Roger Ebert, Chicago film critic extraordinaire, died on April 4th 2013. My memories of Ebert are entirely derived through his writings. I have never met Roger in person.
I first began reading Ebert's reviews when Siskel died. That was back in 1999 and I was still a teenager watching awful movies like The Animal or The Waterboy (sadly admit I witnessed both in theatres). I had been watching the Siskel and Ebert night at the movies up until then, and it was entertaining stuff. They bickered but you knew there was a real opinion behind every comment. Every week they introduced countless new films. It would have been impossible not to tear down the walls and open up. Keeping in mind they were not professional talkers, rather professional writers, and could not BS their way through every review. I have a good BS detector and never once did alarms sound with these two. My own "to thine own self be true"-type honesty had yet to mature, and so as I watched their recommendations of good movies week after week I still would go with friends and catch the latest Sandler flick. But shortly after Siskel died, my curiosity got the best of me and wondered what Ebert looked like in writing. Back then his website was nonexistent. The domain rogerebert.com had yet to be registered (as far as I know). Thankfully the Chicago Sun Times had even then an electronic database of his reviews.
Monday, 29 April 2013
Sunday, 14 April 2013
Drugs of the mind and body
I have an open-ended question to pose: Is there any moral difference between manipulating our mind versus our body with drugs? After some thought I decided within the world of work (jobs & offices), physical drugs are normal and mental drugs are everyone's dirty secret. By contrast in the world of sport it is the opposite: physical drugs are demonized and secretive while mentally altered states are the norm (or at worst redundant).
For some context on what constitutes "normal" or acceptable in Western society's drug use, here is the United States' top selling drugs of 2012:
For some context on what constitutes "normal" or acceptable in Western society's drug use, here is the United States' top selling drugs of 2012:
Sunday, 24 March 2013
Swimming vs running trends for four levels of sport
NB: This post is a redux of a previous discussion on the same topic. The difference this time is more reasoning behind the stats and me asking the opinions of other people. Therefore the updated results address suggestions and challenges from a few people, including Alex Hutchinson himself. I feel the questions if not satisfactorily answered are at least out in the open. The good news is that my "discovery" appears to have survived the most obvious challenges and the conclusions should now be more robust.
I wanted to find out what sort of trends, if any, appeared when taking the ratios between the top (i.e. fastest) men's and top women's ratio of times in two sports: swimming and running. I define a ratio as the following
For example, if considering the 10,000 m track event and a woman's time is 32 minutes while a man's is 29 flat, their time ratio is 32:00/29:00 = 1.10. Let's then take another fictitious ratio of 1500m times as 4:20(female)/3:59(male) = 1.08.
Why go to the trouble taking these ratios? To skip ahead, what I've found is that as distance X increases, this ratio goes up for running and down for swimming. Using the same two examples as above, the fictitious ratio goes up from 1.08 to 1.10 as I increase X from 1.5 km to 10km. Here my argument holds because I invented the numbers. All numbers from this point onward will be quite real. Below is an illustration of what I will soon show with actual data:
Simple enough to do these calculations, however it turned out to be more difficult arguing there was any inherent meaning the final results. Considering the above example yet again, I what have I actually shown? Another faster male might run the 1500m in 3:50, so the new ratio becomes 1.13 and my argument now falls to pieces. Or the female times are artificially slow due to low participation. Clearly I am going to need a lot of evidence to support such a sweeping generalization as "women improve with respect to men in swimming but worsen for running". From a (admittedly cursory) check with the available literature and a couple of correspondences, I have not seen these two trends discussed together. Even if the swimming/running down/up trend is well-known, it was a good exercise working with different lines of reasoning. And I imagine at least some of the data here could somehow be novel.
I wanted to find out what sort of trends, if any, appeared when taking the ratios between the top (i.e. fastest) men's and top women's ratio of times in two sports: swimming and running. I define a ratio as the following
Ratio = [Time for a woman to complete distance X]/[Time for a man to complete distance X]
For example, if considering the 10,000 m track event and a woman's time is 32 minutes while a man's is 29 flat, their time ratio is 32:00/29:00 = 1.10. Let's then take another fictitious ratio of 1500m times as 4:20(female)/3:59(male) = 1.08.
