Ezra Fischer, Author at Dear Sports Fan

How Tough is Too Tough in Sports?

There’s a great scene in the Marx Brothers movie, Monkey Business, where a mobster mistakenly hires Chico and Harpo as henchmen. He asks Chico how tough the two of them are and Chico responds:

You pay little bit, we’re little bit tough.
You pay very much, very much tough.
You pay too much, we’re too much tough.
How much you pay?
I pay plenty.
Then we’re plenty tough.

We all know that people who play sports are tough — it’s one of the things most sports fans admire about the players — but how tough is too tough? And what is the right way to respond as fans to that toughness?

Boston Bruins v Vancouver Canucks - Game Seven — If Rich Peverley does have to hang them up for good, hopefully having won the cup a few years ago with Boston will soften the blow of early retirement.

This question came to the forefront this week when Rich Peverley, an ice hockey player on the Dallas Stars, collapsed during a game. His heart had stopped but thanks to the quick action of team doctors and his teammates who immediately piled onto the ice en masse in a successful effort to stop the game and signal the seriousness of the situation as quickly as possible, Peverley’s heart was restarted and he is in stable condition. Peverley had been diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat in a pre-season physical and had a procedure designed to fix it. The game was (rightly, in my mind) postponed by the NHL following the incident.

Soon after it was reported that Peverley was in stable condition, a story started floating around, sourced from the Dallas Stars twitter account:

Per Dr. Salazar, Peverley was aware of where he was when became conscious and wanted to get back in to the game.

— Dallas Stars (@DallasStars) March 11, 2014

As Deadspin commented, “The most Hockey dude ever is in stable condition at a Dallas hospital.”

And indeed, there is something admirable about Peverley’s determination to get back into the game at all costs. It’s similar to the admiration we have for hockey players like Patrice Bergeron who played the final game of last year’s playoffs for the Boston Bruins with broken ribs, torn rib cartilage, torn rib muscles, and a separated shoulder. It’s the admiration we have for basketball players who “walk-off” ankles that we’ve just seen bend in ways that shouldn’t allow their owners to be upright, much less playing a sport. It’s not limited to men either, who can forget gymnast Kerri Strug landing a vault on a broken ankle for the U.S. Women’s gymnastics team or U.S. Women’s National Team player Abby Wambach going up for headers while blood streamed down her head from an earlier injury. A big part of a fans enjoyment of sports comes from admiration for people willing and able to do things that you, the viewer, could not do. Playing through injuries is part of that.

There’s a flip-side to this toughness though. There are some injuries that shouldn’t be played through: head injuries and heart injuries or conditions seem like obvious candidates to us but they are routinely ignored and even hidden by players. Bruce Arthur of the National Post wrote an article about this (as well as the strange need of some hockey fans to denigrate other sports as less tough) yesterday. He writes of Peverley, “Asking to go back in wasn’t so much about toughness as a form of insanity.” He also reminds the reader that two basketball players, Hank Gathers and Reggie Lewis both died of heart problems on the court. When Peverley went down, many people thought of Jiri Fischer, a hockey player who was similarly brought back to life after a heart issue during a game, but there are other examples: Corey Stringer was a prominent football player who died of complications from heat stroke but there have been many others, Kris Letang, a player on the Pittsburgh Penguins, had a stroke this year resulting from a small hole in his heart. He is recovering now but managed to get to the training facility and fly with the team to an away game before the trainers found out and hospitalized him. The concussion story is well documented but it’s worth repeating that a big problem with preventing concussions, particularly the far more damaging second and third concussions in a short period, is that players at every level actively hide them from their coaches and trainers.

So, how tough is too tough in sports? I guess the answer is: when it comes to heads and hearts, don’t be tough; when it comes to anything else, be as tough as you want. That’s a pretty hard psychological change to ask athletes to make though: put the team before your knees, your legs, your arms, but not your head or your heart. It would be better to put structures in place in all sports that, without increasing the incentive of players to hide head and heart injuries, identified them and treated the players medically as people first and players a far distant second. I think it’s okay to enjoy a player whose heart tells him to get back into the game even after it’s just been shocked back to life as long as, as Barry Petchesky of Deadspin wrote, his coach, teammates, team doctors, and the league itself were all determined that it was “never, ever going to happen.”

