Category: Olympics

Summer Olympics: All About Fencing

All About Fencing

Fencing is what happens when a type of fighting, in the process of becoming obsolete, takes a detour and goes down the road of extreme codification that leads inevitably to sport. Fencing is sword fighting with unfathomably complicated rules where no one gets hurt.

How Does Fencing Work?

As you might figure, the point of fencing is to hit the other person with the pointy end before they hit you. (Shout out to all my Game of Thrones peeps out there.) The problem is, Olympic level fencers quite often hit each other at virtually the same time. One solution to this is to put electronic sensors in the swords and the clothing of the fencers. That way, a computer can figure out who hit first when the swords are moving too fast for the eye to see… which is almost all the time. Unfortunately, even electronic sensors can’t tell a lot of the time. So, a complicated set of rules was invented. Without delving too far into these, it’s safe to say that the rules generally favor the more aggressive fencer. If one fencer is on the attack, they will get the point when there is a simultaneous hit.

Why do People Like Watching Fencing?

There’s little doubt about the popularity of sword fighting as a spectator sport. Fencing, on the other hand, is a little more challenging. I imagine a lot of people tune in to fencing to see swashbuckling of the sort they are used to seeing in television shows or movies. You know what I mean, attractive muscly people swinging swords slowly at each other and sustaining attractively placed shallow cuts on just the right parts of their faces or arms. Olympic fencing is not that. The swords often move too quickly to see, and hits happen so fast and simultaneously, that unless you’re an expert in fencing and have amazing eye-sight, you probably can’t see them. Instead of watching the swords, spend some time watching just the feet and legs of the fencers. Divorced from their upper bodies, fencers lower bodies look as though they are engaged in an athletic, balletic, and deadly dance.

Check out some highlights from the 2012 Olympics:

What are the different events?

Fencing has three disciplines, each tied to a different weapon with different rules. Foil has skinny, flexible swords that you can only score with if you hit the point of the blade on the torso of an opponent. Sabre has a slightly shorter, lighter blade with a larger hand-guard. This is because the entire weapon, not just the point, may be used to strike at the entire upper body of an opponent. Epee blades are heavier and stiffer. Epee is kind of a throw-back event, the closest to “real” sword fighting. The entire body is a target, and, unlike in the other two events, there are no right-of-way rules. In epee, if two fencers hit each other too closely to tell who was first, both get a point. There are also team events. In 2016, men will have a team competition in foil and women in sabre.

How Dangerous is Fencing?

Fencing has freak accidents, like any other activity, but unless a sword breaks it is relatively safe. Fencing outfits may be reinforced slightly, but sabre and especially epee fighters just get used to bruising. It may not be for the weak of heart, but it’s not going to kill or badly hurt anyone.

What’s the State of Gender Equality in Fencing?

Very good, at least on the surface. Inclusion of women’s events in the Olympics were a long time coming, but they are here now. Don’t worry about the weird and non-matching team competitions. The Olympics won’t give fencing more medals, so they rotate through the different events for team competitions from one Olympics to the next.

Links!

Bookmark the full Olympics schedule from NBC. Fencing is from Saturday, August 6 to Sunday, August 14 with medal events every day!

Read more about diving on the official Rio Olympics site.

Summer Olympics: All About Archery

All About Archery

Visions of Robin Hood splitting a rival’s arrow may flash through your mind as you watch this Olympic event. At this distance, the chance of splitting an arrow is slight or, perhaps, impossible, but that won’t prevent you from imagining it happen.

How Does Archery Work?

Archery is a relatively simple sport. Line up 70 meters from a target, stand still, and shoot at it. In concentric rings, where your arrow lands determines how many points you score. The bullseye at the center is only 4.8 inches wide and an arrow there gives the archer who shot it (or their team,) ten points. The farther an arrow is from the center, the fewer points it gets. Many arrows are shot, and each score is added up. When all the arrows are gone, whoever or whichever team has the most points, wins. Archers or teams are matching in single elimination games and keep shooting as long as they keep winning matches.

Why do People Like Watching Archery?

I can’t blame you if the idea of sitting still watching other people stand still and shoot arrows seems dull. All I can say, is that Olympic archery is surprisingly mesmerising most of the time. And, if a match is close at the end, it can be surprisingly exciting. Archery is an activity that requires complete calm to succeed at, so it’s interesting to watch what happens as archers struggle to remain calm with an Olympic medal on the line.