Why go to the trouble taking these ratios? To skip ahead, what I've found is that as distance X increases, this ratio goes up for running and down for swimming. Using the same two examples as above, the fictitious ratio goes up from 1.08 to 1.10 as I increase X from 1.5 km to 10km. Here my argument holds because I invented the numbers. All numbers from this point onward will be quite real. Below is an illustration of what I will soon show with actual data:
Saturday, 23 February 2013
Swimming vs running: men vs women
In a older post, I took a ratio between men and women's world records in running for various distances. Top women run slower than top men, that much is clear, but taking this ratio I was looking for a pattern if we merge all the distances from 100 meters to 217 kilometres, obtained here, here, and here. Then I plotted the result as a log-graph. The x-axis isn't pretty, but I have an aversion to base-10 notation (I can't explain why).
Regardless of how I plotted the numbers, three orders of magnitude of data ought to reveal something. What you can see below is, with the single exception of the 100 km road race record is that as distances get longer the ratios increase. In other words women, compared to men, get slower for ultra-long races. Starting at the 60m dash Maurice Greene ran a 6.39 versus Irina Privalova's 6.92 for a ratio of 6.92/6.39 = 1.08, and ending with the 217 km Badwater Ultra that Valmir Nunes ran in 22h 51 min compared with Jamie Donaldson's 26:16 effort for a ratio of 1.15. Averaging the ratios for all the distances leads to an "expected" value of 1.12. To put that in perspective for middle distance people, we could say an 8:54-minute male 3000 meter runner is equivalent to a 10-minute female (which is why I'm annoyed at the women when 10 guys are running that fast and no girls, i.e. here). Consider that a male 4 minute miler is the same as a 4:30 female.
I imagine not many realize women are closer to men's performances for the shorter distances than for longer. Most semi-knowledgable runners will point out how close Paula Radcliffe's time is to top men in the marathon, but fail to realize the difference is even less in shorter distances (and the gap widens as you go farther). On explanation could be that short-distance women are more prone to drug enhancements. Another is that men are more attracted to ultras leaving the women with a comparatively weaker field. Consider the field of the 2012 North Face Endurance Challenge 50 miler with 167 men vs 27 women. I find similar trends in other ultras. Very fast ultra women like Ann Trason don't change this general trend.
UPDATE: Curious, I decided to take male/female ratios of the CIS standards for indoor track and field. (If any non-Canadians are reading this, a university student running a "CIS standard time" at some point in the indoor season qualifies them automatically for the Canadian championships. Otherwise you must medal at the provincials). CIS standards are, sort of by definition, a time expected to be achievable by half a dozen or so Canadians. It is a good yard stick for the overall talent of each distance. Distances span 60m to 3000m (And I included the 4x800m relay to create a pseudo-3200m race). Here are the women/men ratios:
For all distances the ratios are well above the world-class averages. And it gets much worse with longer distances; the 3k ratio is 1.18. The average for all seven distances is 1.16. Keep in also mind that Canadian men are not themselves running incredibly fast times; the National men's 3000m can be won in the low 8 minute range, and the CIS record of 7:54 has stood for 30 years. This is not yet world competitive. The implications are clear: University Canadian women show a comparatively poor performance. I do not mean to pick on anyone, only point out an objective fact: Canadian university women are not running well. This is a fair statement as I'm comparing apples to apples. I also wrote about this earlier regarding the Canadian Olympic standards for men and women. These latter cutoffs hover around the 1.14 ratio mark, still lower than the CIS (i.e. so require the women to run faster).
The explanation for the slow women's CIS standards is not obvious. Female university enrolment is higher than the men's (most universities are at least 60% women), and women's track & field participation is at least as large as the men's (at McGill it was much larger). Also women's sports scholarships are not in short supply. Why are *specifically canadian* females falling short? At least several Canadian women should, for instance, be able to run 9:17 for the 3k or 4:16 for the 1500m (instead of 9:47 and 4:28). Megan Brown is the only Canadian who's close to these two marks.
Random shout-out to all: I would enjoy a coach's perspective on the issue.
(END OF UPDATE)
Now I wanted to compare this log-plot of running times with swimming. I've noticed a recent growth in longer distance swimming events growing in popularity. Consider for instance the 10km "marathon" swim introduced to the Olympics in 2008. Like running, swimming has distances ranging from 50 meters to many miles. I took a ratio of the men and women's records for pool races here (freestyle only). For longer distances I used records from the one and two crossing swims across the English Channel. The Channel is about 35 kilometres wide and a double crossing (there and back) took 16 hours 10 minutes for Philip Rush and Susie Maroney in 17:14 (both Australian). For a medium-long swim distance (3.86 km), I chose the fastest exit swim times of the 2012 Hawaiian Ironman.
