasoning about principles. Are they going to mention how ludicrous it is to speak of morals when the U.S. should have never—at least in my lifetime—been allowed to participate, by these standards? These are standards that I agree to, by the way! It’s just that we always hear about standards in relation to any country that does not run the Empire where the journalist lives.

Just to be clear: there are two authors on this article and neither one of them could clean up this dumpster-fire of an article to have a principled through-line.

“There is no moral rationale undergirding the IOC’s hypocrisy when it comes to Israel and Russia.”

AND AMERICA MOST OF ALL. JFC. Blind spot much? The U.S. funds Israel. The U.S. bombing a dozen countries right now, its drones are everywhere, killing indiscriminately. it sanctions dozens more to economic death. It just started a new war on Yemen, actively bombing them itself after funding and arming Saudi Arabia to do it for eight years before that. It’s running an $80B-per-year proxy war in Ukraine, and it is actively bombing the three poorest countries in the world. Russia is a piker in comparison.

But even these two authors can’t bring themselves to say that, should the IOC want to espouse actual principles about only supporting non-warring nations, then its primary funder would never be able to participate. That’s why it is, unfortunately, nonsensical to talk about banning countries on principle. Unless the U.S. is included, it would always be banning politically.

“More recently, the IOC banned Afghanistan from the 2000 Sydney Olympics because the Taliban barred women from competing in sports.”

JFC. Just dumping on Afghanistan, as one of the poorest and most-attacked countries on the planet. Living under the Taliban isn’t bad enough? Now you also can’t compete at the Olympics?

“The IOC’s actions raise the question: Is there anything Russia or Israel could do that would get them banned from the Paris Games?”

The authors are really irritating me. I guess Nation writers really do work for Empire.

While we’re on the subject: was France or Great Britain ever punished for having torn Libya to shreds? I expect more of Dave Zirin, to be honest. I wouldn’t have expected this kind of tone-deaf take from him.

“Zelensky is aware of the IOC’s pivotal role in all this. In February, he said , “The International Olympic Committee needs honesty,” but added, “honesty it has unfortunately lost.””

Now they’re citing that idiot like he matters. He’s a literal dictator. He has banned elections indefinitely. There are no plans for elections in Ukraine. Most other political parties have been banned. Almost all media organizations have been banned. Ukraine conscrips soldiers into a meat-grinder of a war that they’re running terribly. Ukraine bombs its own citizens. His regime is riddled with right-wing extremists, if not outright Nazis. But, sure, let’s hear what he has to say about how the IOC is the biggest problem. Let’s read how these two fools cite him talking about how other people aren’t honest. Honestly, how in the tank can you possibly be for the U.S. regime? Do these two not see that they’re trying to get the IOC to be a mouthpiece for Empire?

“The IOC, if it acted against Russia, would no doubt be accused of profound hypocrisy. There are many countries over the decades — such as the United States during the Vietnam War or the Iraq War — that deserved sanction and exclusion from the Olympics, but the IOC remained silent. To penalize Russia, they will argue, is nothing more than a double standard: US foreign policy wrapped in Olympic bunting.”

Finally! Too little, late. And the formulation indicates that they’re going to dismiss this statement in the final few paragraphs.

“It’s about standing up to Russia and Israel because, whether the Olympic athlete wants it or not, their success would be folded into nationalism and the war effort.”

Bullshit. It’s about writing this article now rather when the U.S. invades. How does that statement not apply to the U.S.? HOW?

“We should demand consistency and accountability from the IOC. Now is the time for the group to abide by its own stated standards. Russia, in the name of Ukraine, has no place in the Games. Israel, in the name of Gaza, has no place in the Games.”

And the U.S. In the name of Yemen.

Look, I don’t think the IOC should ban athletes from any country. I think we need more places for countries to meet on neutral ground, without judging each and every citizen of the country for the crimes of its government. That’s the leeway that the U.S. has had for decades, going on a century. The fans may have something to say, but you should at least let the athletes participate. God knows it’s one of the few channels for diplomacy remaining. And these two foolish authors would rather convert it into another weapon to point at the U.S.‘s official enemies.

The IOC is corrupt from top to bottom. It always has been. There is no use arguing for principles now. The entire article made no sense, but I fear that it got so much knee-jerk support from exactly the crowd it was written for: unthinking, uninformed, quasi-liberal, affluent Biden-voters.
 

I learned about an exercise called a “Wall Angel” today from a programmer who’d struggled with back, shoulder, and arm pain. I suffer from none of those, but I do have a quick morning stretching routine that I try to stick to. I’m always curious if there’s something I can add to the mix.

What’s a wall angel?

Technically, yes.

The exercise, though, is like a snow angel, but performed up against a wall.

It took me a few search links to find something that would just tell me that, instead of trying to impose draconian cookie requirements or glitchy, non-functioning videos. I found it on LiveStrong,

“It’s a shoulder exercise that involves standing against a wall and raising your arms overhead in an arcing motion, much like making a snow angel.”

OK. I guess there’s not much to it.

It’s a good thing that it’s so easy because the video isn’t working there either.

Then, near the bottom, I see:

“Why Do Wall Angels Feel So Hard?

“Reaching your arms overhead demands ​a lot​ of upper-back and shoulder mobility.

“Think of this mobility as a combination of flexibility, strength and muscular control. And all three of these are things we tend to lack.”

WTF?

Was this written by an AI? Or did I miss a memo? Is raising your arms over your head considered a strenuous activity now?

I’m looking at a picture of a very healthy-looking, veiny-armed individual for whom standing up and putting his arms up shouldn’t pose too much of a problem.

I’ve not added this to my morning stretching routine. I’m already reaching for the sky anyway. Mission accomplished.

I was in the U.S. over the summer and had purchased the U.S. map from Garmin. There wasn’t enough room to store the U.S. map on the device. This article assumes that you’ve tried to sync your maps to your device with Garmin Express, but it failed to copy because you don’t have enough space.

If you have enough space on your device, then why how did you even end up here?

Buying and … installing. ⛔️

You can buy maps directly from Garmin, but Garmin will not help you in any way to load them onto your device unless your device has enough room for the new maps. If it does not, then you’re out of luck, as far as Garmin is concerned.

I imagine that their solution would be to either (A) buy a larger device with more storage or (B) just buy a second device for the other country.

Problem solved. Thanks Garmin.

If you’re not willing to upgrade your device and you’d rather just use the damned maps that you’ve purchased, then read on.

Managing maps for different regions

In my particular case, the European maps use about 10GB. My Garmin Edge 530 has 15GB of space. The North America maps are also about 8GB, so I can’t have all of the maps on my device at once.

I would like to “manage” my maps, preferring to keep the U.S. map for the time I’m in the States, then going back to the European maps. I would like some idea of how I could know what I’m losing if I were to remove the European West and East maps (which I don’t think I need, but I’m not 100% sure). There is no mechanism for identifying which files correspond to which maps. There is no mechanism for archiving maps.

Maps. How do they work?

I’ve managed to learn that,

• All of the maps are located in the /Garmin folder of your device.
• Each map has three files: gma, unl, img.
• The img file is the largest one—usually several gigabytes.
• There is no good way of discovering which of the several copies of maps for a region contains which levell of detail for which regions.

Available apps

Garmin Connect

Garmin Connect won’t help you, neither the app nor the web site.

Garmin Express

Garmin Express won’t help you either.

Garmin MapManager

You can—sometimes—use Garmin Map Manager to see which maps are on your device. If the app even shows your device—which it didn’t for me, when I just checked again—the Reveal in Finder button doesn’t actually show the map in the Finder. Instead, it just shows a parent folder that leaves you with no idea which of the map files corresponds to the map you selected in the dialog.

You’re left with just guessing which files correspond to the maps you want to remove—and hoping for the best. However, you might be able to stumble toward figuring out which maps you’ve removed when you reload the Map Manager after having moved some files.

This procedure is similar to Garmin BaseCamp, which at least seems to more reliably show the device.

Garmin BaseCamp

Garmin BaseCampDid you know that there’s an app called Garmin BaseCamp? It shows you the data that you have stored on your device: maps, activities, etc. It does not let you do anything useful with these, though. It doesn’t let you really see which region is covered by a map. It also doesn’t help you figure out which degree of detail is covered by which map.

For example, there are three maps for Europe: Central, West, and East. They look like they have a ton of overlap. I think I only need the Central one (I mostly ride in Switzerland). I can’t see which map does what, though. It looks like all three maps have the main roads for everywhere, but only have fine detail for certain parts? Maybe? It’s really, really hard to tell.

Still, it will help you at least see which maps you have installed on your device. It will not help you actually see which cryptically named files correspond to which regions, though.

So, you remove some map files, reload BaseCamp, see what’s missing, adjust until you’ve got enough space for the maps you need right now.

This is tedious, but workable. 🙌

OK. 👌 Is that all clear? Does that sound like fun 🤩 ? Because it totally is 💯.

It’s utterly incredible that this is where Garmin is at with their support for their navigation and sports devices after a couple of decades of dominating the market. Capitalist optimization FTW. 🙌

I recently purchased a Garmin Edge 530 biking computer to upgrade from my Edge 500. It had served me well for over ten years, but the battery was no longer holding a charge reliably and wouldn’t last longer than 3 or 4 hours maximum. I also wanted to be able to store routes so that I was no longer the only annoying guy in the group who had no idea where I was going when we left familiar territory.

I got the 530 because it’s compact and doesn’t have a touch-screen.

I’m still trying to figure out how to turn off the “sharp corner warnings” when I’m not navigating. It makes no sense to announce turns that I might be taking—but usually am not taking.

Note to Garmin: here in Switzerland, we have traffic circles. Like, a LOT of traffic circles. You may have heard of them? No, I don’t think you have, because your silly gadget warns me about every single one as a “sharp U-Turn” even though it has NO IDEA which exit I’m planning to take because I’m not riding a route.

Also, while I am navigating, the “upcoming turn” warnings are great, of course. But … only when you’re actually moving at speed. Otherwise, they dominate your device for up to a minute as you crawl your way up a 12% grade toward that “dangerous, sharp corner” that you’re likely to fly off of at 10km/hr. I think I’ve figured out how to have it show those hints only when I’m actually looking at the map, but I haven’t tested yet whether that’s better (next up: I’ll be complaining about missing turns on my route).

Note to Garmin: here in Switzerland, we have hills and mountains and passes. Like, a LOT of hills. You may have heard of them? No, I don’t think you have, because your silly gadget warns me about “upcoming turns” for 45 seconds before I get to them because I’m GOING UPHILL. I’m fascinated to see that you’ve been working on these devices for decades and still haven’t figured out how to adjust the lead time for a turn warning based on vehicle speed.

Fortunately, it pays to complain loudly about things because my friend patiently wrote back that,

“On the Garmin 530 it’s located under “Settings” / “Activity Profiles” − select the profile you want to change, then scroll down to “Navigation”. You’ll now see the Sharp Bend feature and by default it’s “on.”

Doh!

I was on that page. I turned the other option to Text only so that it stops switching to the map on me. I somehow did not see the Sharp Bend option that WAS RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF MY FACE.

Complaining loudly in a semi-public forum FTW! 🎉

Garmin Venu 2I’ve been noticing for a while that our so-called technological overlords are trying to sell us a vision of meticulously tracked health data that will help us all move toward a fitter, healthier lifestyle—and, hopefully, alert us when things are starting to go awry in these delicate biological machines we inhabit.

Insurance companies are starting to incorporate this data into their decisions on how much to charge you for the pleasure of not losing everything you own should you become ill.

As with all things technological these days, these devices and their data are granted a cachet they’ve done absolutely nothing to deserve. Long story short, take all of these numbers with a grain of salt 🧂 and don’t base your ego or mood 😑 on them.

And let’s hope that either the devices get a lot better or that our societies and/or corporate overlords come to their senses and stop making financially consequential decisions based on them.

We will, of course, have to hope for the former because the latter ain’t gonna happen.

Heart rate & intensity minutes

This figure doesn’t have any real meaning. It’s supposed to be an indicator of how hard your body is exercising. It tracks both “regular” and “vigorous” minutes. You get double the intensity minutes for vigorous activity. It is a mystery how these minutes are calculated. You would think they would be related to heart rate—after all, it’s pretty much the only thing that a Garmin Venu 2 can measure—-but the story is not that simple.

If you’re not tracking an activity, the watch doesn’t seem to measure heart rate very consistently at all. When I ride the indoor bike, it’s not enough to track the activity on my phone, connected via BlueTooth to the trainer. In order to track heart rate and record intensity minutes, I have to start the activity on my watch—otherwise it doesn’t notice that I’m pushing an average of 230W for an hour.

It. just. doesn’t. notice.

How is this possible when the watch is on my wrist, measuring my heart rate? Why doesn’t it notice that my heart rate is considerably elevated? It is a mystery, but it does not. I’ll be 20 minutes into the workout and realize that I’ve forgotten to let my watch know that I’m working out. I look at my heart rate there: 72bpm. Impossible. I sit up, but continue pedaling. I start an activity on my watch. My heart rate jumps to 142bpm immediately. It continues to climb over the next few minutes, settling in between 155 and 170, as I would expect for going pretty much all-out.

But…how is it possible that the watch didn’t notice my elevated heart rate on its own? Why would it just tell me I had a 72bpm? What the hell did it think it was measuring that it suddenly started measuring differently when I told it to pay attention?

Another anecdote.

I went for a walk today, climbing 290m over 4km to a lovely little restaurant called Rosinli that perches on a hill just outside my back door. They’re under new management and seem to be doing a nice job of it, but that’s neither here nor there.

I thought I’d started tracking the hike, but I had, alas, not. This is another point of contention: why does the watch require that I not only select to start an activity, select the activity, and then force me to press again to start the activity? Shouldn’t that be the default behavior? Couldn’t I just press stop if I’d intended only to set up the activity for recording but not really get going yet?

But I digress.

Anyway, I wasn’t tracking the activity and I was so taken with the walk that I didn’t notice that my watch wasn’t alerting me as the kilometers unrolled, as it would had it been tracking an activity. I had glanced at my watch a few times to see my heart rate when my partner asked me what mine was on the steep bits. I saw a maximum of 117bpm and 110 and 111 a few other times. It’s pretty steep back there.

When we got near the top, I finally noticed that I’d forgotten to start the activity. My watch had recorded 0 intensity minutes. It simply doesn’t pick up, on its own, that something is going on. If you’re not within the context of an actively recording activity, then you can’t trust any of the numbers.

I noticed as well that the intensity minutes recorded by my Venu 2 are only about 1/3 of the minutes recorded by the ForeRunner 235 I had for years before this watch.

None of this makes any sense. It feels wildly unscientific and unreliable.

👎 Intensity minutes will only ever be approximate.

VO₂ Max

Similarly, the VO2-max score is nearly useless. For one, it is nearly impossible to see this value. You can dig through the app on your phone to find it—More ➡ Performance Stats ➡ VO2 Max—but you’ll ever see it very fleetingly on your watch. I’ve only ever seen it after a walk, never after a hike. I think it also appeared after a couple of runs, but I don’t run a lot.

It has never once appeared after cycling because… why? Isn’t cycling an endurance activity for which VO₂ Max (A) could be measured and (B) would be relevant, if not important? If I’ve only cycled for a while, then Garmin kind of forgets about my VO₂ Max as if there were simply no way to know that figure until I would just do some exercise.

The value appears on the watch only for a few seconds immediately after having recorded an activity—and then never again. There is no way to view this value on your watch, otherwise.

Anyway, six months ago, after having had my watch for a good month already, my watch was convinced that my VO₂ Max was about 30. This is a terrible score, even for a 70-year-old man. If you’re 70 and only clocking a 30 VO₂ Max, then you should probably see a doctor or take a COVID test, at the very least. You’re not absorbing a lot of oxygen, bub.

This was, of course, right in the middle of a typically spectacular, long-distance, biking season for me. But the needle didn’t move at all until it started to rise all the way to 35 about three months later. Then, over the next two months, it’s risen to 45 and stayed there for a couple of weeks now.

My app now trumpets that I’m in the top 15% of all athletes my age.

Cool, but what am I to believe? What the hell is it actually measuring? And why was it so wrong for so long and now I’m supposed to assume it’s right? And why did it make “jumps” in the span of a couple of weeks a couple of times now? It’s like it just woke up and realized that I exercise.

I mean, it was definitely wrong before. I would have trouble getting up the stairs with a VO₂ Max of 30, so that couldn’t have been right. But why would I now believe that 45 is correct? I have no reason for doing so.

👎 VO₂ Max will only ever be approximate.

Fitness Age

You can probably imagine what I think of this value. I’ve only recently learned about it. You can only find it on the app—More ➡ Health Stats ➡ Fitness Age—but not on the watch.

I honestly don’t even want to hazard a guess as to how this is calculated. I shudder to think of its accuracy.

For the first seven months that I owned the watch, I’d never heard of it, then it suddenly told me sometime last week that my fitness age had decreased to 43. Just out of the blue, I got a message on my watch. Congratulations!

I have no idea what to make of this. Again, I’m in the slowest part of my fitness year. It’s winter and it’s even been particularly slow because the weather hasn’t been conducive to hiking or skiing and I’ve been nursing a sore achilles tendon back to health. I had the watch when I was banging out 200km per week on the bike last summer. Apparently, that level of endurance training didn’t have any effect on my fitness age.

Or maybe it was a software upgrade. Or, maybe…

👎 Fitness Age will only ever be approximate.

This was a pretty good game, unless you like defense. I will leave most of the political commentary in the capable hands of others. [1]

• Zelensky 🇺🇦 video call, of course
• Marine Corps 🎖
• Military Color Guard 🪖
• Jets flying over the stadium 🛩
• Three or four songs to start it off? ✅
• The National Anthem was a very nice rendition by Chris Stapleton 🎸
• Coaches and players crying like bitches? 😭 Oh, yeah.
• Giant American flag? 🇺🇸 Yup.
• Soldiers and wars mentioned all the time in the run-up? Yup.
• Paeans to America? Oh yeah.
• Mentioning 9–11? Yup.
• Pretending that Pat Tillman wasn’t anti-war [2] and wasn’t murdered by friendly fire? Yup.
• 2h19m into the coverage and still no kickoff? ✅

• The first quarter saw the teams trade a couple of touchdowns 🏈 🏈

  KC 7 – 7 PHI

• First-quarter 🕒

• Eagles 🦅 quarterback Hurts starts the second quarter with a long bomb for a touchdown in the first eight seconds. 🏈

  KC 7 – 14 PHI

• But the Eagles fumble halfway through the second quarter and gift the Chiefs a touchdown. 🏈

  KC 14 – 14 PHI

• Hurts again: long run on his own to set up 4th and 2 at the 6. Chiefs with illegal motion and it’s 1st and goal. Hurts runs it in himself on the first play. 🏈

  KC 14 – 21 PHI

• Mahomes makes a poor quarterback run of his own and is tackled on his injured ankle. Philly gets the ball back and makes a run down the field.

• Philly settles for a field goal and the first half ends.

  KC 14 – PHI 24

• Half-time. 🕕
• Rihanna is high up on a platform. The songs are a mess. It’s fifteen minutes long, but feels longer. Lots of fireworks. 🎆

• KC gets a touchdown 🏈 in the first five minutes, then quickly gets the Eagles to cough up a fumble and scores on that, too. It’s called back ⛔️ because the received did not have control of the ball, which is a totally bizarre call because it very much looked like he did. The German 🇩🇪 announcers had it 100% right, though.

  KC 21 – PHI 24

• Next are a bunch of ⚠️ flags with questioned calls. Philly gets a razor-thin decision on a catch/not-catch, gets the ball back, and KC loses a time-out.

• Eagles settle for another field goal. 🏈

  KC 21 – PHI 27

• Fourth quarter begins. 🕤

• Kansas City comes marches up the field quickly for a touchdown, on a nice positioning fake-out for an easy walk-in. 🏈

  KC 28 – PHI 27

• KC puts tremendous pressure on Hurts and they’re forced to punt. and KC is back on the offense. KC gets another one. 🏈

  KC 35 – PHI 27

• A quick drive, a long pass, an unfortunate step out-of-bounds two yards before the end zone, but then a quarterback sneak, a two-point conversion, and it’s

  KC 35 – PHI 35

• Five minutes left and it’s all tied up. 🕚
• KC gets up the field—with a run from Mahomes—and gets within TD range. They’re a bit early, though. So, they need to waste time before kicking a field goal. The Eagles help them out by holding on a play, giving them a new first down. Chiefs are wasting as much time as they can. It’s 3rd and 5 with less than a minute. They’re at the 7-yard line.

• Field goal KC with 00:08 remaining

  KC 38 – PHI 35

• Hail Mary from Hurts goes nowhere, falling harmlessly into the middle of the field.

Moroccan bicycle kick dead-on to the bottom near-postAs a friend of mine has repeatedly written, “I feel bad for anyone boycotting this World Cup because it’s the best tournament of our lifetimes.” He also felt bad for himself that he would have to “go back to watching shitty premier league and MLS after this.” He’s quite a bit younger than I am, it’s the best tournament I’ve seen as well. The football has been absolutely top-notch.

It may be highly corporatize and corrupt and awful and wrong, but on the field, it’s absolutely amazing. I’ve never seen so many good goals and such good play in one tournament. So exciting. Whatever else, you can’t take that away from it.

See Wir suchen das schönste Tor der WM (SRF) for a 3-minute collection of clips of several goals, as well as a few more that you could vote on. There were quite a few gorgeous feats.

A boring interlude

But who cares how great the soccer was! It’s the workers in Qatar who should be foremost in our minds. It’s always interesting to see what we’re made to care about. While workers died in the building of the stadia, it’s probably not exactly clear how many, due to the same exact problem we have with all other journalism these days: the loudest voices have the loosest allegiance to reality.

I haven’t put any time into finding out what the real numbers are, but I know that all reporting about Asia is generally wildly inaccurate. Caveat emptor. Witness the recent revelation that Iran was going to kill 15,000 protesters. It turns out to have been one sentenced to death, and that one because he set a police station on fire. There are a few others on trial where the capital punishment is possible.

That may or may not the full information on the situation there—I neither read Farsi nor do I follow Iran’s internal politics—but it’s much closer than the only number people will likely remember, which is at least three orders of magnitude too high.

It’s interesting, though, that we always hear about boycotts when it’s Russia, or China, or Qatar who’s hosting. Qatar and China have abysmal labor practices, it’s true (or I’ve heard). But so does the U.S. At the same time that rail workers all over Europe are luxuriating in a single-day strikes that bring them real gains in remuneration and working conditions, the U.S. just squashed a looming railroad strike with an act of Congress, essentially telling them these laborers that they are essential and their lives belong to the corporations that hired them. If they misbehave in any way, the U.S. will take away their savings (in the form of their pensions).

And, yet, no-one will ever say one word about boycotting the 2026 world cup because the U.S. is hosting it. If not for the horrific labor practices, then what about the hyper-militarization, both domestically and internationally? Bernie Sanders was just made to retract a bill to stop funding Saudi Arabia’s war against Yemen. No problem. Nothing will ever stop the U.S. from funding Israel’s war on Palestine. No problem. The U.S. is waging a trade war against Russia and China—and has done for years. The U.S. is fighting a proxy war in Ukraine—as well as several other places. All of this weakens the weakest all over the world. Is that not enough violence to warrant a boycott? And not a single word will be said about boycotting that World Cup, when so many, many words were said about boycotting Qatar’s.