Australian Hockey Team Refuses to Disband

I rarely center a post around a single story but this one from Yahoo’s Puck Daddy blog is too good to resist. John Raut, owner of the Canberra Knights, a hockey team in the Australian Ice Hockey League, announced at the end of last season that he was disbanding the team due to financial losses and poor competitive prospects. He didn’t bother telling the players before he told the media and when they found out they reacted in an unusual way. The players said to owner John Raut, “you can’t fire us, we refuse to quit” and began a quest to keep the team alive.

Once the players, led by team captain Mark Rummukainen, decided to try to keep the team alive, they had three challenges: they had to find $100,000 of operating funds, they needed to negotiate a new deal with their arena, and they had to prove that their team (which had won only 2 of 28 games the previous season) could be competitive. Owner (now former owner) Raut owned the arena and was willing to work out a deal to let the player-led team stay providing it did not use the name and brand Canberra Knights, which he owns. The money, as you might expect in 2014, came pouring in from fans through a crowd-sourcing campaign still open for donation and about 60% to their goal. In terms of competitive balance, the league helped out by modifying the rules to allow the new Canberra Brave team to sign more imported (European or North American) players. Additionally, some former Canberra players decided to come out of retirement for at least a season to help their old club. Of course, the irony here is that some of the players leading the charger to save the team may find themselves out of a job because of their own success.

It’s a great story and Harrison Mooney does a wonderful job of reporting it. As he writes:

Everything’s backwards in Australia. The toilet water swirls the other way, and the players run the hockey teams.

Read the rest of the story here.

When is a Conference Not a Conference? A Sports Theseus Paradox

This Wednesday, March 12, the Big East Men’s College Basketball Tournament starts at Madison Square Garden in New York City as it has every year since 1983. This year though, the tournament is different enough that it has many sports fans asking the question, “is this the same tournament?” Similar questions about the consistency of existence have been asked throughout history in the form of a paradox called the Theseus Paradox.

gerry_mcnamara — Syracuse and Pitt, who faced each other in the 2006 finals, are both gone from the Big East.

The Theseus Paradox, first posed by Plutarch in his first century Life of Theseus, asks whether Theseus’ ship, having been preserved by replacing one by one, every single board, is truly the same ship? This question is also commonly asked about “my grandfather’s ax”: This is my grandfather’s ax. My father replaced the head and I replaced the shaft. (As an aside, this is one of the many quotations on my father’s classroom wall. I guess the tree doesn’t grow far from where the apple falls…) The question the paradox asks is about the nature of existence — in the case of a sports conference, what makes the Big East the Big East? Is it the conference name, the location of its tournament, or the teams that play in it?

The Big East was formed in 1980 as a collection of schools, many Catholic, mostly in the Northeast of the country, whose priority when it came to sports was basketball. It quickly became a powerhouse college basketball conference in part because of its television contract with an up and coming network called ESPN. For almost two decades, it drove college basketball and was driven by college basketball but then the rise of college football as the big money-maker for college athletics caught up to it. From the mid-1990s the economics of college sports forced the Big East to start making moves to improve its standing in College Football even at the expense of its basketball history. It added schools like Miami, West Virginia, and Virginia Tech which were not only far from being in the Northeast but were also primarily football schools. This emphasis on football mixed with the Big East’s tendency to be stronger in basketball than football despite its best attempt to conform eventually led, starting in 2004, to the slow but steady flight of football-strong schools from the conference. One of my favorite sports writers, Michael Wilbon, wrote a good article about this in 2011. The conflict came to a head last year when seven of the original members of the Big East (all Catholic and all primarily basketball schools) petitioned the league to break away from the remaining schools and form their own league. They succeeded in seceding and because they represented a majority of the remaining charter members, were able to take the Big East name with them.

