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After sitting out 11 months awaiting the results of gender testing, runner Caster Semenya has been cleared to compete in IAAF-sanctioned competitions. For some background, check out this New Yorker piece on Semenya from last November.
An ode to Lionel Messi, the best footballer in the world.
Messi simply does things — little things and big things — that other players here cannot do. He gets a ball in traffic, is surrounded by two or three defenders, and he somehow keeps the ball close even as they jostle him and kick at the ball. He takes long and hard passes up around his eyes and somehow makes the ball drop softly to his feet, like Keanu Reeves making the bullets fall in “The Matrix.” He cuts in and out of traffic — Barry Sanders only with a soccer ball moving with him — sprints through openings that seem only theoretical, races around and between defenders who really are running even if it only looks like they are standing still. He really does seem to make the ball disappear and reappear, like it’s a Vegas act.
I’ve watched just enough soccer to realize that despite having scored no goals and having, by FIFA’s reckoning, only a single assist, Messi is having a great World Cup. He attracts so much attention on the pitch — two or three defenders swarmed him on every touch in the Mexico game — that he should get an assist on nearly every play for opening up the rest of the field for his team. It’s one of those things that the new soccer fan (as many Americans are) doesn’t catch onto right away. (thx, djacobs)
Former NBA player, shot blocker extraordinaire, and humanitarian Manute Bol died over the weekend at age 47. He died of a rare skin condition caused by a medication he took while in Africa.
“You know, a lot of people feel sorry for him, because he’s so tall and awkward,” Charles Barkley, a former 76ers teammate, once said. “But I’ll tell you this — if everyone in the world was a Manute Bol, it’s a world I’d want to live in.”
According to Language Log, Bol may also have originated the phrase “my bad”.
Ken Arneson emailed me to say that he heard the phrase was first used by the Sudanese immigrant basketball player Manute Bol, believed to have been a native speaker of Dinka (a very interesting and thoroughly un-Indo-Europeanlike language of the Nilo-Saharan superfamily). Says Arneson, “I first heard the phrase here in the Bay Area when Bol joined the Golden State Warriors in 1988, when several Warriors players started using the phrase.” And Ben Zimmer’s rummaging in the newspaper files down in the basement of Language Log Plaza produced a couple of early 1989 quotes that confirm this convincingly:
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jan. 10, 1989: When he [Manute Bol] throws a bad pass, he’ll say, “My bad” instead of “My fault,” and now all the other players say the same thing.
USA Today, Jan. 27, 1989: After making a bad pass, instead of saying “my fault,” Manute Bol says, “my bad.” Now all the other Warriors say it too.
Update: As a recent post on Language Log notes, several people picked up on this and kinda sorta got rid of the “may have” and the story became that Bol absolutely coined the phrase “my bad”. Unfortunately, the evidence doesn’t support that theory (although it doesn’t entirely disprove it either). The internet is so proficient at twisting the original meaning of things as they propagate that Telephone should really be called Internet.
Many of the stadiums and venues from the 2004 Athens Olympics are now lying abandoned, unused since the Games and symbolic of the disfunctional Greek economy.
Softball has no following in Greece, and the construction of a permanent softball stadium hasn’t changed that. […] Greeks like sports, but they like smoking more.
A city “winning” the right to host the Olympic Games seems like buying a pig in a poke.
Split-screen view comparing Diego Maradona’s 1986 Goal of the Century with a very similar goal by current Argentinian star Lionel Messi.
I love these World Cup soccer shirts…here’s the Brazilian one:
Another one for the list.
Guillaume Nery is a world champion free diver; here he is “jumping” from the top of Dean’s Blue Hole and falling towards the bottom. No tanks or anything.
Insane. According to the info on YouTube, Nery’s jump was filmed by free diver Julie Gautier, who was also holding her breath the whole time. Insaner!
The New Republic has started up their World Cup blog again.
This spring, we recruited Aleksandar Hemon to write a monthly column about soccer and encouraged him to write without pandering to a broad audience. And that’s the same spirit that we’ve embraced for this enterprise. Our cast of bloggers is filled with many eminent novelists and journalists (and a Deputy Mayor of New York City). They will write about the spiritual and metaphysical aspects of this tournament, I’m sure. But they will also write about tactics and players and coaches. They have a green light to be as wonky as they want.
If this doesn’t make you feel a little tingly, you’re probably going to want to go on vacation from June 11 - July 11.
If I was a fan of England, this wouldn’t make me feel too confident. J.P. Morgan’s quant team used FIFA Ranking, historical results, and something called “J.P. Morgan Team Strength Indicator” to predict the winner of the 2010 World Cup. Their results:
Ultimately our Model indicates Brazil as being the strongest team taking part in the tournament. However, due to the fixture schedule our Model predicts the following final outcome: 3rd: Netherlands, 2nd: Spain, World Cup Winners: England. Alternatively, we point out that the 3 favourite teams (from market prices recorded on 30 April of 3.9-to-1 for Spain, 5-to-1 for Brazil and 5.4-to-1 for England) represent a 52.5% probability of winning the World Cup.