Back to the action

After the first week, I started watching on the first weekend of the tournament. I actually ended up watching quite a bit, I guess. I watched most of these games while doing something else, but nevertheless, there I was, increasingly rapt at the incredible quality of play.

Group Matches

Argentina   2 – 0 Mexico
France      2 – 1 Denmark
Morocco     2 – 0 Belgium (partial)
Spain       1 – 1 Germany
Brazil      1 – 0 Switzerland
Portugal    2 – 0 Uruguay (partial)
USA         1 – 0 Iran
Argentina   2 – 0 Poland
Morocco     2 – 1 Canada
Japan       2 – 1 Spain
Switzerland 3 – 2 Serbia

Quarterfinals

Argentina   2 – 1 Australia
France      3 – 1 Poland
Japan       1 – 1 Croatia     (1 – 3 PKs)
Morocco     0 – 0 Spain       (3 – 0 PKs)
Croatia     1 – 1 Brazil      (4 – 2 PKs)
Argentina   2 – 2 Netherlands (4 – 3 PKs)
Morocco     1 – 0 Portugal
England     1 – 2 France

Semifinals

Argentina   3 – 0 Croatia
France      2 – 0 Morocco

Small final

Croatia     2 – 1 Morocco

Final

France      2 – 2 Argentina

The Switzerland – Serbia match was a cracker. Lots of drama and lots of action. But Switzerland was looking pretty vulnerable at the back. The same for France, although their offensive firepower and ease with which they got through the midfield was absolutely amazing. Argentina just picked up steam the whole way, with Messi playing like a man possessed. Mbappe is also mostly firing on all cylinders. This should be a very interesting final.

Small final

But first, there was the small final, playing for third place. Croatia took care of Morocco in the first half with an early goal which Morocco matched immediately, but Croatia had a beautifully placed shot late in the first that turned out to be the game-winner.

Morocco fought hard, but Croatia is amazing as well. They’re a country of about 4M people and they’ve placed second and third in the last two World Cups. Incredible depth for such a small country.

The Final 👏

And oh my God, what an amazing final!

Argentina goes up on a Messi PK, then goes up 2–0 on a beautiful goal, to go into halftime with a 2–0 lead. The French finally woke up after the 80th minute, with Mbappe putting away a PK, then cracking in a lovely shot just minutes later to tie it up late in the match.

In extra time, things are getting chippy, they’re making mistakes, but both are pressing pretty hard—as hard as you can expect after 100+ minutes of play. Messi puts together some amazing plays and finally puts one away with 10 minutes to go. Incredible!

With four minutes to go, Argentina blocks a shot with an elbow in the penalty box and it’s Mbappe back at the spot. Goal. 3–3.

End-to-end in the extra time, with Martinez blocking a point-block shot for Argentina, then Argentina taking it to the other end for a shot of their own. But it goes to penalties.

Mbappe sinks his. Four goals for him. Nothing to complain about there. He’s a national here, for sure. Messi’s up. He sinks his. Three goals for him. Also did his job. Nice to see champions who act like champions when the chips are down. Incredible work from both of them.

Mbappe would end up being the only goal scorer for France as Argentina made their next three while France missed both of theirs. Final 3 – 3 (4 − 1).

With the Copa America from last year and the World Cup this year and holding literally every possible record for league and championship play alone, Messi is the GOAT. But Mbappe is only 23 and delivered a hat trick in a final where he was fighting for his second World Cup. His numbers are spectacular so far—they’re even better than Messi’s were, at the same age.

Crybabies surrounding the refereeWhatever happened to the rule where only the captain is allowed to talk to the referee? Now players fly from across the field to deliver the amazing news to the referee that they don’t think that their teammate committed a foul and that the referee should reconsider and retract the call. Which never happens. But they all line up to tell him anyway. It’s tedious and childish.

A friend clarified for me,

“the point is not to argue that call, its to encourage the ref to reconsider a future decision on the next call or calls. they are setting the tone, and the ref either stops it or lets it go on. if your captain is the gk is it reasonable to expect him to run to the other end of the field to complain a call? no. and until refs enforce it then players will and should continue to do it. in footballing terms this is called “shithousery””

I appreciate the clarification. But I wasn’t confused as to why they do it. The point about the captain not being close enough is well-taken, but that possibility doesn’t justify everyone playing “captain”. I don’t care much either way because I only watch occasionally and can easily walk away (I’m a dilettante!). I feel bad for people who are stuck watching these antics without even realizing how far away from actual soccer it’s gotten. That Overton Window is a sonofabitch.

The world is full of terrible incentives. This is just another of those. I suppose it’s just my way of complaining every 2-4 years about how soccer is sometimes more about shithousery than anything else. It’s not an honorable sport at that level. It’s all about lying and manipulating for advantage when there’s no other way to get it.

Still, I wonder how much influence shithousery actually has on a professional referee. Do we put up with watching these antics even though it has no effect on the game at all? My friend said that “the referee can end it; they just don’t”, so is this a deliberate WWE-ification/twitterification of the game?

Perhaps it’s deliberately allowed because a lot of people enjoy drama. If there were less drama, fewer people would watch. Fans of the actual sport have to watch it be diluted so that it will attract the interest of people who are fans of drama, but don’t care much about what’s going on between dramatic scenes. They could just as well be watching any other reality show, or browsing TikTok. This mindset poisons the game. [1]

I wonder why this sort of drama hasn’t infected ice hockey or NFL football yet? There, it’s the opposite: players are expected to play through the pain and injury, which is wrong, but in another way.

Garmin Tacx Flux S SmartIt is November, my friends, which means it’s time to complain about Garmin’s TacX software.

I dragged my trainer out of the basement on Sunday. I test-connected it with BlueTooth to the phone and it looked good. I even have a mount for the phone this year. The bike is, once again, pointing toward my iMac, so it’s perfectly positioned for watching series or movies.

I set up The Boys S03, climbed up and started pedaling. The software wanted to calibrate again.

I figured, what the hell, it only took a few seconds the first time, let’s humor TacX. To calibrate, you just start pedaling until you get to 30kph and then let it spin down. It’s literally seconds.

It wouldn’t “take”.

Several times, just wouldn’t calibrate.

There’s a “skip” button at the top.

SKIP.

I started my ride with six minutes of riding flat. Then 0.5% for 90 seconds. Huh, that’s pretty easy. Now 1.0% for 90 seconds. Man, am I in great shape! I barely feel a difference.

Oh.

With or without calibration, the software shows the gradient and speed, but takes the power output from the trainer. Without calibration, the trainer doesn’t change the resistance.

So, I ended up riding flat-out at about 35kph for 40 minutes instead of riding “4 hills”. The software thinks I did the four hills, but it didn’t feel like it at all.

After I’d finished and had made sure that the ride had been saved, I killed the app. Upon restart, I was able to calibrate on the first try.

It’s my own fault for proceeding without calibration, but why doesn’t the software just reset everything after it’s noticed two or three failed calibration attempts? Couldn’t it just ask me, “hey, it looks like calibration is not working, would you like me to reset everything?”. Or “hey, it looks like calibration is not working. You should prolly just restart the app.”

Instead, it offers a “skip” button that suggested to me that I could just ride with the configuration provided by the previous calculation, not that it would just not provide resistance.

What the hell, Garmin? These are basics.

The following article is the text of a message I sent to Garmin to start a discussion about improving the UX for saving activities. 🤞

Garmin Venu 2Is there any way to prevent the Venu 2 from auto-saving an activity while I’m still working on it?

My old ForeRunner 235 would simply drop out of tracking mode and wait as long as I liked to restart the activity. This was fantastic for when I would stop for lunch on a hike. Or if I’d hiked or biked somewhere, wanted to stay x hours, but also wanted to record the hike there and back as a single activity.

The Venu 2 insists on staying active and auto-saves if I so much as brush a sleeve over the surface of the watch.

What I currently do to avoid the annoying auto-save is to lock the screen and then hope I notice when the watch threatens to auto-save my hike within 30 seconds if I dare to stop longer than 30 minutes.

This is quite annoying because I feel like my use-case is a pretty legitimate one. Is there any way to keep my watch from pushing me around about saving my activity?

There are several solutions I’d be happy with:

• Don’t use the touchscreen: Just stop auto-saving the activity. Don’t even try. Drop out of tracking mode after five minutes like the ForeRunner does. It’s OK. I’ll take responsibility for remembering to either continue or save the activity.
• Ask for confirmation: If you can’t stop the auto-saving behavior, please make the watch ask me whether I’m sure I want to save the activity and force me to press the hardware button (akin to how the “discard” behavior works). This would prevent inadvertant auto-saves (which sometimes leads to hikes split into 3 or 4 activities, which is just wrong).
• Just don’t auto-save: Just don’t ever threaten me with a 30-second countdown until the watch saves an activity. I don’t ever want to auto-save an activity in this way. Are you afraid the data will be lost somehow? Is it wasting power toa stay paused so long? Please find another way to resolve this (as I mentioned above, the ForeRunner seems to offer a solution).

One final thing: While the “discard activity” behavior includes a confirmation, the confirmation uses the same hardware button that you’d use to continue the activity. If you accidentally brushed up against the “discard” touch-screen button and then press the hardware button to continue without reading the screen, then you accidentally discard the activity. You could avoid this UX issue by using the bottom-right button (the “B” button?) to confirm discarding.

I cannot emphasize enough how little respect I have for any soccer player who does not stop whining and complaining about calls, even long after the referee has indicated that there will be a VAR.

They are a bunch of puling brats.

No pride. No honor.

They are a whole team full of idiotic children following the referee around like stupid ducklings, all with the most tragic looks on their faces, as if the gravest injustice to ever befall mankind had been perpetrated and they need to prosecute their case endlessly until it is rectified.

And somehow everyone is allowed to talk to the ref, not just the captain. And they all poke the ref in the chest, and get all handsy—and no-one gets a yellow or red card.

It’s a tragedy.

If you’ve ever seen ice-hockey, it’s incomprehensible that soccer players are the same species.

Before I quote from any terrible articles below, I’ll give my take on the women’s figure-skating finals (long program).

Trusova was an absolute physical powerhouse, nailing jump after jump after jump, but not exactly linking it all together with very much style. Sarah Van Berken neé Meier, moderating for SRF in Switzerland, said that she would have been in the top 10 for men with those jumps. It was an exciting program, but my viewing partner said it was “ugly”, compared to Sakamoto, who is a very pretty skater, if not as physically bombastic.

Shcherbakova was a lovely skater and was also very powerful and technically amazing. She absolutely deserved the gold medal. Trusova should probably have gotten third, except that she got an unreasonably high presentation score—it was only about four points under Sakamoto, which is hard to understand.

The Japanese in general were very pretty skaters, with Yuzuru Hanyu putting in a gorgeous, languorous routine that looked like he didn’t even know anyone was there. He never two-footed, he never rested, every move was part of a poem he expressed with himself and his skates. Amazing. Trusova did not look like that. Neither did Nathan Chen: his routine was great, but very different and not nearly as pretty, although it was artistic.

Back to the ladies. Valieva fell four times. She did the same routine absolutely flawlessly in the team competition. She had already handily won the Russian and European Championships in 2022 (setting world records for points) and won the junior world championships in 2020. She has been accused of taking an illegal substance. The team medal she won with Russia hangs in the balance. If she’d won this competition, there would have been no medal ceremony because it, too, would have been tainted. We are not supposed to know about this because she is 15 and she is supposed to be protected. But she is also from a very shitty country called Russia, so tongues wag and rules are not followed in the urgency to accuse Russia of not following rules (both in the U.S. and in Switzerland).

Anyway, I’m pretty sure that she threw the final so that her two countrywomen could take the medals. In all likelihood, without the accusation, Russia would have swept the women’s medals. Instead, they got out of the way and had her fall her way into fourth place, which she did admirably well. It was relatively easy convincing a world who’d spent a week calling her a criminal and monster that the nerves had gotten to a 15-year-old. I don’t think that that’s what happened, though. I think Russia or the IOC or all of them told her to fall on her sword instead. She was probably even remunerated handsomely for it. Those weren’t tears of loss: she was learning how bad it feels to choose the best possible option of several bad ones. At 15, she has learned the lesson of the world. She’s young; she’ll get another chance.

The NYT is a dumpster fire

I couldn’t even really begin reading articles like Why the Beijing Olympics Are So Hard to Watch by Lindsay Crouse (NY Times) or After a Disturbing Night, Concern Rises for Teenage Skaters by Juliet Macur (NY Times) because they’re so incredibly opinionated—even though they’re not in the opinion section of the newspaper. That absolutely doesn’t seem to matter in any way anymore. I’m not sure if it ever did, but I feel like it must have, decades ago.

This is how Crouse starts her “article” about the Olympics.

“Imagine a dystopian Olympics. Maybe it would have athletes skiing on fake snow down parched slopes. Robots mixing cocktails, making dumplings and disinfecting the air. Events staffed by workers not in sportswear but hazmat suits. Instead of a stadium you are eager to sit in, a bubble you cannot leave.

“They’re being staged in a country whose persecution of the Uyghurs has been called a genocide by the Biden administration, and yet China had a smiling Uyghur athlete light the Olympic torch as Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin looked on, two autocrats seated together in the V.I.P. box.”

Imagine a country that invades whomever the fuck it feels like whenever the fuck it feels like it constantly heaving broadsides against other countries, all the while never once being call on its bullshit or, heaven forfend, even being considered to be banned from hosting or participating in the Olympics because of its monstrous crimes. People won’t shut about the slap in the face that is letting China host the Olympics, but no-one ever says anything about the U.S. It doesn’t even occur to anyone that they might be applying their principles somewhat unevenly.

Or, after a week of relentlessly dumping on Russian skaters, the Times now sends out Macur to write,

“Finding a way to protect teenagers inside an authoritarian sports system like Russia’s will be challenging. No doubt girls and women fear speaking out because of possible reprisal against them or their families. Setting up an independent group to provide oversight there is not as easy as it sounds.

“This is Russia we’re talking about, the country caught switching out urine samples in a doping scheme at the 2014 Sochi Games so its athletes could win.”

Obviously, America’s only concern is for the children. Sure it is. Quit your bullshit, you utter hypocrites and monsters. It’s fascinating to watch a country talk about other countries’ abusive systems when they just had one of the greatest child-abuse scandals in history in their own women’s/girl’s gymnastics program. In that case, it was sexual abuse, completely unrelated to the training program. You can argue that a training program shouldn’t abusive, but you could pretend to some humility when your own house is shattered glass.

It’s unsurprising that this kind of bullshit fills the pages of the New York Times. Their agenda has been clear for a while now: provoke war with Russia, by any means possible. I would imagine it’s a good trade-off to retain whatever advertising funding that they have remaining. After having predicted an invasion on the 16th of February—smack-dab in the middle of the Olympics—the front page on the same day looked like this:

NYT Front page on 19.02.2022

No humility, no remorse, no surrender. They have their marching orders from the military-industrial complex.

Every time I want to adjust my ski bindings, I (A) remember how easy it was to adjust them last time and (B) forget how it worked.

It is very easy to adjust the binding for boot length.

1. Get a flathead screwdriver
2. Place the screwdriver under the thick metal tab (found below the large flathead screw)
3. Lever the screwdriver up to lift the tab
4. Slide the binding assembly backward or forward to suit the boot size [1]
5. Make sure that the assembly clicks back into place

Setting Salomon S9 12 TI ski bindings − insert screwdriver

Setting Salomon S9 12 TI ski bindings − lift screwdriver

Click either of the images to show a larger version.

Justification

Why did I write this? Because every other damned guide on the Internet is a 5-10–minute video explaining everything but how to do the one thing I wanted to do. Either that, or it’s a wall of text with no useful images (see below). It’s not rocket science, but after a year or two of not doing this, I’ve usually forgotten about the tab—and get all intrigued with the myriad screws available on the binding.

Unscrewing things is a bad idea. Do not unscrew anything unless you absolutely have to. You do not have to unscrew anything in order to adjust for a boot—unless the boot is just way too big or small for the binding placements, in which case you’ve got a lot more work ahead of you than you thought.

The guide I ended up using is the enticingly named How to Adjust Salomon Ski Bindings. With no insult intended to the author, this article feels like it was written by an AI or perhaps had been translated back and forth a few times with DeepL.

In case you think I’m being unfair, I’m going to cite the section that “helped” me in full,

“Now to get this next step you must pay close attention since it is an important part of the process. First, if your boot clicks on the link, this alone does not mean that the configuration of these links is the most appropriate. As a general rule, the boot could click on the link independently.

“[Um, what?]

“Therefore, when the boot performs a click, then the metal tab should be between the external and internal hash marks. When we talk about the metal tab we are referring to that tab that you initially raised to move the binding.

“[The part above is what actually helped me remember about the tab.]

“Therefore, if this tab is in this place, that is, between these marks, and is also blocked, then the starting pressure will be adequate or correct. Now, if the metal tongue is located in the housing of the heel piece, or if it is hanging beyond the mark corresponding to the outer hash, we would be talking that the forward pressure is too much, or too low.

“[🤔🤷🏼‍♂️🤔🤷🏼‍♂️🤔🤷🏼‍♂️]

“From this point, you must click on the union with the boot to discern the level of forward pressure. To do this, the metal tab should be located on the internal and external marks, but only at the moment when you do not click on the binding boot. This step must be done with considerable care as there are many incorrect positions for this case.”

I read a lot of tutorials online and this is one of the more inscrutable I’ve encountered. Cheers to them for reminding me about the metal tab, though.

I caught the last 30 minutes of Chelsea vs. MCI in the Champions League final last week. It showed both sides of football. Both sides played absolutely brilliantly and it was a nail-biter right up until the last seconds.

It also showed what’s wrong with football — the team in the lead started strategically chewing the scenery on several questionable “contacts”. As a long-time hockey fan, I think it’s just shameful and unnecessary to flop around to defend a lead.

The team was obviously better than that—they had several wonderful attempts of their own—but they strategically flopped anyway. It’s like it’s instinctual at this point. Their opponents played basically without fouling, playing brilliant and inventive and offensive-minded football. A joy to watch.

Of course I understand it’s strategic and it might even have helped waste a few minutes to ensure the win, but it’s graceless, taking some of the poetry out of an otherwise brilliant win/defense of lead.

I wrote the following about a year ago when I first got my TacX. I have struck out the items that no longer apply.

The TacX App is a joke. It barely does what it needs to do.

• It doesn’t remember your login for more than a few days Now it remembers the login, but randomly shows the log in page with a loading circle on it between some screens, looking very much like it’s going to log out and then catching itself just before it does and proceeding to the next screen. It’s like watching a drunk lurch from one side of the street to the other and back.
• [New]: Now the web site also shows “there are no workouts” for a few seconds while it rummages around in the database for your data. It’s like no-one has ever heard of a loading screen at this company.
• You can’t paste into the username/password fields with hotkeys (you have to right-click and paste from the shortcut)
• It doesn’t remember any of the pages you were on (e.g. it always defaults to the same page in Workouts)
• You can’t edit workoutsYou can only edit workouts in the online software even though the desktop software looks for all the world exactly like the web site (i.e. it’s probably the web site running in an Electron app).
• You cannot clone workouts (to make one like another, but slightly longer/shorter/harder/easier)
• It can’t display your activities (you have to jump to the web page and log in again)
• The web site can sync with Strava, but not Garmin (the parent company of TacX)A year later and the site is finally integrated with Garmin (see below).
• Your activities don’t sync automatically
• Just that TacX is a completely different web site than Garmin Connect almost a yeartwo years after acquisition is embarrassing
• The FTP workout is a mystery. It’s called FTP but just defaults to 14 minutes at 200W. There doesn’t seem to be any way to measure FTP and have it remember it. You have to create the FTP workout yourself. There’s a new section called “Tests” that has an FTP test in it. I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks promising.
• The desktop app asks every damned time if it can have permission to share personal data so I can enable “Live Opponents”, something I’ve never asked it to do. I say no every time, but it doesn’t remember my choice.
• In the new software, another dialog has joined it, overlapping two requests for extra data that I have to reject every single time I start the app.

Here we are, a year later, and I’m inspired to write again.

Garmin finally got around to integrating their account with TacX. TacX is still, for some reason, a separate web site, but it now uses the same authentication provider as Garmin Connect.

The procedure of transferring to the new system was, as expected for Garmin, smooth and intuitive and painless.

• Open TacX
• It offers to “bind accounts”
• I follow the instructions and it seems to work
• TacX proceeds
• There is no data in my account
• I write “bind accounts fucking broken” in my notes [1]
• Restart TacX
• Watch its dance of login boxes and refresh glitches and lack of progress indicators until, suddenly, my workouts are back.

Now, for whatever reason, the (again, from my notes) “stupid cunt of a thing doesn’t show up as bluetooth device”. For whatever reason, the trainer was no longer recognized by TacX. It “needed a fucking device reboot to recognize the cunting thing again” [2].

I was forced to reboot the laptop completely in order to get the device back in TacX (boundless joy, as I’d wanted to have been working out on the trainer for ten minutes already and was, instead, doing software support for a device that literally has one job and for a company that also pretty much has just one job and fails to be able to do it adequately, to say nothing of well, year after year after year).

On reboot, I see that the TacX trainer is “special” in that it is connected via BlueTooth but doesn’t show up as a connected BlueTooth device in MacOS. I’m sure this is totally standard and not at all indicative of hacks built on hacks in the TacX software.

After having nicely elevated both my heart rate and blood pressure, I was actually able to get a workout in and moved on to the “save activity” part of the competition.

To say that the software has timing issues is an understatement.

• Save activity to cloud?
• Yes, please.
• Go to cloud?
• Yes, please .
• Activity not there.
• Refresh
• Activity not there
• Open new page
• There it is
• Click it
• It’s there. Click “view Workout” in the toolbar.
• The corresponding workout has been deleted
• Go to Garmin Connect manually
• There it is
• Go back to TacX
• Refresh
• The corresponding workout has been deleted
• Now it’s stuck on loading data and can’t show the workout in TacX
• Reload the page
• Stuck on loading…

Garmin is a huge software company with literally a single web site to run. They bought a competitor in February 2019 and, almost two years later, have finally integrated the authentication. They have not managed to integrate the web sites, though. What they did manage was to bring their special “Garmin Cloud-expertise polish” to the TacX site. Unbelievable though it may seem, it’s now even worse and more stunted than it used to be.

The TacX app itself is unchanged and feels like someone made a desktop app out of an iPad app. It doesn’t remember any selections. It takes five clicks to do anything.

To end on an upbeat note: you can now only export from TacX to Garmin (Strava export as well “Save TCX” have been removed). However, the sync works as expected and the Garmin activity now takes the name of the TacX activity, by default. I know, right? As if that weren’t already enough engineering prowess, they’ve also changed the default activity type to “Indoor Cycling” (it used to be “Cycling”). It’s like a Christmas miracle.