The opposite trend results in distance swim events as the running. In this case the fastest women are begin to match the best men. The ratios dip under 1.10 very quickly, i.e. all racing distance longer than 100m show less than a 10% difference between genders.
At more than 70 km/16 hours of swimming, however, the number of participants dwindle fast due to the dangers of drowning, so I didn't search for longer swims than this. That makes the women's times even more impressive, as there are so few competing. One hypothesis why women begin to catch men is that women have naturally high body fat percentages. But I wonder about this, as how difficult can it be for a man to gain body fat weight while still maintaining muscle. Not to mention men are taller swimmers which may add a possible advantage (certainly in a pool, anyway). The answer must be more complex.
Let me stop over-speculate. If anyone has a good explanation I'd love to hear about it.
Regardless of how I plotted the numbers, three orders of magnitude of data ought to reveal something. What you can see below is, with the single exception of the 100 km road race record is that as distances get longer the ratios increase. In other words women, compared to men, get slower for ultra-long races. Starting at the 60m dash Maurice Greene ran a 6.39 versus Irina Privalova's 6.92 for a ratio of 6.92/6.39 = 1.08, and ending with the 217 km Badwater Ultra that Valmir Nunes ran in 22h 51 min compared with Jamie Donaldson's 26:16 effort for a ratio of 1.15. Averaging the ratios for all the distances leads to an "expected" value of 1.12. To put that in perspective for middle distance people, we could say an 8:54-minute male 3000 meter runner is equivalent to a 10-minute female (which is why I'm annoyed at the women when 10 guys are running that fast and no girls, i.e. here). Consider that a male 4 minute miler is the same as a 4:30 female.
UPDATE: Curious, I decided to take male/female ratios of the CIS standards for indoor track and field. (If any non-Canadians are reading this, a university student running a "CIS standard time" at some point in the indoor season qualifies them automatically for the Canadian championships. Otherwise you must medal at the provincials). CIS standards are, sort of by definition, a time expected to be achievable by half a dozen or so Canadians. It is a good yard stick for the overall talent of each distance. Distances span 60m to 3000m (And I included the 4x800m relay to create a pseudo-3200m race). Here are the women/men ratios:
For all distances the ratios are well above the world-class averages. And it gets much worse with longer distances; the 3k ratio is 1.18. The average for all seven distances is 1.16. Keep in also mind that Canadian men are not themselves running incredibly fast times; the National men's 3000m can be won in the low 8 minute range, and the CIS record of 7:54 has stood for 30 years. This is not yet world competitive. The implications are clear: University Canadian women show a comparatively poor performance. I do not mean to pick on anyone, only point out an objective fact: Canadian university women are not running well. This is a fair statement as I'm comparing apples to apples. I also wrote about this earlier regarding the Canadian Olympic standards for men and women. These latter cutoffs hover around the 1.14 ratio mark, still lower than the CIS (i.e. so require the women to run faster).
The explanation for the slow women's CIS standards is not obvious. Female university enrolment is higher than the men's (most universities are at least 60% women), and women's track & field participation is at least as large as the men's (at McGill it was much larger). Also women's sports scholarships are not in short supply. Why are *specifically canadian* females falling short? At least several Canadian women should, for instance, be able to run 9:17 for the 3k or 4:16 for the 1500m (instead of 9:47 and 4:28). Megan Brown is the only Canadian who's close to these two marks.
Random shout-out to all: I would enjoy a coach's perspective on the issue.
(END OF UPDATE)
Now I wanted to compare this log-plot of running times with swimming. I've noticed a recent growth in longer distance swimming events growing in popularity. Consider for instance the 10km "marathon" swim introduced to the Olympics in 2008. Like running, swimming has distances ranging from 50 meters to many miles. I took a ratio of the men and women's records for pool races here (freestyle only). For longer distances I used records from the one and two crossing swims across the English Channel. The Channel is about 35 kilometres wide and a double crossing (there and back) took 16 hours 10 minutes for Philip Rush and Susie Maroney in 17:14 (both Australian). For a medium-long swim distance (3.86 km), I chose the fastest exit swim times of the 2012 Hawaiian Ironman.
