Other Sports Archives - Page 8 of 12

Why do people like fencing?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do people like fencing? I went to my cousin’s fencing tournament and I couldn’t follow it at all. It looked like people just jumping at each other and arbitrarily scoring. What am I missing?

Thanks,
Frances

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Dear Frances,

Good for you for supporting your cousin, even if it was hard to tell what was going on and to enjoy the fencing tournament. You’re absolutely right that fencing can be bewildering to watch if you don’t know what’s going on or are far away. That said, there are lots of good answers to your question of “why do people like fencing?” Here are just a few:

Fencing is the Paleo of sports — what is more “natural” than fencing? I suppose boxing or any of the track and field events are on the same level with fencing, but it doesn’t get much more instinctive than grabbing a long object and trying to hit the other gal before she hits you. There’s an appeal to sports like fencing that abstract a real-world (and in the case of fencing, absolutely vital) activity and puts it into a sports context. If you care to learn more than you ever thought you’d know about the history of fencing while seriously enjoying yourself, Richard Cohen’s By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions is your best bet.
So many awesome cultural parallels — If there was ever a sport to capture the imagination of children and adults alike, it would be fencing. In our days of seemingly constant, low-grade but disturbing armed conflict, there’s something romantic about the days when combat was done face to face between people armed with swords. Not that war was ever actually romantic in any way but it certainly seems that way from the way it shows up in our culture. From the lightly satiric The Princess Bride to the many versions of Robin Hood (I grew up with Errol Flynn’s version and, of course, the comedy, Robin Hood: Men In Tights) to one of the consensus top ten movies ever filmed, Seven Samurai, to the modern classic of revenge, Kill Bill, sword-fighting has been at the center of many of our favorite movies. Even our best science fiction movies like Star Wars take fencing into the future to grab viewers’ attention. In terms of books, there’s almost an entire genre (fantasy) that leans on the appeal of fencing to draw its audience in. I’ve recently enjoyed a new epic series called the Mongoliad that’s chock full of sword fighting and describes in great detail different styles of fencing from Northern Europe to the Mediterranean to Mongolia. LARPing or Live Action Role Playing is an increasingly popular activity for people interested in sword fighting. None of these things are fencing but any of them could be a reason for picking up the sport and giving it a try.
Fencing is incredibly fast and graceful — As you mentioned in your question, it’s sometimes hard to see what’s happening because fencers are so fast and it’s definitely hard to tell how precise, measured, and graceful their movements are because great fencers package seven distinct motions in the time it takes most of us to think about getting off the couch. A practiced fencing fan, likeRay Glickman, the grandfather of top U.S. Junior Boy’s fencer Ethan Mullennix, can learn to appreciate fencing in person. “It’s just beautiful to watch. They move like ballet dancers,” Glickman said to Mike Kepka for his article on Mullennix in SFGate.com. For the rest of us, luckily, we can watch videos of fencing in slow motion like this amazing one
http://youtu.be/Z86tpjRaiK8?t=1m36s
It’s an amazing workout — I did a couple weeks of fencing camp when I was a kid, so I can personally attest to this benefit of fencing. It may not look like it would be as much of a workout as some other sports, but the main challenge is not one that’s easy to see if you’re not looking for it. Virtually every move in fencing, from the start of a bout to the end, is done in a full-on deep knee bend position. It’s like playing a sport while doing squats. After just a minute or two of fencing, your quads begin to burn and they don’t stop. If you’ve got bad knees or are trying to protect yourself from ever having bad knees, fencing is the perfect sport for you. According to www.findthebest.com, you can burn 430 calories for 150 lb person in one hour of fencing.
Technicalities and technology — One of the common themes that runs through enjoyment of sport is understanding and enjoying the technicalities of an activity. Fencing has an enormous number of technicalities! First of all, there are three types of fencing, each which has a different weapons and a different set of rules about where you are allowed to hit your opponent. Even more delightfully technical are the right-of-way rules that dictate who gets the point if the two fencers hit each other at exactly the same time. The action is so fast and the rules so precise that most guides to watching fencing, like this one from Crimson Blades fencing academy, suggest watching the referee to see what has happened. Even this takes some work to learn how to interpret the referee’s hand signals as you can see in this awesome poster:

This wonderful illustration of the referee signals in fencing (one wonders if, in action, they look just a little like this,) comes from fencing instructor and author Massimiliano Longo who is currently raising money for a US and UK version of his wonderful illustrated guide to fencing for children. Please give his Indiegogo page a look and think about helping to fund it. I donated today!

So, there you have it — five answers to the question, “Why do people like fencing?” I hope these give you a reason to go back to your cousin’s next fencing tournament or even think about starting to fence yourself! If you’re interested, U.S. Fencing is a good resource for finding a fencing club near you.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

When Fake is Too Real: Professional Wrestling

Everyone knows that professional wrestling is fake but not as many know that behind that veneer of unreality, it can be all too real for the wrestlers.