Strava recently published new Community Standards. It’s mostly fine, filled with the standard entreaties to avoid “hate speech” (even though that’s a legal term that has a different meaning every country they have users in) and singing paeans about being nice to each other.

Strava also declares its right to terminate the account of anyone they consider to have transgressed against what seem like deliberately vaguely defined rules.

They probably think they’re being precise when they write,

“Hate speech is a direct attack based on race, ethnicity, age, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, caste, sex, gender, gender identity, serious disease, disability, body type, or immigration status.”

So that’s their definition, but there’s a lot of wiggle room, as always with these kinds of definitions. What is missing is context and tone, something that never interests censors—especially digital ones that are completely incapable of detecting sarcasm or wit.

What is heard versus what is meant

There are innumerable examples of something that sounds pretty bad in a transcript—until you hear the original audio or video and realize that the person being quoted actually said the words in a “yeah right, like we’re supposed to believe that” tone. That is, the spoken meaning was the opposite of what it looks like when written down. That’s not a rare occurrence, honestly. Almost any discussion about anything of substance can be sliced and diced to distort its meaning.

So, for example, I’m not sure if I would get banned for telling one of my oldest friends that he’s slower than me on a particular hill because “everyone knows Turks can’t climb.” I mean, I would be totally kidding and it would be a joke between us (and my account is restricted to only followers), but who knows who else would lean in to take a look and take offense on behalf of all Turkish people at words exchanged between friends and not intended for anyone not privy to the context?

Not what Strava is selling

I, on the other hand, signed up to Strava as a place to upload sports data and share it with friends, who do likewise. Strava is a platform, but now they think they’re a cult. Although you would think that their purpose is to provide a sports-data platform, according to these new standards, they have higher goals. To whit, to,

“[b]e inclusive and anti-racist

“Strava is committed to actively dismantling and eradicating racism and discrimination in all forms. If you use Strava, you’re joining us in this commitment, without exception.”

If I use Strava, I have to join this commitment? No exceptions? What the actual hell, Strava? I paid you money so I can see my historical data neatly and nicely parsed and now you tell me that, by the way, I’ve also got to join you on your crusade of anti-racism? In order to use Strava, it’s not enough that I am not racist in my thoughts or actions, but I have to don superhero togs and actively fight racism, nay, “dismantl[e] and eradicat[e] racism and discrimination in all forms”.

Fuck, dude, I’ve got a day job, OK, Strava? Is it all right with you if I just work there, teach my night-school classes and ride my bike once in a while? Jesus, I didn’t think signing up to a sports platform meant I was signing up for a war on racism. A war whose parameters are defined, of course, by a VC-infused, Silicon Valley company, which is where I like to look for moral and ethical guidance.

If you’re sufficiently woke, then you’ll happily swallow this transgression of a paying relationship without a second thought. The list of things that count as “hate speech” won’t trigger a single worry that perhaps the net will be cast too widely.

Protecting yourself by hiding yourself

I suppose the answer is to not leave any comments on Strava if you want to stay on the safe side. Another approach is to expose only a stunted, anodyne version of your identity there, which is what many of us end up doing in most relationships. That’s probably a good rule of thumb these days for pretty much anything that considers itself to be “social” media—media that then doesn’t really let people “socialize” in the way that they choose.

So, sites are policing language and behavior on so-called social sites—and the state is working hard to make encrypted, private, communication channels open to agents of the state, just to make sure you’re not committing crimes. For now, their stated goal is to prevent “human trafficking” and “buying drugs” and all sorts of other nefarious activity that they allege is rising dramatically, if not stratospherically.

But how long will it be before policing of hate crimes and forbidden language—and thoughts—comes to formerly private conversations? As we’ve seen with Twitter and Facebook—and now Strava—the policing is coming everywhere people gather and interact. If you’ve nothing to fear, you’ve nothing to hide, right?

People put so much stock in the records and trophies and numbers available on Strava, but it just seems so unreliable.

For example, I’d done a long ride a couple of weeks ago: about 140km with 2350m of climbing in just under six hours. Strava “estimated” my average wattage at about 144w. [1] A buddy of mine saw this and went out for one of his own a couple of days later, putting up about 150km with 2350m in about 6:15. My buddy went faster and farther, weighs at least 6-8 kilos more than me and Strava still “estimated” his average wattage at 131w.

I thought this was wrong enough that I scrolled through the segments on his ride, which looked mostly normal (I honestly haven’t tried to figure out how Strava averages the estimated watts), until I came across this segment:

Strava? You OK, buddy?

I’ve seen segments before where Strava has literally no problem with a 1km segment marked at 11% average incline but that I’ve managed at a cool 30km/h—about 3x faster than I would be able to climb something like that, Strava chirpily informs me that I put up 2900+ VAM [2] at I don’t even remember how many hundreds of watts. This feat is flatly impossible for almost any rider, but the segment somehow spends years in Strava’s database without being flagged. [3]

Still, this is the first time I’ve seen Strava estimate 805w on a descent, which my friend managed with absolute aplomb at a cool and calm 106bpm heart-rate. [4] Not bad for an old guy. :-)

Strava makes for strange conversations: I’ve had discussions with nearly non-technical cycling colleagues about “eventual consistency” and caching and shared servers and data regions. It’s a funny old world.

In the two shots below, Strava is telling me that I got my second-best time [1] but the time for each activity is clearly lower than the time that it’s indicating as a PR. Even after recalculation, Strava is adamant. I’m not sure what could cause this as it’s pretty basic math. Maybe the numbers they’re showing are different than the numbers they’re using to calculate aggregated values (like PRs).

Mauer Climb PR

Maur Bergsprint PR

The next one is a bit of a twist: when I looked at a friend’s segment, I was wondering when I’d last ridden it, so I showed “My Results”. There I saw that Strava claims a different PR for that segment because it seems to have never updated it when I rode it faster earlier this year.

Baumastrasse − Wirzwil

Strava sometimes caches too aggressively and it’s not immediately obvious how one gets Strava to recalculate. [2] Most likely you don’t; instead, you should just be happy that you were outside and stop sweating the numbers.

This information is available in many videos and forums, but I’ve collected it here so that I don’t have to look it up next time.

Chain is rubbing on other gears

The DI2 does not adjust itself. It does, however, know how far apart your gears are. Once you’ve got one gear—a central one—adjusted, the others are automatically correct, as well.

The DI2 also almost never needs adjustment (at least in my experience). [1]

If you hear the chain rubbing on any of the gears, then you can use the special adjustment mode to fix it.

• Put the bike into the 5th gear (counting from the largest gear). It doesn’t matter which gear you use on the front.
• Press and hold the little button under the sender for 2 seconds to enter “adjustment mode”.
• Press the small shifter on the right-hand side to move 1/12 of a position (0.2mm) toward smaller/harder gears
• Press the large shifter on the right-hand side to move 1/12 of a position (0.2mm) toward larger/easier gears

Adjust until the rubbing stops. [2]

You can also do this while you’re riding if you still notice an issue. It’s quite easy to get on a flatter, more-open stretch, shift to the central gear, go into adjustment mode and adjust until the rubbing is gone.

Lowest gear does not “hold”

If you put it into the lowest gear and you hear the DI2 buzz, it is thinking about downshifting automatically because it has detected a problem. Generally, you’ll turn once or twice and it will drop back into the second-lowest gear.

This is all the more annoying because when you need the lowest gear, you generally kinda need the lowest gear.

There are two possibilities.

Bent bracket

The bracket holding your derailleur on the frame is bent. This can happen if you hit it hard enough against something. The bracket is designed to bend; if it didn’t, then the carbon frame might crack first. Replacing a bracket is cheaper.

You can generally see if the bracket is bent. If it’s bent, you can bend it back into place with no issues [3].

It was at this time that I learned that it’s a good idea to keep a spare bracket on hand, just in case. I have one now.

Once you’ve adjusted the bracket back into place, you might need to micro-adjust your gears (see above) in order to get them running smoothly again.

Misadjusted lower limiting screw

In my case, the bracket was just fine, but the lower limiting screw (marked “L”) was touching bottom when in the lowest gear. This pressure cause the DI2 to back off by a gear. A quarter-turn to the left (making it looser) fixed this issue immediately.

Do you need big legs to push watts? A friend asked whether good hill climbers would need giant legs to push big watts—450-500W for a light rider, or 6–6.5W/kg. Apparently not. Phil Gaimon is a very strong hill climber. He looks like this.

Scrawny A.F. Not so huge legs, though. In the next video, you’ll see that he can push 450-500W for minutes at a time.

The first video is of Fabian Cancellara vs. Phil Gaimon. Both can push big watts, but Gaimon is retired and weighs about 20kg less. It wasn’t really a fair fight, but still amusing. I was at this ride in Wallis, Switzerland but only rode with Cancellara and Gaimon at the very beginning—before they took off up the Col des Mosses, the 20km HC-climb just before this one.

Complete Race: Phil Gaimon vs. Fabian Cancellara (YouTube)

Next up is a video of a short hill-climb in San Fransisco. The winner pushed crazy watts (787W average) for 77 seconds to win.

Outclimbing Phil Gaimon – 2018 Red Bull Bay Climb (YouTube)

Finally, here’s a video of a track cyclist vs. a road cyclist. Crazy watts again. They compete in several categories, from 6 seconds to a 5km hill climb. If you want to push over 2000W for a short period of time, then you’ll need giant legs. Otherwise, light and strong is the way to go.

Road Cyclist VS Track Sprinter (Who's the better cyclist?) (YouTube)

The article The Corruption of Football by Joshua Sperber (CounterPunch) offers a far better analysis of the final offensive play by the Seahawks—the one that led to an interception—than I could ever have hoped to make.

Sperber starts off by dissecting Emmitt Smith and Dave Zirin’s supposition that foul play must have somehow been involved. That is, “[t]he theory of foul play of course presupposes that Carroll made not only the wrong call but a completely nonsensical one that could only be attributable to corruption […]”. The NFL is certainly not a shining beacon on the hill and it’s very easy to suppose that something shady was going on—especially when the alternative is to suppose that everyone in the Seahawks organization is a moron and that even a relative tyro like yours truly could have made a more sensible call—namely, to run the ball with Marshawn Lynch, as Seattle had done on nearly every other play that game.

Sperber makes a strong case that passing on that play seemed stupid only to people who weren’t actual students of the game.

“Seattle had three plays to score a touchdown and, with 26 seconds remaining in the game, lacked the time (with only one timeout) to run on all three plays. The only question was when the Seahawks would pass, and it was entirely correct to pass on second down, as a second down run, assuming it was unsuccessful (as was Lynch’s earlier 3rd and 1 run), would have dictated a third down pass forfeiting any element of surprise. By passing on second down against a Pats’ defense playing run, Seattle had an excellent opportunity to win the game. And the odds were astronomically high that the pass would have ended in either an incompletion (stopping the clock, as they needed to do) or the game-winning touchdown. In fact, this season it has been statistically riskier to run from the one-yard line than to pass.”

Ok, fine. But he could have chosen a better passing play, couldn’t he? That is a valid point, apparently. Here’s Sperber addressing the kind of passing play Seattle chose.

“Insofar as Carroll should be criticized, it is not that he elected to pass but that he should have called for a relatively safer pass, for instance either to the corner of the end zone or out of a bootleg. Nonetheless, the interception did not result from a coach’s decision but from a weak play on the ball by Seattle receiver Ricardo Lockette and a remarkable (and devastating if he had been wrong) gamble and play by Patriot rookie defender Malcolm Butler […]”

Seattle just got very, very unlucky whereas, at the same time, the Patriots got very, very lucky. Maybe Seattle had just used up all of their luck two plays previous where Kearse managed—against nearly all the laws of physics—to keep the ball bouncing only on himself and to finally catch it while lying on the ground.

If you want outrage, be outraged that “Seattle’s Jeremy Lane gruesomely broke his arm” and “Patriot receiver Julian Edelman stayed in the game after receiving a vicious and illegal (but not penalized) helmet-to-helmet hit”, neither one of which was even mentioned during the broadcast.

Instead, the NFL announcers conspicuously drew attention to the concussion that Seattle’s Cliff Avril sustained and for which he was removed from the game. Lane and Edelman’s injuries weren’t obvious, so they were quietly taken away, while Avril was blown across the field, his case could not be ignored and was instead taken as an example of the NFL’s focus on safety.

Ah, now I can have my life back. [1]

Why are you [2] watching?

I honestly don’t know what comes over me when the Soccer World Cup or the European Championship is on. I never watch club football. I know some of the teams and know where some of the players play, but that’s it. I know many names, but don’t follow assiduously enough to even halfway qualify as a fan.

I am strongly critical of FIFA and their politics, corruption and influence. It’s probably a giant waste of money. At least some of the officiating is almost certainly paid off.

It doesn’t matter, though; I watched pretty much every game of the World Cup.

Enjoying the game, not a particular team

I can enjoy it in a way not open to real fans, though. I find myself unable to just root for my team no matter what happens the way so many others do. I have two passports, but no real allegiance to either of them. I was happy to see both teams—Switzerland and the U.S.—play well overall. They were both punching above their weight class, with Switzerland playing Argentina well and—almost—to a standstill and the U.S. tying Portugal and only losing 1–0 to the overwhelming might of what would end up being the eventual overall winner Germany.

Instead I was free to root for the team I thought played well, or better on that day instead of just rooting for a team even though they were playing like crap or were playing boring football that was beneath them.

Crowing Messi the King (no matter what)

I didn’t root for Brazil at all because they looked inept and unconvincing out there—almost from the very beginning. Only Neymar showed real flair. I didn’t root for Messi simply because he’s Messi, as so many others fell all over themselves to do. That guy has real talent, but it’s not like his shit doesn’t stink. There were times, believe it or not, where Messi was ineffective. I heard commentators give Messi the lion’s share of the credit for a goal that he “started” by passing to someone who passed to someone who passed to someone who scored. I saw FIFA nominate Messi as the man of the match in the final—an honor that even caused Messi to curl his lip in embarrassment. Soon after, he was awarded the golden ball for being the best player in the tournament. Of course he was.

Argentina scored 2 goals in their last four matches of the World Cup. They forced us to watch 360 minutes of (nearly) scoreless soccer instead of 270 minutes of exciting, score-full soccer. I couldn’t get on the Messi train in this tournament because he had a few flashes of brilliance in that long desert of scorelessness and was subsumed in the overall somnolence engendered by the rest of his humdrum squad.

I’m sure he’s brilliant on Barçelona—in fact, I’ve seen him play a few times and it was lovely. His skills are evident. But he does have bad days. The world should acknowledge it and maybe give the man of the match to Götze, who saved us all from having to watch yet another scoreless final be decided on penalty kicks. Or give the golden ball to an exciting scorer who scored goals that mattered, like James Rodriguez of Colombia or Arjen Robben of Holland, who was ever-so-exciting to watch. Or Klose, who became the highest-scoring player of World Cup history with two more goals this year. Or one of the goalies, like Ochoa of Mexico or Bravo of Chile or Navas of Costa Rica, all of whom kept their teams in the tournament much longer than anyone thought possible.

Slowing down toward the end

With many of the games in the so-called knock-out round, there was very little to love. Bad teams played very carefully and defensively. Good teams played very carefully and defensively. Teams that had previously derided others for counter-attacking were now doing so as their main strategy. I’m looking at you, Argentina.

I read that Argentina was awesome because they’d held their opponents scoreless for 457 minutes prior to Götze’s goal in the second half of the extra time in the final. I find it hard to agree—especially as a fan who had to suffer through watching so many scoreless minutes. The worst transgression wasn’t that those minutes were scoreless but that they were so uninspiring.

Glimmers of hope

Games that were interesting included a match between Ghana and Germany in which Ghana punched well above their weight. Algeria would similarly give the Germans much more trouble than more vaunted and well-known foes—and deliver a much more interesting game, to boot.

In the final rounds, Colombia produced some exciting football with James Rodriguez exceeding expectations. The Netherlands improved continually until they were stopped in their tracks by Argentina, against whom their offensive inventiveness abandoned them. Robben reached into his bag of speedy tricks and came up empty. Holland had triumphed against Costa Rica in their first of two scoreless matches against incredibly defensive teams. Netherlands would be back on the offensive against Brazil, which showed up with its tail between its legs to lose the “small final” 3–0.

The much-discussed thrashing of Brazil by Germany has been detailed enough elsewhere but it was quite breathtaking to behold. And there was really not very much of luck in it, to be honest. That Argentina held up so much better against Germany was surprising to me, but I’m willing to consider that luck on Argentina’s part—if not the luck on the field, then the luck that the German team that showed up to pulverize Brazil remained much more cautious in the actual final.

Brazil vs. Croatia (3–1)

Brazil took a little while to get going but showed flashes of brilliance. They got lucky that the momentum didn’t go the other way before getting some fortuitous calls. Brazil almost always gets the benefit of calls. I’m on fence as to whether it’s an in-built, explicit prejudice, an unconscious tendency on the part of referees in awe of their reputation or just a natural outgrowth of their playing so well.

Mexico vs. Cameroon (1–0)

Can’t remember. I think Mexico played pretty well.

Spain vs. Netherlands (1–5)

The Netherlands was on fire that day, with the Arjen Robben/Robin van Persie show delivering four goals for the old-timers. Spain was an utter mess and deserved the shellacking that they got. I, for one, was happy to see that we wouldn’t be treated to a Spanish march to the finals on the back of 0–0 ties and 1–0 wins and 7 million passes.

Chile vs. Australia (3–1)

Despite occasional flashes of brilliance, Australia was definitely outclassed by a more solid Chile. I don’t really remember many details though.

Colombia vs. Greece (3–0)

Colombia showed a class that Greece couldn’t match. Not much more to say about this one.

England vs. Italy (1–2)

Italy and England put on a lovely show, with both offenses producing a lot of imaginative chances and both teams pressing until the very end. Though England played better than I’ve honestly ever seen them play, Italy totally deserved to win.

Uruguay vs. Costa Rica (1–3)

Uruguay started off strong and was upset by Costa Rica, which took the last three goals of the match. I only saw the first half.

Côte d’Ivoire vs. Japan (2–1)

I didn’t see this match, but read that Drogba’s presence on the field inspired his team to two goals in the second half to take the game from Japan.

France vs. Honduras (3–0)

France played a strong game—much stronger than their appearance four years ago in Africa—and Honduras was clearly outmatched. Honduras responded by fouling quite a bit and even ended up losing a man early in the second half.

Switzerland vs. Ecuador (2–1)

Switzerland played with more heart than I’ve seen them play in a long time. They didn’t always play well, but they kept trying hard, kept running hard and even scored the game-winner almost three minutes into extra time in the second half.

Argentina vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina (2–1)

Argentina played an utterly horrible first half, missing passes all over the place and getting a lucky goal. In the second half, Lionel Messi did an utterly brilliant give-and-go, passed three more defenders and bounced a laser off of the opposite post to take Argentina to 2–0. Bosnia clawed a goal back but Argentina had by then organized their defense and held on to the victory.

Germany vs. Portugal (4–0)

Germany utterly dismantled a bewildered Portugal, which could barely put together two passes to say nothing of any offense worth mentioning. Germany had their third goal in extra time of the first half and it was all over but the crying. Speaking of which, Christiano Ronaldo started off strong but his expression eventually descended into his “gonna cry” face, which became permanent when Pepe got his criminal ass thrown off the field for an aggressive and dead-ball head-butt on Müller, who was down after Pepe had already bitch-slapped him to the ground. The second half wasn’t worth mentioning other than seeing Müller round out his hat trick.

Iran vs. Nigeria (0–0)

A boring and terrible game of which we will not speak again. Not too many fouls, but neither team could settle the ball down to get down to the business of actually building a dangerous offense.

Ghana vs. United States (1–2)

Clint Dempsey scored within 30 seconds for the US and that was pretty much all we heard from the US offense for a long time. Ghana, meanwhile, dominated possession and offensive chances and inventiveness, but couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. The US keeper was tested a few times, but never really brought to desperation. Ghana finally scored to even things up at 80 minutes but the U.S. capitalized on a poorly defended corner to take the lead again. Summary: a hapless Ghanian offense produced a single goal book-ended by U.S. goals.

Belgium vs. Algeria (2–1)

Not many chances on either side in a quiet game interrupted by a shockingly stupid foul in the penalty box by Belgium. An Algerian penalty-kick goal soon followed. I missed the second half, where Belgium rallied with two strong goals.

Brazil vs. Mexico (0–0)

A well-played and tactical but still not uncreative match. Mexico had more than its share of chances, forcing Brazilian goaltender Júlio César to make some spectacular saves. On the other end, though, the goaltending magic sparked even more brightly, with Mexican goaltender Guillermo Ochoa making nearly inhuman saves to maintain the shutout. There were occasional glimpses of Brazil’s style, but only Neymar really shone, as well as perhaps Paulinho. The tie was well-deserved, but there could have easily been goals on either side, if it hadn’t have been for the amazing goal-tending.

Russia vs. South Korea (1–1)

Both sides have a precise midfield game, a strong and well-organized defense and a somewhat ponderous offense (at least for the first third). It kind of felt like watching the FIFA 2015 AI play against itself. Russia became a bit more dangerous at the end of the first half and the beginning of the second half but nothing came of it. South Korea woke up a bit more in the second half as well. Both goalies had their problems holding on to the ball. The Russian keeper Akinfeev just totally flubbed a save and spilled it into the net (Kommentator ZDF [1]: “der ist der Depp des Tages. Ich will nicht despektierlich sein aber man kann das nicht anders bezeichnen”). It looked bad for Russia until substitute Kerzhakov brought a lot of energy to the game and was rewarded for it. From that point on, Russia dominated and had a lot more chances.

Netherlands vs. Australia (3–2)

Australia played better than expected and Holland took a while to find their rhythm. Still, Robben delivered a goal to take the lead, but Cahill equalized for Australia pretty much immediately. Australia got a weak penalty and Van Persie equalized, again almost immediately. DePay took the lead for Netherlands. Australia sought the equalizer until the very end, but Holland had the majority of chances and offense. Australia have a long flight ahead of them.

Spain vs. Chile (0–2)

Spain is still trying to find its rhythm. Initially, the Chileans were buzzing like bees and had the majority of the chances and long passes. Spain stuck to short passes (surprise!) but looked very disorganized, especially at the back. What a goal by Chile! Three beautiful passes and a falling-down finish by Vargas gives Chile the lead. Chile goes up 2–0 at the end of the first half and Spain is starting to panic. Spain takes some ugly fouls but manage to get it back under control, although Chile is still not giving them control of the midfield. Chile continues to build offense while Spain makes some very good attempts on set pieces. It is Chilean goaltender Claudio Bravo’s day, though, and Spain is going home. [2]

Cameroon vs. Croatia (0–4)

Cameroon started off with some very nice offensive flourishes but Croatia went against the run of play early and cashed in on a nice pass. By the middle of the first half, Croatia had established itself in the midfield and Cameroon was less on the offense than at the beginning. A shockingly stupid retaliation foul at the end of 45 minutes for Cameroon results in a red card. Croatia didn’t wait long in the second half to take advantage and pushed it to 2–0. They kept on coming and were at 3–0 at 60 minutes. A lot of the Cameroonians looked like they were going to cry. They still had flashes of offensive brilliance right up until the end, but they were too tired from playing a man down for an entire half to get an Ehrentor. [3]

Colombia vs. Côte d’Ivoire (2–1)

Côte d’Ivoire carried a lot of the play but couldn’t make anything of its chances. Colombia took advantage of some serious organization problems. After going down 2–0, Gervinho made a lovely individual effort to get past the Colombian keeper. They would keep trying heroically to get the equalizer. Colombia continued to probe and cause problems at the back, but weren’t able to score again. They also dawdled disgustingly at the end of the game, pissing away the last eight minutes of the game in a skilled display of time-wasting that even the referee was helpless to stop.