This year’s Big East consists of those seven teams plus three more they poached from other leagues. It’s this league that will be having their postseason tournament in Madison Square Garden this week but its unclear how much the new tournament will “feel” like the old one. It will be missing most of its biggest teams and rivalries. Syracuse, UConn, Louisville, and Pitt are gone and with them seventeen of the thirty four Big East historic championship teams. The last remaining historic powerhouse, Georgetown, is robbed of its main rivals and having an unusually weak year. According to Forbes, ticket sales are down 11%. The New York Post argues that what the current tournament has “lost in star power” it has “made up in drama.”

Coming back to the metaphor of the ax, the parallel to the paradox is not complete. Seven of the ten schools in this iteration of the Big East were charter members of the original Big East. So, while the head of the ax may have been changed, at least the shaft is the same piece of wood. Philosopher Thomas Hobbes added a question to the paradox using the metaphor of a ship — what, he posed, if the original planks had been collected on their way out of the ship, and assembled back into another ship? Which would be the “real” ship? Luckily we don’t have to answer this question about basketball because the teams that have left the Big East have mostly scattered into other conferences.

What’s the answer? Is the Big East still the Big East? Perhaps there’s a clue to be found in (the all-knowing, all-powerful,) Wikipedia having two seperate entries for the Big East, one pre-2013, one post? Perhaps there is no answer? Perhaps the only way to know will be to tune in and watch the tournament…

Why do Sports Fans Care More Than the Players?

The other day I was talking to my Mom about the post I wrote following the United States’ loss to Canada in the Olympic Men’s Ice Hockey semi-finals. She complimented me (thanks Mom!) on how well I expressed the emotions of a fan who has just watched their team lose. Our conversation led into a discussion of why it seems like fans take losses harder than the athletes themselves. I decided to turn that conversation into this short essay on why sports fans care more than the players.

sad fans — Toronto Maple Leaf fans react in horror to their team’s collapse in last year’s playoffs.

The day before the U.S. vs. Canada game, I had the opportunity to hang out in the USA house in Olympic Park. There I met the mother of an Olympic Snowboard Cross competitor. When I asked her how he did, she grimaced and said “Not so good.” I commiserated with her and when it was clear that she hadn’t let the loss get in the way of her enjoying the Olympic experience, I asked her if her son was able to enjoy himself after the loss too. Of course he was, was her answer. She explained that he usually takes fifteen minutes to a half-hour to get over a bad performance and that she and her family have learned to give him space until he’s done processing. By the time another American racer had won the competition, her son was already able to enjoy it with him, grinning and lifting him up in celebration.

At the depths of my despair about the fate of the United States Men’s Ice Hockey team, I felt as though I had come thousands of miles for nothing — just to see them lose. But then I thought of this woman and her son. If he was able to get over his loss, which he had traveled thousands of miles for, not to mention the thousands of hours of training, then certainly I should be able to get over my feelings of loss. That’s when my Mom mentioned that when my brother and I were kids and our soccer teams lost, she was always more upset, for longer, than he or I was. She said that our behavior was a lot like the snowboarder’s — by the time we got home from the game, it seemed like we had moved on.

Why is that, we wondered? Why do sports fans care more than the players?

The common answer to this common question, usually asked about professional athletes, is that they care less than the fans because it’s a job for them while it’s a passion for the fans. There’s probably some truth to this. There have been lots of stories in the past year that clarify that locker rooms are workplaces and being an athlete is a job. The Jonathan Martin, Richie Incognito story was about workplace harassment. The brain injury story has been about assumptions of safety and fair disclosure of risk in the workplace. The Michael Sam and Jason Collins story has been about freedom of preference expression in the workplace. Meanwhile, players are being traded and cut by their teams left and right, each one clarifying that athletes are hires, not members of a team family. I’m suspicious of the logic that adds all of this evidence together and comes out with the conclusion that this is why professional athletes don’t seem to care about losses as much as fans. First of all, if this were true, then we wouldn’t expect to see fans of youth or amateur sports care more than the players. Secondly, the selection process to make it into a professional league in a team sport is so competitive that I think it selects for people who care more about the team than most rational people would.