Check out some highlights from the 2012 Olympics:

What are the different events?

Archery has men’s and women’s individual and team events.

How Dangerous is Archery?

If you got in the way of anyone who was shooting, it would be pretty dangerous!! Otherwise, it’s completely safe.

What’s the State of Gender Equality in Archery?

Aside from the qualification target being ever-so-slightly lower for women (600 instead of 630), this sport has complete gender equality. Maybe it will be one of the first to get rid of gender all together.

Links!

Bookmark the full Olympics schedule from NBC. Archery is from Friday, August 5 to Friday, August 12.

Read more about diving on the official Rio Olympics site.

Summer Olympics: All About Table Tennis

All About Table Tennis

We all know table tennis or ping pong. It’s that game we played with our grandparents in Florida or with our friends in their basement. Forrest Gump was good at it. It’s become a mild hipster/tech favorite. No! You do not know table tennis until you watch world class table tennis, like the table tennis in the Olympics. Casual ping pong is to Olympic table tennis as a school yard fight is to World War I.

How Does Table Tennis Work?

For as different as I just described Olympic table tennis being from recreational ping pong, I have to admit the rules are basically the same. There are a few interesting wrinkles though. First, the rule of hitting the ball across the table on a diagonal during serves (like the tennis rule about serving) is only present in doubles table tennis, not singles. In singles table tennis, the serve can go anywhere once it crosses the net. That’s sneaky! There have also been a bunch of equipment changes to slow down the game so that people can enjoy it more as a spectator sport. The ball was enlarged, the paddles restricted. Games are also played to 11 with who serves switching every two points instead of the casual standard of 21 and five.

Why do People Like Watching Table Tennis?

Well, tennis is fun to watch, isn’t it? So why wouldn’t you want to watch tennis as played by GIANTS?! That’s basically what table tennis is like. It’s surprisingly athletic, but instead of running around on the court, these athletes run around the court. Shots force an opponent to lunge from side to side and sometimes even run backward or forward or dive. The mixture of speed and control required to get the paddle into the right spot but not hit the ball too hard is amazing.

Check out some highlights from the 2012 Olympics:

 

What are the different events?

There are singles and doubles events for men and women.

How Dangerous is Diving?

Table tennis is safe!

What’s the State of Gender Equality in Diving?

The simplicity of the events (singles/doubles) make this an easy event for gender equality. What’s more, the rules are set up such that there are exactly the same number of men and women competing. Nice job table tennis!

Links!

Bookmark the full Olympics schedule from NBC. Table Tennis is from Saturday, August 6 to Wednesday, August 17.

Read more about diving on the official Rio Olympics site.

Summer Olympics: All About Diving

All About Diving

Once you’re done with the truly elemental sports — running, jumping, swimming, fighting — you get to the next level of sports. These are sports that add or combine parts of elemental sports. Diving, jumping from land into water, has its roots in that type of combination, but it’s become much, much more. Plain diving, was first an Olympic sport in 1904. By 1908, a second form of diving, called “fancy diving” had gained Olympic status. Fancy diving added acrobatics to the mix. These two forms of diving stayed separate until 1928 when the two were combined. These days, the whole transitioning from land to water thing seems like merely a footnote in the sport of diving. Divers do so many incredible, eye-catching spins, flips, and tucks in mid-air, that it seems as if they’ll never actually hit the water!

How Does Diving Work?

Diving is one of the many Olympic sports that combines aesthetics with athleticism. Dives are scored by a panel of judges who evaluate each dive based on how well executed they are. A dive has three distinct elements that are scored: the approach, the flight, and the entry. An easy way to think about this is that each phase represents the diver in a single element: land, air, and water. If the diver has to deal with fire, something is very wrong. Of the three, the easiest to watch as a casual observer is the entry. The bigger the splash a diver makes, the worse they have done. This usually corresponds with another element of the entry — how vertical they are when they enter the water. Because it’s hard to know what a diver is trying to do in the air, it’s harder to know how well they have performed in the flight. The eleven judges don’t have this problem, both because they are experienced and expert viewers of the sport and also because all the divers must submit their dives before-hand. There is no free-lancing allowed. As in other similar sports, there is a balance between execution and technical difficulty. A well executed very difficult dive may score better than a perfectly executed easier one. In synchronized diving, where two divers execute a dive simultaneously, a fourth element is added into the mix — how closely one diver mirrors the other.

Why do People Like Watching Diving?