Uruguay vs. England (1–0)

Both teams came out with both barrels but Uruguay slowly but surely took control and put away an absolutely lovely header. In the second half, both teams came out storming again and had excellent chances in the early minutes. Poor Wayne Rooney seems to be absolutely cursed. Until, finally, in the 75th minute, he managed to score the same kind of goal he always scores: he shoveled it in from 2 meters out after Sturridge did all the work of getting the ball there. But even the German commentator falls all over himself, talking about Rooney’s “klasse”, which remains an utter mystery to me. Suarez, on the other hand, makes his own goals and fires them into the back of the net. Maybe there’s some room on the Spanish plane for England.

Honduras vs. Ecuador (1–2)

This was an exciting match with a lot of offense from both sides. The action roared back and forth across the field with Ecuador seeming to get the upper hand by the middle of the first half. Still, Honduras struck first during a collapse of the Ecuadorian defense. This woke up Ecuador, which redoubled its efforts and was nearly immediately rewarded with its own goal. The match continued at a high level of play and may be one of the more exciting matches of the tournament. Ecuador had a nice header off of a set piece to take it to the final score of 2–1.

Argentina vs. Iran (1–0)

A not uninteresting match with Iran playing Argentina to a standstill for the first half, stifling all of its chances and putting Argentina on the back foot. Argentina seemed out of ideas offensively and less organized than they needed to be at the back, but Iran couldn’t figure out how to punish them for it. As the second half unfolded, you could see Iran slowly gaining confidence, realizing that they were playing Argentina on an even footing and weren’t even needing a lot of luck to do it. Iran had the best chances and they took their confidence to the midfield, where they even managed to outdribble the fabled Argentinians a few times.

Towards the end of the match, Argentina had the clear upper hand in the midfield, but was still not coming up with any big ideas at finishing time, partly because Iran’s air game was much, much better. Iran tried to break out a few times, but had mostly collapsed to a turtle shell by then and were playing for the tie. There was an exciting attack at the 85th minute by Reza but the Argentinian keeper did well to parry it. Four minutes of extra time: no way to explain that but that they wanted to make sure that Argentina gets enough time to score. And score they did, with Messi firing a beautiful bender at 30 seconds into extra time. Iranians fans will still be pleased at how well their team played; Argentinians will be happy with the win, but justifiably worried about their team’s overall performance.

Germany vs. Ghana (2–2)

Germany had a lot of early chances and seemed to have Ghana bottled up in the half for a while, but Ghana exploded out of their half in the 30th minute with a few very dangerous attacks. A few minutes later and it was Germany’s turn, but the Ghanian goaltender was up to the task…and Germany was shooting almost directly at him. The first half ended with both teams having played each other to a standstill, each having had some good chances, but no goals.

In the second half, Germany lobbed in a beautiful ball and Götze headed/kneed it in. Ghana didn’t hang their heads and responded three minutes later with a beautiful header of their own. And then Ghana strikes again with a beautiful through pass to a strong finish! And Germany brings on Klose, who finishes a Schweinsteiger header with perfect positioning! And it’s 2–2 and it’s a wide-open game! They’re flying up and down the field like they’re playing basketball! What a game! Ghana trembles at the German offense and vice versa. Watching on SAT-1 with a German commentator is fantastic. He’s so excited but very fair, just happy to be part of such a good game. The US was damned lucky that a different Ghana showed up for their game; this one is playing the best of Germany to a standstill. Best game of the tournament so far.

Nigeria vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina (1–0)

I watched some of this game, but fast-forwarded a bit because I had places to be. The teams looked relatively evenly matched, with Bosnia able to get the ball to the Nigerian net but not really even get close to scoring—other than one goalpost, I saw no finishing skill whatsoever on that day. Nigeria was similar with the exception of one right-wing advance to a cross in front of the net that was hammered home for the sole goal.

Belgium vs. Russia (1–0)

I didn’t see most of this match, but the replay I fast-forwarded through showed a match that remained scoreless until the 87th minute. Just before the goal, the announcer on ZDF said that “at least we’ve had three minutes of decent football” and, after the goal had been scored, he described it as Belgium “capitalizing on the only good pass they’d made all game”.

South Korea vs. Algeria (2–4)

Though Korea made a few good attacks , particularly Son, Algeria soon took the upper hand and capitalized on a wonderful individual effort and a nice header off of a corner kick. They followed up a few minutes later with a lovely long ball to a cross to an easy goal. The German commentators were quite harsh with the Korean team: they said not only that the Algerian team was a class better than Korea, but that Korea might be playing the worst in the tournament. But Korea managed to pull themselves together and Son earned his reputation with a nice turnaround and quick strike to claw back to 3–1. The goal would spark their team awake—and back to life. Korea showed much more class in the second half, at times dominating the midfield even if not exactly producing too many dangerous chances. But they flew too high and played too far forward, opening up the back for an eager Algeria, which made a World Cup goal look easy. Korea would take advantage of disorganization in Algeria’s defense to get one more goal, but that would be it for them.

USA vs. Portugal (2–2)

Portugal establishes themselves as the better team in the beginning, taking the early lead in the 7th minute. The USA continued to make use of their fast forwards to make dangerous stabs toward the net, but nothing that really made the Portuguese keeper sweat. By the middle of the first half, the US was pressing far forward and Portugal seemed to just be weathering the storm. The US had some dangerous and very hard shots from outside that got quite close. Toward the end of the first half, Portugal was able to take advantage of the more open defense to get a few good chances, but Tim Howard in goal stepped up in a big way to keep the game close.

The US had a huge chance in the 55th minute, but Bradley was too careful with the finishing touch. Despite the Portuguese keeper Beto having already been beaten, he played right up the middle of the goal and into the leg of a defender. And then, out of nowhere, Jermaine Jones rips a bending laser just inside the far post: Beto didn’t even have time to move. Portugal may come to regret having tried to sit on a 1–0 lead rather than trying harder for a bigger lead.

The US is playing with heart and very fairly, taking few fouls and only one yellow card so far. Portugal is getting a bit sulky, taking some ugly fouls and starting to dive in the box (no cards, though). Portugal settled down, took control of the middle field more and got down to work of playing actual football. Then the US took control again, built up and, in the 81st minute, blew apart the Portuguese defense and Dempsey put it away with his stomach for a 2–1 lead.

Portugal will, of course, get five minutes to try to prevent an early flight home. And they would get their goal with a really nice ball from the left to a header. The US was dead on its feet and gave up the goal with 25 seconds left in extra time.

Spain vs. Australia (3–0)

I didn’t watch this game.

Netherlands vs. Chile (2–0)

Holland continues to improve and had most of the good chances in this game. Robben continues to amaze with his inventiveness, strength and speed on offense. Even at the very end of the game, he had real wheels and produced a perfect cross in extra time for Memphis to knock in to finally crush Chile’s hopes of winning the group. Fun game.

Cameroon vs. Brazil (1–4)

Brazil comes out firing on all cylinders and Neymar in particular seems to be able to do what he wants where he wants. This finally pays off when the Brazilian left wing just seizes the ball, tears up the line and crosses to Neymar, who puts it away. The Cameroonian keeper did his best to keep it close during the onslaught. His teammates paid him back by copying Brazil’s goal from before, fighting the ball out of the corner and laying off a perfect cross. Neymar responded soon after with his second goal of the game—and fourth of the tournament. Brazil soon picked up another one to seal the win and then kept their promise to “get a lot of goals” with another.

Croatia vs. Mexico (1–3)

I didn’t watch much of this game, but the little I saw had Mexico getting the better chances, including one crossbar on a nice outside attempt. This would finally pay off late in the second half when Croatia’s defense wilted and Mexico profited three times in quick succession from the confusion. The third goal was less a result of collapse and more a failure to mark a man carefully, but it was a nice. sneaky goal. At that point, they needed one more to pull past Brazil to win the group, but Brazil scored soon after to take away that chance. And then Croatia got their Ehrentor in the 86th minute to settle things down a bit.

Italy vs. Uruguay (0–1)

Italy had the majority of the possession but didn’t really do anything with it. Uruguay needs a win; Italy is OK with a tie. Buffon didn’t see much, if any, work in this half. The statistics claim more shots on goal, but I can’t recall having seen anything dangerous.

The second half was a bit more interesting, but Italy was given a red card with about 30 minutes left. Jumping straight to red was far too harsh, but that’s how it is. No video replay, so no checking the ref’s initial reaction. Italy played quite strong with 10 men and Uruguay would have had the chance to do the same if anyone had seen Suárez take a bite out of Chiellini’s shoulder. However, no one saw it—despite the fact that he’s been caught doing it twice before, according to the German commentator—and Suárez got no card at all.

Two minutes later Diego Godín of Uruguay scored with his back on a corner kick. Italy put in a lot of effort and had Uruguay squeezed into one quarter of the field [4], but couldn’t score. Godín played a big role in preventing a goal too, so he’s probably the man of the match for Uruguay. As Buffon said, Italy could not find their offensive rhythm from the first game and went scoreless in the last two. As a colleague wrote, “Italy did not deserve to advance, but that ref is an ASS”. Italy is going home.

Greece vs. Ivory Coast (1–1)

Both teams played well, but I’m forced to admit that Greece had the better plan and better discipline, taking advantage of the Ivory Coast twice to seal their spot in the next round. Poor Didier is going home.

Colombia vs. Japan (4–1)

I didn’t see this match, just the goals.

Nigeria vs. Argentina (2–3)

Messi hammered home a rebound to put Argentina in an early lead in the third minute, but Nigeria responded in the fourth minute to even up the score. After some struggle in the midfield, Argentina grabbed most of the control and had most of the chances. Messi, in particular, is really finding his form and, after being denied at the corners by the Nigerian goaltender, he finally landed one just before the end of extra time in the first half to make it 2–1. The second half saw Nigeria pull even almost immediately. Argentina shrugged it off quickly and scored the game winner soon after. Nigeria would try many times, but wouldn’t find a finish. Good game from both sides.

Bosnia and Herzegovina vs. Iran (3–1)

I didn’t see this match, just the goals. The first Bosnian goal was flat on the ground, from way outside and just off the inside of the post. They would score another precision goal, then Iran pulled within one and Bosnia put it away soon after.

Honduras vs. Switzerland (0–3)

Switzerland came out swinging and got an early couple of chances with an excellent cross to Shaqiri, who was denied by the goaltender. In the sixth minute, though, Shaqiri blasted a beautiful left-footed bender just under the crossbar on the far post to put Switzerland in the lead. And then, just like that, Shaqiri was 2/3 of the way to his hat trick. It was 2–0 at the end of the first half. Shaqiri bagged his third of the match and Switzerland defended the 3–0 lead with the help of Diego Benaglio, who was back in his former form after the horrible game against France. Hopp Schwiiz!

Ecuador vs. France (0–0)

I didn’t see really watch this match. The little I saw showed France with a lot of chances, a lot of pressure and no goals.

United States vs. Germany (0–1)

The US played Germany quite well but Germany played the US badly. Both sides played quite carefully and weren’t very exciting. Both teams would progress to the next round because nothing exciting happened in the Portugal vs. Ghana game either.

Portugal vs. Ghana (2–1)

I didn’t watch much of this game, either. Portugal struck first, Ghana got a quick equalizer. Portugal took the lead again later. Both are still going home.

Korea Republic vs. Belgium (0–1)

Belgium got a late goal to go past Korea and seal their spot at the top of their group with 3 wins. It wasn’t hugely impressive, though.

Algeria vs. Russia (1-1)

Both teams played OK with Algeria really playing a level higher than expected. Russia took the lead, but Algeria picked up the pace and equalized on a corner. The tie was enough for them to move on to the next round with Belgium.

U.S. Olympic Hockey

Patrick Kane has a sadOh my God, what an ass-kicking. Canada put on a clinic for America and then Finland did the same, with even more success.

Patrick Kane never showed up—he missed again and again and took horrible penalties. His face after his second penalty sums things up nicely for the U.S. (see left).

And the US didn’t even both covering the greatest Olympic goal-scorer ever, warming the hearts of 40+ year-old guys everywhere by letting Teemu score not once, but twice.

Continental Snowboarding

Regular snowboarder – ready to goFrench snowboarder – ready to goI noticed the following during one of the boarder-cross races: almost everyone stood in the gate at the top with hands on the posts, ready to jump at the sound of the bell (picture at left). The French guy, though, was just leaning back, arm akimbo and relaxed (picture at right). All that was missing was a cigarette and a shot of espresso.

Do you see the difference? I think he won the qualifier race as well, but who really cares? He’d already won our hearts on style.

I shelled out CHF8.– for Zattoo for this month so that I can watch the Olympics on my own schedule. It’s pretty sweet, especially for hockey games.

USA/Czech Republic & Canada/Latvia

Zattoo keeps a 7-day buffer for over 100 channels. You can actually watch for free, but you don’t get HD and you have to watch extra, Zattoo-specific commercials. The Olympics coverage is remarkably commercial-free, at least on the Swiss (Swiss-German, German, French and Italian) and Austrian channels. The German channels have more advertisements but mostly between events. They tend to prefer live coverage. BBC2 I’ve hardly watched at all because they show more interviews and adverts than sports.

What did I think of the hockey games? Latvia played with tremendous heart, proving once again that teamwork can be (almost) equal to loading up on raw NHL talent. Canada played hard but seemed to be thinking about the next match already.

In the US-Czech game, the US showed off a lot of talent but also benefited from more than its share of lucky bounces. They are to be credited with going at the net, but the 5 goals they got (on 25 shots) included a few ugly ones. The right team definitely moved on, though.

The Russians would have loved to have had half the luck of the Americans in their game against Finland. With 38 shots and only 1 goal, it was kind of a sad loss because they, perhaps even more than the US, play an absolutely lovely, balletic passing-style hockey with lots of speed and chances. They dominated the offensive zone for long minutes at a time—even at 5 on 5—but they just couldn’t score.

The story of the Olympics, at least over here in good ol’ Switzerland, is the Swiss women’s hockey team, who showed a tremendous will to deliver what I think is the only rally-win of this Olympics. That almost never happens to Swiss teams—rallying isn’t our thing. It was an exciting game with some decent (non-checking) hockey.

BelgiumBermudaLithuaniaGermanyRussiaSloveniaTongaFranceIrelandItalyLithuaniaUnited StatesUkraine

The Super Bowl takes place way too late on a school night for all but the most ardent fans on this side of the pond. This is not to say that there are no such fans over here. The Germans and British both had full coverage, with the British channel Film4 having gotten Terrel Davis and Mike Carlson to assist the Scottish announcer Colin Murray, who started off slowly but got steadily more hilarious as the game unfolded into a slaughter of Denver by Seattle. There were plenty of people willing to stay up until 04:30 in the morning to watch the Super Bowl. It might be nice if the NFL moved it to the afternoon so that more of us could watch it live. [1] I recorded it and watched it on 23-hour delay.

The game

The first snap set the tone for the Broncos. It sailed into the end zone and gave Seattle a safety in the first twelve seconds. Two interceptions and a fumble rounded out the first half. The second half opened with a Seattle kickoff return for a touchdown—again, within twelve seconds. Denver’s defense was ardent in the first half, but forgot how to tackle in the second, two times in utterly embarrassing ways that led to two touchdowns. Maybe they grew disappointed that Manning kept throwing the ball to the other team or that when he miraculously managed to get the ball to a teammate, he fumbled it. Demaryius Thomas certainly gave his all—-his was the only Denver name we heard in a positive light.

British announcers

At every intermission , the coverage switched back to the booth to let the Scot lambaste Terrell Davis (former Bronco), who took the ribbing good-naturedly. Midway through the third quarter after the latest fumble by the Broncos, Terrell admitted that “there might be no saving this one” to which Murray replied that “Terrell was probably the last person watching the game to admit that”. Later, Davis was forced to admit that Denver was “being taken out to the woodshed”. At the end of the third, Murray glances sidelong at Davis and allows that it was nice that Denver “would not be the first team to be shut out in a Super Bowl” to which Davis could only reply that that was “something positive…good news…I guess”. And when it came time to start thinking about the game MVP, people were encouraged to consider “any number of players on the Seattle Seahawks”.

The British announcers only showed up during pauses in the game—of which there were enough; the in-game announcers are the same as from the video feed from the States (Troy Aikman and Joe Buck, I think?). The guys in Britain had some good analysis, saying the Aikin’s claim that Manning’s legacy is not damaged by this pummeling but, had he won, it would have been reinforced. Davis responded that “you can’t have it both ways like that” and Murry pointed out that this game just “underlines Manning’s post-season question marks”, which I found to be relatively trenchant and spot-on analysis.

Game quality

I’d heard from a few people that the game was boring but I have a feeling that they were Broncos fans. Because, objectively, the game was pretty interesting for Seahawks fans and the unaffiliated. Seattle was really firing on all cylinders defensively and offensively. They were fun to watch, by all rights. Sure, it was a blowout (or a “washout” as the Brits kept calling it) but the action was pretty good, for a football game.

No commercials

The other advantage we have on this side of the pond is that there were very few breaks in the first half and almost none whatsoever in the second. That alone made the experience much more enjoyable. This is similar to the way that Olympics coverage will likely be relatively unadorned by commercials whereas it is almost certain that NBC will ruin the Olympics as usual. This, even more than what will probably be near-constant references ot the US quick-exit plane on standby—because of supposed terrorist threats—or having moved US military presence into the Black Sea, because of same.

Overt militarism

And speaking of military presence [2], I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the Super Bowl coverage started with a few shots of troops in Afghanistan (because that has anything to do with football?) and the national Anthem ended not only with the by-now obligatory Blue Angels flyover but also a medley of Black Hawk and Apache helicopters hovering over the stadium, a move that must have engendered its share of flashbacks and PTSD horrors in many veterans. But the militarism stopped there, presumably because of the aforementioned lack of US advertising during the game. In previous years, there were nearly incessant ads for various branches of the US military or for movies bought and paid for by the Pentagon, like, say, Act of Valor.

Half-time show

To end on a positive note, the half-time show was not as bad as previous years and Bruno Mars was not as terrible as I expected. I thought the red Hot Chili Peppers were decent, especially for a half-time show. Kudos to Keidis and Flea for going out in the NJ cold shirtless.

Wrap-up

The game ended in washout, with the final 10 minutes dribbling by scoreless, which comes as no surprise to anyone, with Denver having all but given up and Seattle just grinding out the clock, forcing another fumble—this time directly from Manning—but otherwise not doing much else of note. Other than being a stone wall to Denver. It was nice to see an outcome that went totally against predictions.

The first round of the EM—which stands for Europameisterschaft [1], which means European championship in German—is over. The qualifying teams are mostly predictable, with all of the usual suspects making it through to the quarterfinals—France, England, Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal—as well as the Czech Republic and Greece thrown in. Greece won the whole thing with an excruciating defensive style in 2004 and the Czech Rpeublic is often quite solid, so not really a surprise.

Some of the quarter-finalists have proven to be quite fun to watch—France, Italy and Spain performed quite well in the midfield in most of their matches, creating ample opportunities. They didn’t always capitalize on those opportunities, but at least they were creating them and giving us something to watch. Germany had a slightly different style that didn’t use the midfield so much but also created a lot of opportunities. Portugal and England did not look as good—despite what their fans will floridly scream in your face—and England especially seemed only able to score on set pieces and defensive mixups.

England’s sole goal against the Ukraine in the last match was off of a bad bounce off of the inside of a defender’s leg that Rooney hammered home with his massive head—newly adorned with an implanted coif—although it was far from the goal-scoring triumph that the German announcer I was watching claimed it to be. this 606 caller ranting about England sums it up rather well:

“What a poor, unimaginative, uninspriational, dour example of English football […] how many opportunities did we have for sitting at the edge of our seats? […] I was so bored I made about three cups of coffee during that match…and I didn’t miss anything!”

Click through to the rant because the whole thing’s quite funny and relatively well-delivered.

Mario Balotelli bicycle-kick goalFor truly inspired goals, look instead to the always exciting Mario Balotelli, who sealed Italy’s win against Ireland with a spectacular bicycle-kick goal or to Zlatan Ibrahimoviç, of Sweden, who full-volleyed his goal against France with such perfect timing and precision that there was never any doubt where it was headed. The Polish goal against Russia was an absolute cracker as the boys from Eurosport like to say. Rooney’s header was pretty ho-hum compared to those; I only mention it because the German announcer sounded like he needed a couple of minutes alone every time Rooney’s goofy-ass Shrek-like mug appeared on screen and one of the local papers splashed said Boo-Radley-like grin all over its cover.

Hulk happyI know it sounds like I hate the English team, but it’s more like I’m sick of listening to how awesome they are when I’ve been wholly bored with their pedestrian performance. And especially this love for Rooney, who played terribly in his first game back after five weeks off. He bobbled almost every ball put to him and did nothing of real note. If I was on the English team, I’d secretly be pissed that he got credit for that goal: he hadn’t earned it at all.

Where the commentators didn’t hesitate to chide Italy for their failure to pummel Ireland into the ground—and they played quite well in the midfield with a lot of possession but little finishing—they lauded England for an utterly dismal performance against the Ukraine. In fact, the Ukraine played very similarly to Italy: lots of inspired midfield with a lack of finishing, though no lack of shots.

Unlike other years, the players of many of these teams have finally figured out where the goal is, putting the ball on goal—and sometimes into cloying defensive legs or the goaltender—instead of moonballing it into the audience in an attempt to bend it in an expectation not matched by anything we know about the physical rules of our universe. France, in the first game in particular, seemed to be quite a force for finding the net and made for quite an exciting game, even if they didn’t score that much. Some of the set pieces still feature those frustrating rockets that never seem to come down and instead soar harmlessly off over the goal. I’m looking at you, Pirlo.

This. Is. Russia.I’ve been mostly watching the games on ZDF-HD, a German channel, because the announcers on Swiss TV are so damned biased—both the German- and French-language channels play clear favorites. And the BBC and ITV channels are wall-to-wall orgiastic displays of English-football love. The Swiss newspapers continue their less-than-subtle prejudice against the East Europeans, chiding the Croatian fans for “lighting flares” (something no other fans did, I’m sure) and the Russian fans for being “too martial [milataristic]” and including the picture shown to the right. Are you kidding me? That flag is awesome! It’s huge! It’s martial because there’s an armed Spartan on it? (The text at the bottom is clearly a play on the signature line from the movie 300.) The Swiss media chose instead to laud fans from Ireland and the Netherlands, two proper countries full of people who aren’t trying to steal our jobs.