My explanation is that fans care more than the players because they have less agency. Another thing I did on my trip was read a lot. My girlfriend (this is turning into quite a family post!) recommended The Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker. In it, a psychologist treats victims of what they called “shell-shock” or “hysteria” during World War 1 and, despite mixed feelings on the matter, tries to cure them so they can go back to the front. Dr. William Rivers (who was a real person — much of the books is based on his and some of his patients’ writings which have survived) uses his few free hours to theorize about the nature of the psychological disorders that he’s working on. He theorizes that the connection between the common incidence of shell-shock among men at the front and the hysteria that during peace-time was a more common female issue, is lack of agency. He doesn’t think that what pushes soldiers or house-wives over the edge is the horror of war or an abusive husband but instead it’s the feeling of being completely invested in something that you have absolutely no power to influence in any material way.

The same, do a much lesser extent, of course, is true of sports fans. We sit in the stands or on our couches and invest ourselves in the success or failure of our teams but we have absolutely no control over what happens to them. As much as we try with lucky jerseys, lucky food, or other rituals, we know that we’re just observers and not a part of the action. My guess is that that is psychologically harder than what the athletes go through during most losses. At least they impacted the game — even if they kick themselves for a bad catch or an errant pass or a missed defensive assignment, they know that they did some good things and some bad ones; they know they had an effect on the game. The athlete who loses doesn’t feel the helpless meaningless feeling of the fan who knows that she cares so deeply about something completely uncontrollable… and that she’s going to continue to next season.

What is a Southpaw? Why Are They Called Southpaws?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a southpaw and why are they called southpaws? Where does that term come from?

Thanks,
Sally,

— — —

Dear Sally,

A southpaw is someone who is left-handed. I’m guessing that you’re asking me instead of an etymologist because you heard the word used in the context of a sporting event. That’s apropos because the term comes from sports, baseball in particular, and was first used to refer to the handedness of a pitcher in particular. Here’s some background about baseball to lead into an explanation of the southpaw phrase.

Of all the major sports, baseball is probably the one that makes the biggest show of respecting its own tradition. One of its longest held tradition is playing games at night but not fully embracing it. According to Wikipedia, there have been night baseball games since the 1880s but major league teams “initially dismissed as an unwelcome gimmick by the big-league clubs.” The last hold-out in the major leagues, the venerable Chicago Cubs, succumbed to the night game trend in 1988, a hundred years or so later. There are still more day games in baseball than any other sport.

Hitting a major league pitch is an incredibly difficult feat and it requires, more than any other quality, great eyesight. As we know from the excellent book, The Sports Gene, the average vision of professional baseball players is 20/13 (they can see at 20 feet what most people can see at 13.) Doing anything to damage this vision, like painting the seams of the baseball white so that they cannot be distinguished from the rest of the ball, makes it virtually impossible for even the best baseball players to hit a pitch.

One naturally occurring factor that could effect the eyesight of the batter is, of course, the sun! If a batter were forced to look towards the sun in a low (rising or setting) position, it would seriously effect the game. Baseball at sunrise is unlikely but baseball games, particularly because of the tradition of playing during the day, could easily be played at or around sunset. You never hear about a batter with the sun in his eyes — fielders, yes, but not batters. This is because baseball stadiums are almost universally designed so that a batter standing at home plate facing the field will be pointed somewhere between due East and due North. This gets them away from the setting sun and, in the Northern Hemisphere, away from the Southerly winter sun as well. Popchartlab has a wonderful poster for sale that shows this.

In a baseball diamond where the batter faces East, the pitcher, standing opposite him, faces West. Imagine facing West and using your body as a map’s key or compass. Your eyes point West, your butt points East, your right arm points North, and your left arm… points South! This is how left-handed pitchers first became known as southpaws. Their paws literally face South in a traditional baseball stadium.

From baseball, the word has moved into other sports and into common use. I hear it most frequently in sports where handedness is a major tactical factor. Sports like hockey and tennis where which hand you favor marks which way you are more comfortable swinging your racket or stick are nice fits for using the term. I’ve also heard it used in basketball and boxing, two sports with motions (shooting in basketball, punching in boxing) that are asymmetrical and handed. In a recent episode of the NPR show, Radiolab, the hosts interviewed an English professor turned mixed martial artist, Jonathan Gottschall, whose first experience fighting was against a lefty and who talked about a theory for why lefties have been evolutionarily retained. The theory suggested that despite many negative aspects of left-handedness (lefties are more prone to any number of diseases and other early deaths,) they have a significant advantage in hand-to-hand combat because their relative rareness means that righties who are used to fighting righties can’t make sense of what’s coming at them until it’s too late.