At more than 70 km/16 hours of swimming, however, the number of participants dwindle fast due to the dangers of drowning, so I didn't search for longer swims than this. That makes the women's times even more impressive, as there are so few competing. One hypothesis why women begin to catch men is that women have naturally high body fat percentages. But I wonder about this, as how difficult can it be for a man to gain body fat weight while still maintaining muscle. Not to mention men are taller swimmers which may add a possible advantage (certainly in a pool, anyway). The answer must be more complex.
Let me stop over-speculate. If anyone has a good explanation I'd love to hear about it.
Tuesday, 12 February 2013
Semicolon
I'm not especially aware of what style I use to type but it's sometimes nice to stop and ponder.
Last year I was reading a "grammar" book by Lynn Truss, Eats Shoots and Leaves. In it she humorously explains a brief history of english typography including the apostrophe, comma, period, colon, and semicolon. Consider that once upon a time none of these notations existed. Early tellings of the bible had not even spaces between words. Hard to imagine, but there you have it.
I remembered reading the following passage, to which I scan on this here blog directly:
An entire book without a single semicolon? A mundane factoid at best. Who cares, right? Now it just so happens I'm reading Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco.
While enjoying the story and not even thinking about the above quote, on page 202 I stumbled across this paragraph:
What's that thing there on the fifth line? Oh my god, a SEMICOLON!
Come on Lynn, were you just joking around or did you not a) check your "academic" source or b) read the book? Is being apocryphal the same as plain false? I dunno...
Here's the best part: Googling this gaffe has led me to others quoting Lynn's claim. See here and here, for instance.
Moral of the story: when you do some homework it's funnier for everyone. When you don't, it's just funny for me, I guess.
Last year I was reading a "grammar" book by Lynn Truss, Eats Shoots and Leaves. In it she humorously explains a brief history of english typography including the apostrophe, comma, period, colon, and semicolon. Consider that once upon a time none of these notations existed. Early tellings of the bible had not even spaces between words. Hard to imagine, but there you have it.
I remembered reading the following passage, to which I scan on this here blog directly:
An entire book without a single semicolon? A mundane factoid at best. Who cares, right? Now it just so happens I'm reading Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco.
While enjoying the story and not even thinking about the above quote, on page 202 I stumbled across this paragraph:
What's that thing there on the fifth line? Oh my god, a SEMICOLON!
Come on Lynn, were you just joking around or did you not a) check your "academic" source or b) read the book? Is being apocryphal the same as plain false? I dunno...
Here's the best part: Googling this gaffe has led me to others quoting Lynn's claim. See here and here, for instance.
Moral of the story: when you do some homework it's funnier for everyone. When you don't, it's just funny for me, I guess.
Thursday, 7 February 2013
Literal Internet
A few weeks ago when the Golden Globes were on, I admit to watching them and Jodie Foster's speech. The next day everyone pretty much reacted the same way, saying she wasn't being "clear" enough in her "confession" to being gay. But of course anyone watching should not have had any trouble figuring that out. I was just reading a blog post by Jim Emerson about the speech, which goes into more than enough detail about what she said exactly. I realized something curious: in the current age internet, everyone seems to assume that everyone else has to be as literal as possible.
Facebook is a good example. I was experimenting with posting some pseudo random, i.e. made-up, thoughts and fake conversations. This attempt confirmed that if one posts anything that isn't literally true, you tend to confuse people. Moreover people just don't tend to do that. In the age of Facebook and blogs, most online activity is based on sincere opinions or photo-based vacation/work/food (ugh)/baby updates. A third possible use of Facebook is to share a link of someone doing something "funny" (but real), or someone else's sincere opinion. Consider that video from a few months back of a child being almost snatched by a giant bird in Mount Royal park: it made the news because *gasp* it was fake!
I remembered Ebert pointing this out back in 2009 in his article The Age of Credulity. To quote:
These days, there is no room for ambiguity, and few rewards for critical thinking. Now every word of a politician is pumped dry by his opponent, looking for sinister meanings. Many political ads are an insult to the intelligence. Here I am not discussing politics. I am discussing credulity. If you were to see a TV ad charging that a politician supported "comprehensive sex education" for kindergarten children, would you (1) believe it, or (2) very much doubt it? The authors of the ad spent big money in a bet on the credulity and unquestioning thinking of the viewership. Ask yourself what such an ad believes about us.