And then there are the cameramen of all channels, who never, ever—ever—fail to highlight the most attractive young ladies cheering for their side. This roving, peeping-tom camera is such a standard part of football now that it’s featured on every channel, regardless of country-of-origin. With those telephoto lenses, they get creepily close, zooming in right on the glistening eyes with their HD lenses. We get it: hot girls are hot. Can we please just see some timely replays now? Especially for those fouls-that-aren’t-fouls and dives-that-aren’t-dives?

The officiating has actually been quite good, with the referees seeming to let the play run a bit more rather than whistling the ball dead at the slightest body contact. Offsides calls have been nothing short of outstanding—Italy breathes a sigh of relief here [2]—and the only black mark so far is the uncounted goal by the Ukraine against England. That one was hard to understand, since there was a ref behind the goal, the one on the sideline and the main ref wasn’t too far away either. At any rate, goal-line technology inches closer, with even the decrepit Sepp Blatter weighing in in favor yesterday.

I’m actually going to be away from television and computers for the semifinal matches—maybe I can catch a game on a French radio station—but I’ll throw out some predictions:

Czech Republic vs. Portugal

Portugal: Christiano Ronaldo scored two in the last match and seems to be warming up. Czech Republic has a relatively well-organized side with a good midfield, but they haven’t shown a flair for finishing. Portugal’s defense will make its usual handful of grievous errors, but it probably won’t be enough to tip the balance in the Czech Republic’s favor.

Germany vs. Greece

Germany: Germany has looked good in every game this tournament, with a strong showing from back to middle to front. Greece was lucky to get this far and should not pose too big a problem. Look for a laser-like goal from Podolski; he hasn’t gotten one yet.

Spain vs. France

Spain: France is unlikely to overcome the ridiculous midfield control that Spain has exhibited so far. Italy played Spain to a standstill on Spain’s own terms, but France has not exhibited that they possess a similar ability in this tournament. Spain had trouble breaking through with a Croatian team that was strongly focused on defense, so the score might be low. Spain’s defense is occasionally porous—like Portugal’s—but it’s unlikely to cost them the game.

England vs. Italy

Italy: England looked awful against both France and the Ukraine, with both teams swarming all over them the whole match. Their defense is relatively tight—and it better be, considering the caliber of player they have and the fact that they play a 1-9 formation, with 9 men in their own penalty box for much of the game—but they scored multiple goals only against Sweden, where they were slightly less lackluster. Italy’s always unpredictable but, you know, Balotelli. ‘nuf said.

Another NFL season is upon us. The Jets—weary, beleaguered, eternally unrewarded warriors—once again trudge to the line of scrimmage. The New York Jets: Week One by Morgan Meis (The Owls) has sports writing that borders on poetry:

“His name is Darrelle Revis and … [i]t is his fate to be the greatest cornerback, the greatest. He is so good that he erases himself. Did you see him during that first game, on Monday Night Football even as the fog lifted? No, you didn’t see him. That’s because his defensive genius negates whatever player he defends. The opposing team simply ignores that side of the field. And so he disappears, pulling all the stars around him down, down, into the quiet place where the opposing passing game goes to die. To Revis Island, where nothing happens.”

The season is young and hope has not yet died.

Just a quick note on Contador’s behavior in the Tour de France when he took advantage of Schleck’s mechanical failure on a mountain stage. Schleck caught Contador napping and managed to break free of the group with only Alexander Vinoukorov managing to keep pace. He was free and clear of the group and riding like a man possessed; it’s hard to say how it would have ended, but it certainly looked like Schleck was about to build on his lead over Contador.

Instead, his chain dropped and clamped between the front sprocket and the crankshaft and he lost precious time freeing it and getting it reset. Contador blew by him and took the advantage for himself and took the Yellow Jersey at the end of the day.

Many think this was very unsportsmanlike and fondly remembered how Jan Ullrich waited for Lance Armstrong when they were both climbing together and Lance was knocked from his bike by a spectator.

I personally think it was poor form for Contador to take advantage of the mechanical failure, but it’s hard to judge in such a high-stakes race where very little separates the two at the top.

However, in his interview immediately following the race, he claimed that he was not aware that Andy had any mechanical problems.

Really.

• Did you think he’d stopped to let you catch up?
• Did you think he’d gotten tired and was catching his breath?
• Did you think he’d seen a pretty flower by the side of the road and wanted to get a picture?

What did you think he was doing when he stopped in the middle of the Tour de France just as he was kicking your ass?

That Contador took advantage of a mechanical difficulty in order to gain the yellow jersey does not make him a jackass. That he lies about doing so is what makes him a jackass.

It would have been far better if he had just been a man about it and admitted to what he did. Instead, he lied about it, gained the well-deserved scorn of the biking world and further cemented his reputation as a purely egocentric idiot.

He changed his tune the following day, admitting that he probably shouldn’t have done it. That’s even worse. Be a man, for God’s sake and at least stand for something. He can’t even commit to being an asshole because it hurt his feelings that everyone thought he was a jerk.

Man up, Contador. If you’re going to win races by the skin of your teeth, at least own your strategy and tell people to kiss your ass because now you’ve won the Tour de France three times.

I’m not really enjoying Spain ruling the sports world: we now have a world cup champion that can barely score goals and a Tour de France champion who lies and lies badly.

I missed the second half of this game because I was watching the Tour de Suisse racing through my home town. In catching up on the news, I discovered the the U.S. had been robbed of a game-winning goal! Or so Facebook and Reddit told me. A search for videos on YouTube turned up several links to videos showing the goal in question: the play was not offsides and no U.S. player committed a foul (to the contrary, it was the Slovenians who were all over the U.S. players).

It seemed quite clear-cut: the U.S. indeed had been robbed of a goal.

However, it’s not up to the players to question the referees, no matter how badly they think they’ve called the game. There are, in fact, FIFA rules against this and most players are clever enough to realize that, should they wish to continue playing in the most prestigious soccer tournament in the world, they’d better just keep their opinions to themselves and let others comment on the officiating. If they don’t, they run the risk of being barred from further participation and/or fined.

There are always those players who simply know when they’re right and when they’ve been wronged. In that case, the rules clearly can’t apply to them, since they’ll be vindicated by the objective evidence. The blog post, Why I Hate Landon Donovan by Ken Silverstein (Harper's), showed up the next morning, detailing just such a case. It’s not the first time that Landon Donovan can’t keep his opinions to himself, despite what are probably desperate efforts from team management to get him to do so. As detailed in the article, Donovan: U.S. victory ‘stolen’ by referee by Martin Rogers (Yahoo! News), Donovan didn’t accuse the referee of bias, just of incompetence:

“They [the officials] stole a goal from us […] It was a good finish and a good goal. […] It was the guy’s [Coulibaly’s] first World Cup and maybe he got caught up a bit. This is the World Cup and you can’t just take away a goal from a team like that.”

On the contrary. They can and do make mistakes. As mentioned above, Donovan is 100% correct about the goal itself—and video evidence backs this up. However, when he says that “you can’t just take away a goal from a team like that”, he is dead wrong because FIFA has never, ever—not once!—changed the result of a game after the fact. That is, they can take a goal away because the score will stand at 2–2. There probably isn’t even a way to make an appeal.

If there was a way to make an appeal, where would it end? Do you go back and pick the game apart, play by play? How can you do this, when one bad call in one place may lead to an opportunity in another? The blog post, Referee Again in Center of Controversy by Jeff Z. Klein (NY Times), notes that exactly this happened. Though one can only find videos of the nullified American goal, the goal was the result of a free kick that resulted from a highly questionable foul granted the U.S. team.

“Odder yet, the foul that led to the free kick was the result of a questionable call by Coulibaly. United States striker Jozy Altidore ran into a Slovene defender and fell theatrically, drawing a whistle from Coulibaly.

“It is unclear whether Coulibaly waved off the subsequent United States goal as a sort of makeup call for having awarded the Americans a questionable free kick — perhaps the only plausible explanation for the nullified goal.”

It’s highly plausible that Coulibaly granted the free kick and immediately regretted it. In most cases, the referee has nothing to rue—the free kick leads to nothing spectacular and the game proceeds with the bad call having had no undue effect for either side. However, the U.S. scored a beautiful, powerful goal on it—after Coulibaly had already blown the play dead. In fact, he seems to have blown the play dead almost as soon as the ball was kicked, which is why many thought he was calling offsides. Perhaps he was making the not-too-far-fetched assumption that the U.S. would commit some fouls in the box while jockeying for position. In that case, even the video replay would have backed him up (though some might have asked how he could possibly have seen the fouls from his field position).

Unfortunately for Coulibaly, none of this happened and the U.S. scored a nice, clean goal off of a free kick that they should never have been granted. Would it not then have been the Slovenians’ place to be outraged that they’d lost the game to a bad call? The only feasible place to end such questioning is to disallow it completely, as FIFA does. This is not to say that referees are infallible, but that to allow players and coaches to question them based on their own subjective impressions is untenable.

There are, however, other, non-subjective solutions. Video replay could be successfully integrated without harming the game: each side gets one replay request per game; if a request results in an overturned call, the requesting team gets another request. Such a system would allow teams to address bad calls, but also keep them from calling for video review too often. FIFA has been adamantly opposed to both video replay and electronically tracking balls to determine whether they actually cross side, end or goal lines—technology similar to that used so successfully in professional tennis.

Some plays—like offsides and set-pieces— are notoriously difficult to call correctly [1]. With so few goals and so little between teams at the international level, it’s a scandal to decide games on referee weakness. It would be much cooler to remember amazing goals than to remember “that time that one guy got away with breaking a rule”. [2]

That said, however, I’m forced to agree with Ken Silverstein: “Landon Donovan is an ass.” He doesn’t understand when sportsmanship and respect for the game trumps being right. These things happen and athletes who have been athletes for as long as Donovan has should know better.

In Switzerland, you can now watch the world cup live online in three different languages (German, French and Italian). It’s very good quality and easily good enough to watch the match. Compared to 4 years ago, it’s absolutely incredible. With a 5MBit connection at the office, we can easily spare some bandwidth to pull down the live stream and stay up-to-date as we work.

Apparently, we’re not alone in doing so.

This afternoon, during the Netherlands – Denmark match, we couldn’t log on to online banking and I was accused of “hogging all the bandwidth”. I didn’t think the video could possibly be eating the whole 5MBit connection, but paused it nonetheless.

It didn’t help.

So, one of us thought, hey! maybe it’s not us! Maybe everyone at the bank is watching the game and killing the connection from that end.

So we tested the theory.

When I announced that it was halftime, we tried connecting to online banking again…and were able to log in immediately.

Viva the World Cup! :-)

Fans would give up food, jobs for World Cup glory? (Reuters) is a tremendously fluffy and stupid article. Did they actually interview people or did they just make this shit up based on gross cultural stereotypes?

“It found that a majority of English respondents – 93 percent – would give up food for a week to see England win, while some 70 percent of Italians would give up their job for an Italian victory.

“Americans were most willing to sacrifice their homes, while South Koreans were most ready to sacrifice their love life.”

• First of all, 93% is not just a majority, but an overwhelming majority. It’s a near-certainty.
• Second off, the classic canard is that English food is utter crap, so of course they’d be willing to give it up for a week.
• That 70% of Italians would give up their jobs is also wholly unsurprising—it’s actually surprisingly low—given their penchant for striking at the drop of a hat. (Again, that’s according to the classic canard.)
• Since a quarter of American homeowners are underwater—they owe more on their mortgage than their house is worth—it’s unsurprising that they’d be willing to part with said houses. Reuters, however, forsook the scientific accuracy of a percentage and went with “most” instead. Not only that, but they applied it to that which Americans were willing to give up rather than to the number of respondents. That is, it’s possible that only 1% of Americans were willing to give up anything at all—who cares about soccer in the U.S. anyway?—but of those, most were willing to give up their house first.
• I have nothing amusing to write about the love lives of South Koreans.

The astute reader will not that this article of a paltry, few-hundred words had not only a credited author, but an explicitly credited editor as well. Kudos to Reuters for their journalistic acumen.

Short Track (or How Sports Works for the uninitiated)

Short track speed skating got the short shrift right up until the end from Eurosport. Apparently, there was a bit of a controversy with one of Apolo Anton Ohno’s races. More details are available in the article, Apolo Ohno Disqualified in 500 Meters, Wins Relay Bronze (Fanhouse)

I didn’t see the video because of the blanket NBC hatred for non-US residents and the NBC stranglehold on video content from the Olympics.

That does not prevent me from having an opinion, of course.

I think the other skater isn’t really allowed to say anything one way or the other, even if he wanted to. The judges and video replay have the last word and that’s it. If someone could say, yeah, but, regardless of what the video shows, I know I fell on my own, then it open the door to manipulation. In this one particular case, it might be considered justice, but it would open the door to manipulation if a skater’s opinion mattered in the outcome of the race.

Also, in the heat of the race, it’s nearly impossible to accurately remember what really happened – your mind makes up a lot of stuff to fill in the huge cracks yours senses leave. A skilled questioner could get the “honest” guy to both admit and deny that he fell on his own … all within a quarter of an hour. That’s why the judges and video evidence override everything.

That’s just sports, man. Ireland’s not going to the world cup because Thierry Henry from the French team batted in the tying goal to qualify – and deny France. The referee didn’t see it, though every camera on the planet did. There’s no video replay in soccer, so that’s that. The call stands … because that’s the rules. Ohno understands the rules because he’s a sportsman … people who care about sports once every two years during the Olympics are not and that’s why there’s almost always an uproar whenever they perceive something as unfair. The athletes, on the other hand, mostly understand that the system’s not perfect and that the ball bounces one way one day and another the next. If it’s randomly imperfect, that’s fine; as long as it isn’t biased.

Closing Ceremonies

It’s pretty much a ritual that you first trundle out the organizers of the thing, Rogge closes ‘er down, the next city gets the torch (as it were) and the outgoing hosts put on a kitschy show, complete with native talent (again, as it were).

Noteworthy was that VANOC CEO John Furlong—the head of the organizing committee from start to finish, all 14 years worth—somehow let himself be pressured into speaking French—for what must have been, like, the first time in his life—in front of a crowd of dozens of thousands in the stadium, and upward of billions planet-wide. This author, in a recent article (Englisch wird die Arbeitssprache), gave EU commissar Günther Oettinger a pass on his abysmal English. However, the reasoning there was that Herr Oettinger is actually pushing for more English in Germany and so should take the first steps himself, regardless of how poorly he speaks it.

It’s a complete mystery why Mr. Furlong agreed to humiliate himself by speaking what we will grudgingly admit was French. The reactions were not gentle, as documented in Closing Ceremonies: The Live Blog by Andrew Coyne (Macleans):

“National unity set back 30 years. […] Question: what’s worse? No French, or Furlong French? Moliere dying several more deaths. […] Tribute to the deceased Georgian luger. Furlong’s Georgian is better than his French.”

And, in ‘ey, John FurLONG, kest keh yu coll dat, Fran-say, eh? (Digital Citizen), which comes out swinging already in the title, but also offers a possible reason for this Francophonic catastrophe:

“Probably pressured to include more French in the Closing Ceremonies by the Conservatives trying to get votes in Quebec, as Heritage Minister James Moore tried by speaking out after the Opening Ceremonies (CBC), John could not have faked an English speaker reading French for the first time ever any better. […] ome francophones have loudly voiced their disappointment at the lack of French at the Olympics Opening Ceremonies. Well, I hope they’re happy now. (Emphasis added.)”

If you’re in the States, you can find the video on NBC’s site. The rest of the world can try to find it on YouTube, but it’s kind of a moving target. If you speak or even just understand French, it’s worth it, though.

TV Coverage

The only reason anyone can niggle about anything about TV coverage is because it does so many things right. [1] And, if you don’t like what Eurosport is showing, switch to another channel that’s showing something else. Other channels, like ORF (Austrian), the triad of Swiss channels (SF, TSR, TSI), and ARD (German) are also showing nearly nonstop coverage. You may not get it in a language you understand – and you may have to adjust your sleep schedule – but if it’s happening, at least one channel is showing it live. And at least one channel will show it at some point in the next 24 hours (with few exceptions).

All in all, the coverage is suffering from the awkward time difference and some mysterious scheduling decisions. The lack of snow and ridiculously high temperatures are having less effect on the quality of their coverage than an overarching love for all things involving cross-country skis. It’s absolutely unbelievable just how much coverage cross-country skiing gets—the pursuit, the sprint, the classic, the freestyle—and its kindred sport, the biathlon. Sure Majdic won a bronze after breaking four ribs just before the race, but it’s not going to happen again: You can look away for a second.

What they do well is show all of the athletes from all of the countries, with very encouraging and fair commentary throughout. The British commentators are hilariously encouraging for their own athletes—“and here’s Britain’s number one skier, Chemmy Alcott […]”—they rarely, if ever, detract from others. And they know their sports, every last one of them. They know who won what where about almost every single athlete; they seem to appreciate how hard it is to even finish seventh once in a world-class event.

The scheduling is killer, though. Though some of the events happen right in European prime-time, many happen in the wee, wee hours of the morning. Speed skating and short-track speed skating are two sports that have gotten tremendously short shrift on all of the channels here (French, German, English, Austrian all carried very little so far). And then, when you’ve watched a full complement of Olympics on Saturday night and get up on Sunday morning to see what you missed when you slept [2], they repeat all of the stuff you saw the previous evening instead of serving up fresh content. It’s somewhat inexplicable.

Nonetheless the coverage is apparently worlds better than some other countries [3] from which I’ve heard reports. There is very little advertising, and a full focus on the sport: Only short interviews and only with athletes—no human-interest bullshit—and usually only after they’ve actually done their event instead of asking them insipid shit about whether they’re nervous or whether they want to win a medal.

Which brings us to the final question of financing model for Eurosport: It’s a complete mystery. Americans are raised to think that sports must consist of 50% commercial content in order to be worth airing. Perhaps the Europeans simply subsidize the hell out of Eurosport so that they do a good job of showing the Olympics rather than struggling to beat a Euro or two out of it. If that’s a socialist wasteland, then I’m staying put, even if just for the Olympics coverage.

Ice Hockey

Krueger’s [4] got his boys all fired up, but they ended up in a tough, tough bracket, playing against first the U.S. then Canada. A 3–1 loss to the U.S. was fair, but Switzerland comported themselves well and certainly were more aggressive on the forecheck. They also managed the final goal to avoid the shutout, which is always good for morale. Next up was a game against Canada that went to a shootout, where NHL star Crosby showed why he gets paid crazy money by finally getting one past the Swiss goalie Hiller.

The U.S.–Canada game was the best so far: It was a pretty impressive performance by both sides. The third period was an offensive tour-de-force, and Miller was super-strong in net, whereas Brodeur was, for once, merely mortal and made at least one costly floppin’-around-on-the-ice error. During the third period, Brodeur was better, but it harked back to his early days with the Devils, when he was stopping 13 shots a game (don’t get me wrong, I was a fan). The Russia/Czech game on the same day (the day of rivalries) was good, but not cracking and the promised Sweden/Finland showdown was more about seething hatred than a great matchup: Finland was outclassed the whole way and took a lot of sniping, nasty penalties (including a game misconduct in the Olympics!).

Ski Jumping

What can you say about Simon Ammann that hasn’t already been said? He put down the two biggest jumps on both hills and strolled his way to two gold medals, head and shoulders above all the rest. The only one who even comes close is Adam Malysz of Poland. All the others are fighting in a single-medal event where the winner gets bronze.

The Austrian jumping team and sports federation showed horrible judgment in complaining about Ammann’s ski bindings, as they must have known they hadn’t a prayer of getting him—or his equipment—disqualified. They must also have strongly suspected that their pathetic attempt at psychological warfare wouldn’t shake him at all. Instead, they got a lot of bad publicity and took home the “sore loser” award (though an Austrian did manage the Bronze in the big hill).

Europort, ordinarily above such things, was inordinately interested for days—even after they’d showed interviews with Olympic officials saying it was all hogwash. Their cameramen focused telescopically on Ammann’s bindings for days; it was kinda funny, actually.

Skiing

Who would have thought that Bode Miller would finally add consistency to his repertoire and medal in every alpine race so far? [5] All eyes were on Lindsay Vonn, who pulled in an impressive gold medal in the downhill, easily mastering a hill that rattled so many others. Her downhill style is so clearly efficient and fast; Bode’s is much more reminiscent of Franz Klammer, with elbows and poles every which way, a little bit of pinwheeling [6] here and there, but still getting down the hill faster than anyone else. You can kind of only watch him with half an eye because you’re fearing the worst the whole time…and he says it himself: Before the Super-G, he said he would go all out and “either get some sort of medal…or give you guys one of the more spectacular crashes you’ve seen in a while.”

The Swiss team is also back in the hunt in alpine sports, with a lot of athletes in the top ten (women and men) and a gold medal (Defago, downhill) and a bronze (Zurbriggen, combined). They’re at least doing better than the Austrians, who’ve collected a gold (Fischbacher, Super-G), which is kind of the yardstick by which the Swiss ski team measures itself these days, for better or worse.

Sliding Events

After a horrifying start, things have settled down a bit, though there have been a lot more injuries and crashes than other years. The danger prompted one Swiss two-man bob to withdraw, which hurt the team’s chances at a medal (the Swiss came in fourth [7]). Most of the athletes have gotten down without injuring themselves too severely, but that shouldn’t really be the standard. The track should punish with time, not with blood.

Sports with Judges

Every year, it’s the same. This year, it starts with the men, where old legends like Elvis Stojko of Canada crawl out of the woodwork to deride ice skating for crowning Lysacek, who’s doing “jumps Boitano did in 1988”. Lysacek doesn’t do any form of quad, though he does some very difficult triple-triple combinations. Stojko makes the good point that the weighting on the scores is ever-more-heavily skewed toward composition rather than technical skill, allowing the judges to pick pretty much whomever they liked the most, rather than the person who did the best technically. That said, I heard that Takahashi blew everyone away artistically and only touched down once (on a quad, ironically). It’s hard to still get incensed about figure skating judging after all these years of watching excellent performers get hosed one way or another. [8]

On a similar note, there’s the judging in the half-pipe competition. Shaun White was clearly head and shoulders above the others, but Iouri Podlatchikov (Swiss, in fourth, naturally) put in a scorching run on his first attempt. He was in a medal position. Then Scott Lago went for his second run and did well, but not amazingly well. His score was 3 points below Iouri’s, as pretty much expected. Ok, no change in ranking there. Then the eventual silver medalist (Piiroinen, Finland) drops into the pipe and does a run similar to Lago’s; the only difference is that he gets a stunning 45 points for it! For comparison, the mind-bogglingly good Shaun White got 46.8 on his first run. WTF? No one really knew where those extra 5 points came from, but there they were, tacked on by the judges. He must have done something super-special, but even the Eurosport judges were mystified. Podlatchikov failed to top that score and fell out of medal contention.

Conclusion: Judged sports still stuck, even in 2010.