Grace in the air, precision timing, tumbling athleticism, chiseled minimalist bodies, and even more minimalist swim suits. What’s not to like? Plus, it’s the only sport where competitors get to chill out in a hot tub before and after their performances!

Check out some highlights from the 2012 Olympics:

What are the different events?

Diving has two different apparatuses, a traditional semi-flexible diving board, like the kind you see at your local pool. In olympic competition, this is called a springboard and is three meters off the ground. There is also a concrete platform to dive off of which is 10 meters (more than three stories!) high. Each apparatus has an individual event for each sex and a synchronized event. Although the individual events are more high-profile, the synchronized events may be more impressive. As hard as it is to believe anyone can perform tumbling acrobatic olympic dives, it’s even more amazing that two people can do it simultaneously.

How Dangerous is Diving?

Despite involving leaping and tumbling in such a way that a diver’s head passes within inches of the diving board or platform, diving tends not to be particularly dangerous for international quality athletes. Even the 10 meter platform, which would be horrifying to leap off of for most of us, is not normally a problem. When injuries do happen, they can be very scary. No one who was watching Greg Louganis’ famous head injury (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5nqeFWufrE) will forget it.

What’s the State of Gender Equality in Diving?

Quite good. Countries may bring up to sixteen divers with no more than eight of them being mon or women. The diving events are the same for men and women and they are judged identically. Plus, the men’s swim suits are as or more skimpy than the women’s!

Links!

Bookmark the full Olympics schedule from NBC. Diving is from Sunday, August 7 to Saturday, August 20.

Read more about diving on the official Rio Olympics site.

For women's sports to thrive, look beyond the World Cup

So far, the women’s 2015 World Cup has been a great success. Sure, it’s had its sore spots: the cringe-inducing spectacle of people playing soccer on artificial turf that literally melts their cleats and burns their feet; the lackluster performance of the United States team so far; the mostly empty stadiums for some Round of 16 games; but overall, it’s been a great time for soccer and women’s sports in general. The games have been fast, exciting, and as a whole, quite competitive. There have been viewing parties all over the country, from bars and living rooms to town squares and outside city halls. Even President Obama got into the act, showing support for the U.S. team.

One way that you can tell that women’s sports has hit the jackpot of popular support with this World Cup is by noting how quickly and vociferously opponents of equality in sport get shouted down in the media. Early this week, Sports Illustrated’s Andy Benoit provided an example when he tweeted his belief that women’s sports in general are not worth watching. As you might expect, Benoit was roundly condemned for his tweet. He was mocked by former Saturday Night Live actors Amy Poehler and Seth Myers (who themselves were good-naturedly mocked by Fox Sports 1’s Jay Onrait and Dan O’Toole). His contention that women’s sports are not worth watching was debunked by innumerable columnists around the country, my favorite of which was Will Leitch in Sports on Earth who argued that anyone who thinks women’s sports are boring, are in fact, boring themselves:

People like Benoit toss out these justifications for not watching women’s sports out of some sort of faux sports purity, like he’s really just out to watch the pinnacle of athletic achievement every night, like anything less than the “best” and the “fastest” and the “strongest” is somehow a waste of one’s time. But this isn’t why we watch sports at all; we watch because every game we watch, we have a chance to see something we’ve never seen before. Dismissing that out of hand isn’t a way of demanding the highest quality performance every game (as if that’s something that could be done anyway); it’s a way of confirming your preexisting biases. It also devalues the actual athleticism on display, and the amount of work it required of everyone to get there.

Although the reaction against Benoit’s comment suggests that he was voicing a fringe, minority opinion, he was not. His attitude towards women’s sports is quite mainstream. Benoit simply made the mistake of speaking out against women’s sports during the World Cup, one of women’s sports two or three most popular events at a time when it’s never been more popular. If you think anything he said was new, you should watch this bitingly ironic video the Norwegian national team made before the World Cup began:

Negative attitudes like the ones the Norwegian team mocked in their video are all too common in the sports world and are relatively safe to voice during the 45 months out of every 48 when a World Cup or Olympics is not going on. This is bad for elite female athletes, it’s bad for people who love watching sports, it’s bad for girls who aspire to be athletes and their parents. I actually can’t think of anyone it is good for. It’s bad for everyone. Unfortunately, as popular as events like the World Cup and Olympics are, they can’t solve the problem because they only come around once every four years. To solve the gender inequalities in sports, a more consistent, permanent force is needed.