The other day I wrote a post about the sounds you hear when you watch sports on television and which of them are real, which enhanced, and which fake. Then yesterday things got very real when I quit my job! Today we’ve got a story about (as Dave Chappele might say), when keeping it fake goes wrong. Everyone knows that professional wrestling is fake but not as many know that behind that veneer of unreality, it can be all too real for the wrestlers. Two recent pieces from Deadspin and Snap Judgement covered this quasi sport in interesting ways.

Fake results, real danger, real exploitation

Deadspin republished an article from Jacobin, a magazine offering “socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.” The article covers the history of labor relations in professional wrestling and is devoted to it’s thesis that “the billion dollar spectacle of pro wrestling relies entirely on the ruthless economic, mental, and physical exploitation of its performers.” Its tone is a little arch for my taste but it’s quite convincing. I was particularly interested to hear how pro wrestling’s leaders used the very fact that its competition isn’t real to their own advantage:

Another delicate maneuver: is a pro wrestling match a competition, or an exhibition? A seemingly minor distinction—but in the eighties, the money men of pro wrestling broke kayfabe, that code of silence safeguarding the industry’s competitive integrity, to all but bellow at state lawmakers that the matches were predetermined, that the whole show was “fake.”

Why? The benefits were compelling. If pro wrestling is just “entertainment,” there is no need for regulatory scrutiny. By pushing through deregulation, with the help of sleazy right-wing lawyers like Rick Santorum, the WWF wriggled out of paying taxes on their TV broadcasts and sloughed off any oversight by state athletic commissions. In New Jersey, for instance, following the state legislature’s 1989 deregulation of the industry, the state “would no longer license wrestlers, promoters, timekeepers and referees,” and wrestlers “would no longer be required to take physical examinations before an exhibition”—a fateful dereliction in a business rife with injury.

As the quote above hints at, professional wrestlers face terrible physical risks. Wrestling is “fake” in that the results of the matches are known by its participants but its physical toll is very real. The acrobatic violent simulations in the ring take close coordination and can easily go wrong. Beyond that, wrestlers take drugs. Lots and lots and lots of drugs. For all the talk of whether its worth trying to ban performance enhancing drugs in “real” sports, wrestling provides a clear example of what can happen if you allow anything. You can understand the dangers of wrestling through numbers — as this wrestlinginc.com article from 2011 shows, of the “of the 51 talents who appeared at the 1991 WWE pay-per-view WrestleMania VII, 14 have died prematurely.” It compares that to top level boxers, football players, and musicians from 1991 and there’s no contest whatsoever in how fatal the activities seem to be.

You can also understand the danger through personal stories like Kevin von Erich’s as brought to you by Snap Judgement. Von Erich was one of five wrestling brothers who followed their father into professional wrestling. It’s a great and horrible story made all the more poignant by von Erich’s gravely voice and his clear love for the profession that did him and his family so much harm. Listen to it here.

What Sounds are Real in Sports?

Have you ever watched a sporting event on television and thought, “what sounds are real in sports?” What about the squeaking of basketball shoes on a wood court? How about the grunt of a boxer taking a blow to the ribs? The sound of a hockey puck hitting the boards? Is that really what the game sounds like? Are they real sounds just amplified to be heard over the crowd or are television sound engineers playing tricks on us by adding sampled sounds in? Would it matter if they were?

Horse-racing-1 — And they’re off! But what is that sound?

This is the subject of an episode of 99% Invisible called The Sound of Sports. 99% Invisible is an independent podcast about “design, architecture, and the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world.” It’s a great podcast and I enjoy a lot of their work. This episode is actually a rebroadcast of a show produced for the BBC by Peregrine Andrews. It delves deeply into that 99% to explore how sound designers shape our experience of sports on television.

The first two thirds of the podcast cover how sound engineers have revolutionized the sports experience over the past thirty years or so by cleverly miking and then mixing different sounds of sporting events into the television feed. I particularly loved hearing from one engineer about how his childhood desire to amplify an acoustic guitar came back to him when approaching the problem of how to convey the sounds of gymnastic in the olympics. Like with his childhood guitar, he took a contact mic and slapped it right onto the most resonant part of the event — the balance beam. As you might expect, the show is lushly illustrated with clips from sports broadcasts. My favorite is a thirty second clip of two coxswains from the biggest rowing race of the year in England, an annual race between Oxford and Cambridge known just as “the boat race.” Coxswains are people who sit in the back of the boat facing the eight rowers and SCREAM. Their job is to set a rhythm, inform the rowers of how they’re doing, to know tactically when to speed up and when to stay steady and to motivate through a mixture of enthusiasm and intimidation. It’s amazing to hear just the sound from the two coxswains in this race, a man and a woman, scream their hearts out.