Technology

To end on a good note, the Vancouver 2010 is very well put together. All information is available in a fairly easily understandable structure. Go to the figure skating and you can get all the information you could want about a routine: which elements were done, how many points the athlete got and on and on. For timed events, there are all the split times for all of the athletes. Even during the events, the pages all update in near real-time, showing splits during races only seconds after the they show up on TV. Just click the little plus-sign next to an athlete’s name in an event and dig through the treasure-trove of statistics.

American football is not static and undergoes rule changes from season to season. One such change is documented in the article Best Intimidating Answer to a Legitimate Question, in which stiff-arming has been considerably curtailed for the 2009-2010 NFL season. Marion Barber can proudly and rightly claim to be almost the sole reason for the change, though he doesn’t seem too put out by the upcoming limitation on his technique.

“Barber made a habit last year of violently stiff-arming potential tacklers in the kisser. So effective, and so unfair, was the move that the NFL Competition Committee deemed it illegal for the upcoming season. Told of the league’s new “Barber Rule,” prohibiting him from going for opponents’ facemasks, the Barbarian never looked up and immediately growled “What about the throat?””

Nice.

Even casual viewers of American football have had to wonder exactly which idiot they have to thank for the regulations governing overtime. As it stands, a coin toss decides which team gets the ball. That team has the opportunity to march the ball into field goal range and take the win. As opposed to the beginning of the game, where settling for a field goal is highly unpalatable, taking a field goal at the beginning of the overtime period is all you need to win. It’s almost never a very satisfactory end to a game. Instead, the NFL should consider a rule change, as described in the article The brilliant NFL overtime silent auction system (Yahoo! Sports).

“Each coach writes down the yard-line at which they’d be willing to accept the ball, and they put their bid in a sealed envelope. Both coaches hand the envelopes to an official at midfield, and the coach who’s written down the least advantageous yard-line gets the ball, at the yard-line he’s written down.”

A system like that would include much more strategy and would allow both teams to take the ball, if they have the guts.

This picture from The Year 2008 in Photographs (Big Picture Blog) is absolutely mind-blowing:

“Kerby Brown rides a huge wave in an undisclosed location southwest of Western Australia July 6, 2008, in this picture released November 7, 2008 by the Oakley-Surfing Life Big Wave Awards in Sydney.”

Italy 2 – France 0

The vaunted Italy–France matchup went awry early for France as Franck Ribéry injured himself on a bad tackle and had to leave the game in the tenth minute. [1] Then, with their offensive duo of Henry-Ribéry cut in half, Eric Abidal pulled Luca Toni down in the box, giving Italy a penalty kick and earning himself a red card. Pirlo converted the penalty to put Italy in the lead 1–0. Italy looked quite strong and confident on the attack, using a good passing game through the middle to create chances again and again, though Luca Toni failed to capitalize when he should have.

France stormed onto the field in the second half but, with only ten men, their advantage was limited and Italy slowly but surely seized back control, going up 2–0 on a long free kick by DeRossi. The final twenty minutes featured only offensive action from the Italians, with the French feeling the weight of their missing man and the impending loss. The French side was not very impressive in any of their matches and rightfully finished at the bottom of their group.

Holland 2 – Romania 0

Again, with both games played at the same time, it was hard to get a feel for this game, but with two goals against the vaunted Romanian defense, Ned just keeps on rolling. I pity the fool that has to play them next.

Germany 1 – Austria 0

This match was horribly boring; watching the first half was like watching a cat play with a mouse, as the Germans gave the Austrians a long leash to see what they could do. Austria was clearly outmatched, but they collapsed to an ever-exciting nine-men-in-the-box formation at the slightest hint of offense from the Germans, which made it hard for Germany to capilatize or even create chances. So, it wasn’t surprising that the lone goal came from a scorching free hick by Michael Ballack.

Croatia 1 – Poland 0

The matches were shown at the same time, so there’s not much to say about this match because I didn’t see it. Croatia gets through ahead of Germany, though.

Switzerland 2 – Portugal 0

Switzerland was already out and Portugal had benched many of their star players [1], but the Swiss came out still hunting for their first win in EM history. The Portugese had the game well in hand throughout the first half and both teams had a couple of decent chances. The replacement goalie for Switzerland was the old hand Patrick Zuberbühler—”Zubi” to everyone here—who made heavy use of his good friends the goalposts, as usual.

In the second half, the impossible happened and it started to look like Switzerland had discovered the ability to play 90 whole minutes of football. This rather strange theory acquired a considerable amount of supporting evidence when Hakan Yakin put in his first goal in the 75th minute to go up 1–0, then was all but proven when the flailing Portugese committed an aggregious foul in the box for a penalty. A nerveless Hakan Yakin put that one away as well, to all but seal the win for the Swiss.

The Swiss finally got their win and finally got a game where they scored more than one goal: it’s not a trip to the quarter finals, but the team managed to deliver a hell of a match for their ailing fans. [2] They managed to send at one message loud and clear: next time, bring your A-team, Portugal.

Turkey 3 – Czech Republic 2

Since the matches ran at the same time, it was tough to get a feel for this match as well. The Czechs slowly but surely built up a 2–0 lead throughout the first half. Volkan, the Turkish goalie got a good piece of both shots, but the Turkish defense left him high and dry both times.

Turkey did a good job closing the gap with a nice goal late in the second half. Then, even deeper into the second half, Nihat picked up a terrible bobble by the Czech goalie to even it up at 2–2. And then, ‘cause that was so damned easy, Nihat slammed one off the underside of the crossbar in the top-right corner to put Turkey up 3–2. [3] What an amazing comeback.

In extra time, though, the Turkish goalie Volkan committed an amazingly stupid foul by pushing a Czech player after the ball had gone out of play for a goal kick. Volkan was rightfully given a red card and Turkey was down to ten men without a real goalie for the last 4 minutes of extra-time play. [4] It was incredibly stupid of Volkan, but he wasn’t alone as tempers were flaring out-of-control on both sides. The Czechs also got a yellow less than a minute later and Milan Baros of the Czech Republic got one from the bench as well. The tiny-looking Tuncay wasn’t tested in goal and Turkey won a few minutes later to move on to the quarterfinals.

Spain 2 – Sweden 1

Spain and Sweden were relatively evenly-matched, with Spain going into the lead early on a corner kick. Ibrahimovich evened it up for Sweden in the 35th minute and, from then on, all was pretty much quiet with no real chances for either side. The only events of note were a pretty obvious bodycheck by Sweden in the penalty box that didn’t impress the referee at all [1] and a relatively obvious handball—again by Sweden and again in the penalty box—that also didn’t get called.

Luckily, the Spanish would not be left to to smolder about the missed calls as David Villa, the hat-trick hero from the match against Russia picked the pocket of the Swedish defense and put in the game-winner three minutes into extra time at the end of the second half. A brilliant goal by the natural goal-scorer and a well-deserved win for Spain.

Russia 1 – Greece 0

Things started off as expected, with Greece playing turtle as usual and the Russians putting on a flair-filled offense that generated a lot of chances early. The Greeks were equal to the challenge and, in the 20th minute decided to see what the other half of the field looked like and put on some decent offensive pressure of their own. Soon enough, the well-organized Russian side had action back in the other end again.

The Russians were in their red kit, which looked pretty snappy and the announcer here offered some interesting tidbits: all the players play in the Russian league and nine of them play for the same team in Moscow; they also look pretty young. Their focus on offense paid off in the 34th minute, when a Russian chased down an errant cross and re-centered it with a bicycle kick, which luckily went to a Russian foot and in for a goal. One minute later, they were knocking on the door again and the much-vaunted Greek defense was looking creakier and creakier. It almost looked like the Russians had a bit too much in the speed department for the Greeks to handle.

The Greeks came out with goals on their mind in the second half, but couldn’t put anything convincing together. The Russians played their speedy counterattacking game [2] but couldn’t extend their lead. It’s not like there weren’t any quality chances on both sides; it’s just that both keepers played very well. Near the end of the match, the Greeks put one in, but it was called back on a squeaker of an offsides call. In extra time, both teams had good chances, but Greece was offsides three times and Russia couldn’t shoot straight. So, for all the action, the match ended with only one goal.

The defending champions are mathematically eliminated with their second loss.

Italy 1 – Romania 1

It just wouldn’t be Italy if they didn’t require certain teams to win and other teams to lose and goal differences to be just right in order for them not to be mathematically eliminated. The game was exciting enough, with Romania having a few chances, but Italy having quite a few more—they just didn’t capitalize as often as they should have. As usual, they had one goal taken back—a nice header by Luca Toni—on a poor offsides call, but that’s become so standard that it’s not even worth complaining about. The Romanian Mutu jumped on a horrible backpass from Zambrotta to the goalie Buffon to make it an easy 1–0 for Romania. Only minutes later, Italy had already equalized on a nice header off a corner kick, dampening the Romanian celebrations.

Then, just in case there were still some Italian fans not in need of defibrillation, the referee called a penalty kick [1] in the 81st minute. Buffon was up to the challenge and parried it away to maintain the tie and keep the slim Italian hopes alive. The Romanians didn’t exactly impress and the Italians still have some work to do, but they played much better than in the first match against Holland.

Netherlands 4 – France 1

Both teams came out charging, but the Dutch slowly but surely took control and put one away in the first ten minutes on a nice header off a corner kick (similar to the earlier goal by Italy). The game was a good deal rougher than others, but there weren’t many yellow cards. The French were having a lot of trouble finding their rhythm and, despite bursts of individual brilliance from Ribery and Henry, they weren’t playing well together at all.

The second half saw the French mount incredible offensive pressure for the first ten minutes, but the Dutch put together an amazing counterattack that started with a beatiful two-footed move by Van Nistlerooy to keep the ball in and move it to Robben. After roaring up the sideline, he blasted a pass across the goalmouth, where Van Persie full-volleyed it through the French goaltender’s hands to dribble into the net and make it 2–0.

A brilliant player like Henry cannot be completely denied and he finally got the French on the scoreboard with a brilliant deflection to the far post that looked more like an ice hockey goal. He didn’t celebrate long as Robben nailed a near-post shot from an improbable angle less than two minutes later to make it 3–1 for Holland. [2]

Seconds before the final whistle, nearly three minutes into extra time, Sneijder snapped a screaming shot from the top of the box that snuck in under the crossbar and completed Holland’s double-shot of humiliating the Italians and the French. Seven goals in two games against two high-powered opponents—the Dutch are clearly not a fluke. [3]

Germany 1 – Croatia 2

Instead of the Germans, it was the Croatians that were extraordinarily well-organized and put together play after play on the net. By the end of the first half, the Germans were showing their frustration after nearly every offsides call and after every defensive error, both of which occurred often. The referee was a bit yellow card-happy against the Croatians, handing out eight of them in the first half—sometimes for tackles that got a lot of ball and almost none of the opposing player.

After an initial onslaught by the Germans, the Croatians slowly reasserted themselves and Olic picked up a rebound off of a very lucky shot to go up 2–0. The German frustration grew throughout, with them yelling at each other, the referee and taking it out on the Croatians with some pretty risky tackles. Michael Ballack—sporting, once again, the same awesome jeri-curl he had in the first game—picked up a yellow card for an almost purely relataliatory tackle. Luckily for the Germans, Podolski stayed cool-headed and cranked a full-volley shot almost through the back of the net in the 80th minute. Once again, he refrained from cheering and putting on an ego show after his goal; he just jogged determinedly back to the center.

Austria 1 – Poland 1

Austria came out of the gate strong, outclassing the Poles on every level and getting a couple of huge chances in the first 25 minutes. Unfortunately, they also showed how a team at this level (similar to the Swiss) can make a very entertaining game, but have no finishing ability whatsoever. Amazing passing plays and breaking open the defense again and again for huge breakaways does not win games—you. have. to. put. the. ball. in. the. net. Being awesome but not scoring only increases the pain when the other team scores on the only chance they get. Regardless, the Austrians made the Poles look extremely lame for most of the first half. And then, Poland scored.

At half-time, the best comment came from the Yogi Berra of Austria: “Wenn wir keine Tore schiessen, dann werden wir auch nicht gewinnen.” (“If we don’t score any goals, then we won’t win.”)

In the second half, the air had gone out of Austria and Poland wasn’t tremendously interested in getting a second goal, so it settled into a more-or-less boring routine. In the last 10 minutes, Austria started putting together some more offense again, but couldn’t even put a shot on the net. Then, unlike Switzerland, they created an opportunity to get a penalty kick three minutes into extra time…and they put it in. With authority. [1]

Congratulations to Austria for prolonging the party for at least one of the hosts; for now, Switzerland is alone in playing host to all the cool kids, while they all play in our pool and eat all our food. [2]

Portugal 3 – Czech Republic 1

This match marks the first equalizer of the tournament, with the Czechs pulling even not long after Portugal shot into the lead. The first half stayed relatively even, but the start of the second half was dominated by Portugal’s offense, which failed to crack the well-organized defense of the Czechs for twenty minutes before Ronaldo put his side’s second one in on a low scorching shot.

Christiano Ronaldo is the Portugese star and it’s amazing to see his dedication shine through: his balance is clearly affected whenever he even loses the ball. If he’s dribbling along and another player tackles the ball away, he falls over just because the ball is no longer there to provide balance for him. There seems to be no other explanation. [1] The Czech Republic spent a lot of time in the Portugese end, but couldn’t find the equalizer. Just into extra time, the Portugese popped the ball loose and took a third goal on an assist from Ronaldo. [2]

Turkey 2 – Switzerland 1

The whole stadium is red because the national flag for both teams is white on a red field. However, the Turkish side is once again sporting the hyper-macho, powder-blue trainers that made their debut against Portugal. Just after kickoff, the Swiss weather had enough of being polite about the EM and just started dumping buckets of rain all over the field. The players were soaked inside of minutes and tons of slip-slidey action, splashing through puddles, misjudged ball-hops and hospital passes [3] ensued.

Just after Tuncay got a yellow card for falling on his ass into a Swiss player [4], the Swiss put in a hilarious, well-executed, slow-motion goal to go up 1–0. Nice to see Hakan Yakin keep to his promise to not celebrate his goal out of respect to Turkey. Soon after, he got another chance and almost added another, but shot wide. The field was soaked and the ball was barely moving on the ground; the Swiss seemed better able to deal with it than the Turks.

The second half, however, belonged to the Turks, who had a hell of a half-time talk and seemed much more comfortable on the wet turf. They circled like lions and the Swiss only responded with counterattacks, one of which was beautifully executed, but failed on a weak finishing shot from Hakan Yakin [5]. After the Swiss seemed to take over for the final 8 minutes or so, the Turks struck back with a wicked shot 2 minutes into extra time to take it 2 – 1.

Switzerland—one of the two host countries—is officially the first team to leave the tournament.

Spain 4 – Russia 1

It was a miserable day in Innsbruck, but the steady downpour didn’t seem to have much of an affect on either side. There were more fouls early in the match, but far fewer once nerves had settled.

It started out as a pretty evenly-matched contest with both sides showing flair and imagination in controlling the midfield and penetrating the penalty area. Much to Russia’s chagrin, however, it turned into a Spanish clinic on goal-scoring. The Russians didn’t play poorly nor did they have horrendous defensive lapses like Italy yesterday. They just fell victim to a Spanish side that is, for once, living up the hype. They certainly looked like a favorite and seemed able to score nearly at will—especially David Villa, who came away with a hat trick.

The Russians finally put in a lovely header on a corner kick late in the second half, but Spain got their fourth just shy of extra time just to show that they could. All in all, it was an even more entertaining match than Germany–Poland and gave us the first game with goals from both sides.

Sweden 2 – Greece 0

Now it’s clear what happened to the Italian defense: Greece took it. Four across the back, along the top of the box, just like God intended. The first half ended in a scoreless draw, with Sweden making attack after attack and Greece actually venturing into the other half more than expected. Their coach, who only speaks German, was often shown screaming from the sidelines to a team that mostly speaks only Greek and a bit of English. It’s amazing the level of organization they have considering the team consists of players from over 20 different pro teams.

After knocking on the door countless times, Sweden finally cracked the Greek defense and Ibrahimovich put one in. With the Greek team showing some stuff on the offense, the defense suffered and the Swedes soon slotted another. That would be all for the game, but it was enough to hand the defending champions their first loss (and first conceded goal) in in over 400 minutes of Euro finals match time.

The Spain – Sweden matchup promises quite a bit of action.

France 0 – Romania 0

Beni Thurnheer, whose in-game exclamations usually tend towards the annoying, put it perfectly with this turn of phrase: “Ein unglaublich langweiliges Spiel aber auf einem sehr höhen Niveau”. In English, that’s “An unbelievably boring game, but played on a very high level.” Both sides were good and showed strong defense, but it was a ninety-minute snooze-fest. The French coach walked onto the field after the final whistle, clapping slowly; it was hard to determine whether he was genuinely applauding or whether he was clapping sarcastically.

Italy 0 – Holland 3

The first half ended with Holland in the lead by two goals. With the marked lack of replays [1], we had to wait until half-time to get a good look at the first Dutch goal, which was not offsides on a technicality. [2] It was an exciting match because there was a lot of action around both goals, with only Holland capitalizing. It’s not that Italy had no offense—it’s more that they seem to have left their much-vaunted defense at home. Once Matterazzi left the field, things were marginally better and the addition of Del Piero kicked the Italian offense into high-gear. [3]

The build-up through the midfield made for exciting football—and seemed to have the Dutch on their heels for a good half an hour—but they didn’t create too many high-quality shots. Holland looked quite good, though it’s hard to argue that they didn’t also get pretty lucky [4]; they profited immensely from a counterattacking style we’ve actually come to expect from Italy against an Italian side that had a defensive style we would expect from a pickup game at the park.

Italy tried on different playing styles like they were trying on hats. The team only boasts about half of the players it had when it won the World Cup two years ago and they are notorious for being slow out-of-the-gate in tournaments. They showed some good football and will probably get it together to squeak out of the first round.

The Dutch looked very good and probably got a lot of confidence out of the match; it will be interesting to see how their style works against the very defensive French and Romanian teams.

At the end of two days of play, both hosts—Switzerland and Austria—have had a chance to play and both, as expected, got zero points for all their effort. So far, the usual suspects—and those rated higher in the FIFA rankings—have won their games, though not without a struggle and not without showing weakness in the form of a soft game or what looked like squads that weren’t ready to run the full ninety minutes.

If a squad can’t play ninety minutes in a Swiss June like this one—15°C and cloudy—then they likely can’t play anywhere. The somewhat unseasonable [1] weather has actually been a blessing for football, as the matches have stayed quick for far longer than usual for summer tournaments. [2]

Switzerland 0 – Czech Republic 1

The Swiss team is known, at least in Switzerland, for a lack of heart. They showed up with plenty of heart yesterday and also lots of organization, but it was all for naught as the Czech team capitalized on their only decent shot of the match. In addition to losing their opening match despite having done everything right (short of scoring, as is always the case when one enters into discussions of who deserved to win), they lost their star striker, Alex Frei, to a knee injury late in the first half and their strongest effort in the second half ended up glancing off the crossbar. There was also the matter of an uncalled handball by a Czech defenseman while in the penalty box, which would have offered a real chance at a well-deserved tie. [3] Overall, it was exacty the strong showing the Swiss wanted with the wrong result. The Czechs were either tired [4] or were conserving energy for later rounds.

Portugal 2 – Turkey 0

Portugal is expected to go a long way in this tournament—as they did four years ago, where they lost the final on penalties to Greece. They are not expected to exhibit any sportmanlike or humble qualities on the way there and their performance did not disappoint. As in 2006, during the World Cup, the Portugese were throwing themselves at the ground whenever a Turkish player was within two meters of them, as if there was a problem with gravity around players of the opposing team. Luckily, the referee was having very little of it (though he also didn’t hand out yellow cards for diving) and, luckily, none of these antics led to a goal. Both Portugese goals were actually quite good and the result was well-earned. The Turkish side also played well, but are clearly lacking a finisher without Hakan Şükür. [5]

Croatia 1 – Austria 0

Austria appears much farther down the official FIFA rankings than Switzerland and was not expected to do very much in this tournament. However, as with the Swiss, the home-field advantage helped them bring the thunder and surprise the Croatian side with a tremendous effort wherein they kept up the pressure for the entire game. The Croatian side, on the other hand, really only played for the first 25 minutes or so before settling in for a far more defensive game than was expected—and than they had been bragging about before the game. The Croatian player that bragged that he had more skill than all the Austrians put together should, by all rights, announce a correction by tomorrow, at the latest. The Austrians earned it.

Though the Swiss threw themselves a massive pity party this morning, it seems even worse to lose as the Austrians did: on a penalty kick in the fourth minute. The foul was not in doubt and was committed by a defender clearly overwhelmed by the initial ferocity of the Croatian attack. Little did he know that the ferocity of the Croatians was very limited and that his team would turn out to be more than a match for them. Like the Swiss, though, the Austrians lack finishing and never really threatened with the equalizer [6].

Germany 2 – Poland 0

From the outset, it was obvious that these two sides had the most class on field and really moved the ball around in a way not yet seen in this tournament. [7] The Poles seemed like a good match for Germany, but the Germans managed to pop their two strikers (Klose and Podolski) free a couple of times in the first half and easily put away a goal on one of the breakaways. The Germans distinguished themselves immediately post-goal by huddling together quickly and relatively quietly before returning to the center field, ready for business. Even the coach jumped in the air once and was already cool and collected when next the camera found him. [8] It was nice to see them score a goal without the goal-scorer irritating everyone in sight with his arrogance. Podolski—who’s got a cannon and isn’t afraid to use it—scored the second well-earned goal as well. Though Poland played well and created a lot of chances, they couldn’t put one in. If you don’t have a horse in the race, this was definitely the best football match so far. Germany looks very strong.

Sportswriters Swoon Over DC Ballpark by Dave Zirin (Common Dreams) brings news of the opening of the new baseball park in Washington DC in a deal that moved the Montreal Expos south to the USA. Apparently, the mainstream media coverage was nothing short of effusive—gushing, even—about the new stadium, which was almost wholly financed by taxpayer money. From the article:

“$611 million of tax payer money in a city that has become a ground zero of economic segregation and gentrification. $611 million over majority opposition of taxpayers and even the city council. $611 million in a city set to close down a staggering twenty-four public schools. […] That’s $611 million, a mere five months after a mayor commissioned study found that the District’s poverty rate was the highest it had been in a decade and African-American unemployment was 51 percent.”

In a fitting cherry on top, president Bush [1] threw out the first pitch on opening night. He would have to have been less-than-oblivious not to notice the booing. Lucky for him…

The next Olympics will be in China—everyone who’s anyone knows that by now. Some objected to the selection of China a long time ago, citing human rights violations; some objected to the selection of Russia for the next winter Olympics for similar reasons. None of the objecters seem to understand that the marketing—which emphasizes a wholesome gathering of nations striving for peace through competition—is wholly separate from the business of the Olympics, which emphasizes making money for all the important entities involved. This includes private industry, government agencies and, of course, the IOC. The IOC likes to select places that guarantee it fun times for its members (remember the bribery debacle surrounding the Salt Lake City Olympics?) and lots and lots of profits and kickbacks. China and Russia are simply overflowing with such guarantees.