If you’re more of a UBS (wo)man, they have it as (1) Brazil, (2) Germany, (3) Italy.
Q. When should NBA coaches take players out of games because of fouls? A. A lot less than they actually do.
Conventional wisdom seems to regard foul management as a risk vs. safety decision. You will constantly hear something like, “a big decision here, whether to risk putting Duncan back in with 4 fouls.” This is completely the wrong lens for the problem, since the “risky”* strategy is, with the caveats mentioned, all upside! Coaches dramatically underrate the “risk” of falling behind, or losing a lead, by sitting a star for too long. To make it as stark as possible, observe that the coach is voluntarily imposing the penalty that he is trying to avoid, namely his player being taken out of the game! The most egregious cases are when a player sits even though his team is significantly behind. I almost feel as though the coach prefers the certainty of losing to the “risk” of the player fouling out.
(via mr)
World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup!
Starts one month from yesterday. Can. Not. Wait. And it seems as though the TV coverage might be decent in the US as well:
Yesterday ESPN also confirmed that:
1. All 64 matches will be broadcast live.
2. In high definition.
3. On either ESPN, ESPN2 or ABC.Of those 64 matches, 52 will be simulcast online at ESPN360.com. Which means many many Americans with be able to either secretly or not so secretly watch games at work 100% legally and in high quality (although the service is only available via certain internet providers).
Some of the games will also be broadcast in 3D, which…I don’t even know what to say about that.
Some of my favorites are Prezbo, My Name is My Name, Hamsterdam, Always Boris, Fuzzy Dunlop, and Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit. Glaring omissions? Hit Me on My Burner, Snot Boogie, and Pack o’ Newports. The full list. (thx, tash & nathan)
The Raiders organization welcomed sixth-round draft choice Travis Goethel Wednesday and said the Arizona State linebacker would more than likely be asked to start as a Bay-area Realtor by the beginning of next season.
This story is so crazy I don’t even know where to start. For one thing, Jure Robic sleeps 90 minutes or less a day when competing in ultracycling events lasting a week or more…and goes crazy, like actually insane, during the races because of it. Because he’s insane, his support crew makes all the decisions for him, an arrangement that allows Robic’s body to keep going even though his mind would have told him to quit long ago.
His system is straightforward. During the race, Robic’s brain is allowed control over choice of music (usually a mix of traditional Slovene marches and Lenny Kravitz), food selection and bathroom breaks. The second brain [AKA his support team] dictates everything else, including rest times, meal times, food amounts and even average speed. Unless Robic asks, he is not informed of the remaining mileage or even how many days are left in the race. “It is best if he has no idea,” Stanovnik says. “He rides — that is all.”
During one race, Robic hallucinated that mujahedeen on horseback were pursuing him; his support team pretended to see them too and urged Robic to outrun them. Read the whole thing…this is an awesome and disturbing story. A recent episode of Radiolab on Limits has more info.
False: Fidel Castro was recruited to play professional baseball in the United States. True: after taking over Cuba in 1959, Castro played in a few exhibition games with his fellow revolutionaries.
Cubans know that Fidel Castro was no ballplayer, though he dressed himself in the uniform of a spurious, tongue-in-cheek team called Barbudos (Bearded Ones) after he came to power in 1959 and played a few exhibition games. There was no doubt then about his making any team in Cuba. Given a whole country to toy with, Fidel Castro realized the dream of most middle-aged Cuban men by pulling on a uniform and “playing” a few innings.
Here’s Fidel pitching in one of those games:
Here’s more information about Fidel’s baseball career. (via slate)
Even when jogging for fun, many male runners won’t let themselves be passed.
When I asked a male friend what he feels like when he’s passed, he said, “I don’t get passed.” Then he admitted that the reason he’s gotten in such good shape recently is so he won’t get passed. Another friend says that if he hears someone on his heels, he sprints. And if he passes someone, he also has to sprint, to keep from getting passed back.
This month’s Esquire has a profile of Usain Bolt, a man ahead of his time.
It’s worth keeping in mind that there is a significant difference between the final seconds of Usain Bolt’s gold-medal run in Beijing in 2008 and the final seconds of his victory this afternoon in Call of Duty. In the video game, right up until the moment Sadiki took out the final terrorist, Bolt was on edge, nervous, uncertain. It taxed him. He almost lost.
Beating the video game was a challenge for him. Executing the most dominant and effortless performance in the history of the Olympic Games was not.
Ethan Siegel, a theoretical astrophysicist at Lewis & Clark College, recently charted a graph to demonstrate that, judging by the incremental progression of the 100-meter world record over the past hundred years, Bolt appears to be operating at a level approximately thirty years beyond that of the expected capabilities of modern man. Mathematically, Bolt belonged not in the 2008 Olympics but the 2040 Olympics. Michael Johnson, the hero of the 1996 Olympic summer games, has made the same point in a different way: A runner capable of beating Bolt, he says, “hasn’t been born yet.”