I hope this answer has been both helpful and interesting. If not, can we blame it on the fact that I’m a life-long northpaw?
Ezra Fischer

Winter Olympics: Post-final Thoughts About the Media

I know, I know, you thought I was done writing about the Olympics. I thought I was too but something has been bothering me in the nether-reaches of my brain. I’m disappointed in how the Western media portrayed Sochi in the lead up to the games. Before I went, I was concerned and scared from what I had been reading. The hotels were unfinished, radioactive shitholes. There were suicide bombers on every block and even if the Russian Army were somehow able to deter or demolish them, the people living in the area would be overwhelmingly resentful because of having been forced to live under martial law for months before the Olympics even began. Oh, and any food in the area would have been in storage for at least three months because that was the last time any shipments of anything were allowed into the area.

With the possible exception of terrorism, this simply wasn’t true. None of it. There were reasonably fresh tomatoes and cucumbers at breakfast every morning that clearly had not been stored for three months. The people I met and even those I passed on the street seemed generally happy to show their neighborhoods to the world. I did sense and enjoy a little bit of, how do I describe it, self-deprecating humor in their enjoyment? Sochi and the surrounding area isn’t a perfectly curated resort, indeed, it’s probably not even all that well run, and I think the people who I ran into we’re a little amused that the world had descended on them. Either it took a Jersey boy to identify this in them or I was projecting.

I am certain that some of the hotel accommodations did have serious issues. By no means am I saying that the journalists and athletes who were there before the games began were falsifying their tweets and pictures showing yellow water, oddly designed toilet facilities, and other bizarre oddities. There were some hoaxes (apparently Jimmy Kimmel had something to do with the photo of a wolf inside a hotel) but the larger problem was twofold. First, people have a really hard time understanding that something that happens to one person in a large group is as rare as it is. This is one of the reasons why an act of terror that kills a few people can scare so many (more on terrorism in a minute, but this is equally true of a traffic accident, a murder, a lightening strike.) Second, the media clearly benefited from exaggerating or embellishing these stories and encouraging people to take them seriously. There’s an old saying in newspapers, “if it bleeds it leads.” In this case the most direct approach to driving general interest in a group of sports with only fringe followings was to gleefully project disaster.

Before the games, I took the terror threat quite seriously and I still do today. The tricky thing for anti-terrorism forces is that the only evidence of their work is negative. If they mess up, even once, everyone knows. If they succeed, the natural reaction for onlookers like me is to say that the threat was overblown and there’s simply no good way for them to advocate for themselves. Most of the time, if an attack is prevented, publicizing it will be a bad idea because it would compromise intelligence sources or gathering methods. So, let’s leave this one for historians to decide.

The problem is that people stayed home. That’s not a big deal if they were fans, (although one of the real problems with Olympic Games is that they cost so much and bring in so little, so any loss in profit is bad for the host country and eventually bad for the Games themselves,) but it is a big deal for a parent, sibling, child, or partner of an athlete to miss seeing them in person. The Olympics only come once every four years and qualifying next time is no lock. What a shame to miss out on that so that television stations can grab a few extra eyes and newspapers can sell a few more editions.

Winter Olympics: Ice Hockey, Cross-Country, and Reflections

The Olympics are over. I’m so glad I was able to go in person although, as you’ll read in a bit, the last couple days were frustrating. On my second to last day at the Olympics I went to both the Men’s Ice Hockey semifinals. On my last day there, I went to the Women’s Mass Start 30k Cross-Country Skiing race. Then I took an overnight train to Rostov-on-Don, a city in Russia about ten hours North of Sochi. After a day or rest, recuperation, and a little Olympics TV watching, I’m flying to Istanbul tonight.