And, in case, anyone finding themselves harking back to simpler times, when the Olympics were still pure, should read A Lesson on Protest From the 1980 Olympics by Michael A. Kroll (Common Dreams). It tells of the 1980 Winter Olympics (Wikipedia), which had the noble goal of turning its Olympic village into a prison afterwards, in order to turn a profit. Couple that with the fact that, according to Olympics Then & Now, the village of Lake Placid had only 2,731 people in 1980, and Americans have lost the right to say anything about the Olympics being awarded to backwards countries that aren’t ready for them and that run roughshod over the Olympic spirit.

Despite protests [1], the 1200-person structure was converted to a prison after the games—and that was just fine for everyone concerned. Except, of course, for the “young, mostly black and Latino men from the urban centers of New York City and Philadelphia” populating it. Those surprised that the IOC would allow something like this to sully the reputation of the Olympics haven’t been paying attention.

In the world of club sports, advertising is everywhere. Though the US has thus far resisted the urge to plaster corporate logo all over its players, Europe has long since capitulated to this lucrative source of financing. Ice hockey teams look like a unicorn ate too many jelly beans and threw up rainbows all over the ice—potheads would love it if the guys just wouldn’t move so quickly. Football [1] players look marginally better, their team owners usually restraining themselves to a single logo of a telecomms company. One extremely popular team, Barcelona, has thus far resisted the urge to adorn.

Until now.

Barça take the moral high road reveals that Barcelona has indeed agreed to emblazon their jerseys with the logo of an international company: Unicef.

“It will not be the brand name of a corporation. It will not be a commercial to promote some kind of business. It will be the logo of ‘Unicef’. Through Unicef, we, the people of FC Barcelona, the people of ‘Barça’, are very proud to donate our shirt to the children of the world who are our present, but especially are our future.”

Mock if you want, but with the donation of “just over £1m to its humanitarian projects each year”, Barça is well ahead of any of its rivals in showing that even mega-rich football clubs can be something other than rapacious sharks in the corporate sea.

Barça Unicef Jersey

Steve Yzerman retiresSteve Yzerman has retired from the NHL. He played for the Detroit Redwings all 23 years of his career, leading them to 3 Stanley Cups and 21 playoff appearances. He’s even got an Olympic gold medal, which he won with Canada when they could still play international hockey. ‘Captain’ forever has a place in hearts of Detroiters tells his story.

“There’s not a statistic for heart, but Yzerman would be the unquestioned record-holder. Through the years, he’s had five knee surgeries and lost all his cartilage in his right knee. He’s had a herniated disc, vertebrae fused and a smashed orbital bone. He’s had to sit in hyperbaric chambers to speed the healing processes.”

He’s easily the best all-around player (defense/offense) of the last 20 years, and clawed his way up to seventh on the all-time points list with 1755, with 692 goals and tallied 1,063 assists. He will be missed, but he’s more than earned his retirement.

The last couple of days have been pretty lackluster for football, from the Holland–Portugal disaster, wherein 16 yellow cards and 2 red cards were dished out to the two out-of-control teams, to the Italy–Australia and Switzerland–Ukraine games, which treated us to over 200 minutes of scoreless football. 200 minutes of master class in defense and all of the buzz today is about diving in the penalty box. The day before, Germany took an early two goal lead and sat on it for a further boring 80 minutes and England had a sterling 3 seconds of play courtesy of a Beckham free kick in a 1–0 win. That’s a lot of strategic football for even the most hardened of fans. And yet, diving is on the top of the list of worries.

If you look at the cards to goals comparison, you’ll see there have been quite a few yellow cards. A few have been for diving, while others have been for delay of game. These are the things that FIFA is cracking down on these days. The large majority of the cards have been for excessively hard tackles, tackles from behind or tackles that are off the play. Players tend to flop when struck for several reasons:

1. Getting hit hurts sometimes, no matter how much we want to think that each and every player on the pitch is a whining pussy
2. Referees don’t call what they don’t see; a player who doesn’t embellish a legitimate foul and tries to stay on his feet is one who loses the advantage to a foul play
3. They’re trying to cheat and get a good free kick or a penalty

Grosso 'Dives'It’s the last accusation that is being thrown at Grosso of Italy, who went down in the box extremely late in extra time against Australia. The replay showed that Grosso probably could have avoided the defender who, having missed the ball neatly dinked around him, sprawled himself in a wild tackle at Grosso (the Italian coach said that he’d already shrugged off one foul at that point, whereas the Austalian coach says no fouls whatsoever occurred). Yeah, an athlete of Grosso’s capability should easily be able to avoid getting wiped out by a desperate tackle directly in front of him. True. But that’s not exactly his goal, is it? His goal is scoring goals. To that end, he did a sweet little maneuver to deke the last defender and was gearing up to shoot when suddenly the way to the ball is blocked by a wildly sliding Australian. Grosso’s goal is not to escape the game without getting hit—it’s to put that ball in the net. Our goal as fans is to see goals get scored, not to see skilled players threatened off the ball by illegal tackles. So Grosso makes no attempt to avoid the “wild assault of Australia midfielder Mark Bresciano” (Totti kills Oz hopes at death (Eurosport)) and goes sprawling quite theatrically on the ground. If he’d leapt over Bresciano, avoiding all contact, he’d have been rewarded with nothing for all of his effort—and wild, unskilled play would have won out.

So to those that ask why such a skilled athlete shouldn’t be able to avoid such a wild tackle, the question in response is “why should he?” Letting hard tackles and wild play terrorize the best players—the ones people tune in to watch—into careful play isn’t good for anybody. It leads to the highly defensive, scoreless matches we’ve been seeing in the last few days. Should out-and-out diving be punished? Yes. And it has been in this tournament. Compared to other years, notorious diving teams like some South American clubs, Italy, Spain and others are doing a lot less of it for fear of yellow cards. Embellishing a legitimate foul is something we’re going to have to live with because the alternative is broken games with no flow and “goon squads” á la ice hockey. To be honest, the large majority of replays where it appears a dive took place showed a defender clipping at least a part of a foot or leg or tugging some part of the uniform. That the action causes a healthy, strong player to actually fall down is ridiculous. But without falling down, the referee has no reason to stop play and the defenseman gets away with using dirty play to nullify a scoring play, of which there are precious few of in the first place.

The team should be congratulated for demonstrating such character. –Luis Figo

Ivanov did this 4 timesThe article Four off as Portugal send Dutch home (Eurosport) covers a match that looked more like ice hockey on grass than World Cup football. You have to have seen the match to realize just how ironic the quote above is, coming from Luis Figo, who was part of an extremely vicious Portugese side against the Dutch last night.

The two sides—both capable of very fine football—quickly became more concerned with producing and receiving yellow cards. Maniche of Portugal put in a nice goal to take the lead in the 25th minute and the Dutch spent the rest of the game missing the net completely and barely disturbing Ricardo, the Portugese netminder. A deliberate handball by Costinha (Portugal) got him sent off with a second yellow in extra time in the first half, setting up what should have been steady pressure from the Dutch and desperate defending from Portugal. The Dutch should have equalized on a bizarre non-call in which a Portugese defender came soaring in, leg high, and planted his foot into Dirk Kuijt’s chest, knocking him on his ass directly in front of the goalie. Though the referee was looking right at the play, he not only did not call a penalty, he waved the entire play on as if nothing had happened.

Then in stepped Luis Figo, sporting a maturity level of the under–17 league—one which most of his team (but especially Deco) shared.

“The spark was provided just before the hour mark by the habitually cool Luis Figo, who – unseen by Ivanov – headbutted Mark van Bommel following a foul by Giovanni van Bronckhorst on Barcelona team-mate Deco.”

*BAM*Somehow, Figo only got a yellow card for an attack on a player after the whistle was blown. That was the referee Ivanov’s seond error: it doesn’t matter that Portugal was already down a man and that Figo was the best player in the world for several years—if he head-butts another player outside of play, he’s off. At that point, it would have been a deserved 11–9 players on the field, as the Portugese had been playing much dirtier and more dangerously than the Dutch.

Since Figo stayed on, he got to help send off a Dutch player to even things up with his “reaction to what appeared an innocent stray Khalid Boulahrouz arm”. He did get elbowed in the face, but it was hard to say it was deliberate (unlike DeRossi of Italy against the USA), but Ivanov responded to Figo’s histrionics and sent off the Dutch player, likely thinking he’d settle things down by evening up the players.

This was not to be, as the yellow cards kept coming fast and furious and at least twice a brawl almost broke out, due to the annoying habit that the Portugese players had of surrounding fallen Dutch players and exhorting them to get up—presumably in a language they didn’t understand. This swarming behavior earned them no friends on the Dutch team as the Dutch waded in trying to clear their compatriot some breathing room and Ivanov waded in, swinging his yellow card right and left. A simpering, whining Deco set the record by collecting two bookings in six minutes, the second for taking the ball and refusing to give it back for a Dutch free kick. Quality stuff, this.

In the end, the Portugese clung to their one-goal lead in a match that was an embarassment for both sides: the Portugese showed the world what we can expect in a match against a notoriously cool-headed English side and the Dutch showed the world that they just can’t find the net.

The U.S. Bows Out With Honor (Time) highlights the last match in the 2006 World Cup for the United States, including the critical defensive error by Claudio Reyna that led to the first goal for Ghana and the questionable penalty call in the 3rd minute of extra time in the first half.

Questionable? No…that’s not it. Ridiculous? That’s more like it. Bruce Arena has this to say about it:

“I think we’d all agree it wasn’t a good call to have that in the 47th minute, after our team worked so hard to get back in the game…To be positioned to have to chase the game on that call is kind of remarkable in a game at this level.”

Hulk Get AngryThat is exceedingly civil—especially from Bruce Arena, who is not known for pulling punches when talking to the press. All of the replays showed both of Onyewu’s arms (US defender)—and they weren’t touching Pimpong, the Ghanan forward. Pimpong went for the header and missed, then fell down. If there was any contact, it was incidental and done with the body. It’s not a penalty kick, it’s probably not even a penalty and it’s certainly not a penalty kick in the last minute of extra time in a tied game that decides who advances in the group when one team just tied the score not four minutes before. Once again, a referee is playing God.

Ranting aside, the US needed to win this game in order to advance and the way they played in the second half wasn’t going to land them a single goal, so it doesn’t really matter that they needed two. As Arena said, it doubtless had an effect on their morale, but their morale has nothing to do with their aim. They approached the Ghanan net several times, but put almost nothing on target—outside of a McBride header that almost snuck in off a post. Most of their kicks soared over the crossbar, indicating that the MSL should probably standardize their goals to be the same size as those used in international competition so that the Americans have a fighting chance next time. Their passing and trapping game leaves a lot to be desired as well, especially when compared to the tight, crisp passing of nations like Argentina, Holland or Brazil. It’s not that they need to make the hundreds and hundreds of passes [1] favored by South American teams, but they need to drop the ball to their feet much faster in order to be able to do something with it. There is altogether too much time wasted in trapping on the third bounce and chasing bad passes.

Ronaldo

I'm Bulking Up!On a completely different note, it was really nice to see Ronaldo return to form tonight against Japan. Ronaldo still has what it takes gives more details on his attempt to surpass Gerd Müller’s record of 14 World Cup goals. Ronaldo had 12 coming into this tournament (4 in ‘98 and 8 in ‘02) and just put up 2 more against Japan. One more and he’s got the lead. It’s nice to see the 183cm/90kg striker prove all of his critics wrong when they say he’s too chubby to get the job done. He still manages to be effective, running with the best of them for 90 minutes (usually). Good for him.

The US and Italy squared off tonight in match that started off with a strong American side attacking into an Italian defense that was simply absorbing everything. The Italy that played Ghana using the midfield was gone and the classic counter-attacking Azurri style was back. Though the Americans controlled the run of the play for the first 20 minutes, Italy capitalized on a perfectly executed set play to hammer a headball past star goalkeeper Casey Keller. The US deflated slightly after that, but were suprised to see Italy bang home an own goal to tie things back up for them. [1]

Mcbride's InjuryThat was the start of the circus. De Rossi, an Italian player with a history of discipline problems, targeted Brian McBride with an exceedingly deliberate elbow to the face, for which he was promptly ejected by the referee, who was standing not twenty feet away [2]. At this point, Italy had racked up an own goal and an ejection. Bravo. World class and relatively typical stumbling start to a World Cup for Italy.

America was not to be outdone on this front. Shortly before half time, Mastroeni, soon after launching a marvellous shot that almost put the US in the lead, sliced in cleats up and way late on a tackle and gets sent off as well. Again, the referee was not ten feet away from the play! Ten men to ten for those keeping track at home. Soon after both teams returned to the field, Eddie Pope (US), who already had a yellow card from the tenth minute in the first half, tackled Gilardino from behind with almost no chance on the ball and grabbed himself a second yellow card. Hit the showers, Eddie. Incredibly, the US had taken the advantage offered by a disintegrating Italian team and turned the tables on themselves.

The rest of the match played out terribly, with the Italians refusing to go on the attack until the last 8 or 9 minutes of the game and the Americans unable to mount much of an attack (though DeMarcus Beasley offered some excitement, the US ended up with zero shots on goal). The US defense was quite solid, but could hardly prove themselves heroic against the sluggish, out-of-sorts offense offered up by the Italians. The US technically has a chance of qualifying, but they play Ghana next, who shut out the number two in the world Czech Republic 2-0 in a game that they dominated from start to finish. The flying Czech Republic of the first game against the US was completely absent and the Ghanans showed the same good form they did against Italy in their first match.

A Plague of Offsides

Italy looked bad, but was dogged once again by incredibly poor officiating by linesmen calling offsides. In several cases, as in the last world cup (see Refereeing at World Cup (earthli News) for more information), Italy lost significant breakaway chances to offsides calls that were simply not offsides. The officiating has been relatively solid in this respect in other matches, which indicates either a conspiracy against Italy (read Corriere d’ella Sera tomorrow for the various flavors) or an inability to call the close-to-the-line Italian style accurately. As mentioned in the article above, the only real solution to this is to put a goddamned linesmen in the booth, where he or she has the same God-like perspective we all have watching at home. The referee is already wearing a microphone and earpiece taped to his face—what’s the problem, FIFA?

Questionable Cards

The other country robbed of a goal was Argentina, whose Hernan Crespo also got a yellow card for continuing play after the whistle was blown. Argentina is playing about 100 times better than Italy, so they don’t have to care about bad offsides calls—they got an incredible 6 other goals that game. The yellow card was a tough call as the Argentinian fans are staggeringly loud and the blown whistle wasn’t audible to the viewers at home either.

Yellow cards are important in the first round, as two cards accumulated over two games results not in ejection, but in missing the next game in group play. Again, Argentina has so much firepower that they wouldn’t miss Crespo too badly in their third game, but the referee shouldn’t be so fast and loose with yellow cards for non-gameplay fouls.

Other useless yellow cards have been issued to Francesco Totti of Italy, in which he tackled a ball in the open field (not in possession) and an American stumbled over his legs afterwards. At worst, this was a free kick, but a yellow card? For what? Drogba, another masterful player, of the Ivory Coast, was similarly punished for coming too close to the goalkeeper. The ball was not in goalkeeper possession until very late, Drogba made only incidental contact with the keeper, the keeper didn’t seem to notice, the referee was perfectly positioned and he issued a yellow card to the best playmaker on the Ivory Coast.

The first red card of the tournament was given early in the second half to Vladislav Vashchuk of the Ukraine in a match against Spain. Not only did the Swiss referee dole out a red card, but he saw fit to grant Spain a penalty kick as well. Vachchuk was dogging the Spanish attacker, and, in the replay, pulled on his uniform briefly while outside the penalty box. The Spanish player seemed not to notice, taking a well-struck shot that almost passed the Ukrainian keeper before stumbling to the ground several steps later (inside the penalty box). Knowledgable commentators have watched the replay and judged that the call was correct according to FIFA rules. This is utter bullshit. If it’s true, then the rules are bullshit. The tugging occurred outside of the penalty box—and far worse uniform pulling was perpetrated by the US on Italy during their match. Not a single instance was called by the referee—even for near undressings that occurred in the penalty box itself. There is a consistency problem, as there always is with referees. Ukraine gets to play a man down for 45 minutes against a powerful Spanish team—all for a foul that is at worst a free kick and at best, simply nonexistent.

Red cards should be reserved for plays that impede or bring down a player on a clear breakaway (as in ice hockey, which gives penalty shots), intentional handballs, and dangerous tackles, intentional or not. Intent to injure should be punished with multi-game suspensions and fines.

Angola vs. MexicoThough there’s been some supremely good football in the first week of the world cup, there has also been some disappointing football. And then there’s the Angola-Mexico match. Now that was so bad, it was funny. The Angolans outclassed the Mexicans throughout most of the match, mostly due to their ability to string two whole passes together where the Mexicans were managing at most one. Mexico must have gotten the mistaken notion that they were good just because they consistently beat the USA. Mexico was god-awful and couldn’t get a single shot on goal (on goal—they shot at goal a couple of times) in the ten minutes during which they had a man advantage at the end of the match.

Angola wasn’t better at finishing, but showed some more flair when passing, though they have also mastered the art of passing to the wrong team. Possession changes were fast and furious, sometimes as high as four in five seconds. Amazing stuff. The official statistics for the game show Mexico with 51 losses of possession to Angola’s 40. That’s just absurd. Anyone who watched the match knows it was way more. The official statistics for Argentina–Serbia Montenegro show 38 lost balls to 41—this in a match that Argentina played as close to perfectly as you can imagine.

The best thing about the game was Angola’s incredibly acrobatic goalkeeper. One could argue that he would need to be less acrobatic if he was in position more of the time, but that would be spoiling the party. He was a delight to watch and, when Mexico failed to capitalize on a rare miss by him late in the match [1], I breathed a sigh of relief. He is also apparently not even playing on a team right now, but Angola called him up for the world cup nevertheless. After this performance, he should have a home soon enough.

Neither team deserved to win this match and the 0–0 result was the fairest possible. Since Angola came in the clear underdog, they come out on top having earned a draw. Mexico has earned the right to shut the hell up about being a soccer nation. The commentator on Eurosport said after the match: “Angola hold on for a draw and I think I’m going to cry. Amazing result and Mexico booed off the pitch.” The French commentator on Swiss TV was laughing too hard to say anything.

Lance ArmstrongThe article Armstong cleared of doping charges (Sports Illustrated) brings a sigh of relief to anyone still biting their nails over whether Lance cheated when he won his first Tour de France. The conclusion of this latest bout of shipping 7–year-old samples of Lance’s urine around Europe comes not with exoneration of any wrongdoing, but of the inapplicability of the given evidence. Since it cannot be proved that the samples were not tampered with, they cannot be used as evidence. Furthermore, any results of tests done on the possibly-tainted samples cannot be released to the public. Any student of logic will fail to see how that “exonerates Lance Armstrong completely with respect to alleged use of doping in the 1999 Tour de France”. It does neither one nor the other.

There are just a few facts to consider:

1. The Tour de France is generally about 3500 to 4000 kilometers long. Racers cover this distance in 21 stages, averaging about 180 kilometers per day.
2. The Tour de France is, in general, more difficult than the Giro D’Italia. This year’s Giro D’Italia included a single day of cycling that covered 200km and 4500m of climbing. The Tour de France has even more mountains.
3. Because of these inhuman tasks, biking has became notorious for doping. It is widely accepted that anyone who has a modicum of success in this sport dopes to one degree or another.
4. Lance Armstrong raced once per year—at the Tour de France—and won seven times in a row in this grueling race. He routinely humiliated his competition and rarely looked to be in trouble at any time during his reign.
5. Only very few riders are caught for doping. It is also generally accepted that most riders are very careful.
6. Use of EPO—one of the most effective and natural performance enhancers—is detectable only in “overdosed” quantities. It can be used as an enhancer and cannot be detected as it is a naturally occurring hormone. Tests can simply detect whether the level is unnaturally high.

Given all this, what is one to think of Lance Armstrong, who so dominated the sport for seven years? What is the likelihood that he is such a super-athlete that no one in seven years could even come close to him? You want to believe he gritted his way through, with hard work and training. It’s not like he has a day job. But neither do any of the other competitors. They all train 200km per day, year round. Regardless of what kind of natural talent he has, it stands to reason that someone with a little less talent, but with a lot more drugs, would have taken away his crown. Granted, he was always blessed with a very good team. But T-Mobile and CSC fielded teams full of stars as well. It just doesn’t add up.

If you’re unfamiliar with the sport or haven’t ever watched it closely, you may be fooled into thinking that the riders are human. They’re not. They ride 40-50km per hour for hours at a time, drafting off of each other to save energy, but still putting in ferocious paces for hundreds of kilometers that are just unthinkable. The climbs they do are similarly insane, rising at high percentage grades (sometimes 6%, sometimes up to 16%) for a dozen kilometers. Repeat 4 times in one day during a 160km ride. Deep sports massage, pasta dinner, some sleep, then do it again 20 more times.

Americans like Lance because he’s our kind of guy. He’s got a booming cancer foundation, he can interview in passable French (helping fight the ugly American syndrome), he regularly humiliated the French in a sport that they love and we hardly care about and he left his boring old wife for a rock star (who since left him when she realized that he rides 200km every single day and not just three weeks per year). You want to believe he managed all this and did it clean. Maybe he did. Maybe he did. But these latest findings don’t prove one thing one way or another.

The article, Build It, Or Else (Weekly Standard) is about public funding of private gain in an arena other than the military. Sports teams have been playing the “stadium hopping, city-hopping” game for several decades now and its only getting worse. The most recent and egregious instance is Washington D.C. “issuing $535 million in bonds to build [a] stadium” for the Montreal Expos, which are moving in as soon as it is complete. The article lists a litany of other stadiums, from baseball and football stadiums to basketball arenas, all built with between $200 and $400 million of taxpayer money.

We know the arguments that convince enough people to float these bond issues: it will revitalize the local economy, it will bring new jobs to the area, the added prestige will raise property prices. Can’t that large a chunk of change benefit the community in other, less abstract ways? The cries of these naysayers and opponents of corporate welfare are lost among the hysterical shrieks of brain-dead politicians who claim that “[t]he ripple effect” of a team’s departure “defies our imagination”. It reeks of kickback.

A recent study of 37 cities with large sports franchises found that “claims of large tangible economic benefits do not withstand scrutiny.” This study and others mostly found that the promised increases in consumer spending never occur, as people simply end up spending their money on the sports team instead of other recreational activities. It doesn’t spur people to do more recreation; they don’t have more time on their hands, after all. So the promised boon to the local economy is, in fact, a “zero-sum endeavor, a shifting around of resources”. With the shifting around benefitting the team owner, into whose pockets the money goes (they own the stadium, remember?) and depriving other local businesses. So while it’s zero-sum to an economist, it’s a minus for local businesses.

The promised job boon falls into, at best, the category of a Walmart job boon, which increases minimum wage jobs. At best. On average, however, “[a] city lost on average 1,924 jobs due to the presence of a pro team”. All of these newly jobless people also got to continue paying the tax levied to pay for the stadium for the next decade until the bond is paid off.