That 100-meter final at the Beijing Olympics still gives me goosebumps when I think about it. But all this business about no one being able to touch Bolt’s pace for another 30 years, that’s just bunk. The mark is out there. People are going to go for it. My prediction: Bolt will continue to break his own mark but someone else will approach or equal Bolt’s current record in fewer than five years, if not three.
Bill Simmons has finally accepted the gospel of sabermetrics as scripture and in a recent column, preaches the benefits of all these newfangled statistics to his followers. The list explaining his seven favorite statistics in down-to-earth language is really helpful to the stats newbie.
Measure BABIP to determine whether a pitcher or hitter had good luck or bad luck. In 2009, the major league BABIP average was .299. If a pitcher’s BABIP dipped well below that number, he might have had good luck. If it rose well above that number, he likely had terrible luck. The reverse goes for hitters.
(via djacobs, who has an extremely high VORF)
We’re only a game or two into a long baseball season, but you might not see a better play all year than this one. Here’s a YouTube embed, although I don’t know how long it will last.
Video from the NFL Combine showing just how fast prospective NFL players can run compared to normal people.
It is almost unbelievable how quickly Jacoby Ford (the top performer in the 40 this year) covers that distance.
The NFL has approved a new overtime rule for the playoffs. Each team will now get at least one overtime possession unless the team winning the coin flip scores a touchdown on the opening drive.
In 1994, the spot of the kickoff was moved to the 30-yard line from the 35, allowing for longer returns that put the receiving team into field-goal range with just a few plays or a long penalty. Since then, the team that won the toss won 59.8 percent of the time, because even if it did not win on the first possession, it often controlled field position. The team that lost the toss won just 38.4 percent of the time. And before the kickoff was moved, teams won with a field goal on the opening possession just 17.9 percent of the time. After the kickoff moved, it rose to 26.8 percent of the time.
I’m pretty happy about this. Like I said after the Saints/Vikings game in January:
Congrats to the Saints, but the coin-toss sudden death OT thing has to be the worst rule in sports.
A “racing freak” named Bill Caswell bought an old BMW off of Craigslist for $500, fixed it up, and entered it in a rally car race against teams with new $400,000 cars and support crews. He came in third in his class.
Some kids threw boulders in the road on a transit and I punctured my gas tank losing nearly a half tank in 24 km on the next stage. Best part, the officials pointed out our leak and showed a handful of gas to us when we asked how big it was — I knew we were screwed, but they said we could start the stage so we did. I patched it with just stuff in the trunk — RTV and balls of duct tape — twenty feet after the stage finish, on the side of the road, with the officials watching. Didn’t have time at service to fix it so five stages tomorrow with RTV patch.
From the early 80s, a video history of freestyle aerial acrobatic skiing.
Note the smooth-skiing gent in the first minute and the almost aggressive lack of helmets.
The Big Picture has an awesome set of photos from the 2010 Winter Paralympic Games in Vancouver. Handicapped my ass…most of these events look much tougher than their regular Olympic counterparts.
Attention @THE_REAL_SHAQ: it’s all about parabolas and backspin.
Free-throw success is also improved by adding a little backspin, which pushes the ball downward if it hits the back of the rim. The North Carolina State engineers calculated the ideal rate of free-throw backspin at three cycles per second. That is, a shot that takes one second to reach the basket will make three full revolutions counterclockwise as seen from the stands on the player’s right side.
(via mr)
Forty years ago, Yuichiro Miura skied down Mount Everest.
“When I planned to ski Everest, the first thing I faced was ‘How can I return alive?’” he recalls. “All the preparation and training was based on this question. But the more I prepared, I knew the chance of survival was very slim. Nobody in the world had done this before, so I told myself that I must face death. Otherwise, I am not eligible.”
Miura’s exploits were the subject of The Man Who Skied Down Everest, which won the Oscar for best documentary.
Shaquille O’Neal curated an art exhibition that opened this weekend at Flag Art Foundation in Chelsea.
Do you ever get time to visit museums?
I used to go a lot with my kids. Donald Trump is a great friend, and he has four or five Picassos on his plane. And that’s where I would look at them. One time, I was at a museum and tried touching a Picasso. You break it, you buy it, they said. I was told it would cost $2 million.
What if the Super Bowl was directed by Wes Anderson or Quentin Tarantino? You’d get something like this. The Werner Herzog bit at the end is great.
The Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art have a Super Bowl bet…the loser loans a significant piece of art to the winner for three months. The directors of the two museums trash talked back and forth via email and Twitter before agreeing on the paintings to be loaned.
“Max Anderson must not really believe the Colts can beat the Saints in the Super Bowl. Otherwise why would he bet such an insignificant work as the Ingrid Calame painting? Let’s up the ante. The New Orleans Museum of Art will bet the three-month loan of its Renoir painting, Seamstress at Window, circa 1908, which is currently in the big Renoir exhibition in Paris. What will Max wager of equal importance? Go Saints!”
(thx, stuart)
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