The Men’s Ice Hockey Semis were the events I was most excited about seeing. When I first thought of going to the Olympics, they were the big investment I made in terms of money and emotion. Seeing the best four countries in the world was going to be great! After Russia lost to Finland, I was disappointed both because I felt bad for the host team and country (the Russians took this event so seriously that Putin apparently said that if the men’s hockey team won gold, no one would care what else the Russians won in the Olympics and if they didn’t, no one would care what medals the Russians did win) and I also felt robbed of what would have been an amazing experience to be in the stadium for an important Olympic home game. Nonetheless, I was excited to see Finland play Sweden and VERY excited to cheer on the U.S. against Canada.

It wasn’t until the U.S. lost that I realized how much I had invested emotionally in that game. I felt like crying. It felt like I had come thousands of miles to see this game and then we had lost. Not just lost, but lost 1-0 which means I never got to celebrate; there was never a moment of joy to look back on fondly. The team looked like it was moving in molasses from the first minute of play while the Canadians danced around on the ice. Ugh.

Here’s the thing: the Olympics are about so much more than sports. They are a travel experience of a lifetime for many. I talked to a woman whose son had competed for the U.S. in Snowboard Cross and she had never left the country before! For her and her son, the Olympics are an achievement to be proud of for the rest of their lives. The Olympics are a great way for cultures to mix and people to meet one another. The Olympics are an opportunity for the host nation and people to welcome the world to their shores proudly and show themselves to be a fine people — which the thousands of Russian volunteers and people of that region certainly showed me. The Olympics are also a commercial enterprise for its sponsors and broadcasters. But for sports fans… the Olympics are about sports and for me at that moment, the event that meant the most to me had just gone wrong. Ugh.

Now, a few days later, I’m beginning to get over it. Before I left Olympic park that night, I made sure to put everything aside and take a few minutes to just enjoy being there. I grew up watching the Olympics with my Mom on television and playing my Dad and Brother in an Apple IIe game called the Olympic Decathlon whenever I could wrangle a game out of them. I never really thought about going — I don’t like big masses of people, it’s expensive, etc. — but being there connected me with myself and my own history in a wonderful way. I’m glad I went.

Over time, my memories of the event and my memories altered by my photos of the event will take precedence in my head but I’ll also never forget the impotent feeling of watching the U.S. lose to Canada without ever scoring a goal. At the same time, I’ll never forget walking out of the bar in Manhattan where my boss and I had snuck off to watch U.S. vs. Algeria in the 2008 World Cup and reeling with disbelief at how amazing Landon Donovan’s extra time goal had been or riding in a taxi to Brooklyn with my friend James to a party at his house which he had skipped to watch Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals the year the Penguins won the championship. I guess that’s part of being a sports fan.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra

P.S. Oh — right, I promised to write about going to see Cross Country Skiing in person. Don’t do it unless you’re with a group and have a big supply of booze, flags, and ideally cowbell. You stand there for fifteen minutes and then some people ski by really fast for about ten seconds. Then you wait again.

Winter Olympics Day 4: Women's Curling Gold Medal Game

And on the fourth day of my Olympic adventure I went to see the Women’s Gold Medal Curling game. I have to preface this by saying that I thought it was a little dull most of the time. No wonder Canadians like it so much? Sorry, sorry, I’m just sore from their comeback against the U.S. in the Women’s Ice Hockey finals later that night. Dull or not, there was a lot to observe and learn from. Here are some of my observations.

Curling is the bar-game of Olympic sports. As such, even the best curlers in the world are pretty average looking when it comes to body type. It’s funny to imagine them living in the Olympic Village among the sex-crazed elite athletes trying to pick each other up constantly. The fans, perhaps mirroring their favorites, also seemed a little… perhaps decrepit? Maybe there are some conventions about staying quiet for the shots but even when there was cheering it was subdued and repetitive in nature.

One thing the curlers are absolutely elite at was communication. I think curling would be a great sport to use as a team-building activity. There’s one person who throws the stone, one who is standing near the target, and two sweepers. The two sweepers follow instructions without comment, primarily from the person standing near the target but also from the person who made the throw. There were a lot of screams of “Haaaaard” or “VERY HARD” and there was a visible difference between those two “settings.”