So there’s a decrease in jobs, a large chunk of tax money missing and the economy is not improved. What is the point of the whole endeavor? Why do many cities still decide to build large arenas for their privately-owned sports teams? “The main economic effect of publicly-subsidized stadiums is to dramatically increase the value of the teams”. The advantage to local politicians ordinarily comes in the form of kickbacks and perks; in other cases, like New York City, one has to wonder how far and wide Mayor Bloomberg’s investments are spread. [1]

Baseball teams see the most significant gains, where teams that had a new stadium built for them “between 1991 and 1997 … increased 79 percent” in value; others increased 11 percent. The Financial Times study provided a concrete example:

“Here’s how it works: B/R Rangers Associates purchased the Texas Rangers in 1989 for $86 million. Threatened with losing the team in the early 1990s, Texas taxpayers forked over $135 million to help build the new Ballpark at Arlington, now called Ameriquest Field. B/R Rangers Associates then sold the team in 1998 for $250 million.”

Arlington’s $135 million investment of public funding translated into a $160 million dollar private profit 9 years later. Social welfare is verboten—it’s socialist claptrap—but corporate welfare is the stuff of dreams. The residents of Arlington got to pay off the bond with local sales taxes for 17 years. And who used his down-home Texan charm to convince Arlingtonians to vote for the deal and then walked away with a fat piece of the profits?

Your president and mine, George W. Bush.

The Olympics can be a harsh mistress:

Swiss Men’s Hockey Team Shocks Canada

Coming only two days after their stunning upset of the world champion Czech Republic, 3-2, the Swiss team shut out the defending Olympic champions in a hard-fought battle.

Japan upsets Canada in women’s curling

Curling is more popular in Canada than hockey, if you can believe that. The women’s team is favored to win the Olympics again this year; they lost to Japan today.

‘Nuff said.

Last night saw the Olympics pairs figure skating final unfold in Torino. Unusually, things were going quite well and there had been only one judging anomoly for most of the evening. That one occurred when a Russian couple mysteriously got enough points to maintain their 8th place position over a 9th place Polish couple that outshone them completely. Figure skating is complicated to judge and the most unnoticable things (like which edge you’re using and so on) are quite hard and get marked higher. It seems a small stumble or out-of-sync moment or two can be cancelled out by several other small, well-executed moves. This initial mysterious mark didn’t really affect the standings and so was quickly forgotten.

The evening was rolling right along until the final two couples.

The penultimate couple to skate was another Russian pair, Tatiana Totmianina and Maxim Marinin [1], who had already won a couple of world championships and were retiring from competition after this Olympics. In order to completely eliminate controversy, they put forth a performance that was simply unbelievable, with a grace and elegance that was a step higher than anyone else at the rink. The judges concurred and gave them technical merit scores of 69, where the previous high for the evening was about 62 points. The 62 points were earned by a Chinese couple, Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo, who also put in a master class performance. Though theirs was clearly not as close to perfection as the Russians, they had a solid silver medal performance under their belts.

I deserve silver!Then came the final couple, Zhang Dan and Zhang Hao. The image to the right shows Zhang Dan almost 40 seconds into the routine, recovering from a horrifying fall in which she fell out of a throw and slammed her knee into the ice. Not to fear, ladies and gentlemen, for that is a picture of a silver medal performance.

The drama didn’t end there, as she got up, shook it off and finished the remaining four minutes of the program. Simply amazing. Though all of the skaters are pretty tough, this was a true triumph of the will—to complete the program at the Olympics. It only comes around every four years and it does that to you (remember Kerri Strug?). Opinions differ as to how they finished the program. The article, Turin falls in love with mainland bravehearts (The Standard) is of the opinion that, “[t]hen the Zhangs [2] nailed everything.”

I might believe that if I hadn’t seen the routine myself. They did a respectable job, but it was clear they were shaken. She stumbled out of a throw later in the program (not touching a hand down, but still a clear stumble), two-footed a landing on a paired jump and they were not synchronized on the spins very late in the program. I was aided very much in noticing these things by the two excellent announcers on Eurosport [3]. Both announcers (experienced judges of the sport), my wife and I (dilettantes who become interested in the sport at least once every 4 years) slotted the brave couple at 4th place. They were clearly going to lose points for the crash, the delay and the other mistakes.

Pretty please?The article, Zhangs deserved medal, say ISU, defends the silver medalists from Olympics final last night. They said that, “[w]hat they performed on the ice was perfectly all right to justify the marks they received.” They did not; quite the opposite, in fact. They scored over 66 points on technical merit, meaning they were 4 points better than everyone else except for Tatiana and Maxim, whose matchless performance was deemed almost matched by the face-planting Zhangs. This is patently ridiculous, as seen in this other angle of the silver medal performer to the left.

This is especially sad as the couple that was in second place had performed really well—without falls—and their backstory in recent weeks showed no small amount of moxie of their own. Then, here come the figure-skating judges to prove that no ratings system can keep them from their flights of fancy. They trampled all over one couple’s fairy tale Olympics to hand-deliver it to another.

“[The ISU], however, refused to speculate whether there might have been an official protest if Chinese competitors had not occupied second, third and fourth places in the competition.”

As my opinion vis-a-vis figure skating is not at all respected [4], I have no qualms in saying that there would have been a huge, f*%$ing uproar. It’s only because they’re all on the same team that the coach isn’t making a big stink about how Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo got steamrolled in the name of teary-eyed sentimentality. At any rate, whereas I’m glad those two got a medal (having clawed their way up from 5th after the short program), I am also sad that they got the short end of the stick from those infuriating figure skating judges.

But so is figure skating and so, it seems, it will always be.

Let’s break tradition and start off with good news first.

Non-US coverage is quite good

Whereas many of you in the States might be suffering from the same wonderful NBC (prime-time … I’ll get to that) coverage, those in other parts of the world are faring a bit better. Has NBC Turned The Olympics Into Will And Greece? is a discussion that runs the gamut of complaints about NBC coverage. There are the stories of crass commercialism:

• Athletes not allowed to carry or display any brands that are not official sponsors. (notice how all of the water bottles are unmarked?)
• “The Nike swoosh on every USA uniform. Must we commercialize everyfuckingthing?”
• Massive TV commercial onslaughts, often outweighing time spent on the sport
• Nationalism, which, while present in all countries, (Switzerland has extended coverage of the exciting-to-watch sport of women’s air pistol) is somewhat exaggerated when “a greater percentage of the total time [is spent] on the playing of the US national anthem than on the match itself”

But I said I’d start on a good note, right?

• I’ve heard that other channels, like Bravo, USA and others are broadcasting a wider range of sports for US residents
• There’s still the CBC in some parts of the country to save us all
• Eurosport (all over Europe) shows round-the-clock coverage

  1. Commercial breaks come every 15-20 minutes or so and only last 30 seconds to a minute
  2. They cover almost everything. Seriously. I’ve seen badminton, table tennis, shot put, archery, sculling, sailing, canoing, air rifle, volleyball, fencing, dressage, water polo, and all sorts of other stuff I didn’t even know existed.
  3. You never see the announcers
  4. The british announcers are funnier than the german ones. (favorite quote so far: “He’s an awful hurdler, but quite fast between them.”)
  5. There are almost no interviews. When there are interviews, they are in a tiny picture-in-picture box in the top left corner. On-screen, the action continues.
• If you don’t like Eurosport, you’ve got 10 other channels to choose from.

Olympic Judging still sucks

I just watched the 2004 Athens men’s high bar final. Anyone who watched it knows who actually won the event — Alexei Nemov.

He was mysteriously in 5th place. Apparently, the judges found that 12 medals, over the years, were enough for him. That’s how the Olympics works.

It sucks.

Refreshingly, the crowd booed for 15 minutes before Nemov was able to calm them back down.

You’ll hear arguments that the judges, with their God-like insight, see things mortals cannot, and judge the routine by more than just flash.

Whatever.

You should have seen that guy fly. Blew the competition away. Just watching his 30 second routine — you couldn’t breathe.

5th place.

If you’ve been watching the World Cup, setting your alarm for 2:30 in the morning and dragging yourself out of bed to watch Andreas Cantor scream at you in Spanish on Univision, you’ve seen a lot of questionable refereeing. Probably the most often-miscalled play is offsides, in which the linesman always seems to err for the defense.

There have been other game-changing calls, though. Probably the first was in the first round of games in the group stage, in which Turkey was robbed of a tie and a point when the referee in the Turkey-Brazil match, “Mr. Kim Young-Joo, judged that Luizao fell in the area and awarded Brazil a penalty kick”. (Source: Brazil 2 : 1 Turkey on Fifa World Cup). Brazil puts away the kick in the 87th minute and collects the win. The replay, however, shows that the pulldown occurred at least 2 steps outside of the penalty box and should have been a free kick.

In the U.S.-Mexico match, a corner kick in the second half was “… superbly punched clear by O’Brien as Borgetti contested in the air. [Referee] Pereira waved play on as the Mexican’s appeals fell on deaf ears.” This should have resulted in a penalty kick and even a red card for a deliberate handball. (Source: USA create history against Mexico on Eurosport)

The team most sorely abused by bad officiating was easily Italy. Eurosport again has the article Maldini: ‘It was scandalous’, which talks about two bad calls in the South Korea-Italy game. The first was:

“…when Christian Vieri served Tommasi perfectly in the area before the Roman beat keeper Lee Woon-Jae from close range. Goal Italia? No mister Tomassi you were off-side according to the ref… Certainly not according to the video replays. Even Brazilian TV Globo proved on a World Cup show that the Roman midfielder was 23 centimetres on side.”

The other call was a red card issued to Francesco Totti for diving in the first overtime period. Soccer Referees on Run, and They Can’t Hide on the NY Times quotes “Joseph S. Blatter, the president of FIFA” as saying “the call made by Referee Byron Moreno of Ecuador against Francesco Totti of Italy on Tuesday should not have been a yellow card, a penalty that resulted in Totti’s ejection.”

CNN writes Livid Italians allege Cup ‘plot’, which provides more coverage of Italy’s 2002 cup run:

“The Italians had five goals disallowed in three matches and a series of questionable decisions go against them before Tuesday’s second round match.”

Unfortunately, in response to this, the Italians now suspect a conspiracy against them. Specifically in the last match, they say “It seemed as if they just sat around a table and decided to throw us out”. The suspicion is that FIFA really wanted to keep one of the hosts in the cup. If that’s true, why not just cheat Turkey a little more and keep Japan in the cup? The blatant calls against the Italians aren’t a conspiracy theory, they’re just bad judgements. Italy lost to Croatia because two goals were called back for offsides when video replay showed that they were both well onsides. The goal against South Korea in overtime was also onsides, as mentioned above.

Another article on Eurosport, What the users think of the ref… fields opinions from people who’ve written in about the refereeing. One user asks “…when FIFA will have some common sense and put a referee in the stadium with the video, connected with the main referee on the pitch?” I think this is a very valid point as the best linesman FIFA has to offer right now can’t call offsides to save their lives. The vantage people at home are offered in the replays is the one the linesman should be watching all the time. When they see offsides, signal the referee on the field. No instant replay necessary, just using technology to call the game better.

The Germany-U.S. semifinal contained a non-call of a supposed handball by German defender Frings, but in this case, it seems that referee Hugh Dallas made the right call (Source: U.S. Tying Goal Only an Inch Away):

“The key is whether Frings moved his arm to stop the ball or whether the arm was at is side. Replays weren’t conclusive, but it looked more likely that he didn’t move his arm. … ‘If the ball strikes the defender accidentally, no offense is committed,’ soccer rules state.”

In the other semifinal that day, Brazil-England, Ronaldinho, who put in a wonderful game with an excellent run and pass to Rivaldo for a goal and a great free kick for a goal, was put out of the match in the 57th minute for a “studs-up tackle”. The rise and fall of Ronaldinho on Eurosport says “A foul? Probably. A yellow card? Severe. A red card? Ridiculous…”

The replay shows the contact was purely unintentional, having just missed the ball, and calling that ‘studs-up’ was really stretching the imagination. The referee saw something completely different and issued a red card straight away, even though the play resulted in no injury (feigned or otherwise) and no advantage. So, though Brazil goes through, we are denied seeing another nice game played by Ronaldinho.

FIFA World Cup News is reporting that Rivaldo fined for fake injury, which occurred (or didn’t, in fact) during Brazil’s match against Turkey. Apparently, the fine was assessed in lieu of an outright ban from the tournament, as FIFA is admanant about preventing fakery from dominating soccer. From the looks of some matches, this is almost definitely a losing battle, as there has been quite a bit of excess flailing and extreme acrobatics again this year.

“Rivaldo admitted after the match that he had deliberately exaggerated an injury, holding his face after Turkish defender Hakan Unsal had kicked the ball at his legs, in a bid to get Unsal sent off. … He said after Monday’s game: “Obviously I exaggerated the incident for the guy to be sent off. … The ball hit my hand and my leg. It didn’t hit me in the face but that kind of attitude (kicking the ball against an opponent) must not be allowed on the pitch. He deserved to have a red card.””

The wasn’t the only issue in the match, as the officiating in general was called into question; the referee was in charge of his first World Cup match ever.

“Turkey’s coach Senol Gunes said the result of the game “was a tremendous injustice” because of the refereeing of Kim Young-Joo, the first South Korean to control a World Cup game, who made several debatable calls. … The 86th-minute penalty decision was also shrouded in controversy. Alpay was clearly outside the penalty area when he started pulling the shirt of Luizao.”

Unfortunately, with teams becoming better and better, more matches will be decided by a bad penalty call or an improper offsides call.

Real Madrid won the European Champion’s Cup for the ninth time on Wednesday, on a goal from Zinedine Zidane that was simply amazing. Goal.com (UK version) has Zidane wonder-strike clinches Real´s ninth European Cup, which has the best coverage I could find.

“Roberto Carlos sent a speculative looping cross into the area and the French international midfielder showed wonderful balance and composure to lash an unstoppable volley into the top corner.”

I didn’t find a video, but this is pretty good. It’s a long series of still images showing the goal from different angles…almost like a video. You have to go to the article, then click the link under the first paragraph. Click ‘next photo’ to go through the pictures like a flipbook.

Update: That’s not the wonder-goal…it’s a goal versus Deportivo. That’s pretty disengenuous.

Update: This goal is really hard to find, but kavorka has found a list of video highlights and goals. He says the quality is OK, but it’s in RealVideo format. Go to Madrid win ninth European crown on UEFA’s site, then look on the right, in the second box down to find “Related Interactive”. Videos are at the top and include “Highlights” and “Goals” in high and low bandwidth flavors.

Zoloft

So, now that we’ve all learned how to become Olympic champions (eat at McDonald’s, drink Budweiser and chug Zoloft, which, by the way, shouldn’t be a surprising sponsor of the Olympics, since Study Finds Utah Leads Nation in Antidepressant Use). Mark Morford reports in Numerous Mormons On Prozac that Utah has twice the national average in anti-depressant usage.

<q>Other states with high antidepressant use were Maine and Oregon. Utah’s rate of antidepressant use was twice the rate of California and nearly three times the rates in New York and New Jersey, the study showed.</q>

NBC vs. CBC

Don’t get me wrong. I love the Olympics. I haven’t missed watching an Olympics in my whole life. Growing up near enough to the Canadian border, I was treated to the noon to midnight Olympics coverage on the CBC, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation. If you’ve never heard of it, you really don’t know what you’re missing.

While NBC, which has exclusive U.S. distribution rights to the next 800 Olympics, is moving increasingly to packaged, videotaped coverage, with long, moving interviews with family and friends, clever promotional tie-ins, and even, if you’re quick, the occasional sport occurrence, all sandwiched between 3 or 4 minute long commercial blocks that just keep on coming, the CBC still covers the Olympics mostly as sports.

The start, middle and finish of the event are often shown. Athletes from other nations that may or may not win medals, may or may not have had cancer or withstood great odds can be seen. Sure, Canadians get pumped up, but not even close to NBC’s outright jingoism. The sports can easily speak for themselves. However, NBC doesn’t trust the American attention span and drowns it all out with truck commercials.

Yeah, I watched the Olympics on NBC this year again. I have no choice. I don’t get the CBC anymore. I was actually in broadcast range for one weekend and revelled in at least 15 glorious hours of live coverage. An AlterNet article, Welcome to the American Olympics talks about the CBC, the cost of the Olympics and the growing feeling that these are the American Olympics:

<q>Part of the appeal of the Olympics is its carefully cultivated image of selfless altruism and global harmony … But while selling that image, the United States, especially in years when it hosts the games, tends to think it’s all about us. … A sociologist could probably find something compelling in U.S. media’s obsession with proving that no matter what we do or who among us does it, America really is #1. It reeks of an insecurity, or immaturity, not befitting a great nation. But the simpler truth is, it’s probably what the networks think American audiences want. We grow up with mindless jingoism and “America #1” propaganda from birth …</q>

Well, Aren’t We Proud Of Our Medals? by Robert Reno in the New York Newsday also talks about the crowing of the U.S. and suggests that the reason the U.S. was so successful was simple investment. With $40 million dollars invested into the USOC directly, that comes out to over $1 million per medal.

<q>Sandra Baldwin, president of the U.S. Olympic Committee, said it was “not serendipity” that we seemed to dominate these games. … “We put a lot of money and a lot of time into these games and we’re happy to see it pay off,” she said.</q>

He also points out that other nations have far better cost/benefit ratios and have much higher medals per capita as well, so perhaps the U.S. should zip it.

<q>After all, the Germans got the most medals, 35, on the strength of a gene pool of only 83 million people. If their athletes had had the bad taste to dance around shrieking boasts to being the master race, I suppose we would have just had to put up with it. … The Norwegians, of whom there are only 4.5 million, won 24 medals. Austria, home to 8 million people, won 16 metals. … Do your arithmetic and see what were among the more stunning “victories” of these Olympics.</q>

Switzerland, with about 7.1 million people, took 11 medals.

Costs

The cost of the Olympics is another issue that gets neatly glossed over. You see, despite the best gouging efforts of local retailers and restauranteurs in Salt Lake City (Durst’s Olympic Winners and Losers tells of $7 hot dogs and $3.50 Snickers bars), they came up well short of the $1.5 Billion price tag for hosting the Olympics. Campaign Contributors Go for Gold tells of the wheeling and dealing that made the Olympics happen (this is all after the whole mess with the bribes, scholarships and prostitutes for the IOC).

<q>The price tag for taxpayers for the 2002 Olympics is some $1.5 billion, according to a special report in Sports Illustrated by award-winning investigative reporters Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele. That’s one-and-a-half-times more than the amount spent by the government on all seven Olympics games in the U.S. since 1904, combined, even after adjusting for inflation.</q>

Environment

Gold, Silver, Bronze — But Not Green (again on AlterNet) tells the story of the environmental situation there. The games were to be very eco-friendly, with rail lines and buses put in, but, in the end, there wasn’t time, and tens of millions of dollars were put into the tried and true parking lots, highways and thousands of SUVs.

<q>The environment was touted as one of three pillars of the Olympics, along with sports and culture, and cities bidding for the Games had to trot out their green credentials. … Such considerations, however, have largely been abandoned in Salt Lake, and in the end the region will … likely [be] left with significant environmental damage from the Olympics.</q>

Some of the ongoing issues in the area are covered also in the February National Geographic in Leap of Faith (abstract only), over 80% of Utah’s population lives in the Salt Lake area, the “Wasatch Front” and the population looks to double in the next 50 years. The water situation is so desperate there that rivers have been moved already, and there are plans to reroute another with a dam, destroying the largest wetlands in the “intermountain West”.

On to Athens.

The LA Times has another Olympics story, called Want to Sire an Olympic Hopeful?…, with a humorous look at creating your very own Olympic athlete that you can cheer for in some embarassing way that NBC will be sure to zoom in on way too close and broadcast to the nation for what seems like several painfully long minutes.

<q>The Olympic Games depress me, so I am glad they are over. I don’t need to be reminded every four winters that I married a woman who comes from a family of oafs, which wasn’t capable of producing a gifted athlete, thereby making my children too uncoordinated to win a medal. … It’s not my fault, of course, because I was young and seduced by this woman, never knowing it would end my Olympic dreams.</q>

Steven Bradbury: A mastermind in the sport of short-track speedskating, he was well-positioned in the men’s 1,000 final, way behind the pack, waiting patiently for the other four competitors to wipe out so he could cruise home for the gold. My kind of Olympic champion. The wily Aussie is now forever a part of the sporting lexicon: Whenever an athlete succeeds through nothing more than dumb luck, it’s now called “pulling a Bradbury.”

Wayne Gretzky: He snubbed Patrick Roy, he left Joe Thornton off the roster, he acted like a crazy man during Team Canada news conferences, he wound up winning the gold medal. He pulled a Bradbury.

The LA Times article, A Toast to a Host With the Most has some nice Olympic recaps.

In a little-reported press conference before the Olympics, SatireWire reports that Bush Asks Non-U.S. Olympians to Unite…

<q> … We have a problem because the enemies of justice, the enemies of liberty and prosperity, would like nothing more than to see America’s weaknesses exploited. They would like nothing more than to celebrate our humiliation on the international stage that is the Olympics. You must not let this happen. You must help us strike another blow against the forces of tyranny and oppression. Athletes of the world, in these Olympic Games, unite behind America by finishing behind America. … I see many of you are shaking your heads, and I realize that this campaign requires sacrifice. After all, you have trained your entire lives just to get here. You dream of a gold medal, and honor for your country. Those are worthy dreams. But now is not the time for petty nationalism.</q>

A week and a half into the Olympics, it seems the people of the world have united and responded to the President’s pleas. Except for the Canadian Women’s hockey team, which didn’t get with the program. Look for Canada on the short list with rest of the Axis of Evil.

Charles Krauthammer of the New York Newsday puts forth an opposite proposal in Time to Throw the Olympics:

<q>Do we really need the men’s short-track speedskating gold medal? Can we not live without winning the two-man bobsled? Did we really have to beat the Chinese women’s hockey team 12-1? … Call me a lefty, but I cringe watching NBC’s rah-rah coverage of the Olympics. It is worse than usual. A need for some post-Sept. 11 flag-waving? We’ve already had a fairly substantial outlet for flag-waving. It’s called Afghanistan. Salt Lake, on the other hand, is an opportunity to show a bit of graciousness.</q>

CNN/Sports Illustrated has the latest on Simon Ammann in Gold Again…. Switzerland has changed gears in the winter Olympics from the ski hills to the ski-jumping hills. Simon Ammann comes out of nowhere to take both of the individual events in the ski-jump, the K90 and the k120.

<q>The 20-year-old Swiss, who looks as if he could pass for 14, joined Finland’s Matti Nykanen as the only jumpers to win events on both hills in the same Winter Olympics. Nykanen did it in Calgary in 1988. … just like he did on the small hill, sticking the final jump of competition to win, Ammann captured the large hill by leaping 436 feet (133 meters) to finish with 281.4 points. </q>

Coverage on the k90 jump is at Jump for joy…