Tanya Wheeless, a former executive of the professional basketball teams, the Phoenix Mercury and Suns, wrote recently about the challenge of sustaining interest in women’s sports beyond the World Cup in Time magazine. She suggests that the critical variable in equalizing the opportunities and rewards provided by sports to women is investment:

What if the likes of Nike, Adidas, Coke, and Gatorade spent as much promoting female athletes as they did men? What if women’s leagues had the same marketing budget as men’s leagues? What if the National Women’s Soccer League got as much airtime in the U.S. as the English Premier League?

Naysayers will say all of that would happen if the interest were there. I say, increase promotion and the interest will follow. It’s the difference between having a market and creating one.

Wheeless could not be more right. The future of women’s sports must be bolstered by strong professional leagues. Professional leagues provide opportunities for athletes to get the training and experience they need to become world class. Without strong professional leagues, athletes are left making gut-wrenching decisions, like that of Noora Raty, perhaps the best women’s hockey goalie in the world, who retired at 24 for financial reasons, or Monica Quinteros, the 26 year-old Ecuadorian soccer player who left her job as a gym teacher to play in this year’s World Cup. You think they might have stuck with their sports if they could have made a living doing so? Yeah, so do I.

We don’t need to leave it to “Nike, Adidas, Coke, and Gatorade.” We can do something about this ourselves. We can contribute to equality and the success of women’s sports by becoming a fan of an existing women’s professional team. That’s exactly what I aim to do with the local professional women’s soccer team, the Boston Breakers. I’ve been to one game so far this year and it was a lot of fun. Held in a Harvard University complex convenient to most of the greater Boston area, Breakers games provide high-quality soccer in a thoroughly enjoyable atmosphere. I’m going again this Sunday when the Breakers take on the Western New York Flash at 5 p.m. Tickets are available and affordable. Join me!

There’s really no excuse to continue watching only male sports. There are successful women’s basketball and soccer leagues: the WNBA and NWSL, and later this year, a brand new professional women’s ice hockey league, the NWHL will begin. The WNBA is carried on television by the ESPN family of channels and you can buy streaming access to all the games for only $15. The NWSL goes a step further and puts all of its games on Youtube for free! If you’re reading this post now, you can watch those games. So join me, over the next year and more, in supporting women’s sports by putting our eyes and our wallets were our mouths are!

Dear Sports Fan joins the real world: Meetup

Watching sports with someone who knows more or less than you can be a frustrating proposition.

If you’re the person who knows less about sports, you probably have a lot of questions. How many can you ask before the sports fan you’re watching with gets annoyed? When is the right time to ask? You don’t want to ruin the game for your companion by asking a simple question right at a suspenseful moment. Talking about simple questions, it can be difficult to learn when it seems like the answers to all your questions contain vocabulary words you’re not completely clear on. Words and concepts that are second nature to a sports fan, like offside, holding, second set, third and seven, or two and two, are not easy sailing if you don’t know what they mean. It often feels like a choice between pestering your companion incessantly or accepting that the sporting event can only be pleasant but indecipherable background noise.

Being the person who knows more about sports can also be tricky. Knowledge often comes from passion, so the person who knows more often wants to focus more on watching and less on talking. It can be legitimately difficult to explain the components of something you may have learned very gradually from an early age or from the altered perspective of being a participant.

It’s difficult to watch sports without understanding them but it’s impossible to learn without watching. It’s a Catch 22 of Hellermanian proportions — at least it was, until now. After four years of explaining sports online, Dear Sports Fan will be making its first foray into the real world. I’ve started a Meetup group called Dear Sports Fan Viewing Parties for people who want to watch sports with explicit permission to ask question and for sports fans who want to help create a supportive setting. Our first Meetup will be this Monday, June 8, at 7 p.m. to watch the U.S. Women’s National soccer team play its first game of the 2015 World Cup against Australia. We’ll be gathering at Orleans bar in Somerville near Davis Square. If you or anyone you know lives in the Boston area and would like to be a part of this experiment, let me know or sign up here.

What is the sport of athletics?

Dear Sports Fan,

My family and I just got back from a trip to Europe. We spent several days in Iceland where we were regaled with stories of Icelandic sports, including their country’s four Olympic medals. Two of the medals are in a sport called “athletics.” What is the sport of athletics?