Things really get moving in the last twenty minutes or so as the show explores the aspects of sports sounds that are fake or “enhanced” as the engineers like to say. For me, the most important message in the segment came from an engineer who was explaining how the familiar sound of a basketball swishing through a hoop is real but never heard in person. He says “Most of us involved in sports sports try to… enhance the experience. We tread the middle road between what’s real and what’s unreal.” What I love about this line of thought is that the more I learn, the less clear what’s right and what’s wrong. At first, it seems wrong to change how the game sounds so materially. Does it matter if the basketball swish is real or sampled if its amplified so far out of proportion to reality? Maybe a little. But then you hear about the challenge of mixing the sound for a rowing race in the olympics. The course is long and winding. The rowers move fast. Worst of all, in order to capture video of the event for television, the race is surrounded by four motor boats and a helicopter, each of which makes enough noise to drown the sounds of the race out. Together, they produce a cacophony of sound to depress even the most truth-devoted sound engineer. So, what do they do? They go out earlier in the day, when the river is quiet, and record the sounds of a few random people rowing. Then they mix the sound, layer it with some cheering, and off they go.

By far my favorite story of fake sounds in sports is that the familiar sound of hooves hitting the ground in a gallop during a horse race is actually a slowed down clip of a herd of buffalo stampeding. The sound engineer who spilled that trick of the trade chuckled and said he thought everyone had probably been using the same clip for the last thirty years! I just love that. It reminds me of an episode of the Simpsons my friends and I loved to quote in high school. Some guys are filming a movie (yes, within a cartoon television show) and they need to film a cow. They use a horse. Someone asks, “Uh, sir, why don’t you just use real cows?” The reply is “Cows don’t look like cows on film. You gotta use horses.” Another question comes, “What do you do if you want something that looks like a horse?” And the payoff is “Uh, usually we just tape a bunch of cats together.”

Usually, when cats get taped together (metaphorically, of course) in sports sound engineering, it seems to be to heighten the reality of the sporting event for far away viewers. Towards the end of the podcast, another possible reason surfaces and it’s what I was left thinking most about after the show. One of the key interviewees in the show is a sound engineer who works for EA Sports on sports video games. Doing sounds for video games, he’s totally free to use whatever fake sounds he wants, and he takes full advantage of that. For example, in a boxing video game, he layers in the sound of celery snapping to evoke ribs breaking when a video game boxer takes a body blow. He points out that televised sports are actually competitive with his games. This is true. As a sports fan and a sports video game fan, there have been times when I’ve switched off a boring game to instead play a sports video game. Part of this competition is a sound effects arms race. The fake sounds in video games sound more “real” than the real sounds of miked sporting events. To keep their viewers, television stations must match the reality of its fake competition!

99% Invisible is a good show to subscribe to and this episode in particular was a great hour of listening. Check it out today!

Why Does One Player Wear a Different Color in Volleyball?

Dear Sports Fan,

I was watching the World Cup Championships of Men’s Volleyball the other day between the United States and Brazil. Why does one player wear a different colored jersey in Volleyball?

Thanks,
Nora

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If you’re interested in other Olympics sports, I’ve written about all the events and have worked on some schedules too. Find it all here.

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Dear Nora,

I’ve been wondering about the person in volleyball who wears a different colored jersey for years. I’ve known they were called a libero and that they played by a different set of rules but I didn’t know what they were. Now I do!

The libero is a defensive specialist by nature and by rule. He or she is usually the best player on the team at keeping the play alive by digging the opposing team’s best shots before they hit the floor. The libero, which literally means “free” in Italian, is something of a magical position because it is allowed, by rule, to ignore most of the normal rotation and substitution rules in volleyball. Like soccer, volleyball limits the number of substitutions allowed. Teams are allowed six substitutions per set in international play but the libero may substitute infinitely. This allows a team to protect their front-court specialists (usually really tall players who like to spike the ball but aren’t great at getting down on the floor and defending the other team’s spikes) from having to play the back line. The libero can also play the whole game while normal court players must rotate off and then back on after they serve.

As is often the case, with great freedom comes great restriction, and that is true with the libero. The libero is only allowed to play in the back line and cannot attempt any truly aggressive maneuvers like blocking or spiking a ball. The libero usually bumps the ball (hits it with her hands below her chest) but is also allowed to set the ball (hit it up gently using two open hands,) but only from more than three meters behind the net. If the libero sets the ball from closer than three meters, play is allowed to continue but the libero’s team has to just hit the ball over the net, they cannot try to spike it. The libero never gets to serve the volleyball. There can only be one libero, he or she is designated before the game by the coach (and by coming to the game wearing a different shirt,) and must remain the libero the entire game unless injured.