What I see is that thank to there being less anonymity online now, people have translated that into meaning you have to say only what you see, and conversely (and more unnervingly), understand things to mean exactly as people say. The flood of real-time media in addition to friend's photos and shallow blogs means you can't find many willing to make stuff up. I bet Swift would not believe how gullible we are. Conversely, The Onion is some kind of last bastion of hope, though even here sometimes straight-up report actual news (with a twist) or being counterfactual.
My brother quizzed me with three articles, asking which one is real. Here they are:
Reality is crazier than imagination. Maybe the reason we need people to make stuff up now and then is for a mental check. If you just accept things as always being crazy, when do you know if things have gone too far? The absolute craziest thing to happen in 2012 was the Stop Kony movement. It was perfect: the harsh reality of how the world really works and the online credulity of current internet users met like an unstoppable force meeting an impenetrable object. The outcome was more insane than anything I could have imagined.
Back to Foster's speech. Analysts reflecting back seem to agree there was some sort of, perhaps unintended, brilliance achieve merely by not being strictly clear. The best way to anger the "online" community is to be ambiguous. Great works of literature and film meant to be symbolic are being ignored precisely for that reason. High res video is going to make abstract art hard to produce. Think of how old-school video games had much more character. Watching Wreck-it-Ralph you see how true this is. Music is always abstract, but then people aren't upgrading their audio equipment the same way as they are adding more lines of resolution to their TV: the MP3 format has been around how long now?
Popular shows are based on how "real" they look. I think this is what makes The Wire so famous right now. Reality TV is weird since it purports to be true yet is more heavily edited than any piece of fiction. Both seem more "real" despite everyone knowing there is a "fake" element to any story. That much never goes away. What's going away is the ability to interpret what you see. To know you are facing a Rashomon-type event and it's up to you to choose an ending. That's why Fantasy novels are still popular: utter fiction, but completely unambiguous. Bilbo goes to the mountain and slays a dragon and goes home, no two ways about it. What's disappearing is story-telling that leaves you deliberately to write your own endings.
I was browsing the 2012 Sight and Sound poll and found some movies that might not be "understood" anymore: Man with a Movie Camera, Passion of Joan of Arc, 2001, Breathless, Au Hazard Balthazar, and Persona. Those last two will really annoy a modern audience. Naturally Rashomon is in there too. This is why I think Les Mis told as a straight story, i.e. about the characters, is so silly. The book is really about what going on around them and they are just serving as coat racks for more interesting descriptions of the Paris sewers, Waterloo, the church, the textile industry, prostitution, etc. Take that all away and you are left with a handful of characters and a plot that makes no sense. Only a modern audience would eat that up. Think of how the newest incarnation was sold: Come see a "live" musical. That's right, an abstract outburst of singing made to look more realistic!
I guess the tragic part is when themes are lost in a story because no-one is left to see them. Groundhog Day is still a celebrated movie, but I wonder how many first-time viewers understand its thematic elements? Even Ebert missed this the first time around before later adding it to his Great Movies collection. Or another example: Yogi Berra quotes taken literally mean nothing. Then you realize it's a brilliant mocking of 99% of real-world sports analysis. How many get that kind of humour anymore?
Abstract, credulous-challenging stuff is more important than ever to act as a teaching tool for reality. No, not just for reading the news, but even doing science and math, which are abstract to their very core. Even, and perhaps especially in rigorous disciplines, non-practicioners tend forget that a symbol will always remain a symbol until you can interpret it. This skill is only becoming more important to have, but fewer and fewer seem to possess it.
Abstract, credulous-challenging stuff is more important than ever to act as a teaching tool for reality. No, not just for reading the news, but even doing science and math, which are abstract to their very core. Even, and perhaps especially in rigorous disciplines, non-practicioners tend forget that a symbol will always remain a symbol until you can interpret it. This skill is only becoming more important to have, but fewer and fewer seem to possess it.
Can we introduce a new word for this phenomenon? Is this the age of the "liternet"?
Wednesday, 23 January 2013
Lance
I've been thinking it over, and I have decided I have nothing nice to say about Lance Armstrong. I once believed his story; the one about coming back from cancer and winning the tour. It is a true story, after all. But facts, alas, remain boring facts and say nothing about we should what to do with the information.