Curling, like Tennis, has alternating ends (games in tennis) when one team has a clear advantage over the other. In tennis, the player who is serving is expected to win the game. That’s called “holding” serve and losing a service game is called a “break.” In Curling the advantage comes from who goes first and who (therefore the other team) has the final shot. The team that has the final shot has the advantage and should earn at least a point. There were some ends like the sixth that went pretty much exactly the way you’d think it would go. The first team put a stone down, the second team knocked it off, repeat, repeat, repeat, until the last team to go took their final shot. This was exceedingly boring. But some of the ends were much more complicated with five or six stones on the board at once, creating interesting tactical and geometric conundrums.

Even sitting in the first row, I found myself looking at the big screen in the arena when there were multiple stones in play. It was showing the shot, familiar to TV, from directly above the target, looking down. Although you lose all sense that these are three dimensional objects, it really is the perfect view for insight into the tactics of the situation. It occurs to me that almost every sport is better live AND every sport is better on television. People have figured out, especially for sport like curling or speed skating that have very predictable movement, exactly where to put the cameras and how to move them to best convey the game to the viewer. You lose all that live, and while the atmosphere at the arena and the extra stuff you see during breaks or somewhere that would be offscreen is great, you often lose some sense of what is happening in the game itself.

Watching curling was interesting and I’m glad I went but it was the first of the sports I’ve seen here that didn’t make me want to join a league when I got home — Ice Hockey, yes, Speed Skating, yes, Curling? Not really. Today I’ll be watching some more Ice Hockey, this time Men’s. It’s the semi-finals: Sweden vs. Finland at 4:00 OT/7:00 ET and Canada vs. USA at 9:00 OT/Noon ET.

Go USA!

Winter Olympics Day 3: Speed Skating

Day 3 was a beautiful, mostly sunny day in Russia and I want to see the Women’s 5,000 meter speed skating event. 5,000 meters is a little over 3 miles. It’s the longest of the women’s speed skating events and it takes the best in the world a little under seven minutes to complete the race.

The race took place in Adler Arena (hooray Adler! That’s the town I’m staying in) and my first impression was, “whoa! that’s a long rink!” The speed skating track is a skinny, elongated oval 400 meters around. So the race was a little more than 12 laps. Although there are only about a dozen rows back, because the rink is so long, the arena holds 8,000 people and tonight it was pretty much packed. The fans were predominantly Russian but after that, dominated by the Dutch. The Dutch, who are traditionally and currently dominant in speed skating were out in full force and it seemed to me as if the arena had actually been designed for them. There was a clear orange motif (the color of the Dutch) throughout — orange seats, orange boards around the rink, etc.

I had never seen speed skating in person before and I was impressed. The skaters flew around the rink and, given that this is the longest distance race, I can only imagine how much faster they go in the sprints. When the crowd was not roaring for a Russian skater, the arena was so quiet that you could distinctly hear the snicks of the skates digging into the ice as a racer went by.

Speed skating is all about efficiency. The less the racer moves, the faster they are able to go. You’ve probably seen speed skaters tuck one arm behind their backs on TV. In person I noticed that some of the racers had a thin rope tied around their waists so that they could loop their thumb into it behind their backs to take a little strain off that arm. Of course, uninitiated spectators like me think that a racer who is moving more is probably going faster. It’s actually the opposite. The faster they look, the slower they are going. As some of the racers got tired, you could notice their heads bobbing slightly and their arms whipping about a little more. Any wasted movement is counter productive but it’s natural that as you get tired, you lose the ability to control every motion so carefully.

The best of the best skated aerodynamically throughout. It’s amazing how angular the racers look while they are skating — their bodies remain at close to a ninety degree angle the whole time. Even after they finish, and are trying their best to catch their breath, they stay bent over like that. It’s only when they finally stand up straight that you go, “whoa!!” and remember that this sport is powered primarily by the butt. The only real exception to this rule was the winner of the competition, a skater from the Czech Republic named Martina Sablikova who looked far to stick-like to have the power for this sport. I suppose, like Usain Bolt who is “far too tall for a sprinter,” the best are sometimes outliers even from a population of outliers.