Thanks,
Mia

Dear Mia,

Athletics is an umbrella term that refers to a number of sports, many of the Olympic ones. It’s primarily a British term. The American equivalent is “Track and Field.” In the current Summer Olympics, the sports that fall under the general term Athletics include: running (everything from a 100 meter sprint to a marathon), hurdles, the steeplechase, relay races, race walking, the four jumping sports (high jump, long jump, pole vault, and triple jump), the four throwing sports (javelin, shot put, discus, and hammer throw), and the decathlon.

As for Iceland’s two medal winners, here is their story. Vilhjálmur Einarsson won the silver medal in the triple jump during the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne. Vala Flosadóttir won the bronze medal in the pole vault during the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. Oddly, it seems that Icelandic athletes do well in Australia.

I mentioned before that “athletics” and “track and field” were basically the same term but that there are slight differences. Track and field, the predominant American field, refers only to sports that take place in a big stadium that includes both a track and a field. Athletics also encompasses sports that are like the sports that would take place in that arena but that need a little more space or different terrain. The three main sports that are included in athletics but not track and field are the marathon and race walking, which usually take place on roads, and cross-country running which takes place on grass and mud. In general use though, particularly pertaining to the Olympics, they’re the same thing. One is just a Britishism and one an American term.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

Six Months Later the False Sochi Media Narratives Continue

I had the great luck of being able to attend the Winter Olympics games in Russia this past year. I blogged about it extensively which you can see here if you care to browse. In one of my final posts on the subject, after I had returned to the United States, I wrote about how I felt the media had done a disservice to the Olympics and to Russia by pushing the narrative of how messed up things were way too far. Here’s what I wrote:

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.

Six months after the Olympics, the disappointing narrative continues. Gizmodo.com reblogged a photo essay by Russian photographer Alexander Belenkiy under the headline, “Just Six Months After the Olympics, Sochi Looks Like a Ghost Town.” This is misleading at best and intentionally, journalistically yellow at worst. Now, I will admit to not speaking Russian. So, when I look at Belenkiy’s photo essay, I have to rely on a combination of just the photos, my memories of the Olympics, and Google translate. Google translate does its best, but… well, lemme just quote the opening paragraph accompanying the photos:

Just six months ago, at the Olympic stadium cried chubby teddy bear. He did not fall, as his ancestor from the eighties, but also among us can not see it. Hiding in the woods?

Setting humor aside for a minute, here’s what angers me about this coverage. All those photos are of Krasnaya Polyana not Sochi. Krasnaya Polyana was where the alpine and cross country skiing events and the sliding events were held. The Russians ambitiously developed an almost completely brand ski resort town up in the mountains to host these events. Their hope was that, in time, this resort would become a national and international ski destination, pulling some of the business away from Europe’s alp resorts. Whether or not that comes to pass, I can’t say I’m surprised to see it virtually abandoned in August! Compare the mountains in Belenkiy’s photos with what the mountains looked like in February. Here’s one of my photos from the Olympic games:

Olympic Mountains
When the snows return, my guess is that the people will too.

Send some photographers to Jersey shore towns in January and see what they look like or even Colorado mountain towns in Summer. Meanwhile, back to Sochi. Sochi is a coastal city that, although it was the city name used as the host of the Olympics, didn’t actually have any events in it. None of these photos are of Sochi at all! Sochi is a bustling small city of over 300,000 people. I promise it’s not abandoned today!

Paralympic Sled Hockey Finals

2014 Paralympic Winter Games - Day 4
Nikko Landeros shields the puck from a Russian opponent

The Paralympic Sled Hockey Finals will be televised at 1 pm on NBC! The United States will play host country Russia in what’s is invariably going to be an exciting rematch of their preliminary round game from earlier in the tournament. For the Russian fans, it will likely also have some revenge-factor for their team’s Olympic defeat to the U.S. in the Olympics last month.

In case you’ve never seen sled hockey, here’s a highlight reel of hits to get you pumped up. The action is fast and inspiring. Nikko Landeros, pictured here, is one of two Coloradans who lost their legs seven years ago when they were high school classmates. They were changing a tire on the side of the road when a passing car hit them. Now they are both representing the United States in the Paralympics.

The Denver Post has a wonderful profile of Landeros and Tyler Carron which I highly recommend reading. NBC always markets the Olympics by focusing on stories of athletes overcoming obstacles but the Paralympic stories trump them by a mile. I can’t wait to watch today. Go USA!

 

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.

20140226-212349.jpg

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.