For instance, if I told you someone died, this would not in itself a shock, for we all know people die every day. More information is needed. How old were they? Did they have heart trouble or inoperable cancer? If I told you they were murdered, this would now grab your attention. If I said they were someone I knew, this would certainly lead to a lot of questions, and would certainly result in you stopping in your footsteps. Therefore details matter.
If I told you I won a bike race, then I'd be congratulated. If I told you I won it by using a car, or a shortcut, against toddlers, or there was no finish line, this new information would eliminate all respect for my story. More specifically, you'd be correct in stating I was not even in the bike race if I was driving. Such a simple and obvious fault. Likewise if a race takes place over a circuit (as in running or skiing), cutting a shortcut for yourself is not only frowned upon, if discovered leads to an absolute disqualification. There is no mention of your racing time, no mention of how fast you went before you cut around the course. No, just a DSQ listed beside your name.
I got a DSQ once, in grade 10 in XC skiing. I was at OFSAA, and accidentally took a wrong turn thanks to a confused official, who thought I was not in the race, pointing for me to turn a sharp left. I obeyed, and ended up taking a longer -not shorter- route to the finish, another official noticed and had my name scratched. I was pretty sad finding out that I had not even been counted in the final results. Otherwise I had a decent race going on in me that day. But according to the strict rules, I had not followed procedure.
I have heard it said it is impossible to make a global definition of a game. If you say a game is for fun, then I can show you war games that are no fun. If you say a game involves at least two players, I can point to all manner of video games and Solitaire. If a game must be won or lost, I show you Spin the Bottle. But there is one thing they all have in common: there is always an agreed-upon set of rules. In the "game" of war, even here there is the implicit rule after enough people are killed someone must forfeit. Terrorism does not quite obey this rule, but I would argue terrorism by definition is when sides have not agreed upon the rules, and the "sides" themselves are poorly defined and therefore is not a game (unlike, say, Waterloo).
I digress, with reason. Point is the use of drugs in sports is not morally wrong, in itself. If everyone agrees up front that one should win at all costs, then so be it, for that particular sport. Let the Tour de France, or some track or field event, become DeathRace 2000. Do anything to win, or whatever to yourself (We seem to frown on hurting/killing others to get ahead in sport, so I guess that option is still out unless counting boxing or tackling in football). Once cyclists or runners, etc agree they are willing to enhance on any self-inflicted level, then perhaps doping is an option. At least that's the excuse you hear more than any other, that "everyone else is doing it". If rampant cheating is truly the case, why should we not agree that drugs are available for all, in full view of spectators? Post-race interviews could involve bragging about their cocktails. I'd like to watch someone dope in real time. This why I love the documentary "Bigger, Stronger, Faster", as it in fact does show people doping in full view, and with candid honesty. I guess since these drugs are illegal they are less candid. But hell, there is no shortage of people candid about smoking pot, an also-illegal substance.
I also understand there is no reason to believe taking EPO or testosterone will cause your body irreparable harm. It's irrelevant to argue the hard done by doping. I'm not interested in citing studies but acknowledging those who take enhancement drugs are only adding single-digit percent gains to their performances. They are not necessarily losing life years from these dosages, though perhaps by pushing their bodies to new heights the odd heart attack is more frequent. Otherwise there is a small gain, just enough. Just like the argument of the illegality of doping, the danger of doping is a red herring. Neither reason is the real reason why drug users don't talk about it; they keep silent because they know they're not playing by the rules, hence upsetting the definition of the game.
Consider this also: why are there no athletes performing on their own, showing what can be done with unlimited drugs? I'd like to see someone make a youtube video of themselves doping to high heaven, then running a 9.5s 100m dash. The reason you don't see rogue athletes is because although drugs instilling a sense of goofy confidence, the do less than being part of an organized training system. Most sports don't let you play if you're candid about drugs. Some exceptions I know of are powerlifting, baseball, and football, where the players do play at all costs, and the fans have more or less decided the "sport" is a freak show operation, an occasion to drink beer and think "better you than me". After watching the pros at work, a real sport -or game for that matter- is one that makes you want to go out and play it yourself.
Lance helped turn the TDF into a "better you than me" kind of sport. Toughness, which can be admirable, had been replaced by pure basic stimulus-response. Worse yet, I took this quote from Lance's book It's not about the bike to illustrate how completely dishonest he was in the game of racing:
To quote a New Yorker article by Michael Specter, "speaking of apologies: sorry France, you were right all along. The guy’s a creep".