I have to give a lot of credit to the speed skating crowd. As I said, the size and shape of the arena made it hard to feel connected to the rest of the fans but when a Russian woman was skating there was a roar of cheering and flag waving that looped around the course just ahead of her like the crowd was doing the wave at Olympic record pace. As the Dutch woman I was sitting next to said, “when you yell at her, she goes faster.” She added that “all Dutch people are like that” but I think it probably applies the same to Russians because it seemed like the Russian skaters took energy from the crowd. The best of the Russian skaters just missed the podium by 11 hundredths of a second. Heartbreaking, especially because the crowd must have known that its beloved Russian Men’s Ice Hockey team was losing to Finland at the same time.

Up next, Curling!

Winter Olympics Day 2: A Women's Ice Hockey Double Header

Today I saw my first Olympic events in person! I went to two women’s ice hockey games: Germany vs. Japan at noon Olympic Time and Russia vs. Finland at 430 OT. Germany beat Japan 3-2 and Finland beat Russia 4-0. But I know you don’t come here for the scores, so let me give you some of my impressions.

Women’s Ice Hockey is not the same as men’s and it took a little while to get used to. The biggest difference in the rules is that body checking is not allowed in the women’s game. You’d think that by disallowing body checking, you’d get a game that looks the same, just without the body checking. Totally untrue! The biggest difference is that by disallowing body checking, you give the hockey players all sorts of freedom unavailable to men. The women today were doing all sorts of things like skating towards the boards to retrieve a puck with an opponent barreling down on them or looking down to gather a bouncing puck while skating through the middle of the ice that are totally impossible in the men’s game because anyone who tries it will be flatter on the ice than a pancake within thirty seconds. It took almost the first whole game for me to stop having the cringing “oh my god, don’t do that, you’re going to get crushed” instinct. Tactically what this means is that puck possession is an even bigger imperative in the women’s game because it’s so much harder to get the puck from an opponent if you can’t hit her.

The other major difference is that the puck looks heavy. This is something you don’t often think in the men’s game because everyone who plays it at a high level is so darn strong that the puck looks weightless. In the men’s game, the puck moves in straight lines whether being passed or shot. In the women’s game, except for one or two of the most impressive players, the puck moves in curves. Shots have arc and passes noticeably dip as they run out of steam.

The atmosphere was great. Shayba arena seats around 5,000 so it’s very intimate. There are only around 20 rows of seats in two tiers surrounding the rink. The Japan vs. Germany game had around 2,000 people attending; the later game, because it involved Russia, was almost full with over 4,000 fans. During the first game, the crowd shouted “Shaybu! Shaybu!’ I asked some fans what it meant and they said it meant “let’s see a goal!” I wondered if it was a little bit of a sarcastic comment shouted when a fan feels the game is lagging. Later on, when the whole crowd was shouting it fifteen seconds into the Russia game, I understood it was just an exhortation. The crowd seemed to be tilting towards rooting for Japan. Not sure if there are socio-political reasons for that or if the Russian crowd just preferred the team that was loosing for most of the game.

I was really thrilled to get to see a Russian team play in person but unfortunately they never really had a shot in that game. Finland’s goalie (just like the men’s team) was rock solid and their top line of forwards, #77 Susana Tapani in particular was head and shoulders better than everyone else on the ice.

Women’s hockey was lots of fun to watch in person and it gave me a few ideas about rule changes. It drives me a little crazy that the rules prohibit women from body checking but I also understand that the men’s game is prohibitively violent, particularly as we understand more and more about the long term effects of brain injuries. So, if you think about it this way, that it’s not because the players are women that the rules are stricter, it’s because the game is more recently established and it’s certainly easier to establish strict rules than to change established ones to be stricter. Here’s my proposal — it seemed from watching that women could make contact with an opponent to shield the puck from her, just not in an effort to take the puck from her. Men are allowed to hit each other as long as the puck is nearby. Why don’t we meet in the middle — outlaw any body check that is not clearly intended to either keep the puck or get the puck?

Speed skating tomorrow!! Thanks for reading,
Ezra