I like to think of every sport as a separate country. Each chooses the rules to follow. Some sports involve more cheating than others. What always surprises me is how little drug use is found in swimming. You would expect swimming to be tainted with steroids but instead I find swimmers the most technically minded people in the world. Read Swimming Fastest to see a level of science not found in many sports. Distance runners have been pretty good about obeying the rules, but sprinters less so. Oddly enough sprint cycling appears cleaner than endurance kind. To me, at least, this means each sport can be individually faulted. And to effect a cure the sport must be ruthless in changing its image, both bottom-up and top-down. Example: When I ran XC for McGill, casually we (the guys) agreed -after hearing about doping in CIS football- that if anyone on our team showed evidence of cheating, we'd call them out and ostracize them for good. It never had to happen, but I would have done it.
In that vein, Lance needs to disappear for good. Casting him to oblivion is the only thing that would matter to him, and would be a way to restart the potential of cycling to be interesting (The sport can be interesting, but only if the victories matter). Were Lance a fellow athlete, I would call him out (and consider changing sports). Were he a family member I would not come to his funeral. Hopefully, in the future, his will be an unmarked grave.
Sports is interesting like many things are interesting because we hope to learn something from them. If sports is about watching people get hurt and enjoying the feeling, we have a problem. It has to be more than about pushing through the pain. Smart sports planning is listening to the pain, and treating it like valuable information. Sports is about symbolism, and seeing the best personalities shine through under the hardest circumstances. Sports is a of things; winning is only interesting if it's both beautiful AND meaningful (for instance if Ussain Bolt runs an amazing 100m against a field of women, it may be pretty to watch by hardly meaningful as a "victory"). Sport: so simple, yet so easy to fuck up.
For instance, if I told you someone died, this would not in itself a shock, for we all know people die every day. More information is needed. How old were they? Did they have heart trouble or inoperable cancer? If I told you they were murdered, this would now grab your attention. If I said they were someone I knew, this would certainly lead to a lot of questions, and would certainly result in you stopping in your footsteps. Therefore details matter.
If I told you I won a bike race, then I'd be congratulated. If I told you I won it by using a car, or a shortcut, against toddlers, or there was no finish line, this new information would eliminate all respect for my story. More specifically, you'd be correct in stating I was not even in the bike race if I was driving. Such a simple and obvious fault. Likewise if a race takes place over a circuit (as in running or skiing), cutting a shortcut for yourself is not only frowned upon, if discovered leads to an absolute disqualification. There is no mention of your racing time, no mention of how fast you went before you cut around the course. No, just a DSQ listed beside your name.
I got a DSQ once, in grade 10 in XC skiing. I was at OFSAA, and accidentally took a wrong turn thanks to a confused official, who thought I was not in the race, pointing for me to turn a sharp left. I obeyed, and ended up taking a longer -not shorter- route to the finish, another official noticed and had my name scratched. I was pretty sad finding out that I had not even been counted in the final results. Otherwise I had a decent race going on in me that day. But according to the strict rules, I had not followed procedure.
I have heard it said it is impossible to make a global definition of a game. If you say a game is for fun, then I can show you war games that are no fun. If you say a game involves at least two players, I can point to all manner of video games and Solitaire. If a game must be won or lost, I show you Spin the Bottle. But there is one thing they all have in common: there is always an agreed-upon set of rules. In the "game" of war, even here there is the implicit rule after enough people are killed someone must forfeit. Terrorism does not quite obey this rule, but I would argue terrorism by definition is when sides have not agreed upon the rules, and the "sides" themselves are poorly defined and therefore is not a game (unlike, say, Waterloo).
I digress, with reason. Point is the use of drugs in sports is not morally wrong, in itself. If everyone agrees up front that one should win at all costs, then so be it, for that particular sport. Let the Tour de France, or some track or field event, become DeathRace 2000. Do anything to win, or whatever to yourself (We seem to frown on hurting/killing others to get ahead in sport, so I guess that option is still out unless counting boxing or tackling in football). Once cyclists or runners, etc agree they are willing to enhance on any self-inflicted level, then perhaps doping is an option. At least that's the excuse you hear more than any other, that "everyone else is doing it". If rampant cheating is truly the case, why should we not agree that drugs are available for all, in full view of spectators? Post-race interviews could involve bragging about their cocktails. I'd like to watch someone dope in real time. This why I love the documentary "Bigger, Stronger, Faster", as it in fact does show people doping in full view, and with candid honesty. I guess since these drugs are illegal they are less candid. But hell, there is no shortage of people candid about smoking pot, an also-illegal substance.
I also understand there is no reason to believe taking EPO or testosterone will cause your body irreparable harm. It's irrelevant to argue the hard done by doping. I'm not interested in citing studies but acknowledging those who take enhancement drugs are only adding single-digit percent gains to their performances. They are not necessarily losing life years from these dosages, though perhaps by pushing their bodies to new heights the odd heart attack is more frequent. Otherwise there is a small gain, just enough. Just like the argument of the illegality of doping, the danger of doping is a red herring. Neither reason is the real reason why drug users don't talk about it; they keep silent because they know they're not playing by the rules, hence upsetting the definition of the game.
Consider this also: why are there no athletes performing on their own, showing what can be done with unlimited drugs? I'd like to see someone make a youtube video of themselves doping to high heaven, then running a 9.5s 100m dash. The reason you don't see rogue athletes is because although drugs instilling a sense of goofy confidence, the do less than being part of an organized training system. Most sports don't let you play if you're candid about drugs. Some exceptions I know of are powerlifting, baseball, and football, where the players do play at all costs, and the fans have more or less decided the "sport" is a freak show operation, an occasion to drink beer and think "better you than me". After watching the pros at work, a real sport -or game for that matter- is one that makes you want to go out and play it yourself.
Lance helped turn the TDF into a "better you than me" kind of sport. Toughness, which can be admirable, had been replaced by pure basic stimulus-response. Worse yet, I took this quote from Lance's book It's not about the bike to illustrate how completely dishonest he was in the game of racing:
In a series of raids on team cars, French police found trunkloads of EPO and anabolic steroids. Team members and officials were thrown in French jails, everyone was under suspicion, and the cyclists were furious at the tactics used by authorities. Of the 21 teams that began the race, only 14 finished. One team was expelled and the other six quit in protest. Doping is an unfortunate fact of life in cycling, or any other endurance sport for that matter. Inevitably, some teams and riders feel it's like nuclear weapons–that they have to do it to stay competitive within the peloton. I never felt that way, and certainly after chemo the idea of putting anything foreign in my body was especially repulsive. Overall, I had extremely mixed feelings about the 1998 Tour: I sympathized with the riders caught in the firestorm, some of whom I knew well, but I also felt the Tour would be a more fair event from then on.
To quote a New Yorker article by Michael Specter, "speaking of apologies: sorry France, you were right all along. The guy’s a creep".
I like to think of every sport as a separate country. Each chooses the rules to follow. Some sports involve more cheating than others. What always surprises me is how little drug use is found in swimming. You would expect swimming to be tainted with steroids but instead I find swimmers the most technically minded people in the world. Read Swimming Fastest to see a level of science not found in many sports. Distance runners have been pretty good about obeying the rules, but sprinters less so. Oddly enough sprint cycling appears cleaner than endurance kind. To me, at least, this means each sport can be individually faulted. And to effect a cure the sport must be ruthless in changing its image, both bottom-up and top-down. Example: When I ran XC for McGill, casually we (the guys) agreed -after hearing about doping in CIS football- that if anyone on our team showed evidence of cheating, we'd call them out and ostracize them for good. It never had to happen, but I would have done it.
In that vein, Lance needs to disappear for good. Casting him to oblivion is the only thing that would matter to him, and would be a way to restart the potential of cycling to be interesting (The sport can be interesting, but only if the victories matter). Were Lance a fellow athlete, I would call him out (and consider changing sports). Were he a family member I would not come to his funeral. Hopefully, in the future, his will be an unmarked grave.
Sports is interesting like many things are interesting because we hope to learn something from them. If sports is about watching people get hurt and enjoying the feeling, we have a problem. It has to be more than about pushing through the pain. Smart sports planning is listening to the pain, and treating it like valuable information. Sports is about symbolism, and seeing the best personalities shine through under the hardest circumstances. Sports is a of things; winning is only interesting if it's both beautiful AND meaningful (for instance if Ussain Bolt runs an amazing 100m against a field of women, it may be pretty to watch by hardly meaningful as a "victory"). Sport: so simple, yet so easy to fuck up.
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