The libero is a recent addition to volleyball. It was added on April 20, 1998 by the president of FIVB, the organizing body of international volleyball. Soon after it was introduced, the libero rule was adopted by U.S. high schools and colleges who, in addition to the benefit of longer, more exciting rallies, found that another benefit of the rule was inclusion. Volleyball is a sport that rewards height. Smaller players cannot play nearly as well near the net as their taller counter-parts. The angles just don’t work well up there unless you’re tall enough to get your hands above the net. The libero gives an opportunity for at least the best of the shorter players to succeed. Said 5-foot-4 libero pioneer Kirstin Higareda to the Washington Post, “It’s a big deal. It’s really given shorter people the opportunity to play volleyball.”

It’s fun to think about it in the context of rule changes in other sports that are intended to offset an imbalance favoring either offensive or defensive play. In NHL hockey, the offensive zones were enlarged to create more scoring opportunities. In the NBA, the most obvious example is the introduction of the three-point shot to increase offense but other examples abound. Major League Baseball probably comes the closest to having a libero in the form of the designated hitter. The designated hitter or DH is a position who, like the libero, only plays one half of the game. Unlike the libero though, the DH only plays offense, batting regularly but having no responsibility in the field.

The libero has cultural parallels that reach far beyond sports. It seems like every group of people and every pastime has that one person who’s a little different; who plays by another set of rules. Shakespeare’s plays are full of these kind of characters, the most famous of which is probably Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In a deck of cards, there’s four of every card plus a couple of jokers. The unique character is called the fool in some traditional English dance forms like rapper and molly. Every group of friends needs a good oddball, just like every volleyball team needs a good libero. So, if you’re ever trying to remember what a libero is, just remember: a libero in volleyball is just like Ol’ Dirty Bastard was in Wu Tang… except less offensive.

Groan inducingly yours,
Ezra Fischer

Why Don't They Race the Last Stage of the Tour de France?

Dear Sports Fan,

Something a little strange happens on the last stage of the Tour de France: the riders drink champagne. Why is this? What is going on? Why don’t they race the last stage of the Tour de France?

Thanks,
Julio

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Dear Julio,

You’re absolutely right, the last stage of the Tour de France isn’t much of a race and some of the cyclists will have champagne in hand during the race. The Tour de France is a 21 stage race held over 23 days. The total distance of the course is 2,276 miles and the overall result of the Tour is the cumulative time it takes to complete all 2,276 of these miles. The primary reason why the last stage is largely ceremonial is because the standings are almost always set in stone by the time the riders get to the last day. For instance, this year, the leader, Vincenzo Nibali is 7:52 ahead of the second place rider, Jean-Christophe Peraud.

The time gaps between second and third and third and fourth are much closer — each around a minute. This leads us to the second reason why the last stage is not often the setting for any real racing: the course. The course of the last stage varies from tour to tour but it is almost always easier than a normal stage. It is flat and it ends with several loops around city streets in Paris with the finish line on the historic Champs-Élysées. On this type of course, winning the stage by more than a few seconds is almost impossible, even if the riders were to try to do so. The main way that cyclists pick up time on one another in the Tour de France is by making sprints up mountains that their competitors literally cannot force their bodies to keep up with. Cycling is a brutal sport because you usually can’t win by being more clever than your rivals and you usually can’t lose unless your body hurts so badly that it simply refuses to keep up with the winner. This isn’t to say that there are no tactics in cycling — there are — but they all involve applying pain to rivals. There’s just no way to do this on a flat stage.

The third reason why they don’t race the last stage of the Tour de France is tradition. To try to improve your overall standing in the last stage is thought to be highly uncouth and against the ethics of the sport. How can top-flight, insanely competitive athletes put up with a tradition that involves not trying? It’s perhaps not as rare as one might think, especially in situations where the chances of success are very low — where the game is basically over. This happens in American Football when the team leading the game has the ball and because of the minutiae of how the clock works, doesn’t really need to do anything to win. In this case they “kneel it out” — simulating plays by hiking the ball to the quarterback and then kneeling down. In NBA basketball, it’s common for a trailing team to intentionally foul the leading team in the last couple minutes of the game because, although they give up free throws, they stop the clock which gives them a better chance to catch up. Teams that are down by more than 10 points or so don’t normally do this, even in elimination playoff games where there is no competitive reason to give up. Nonetheless, the power of tradition, professional ethics, and social mores outweighs the competitive truth that .00001% chance of winning is better than 0%.

This doesn’t mean that the last stage of the Tour de France is a bore. It’s not. The last ten or fifteen minutes of the race are fascinating and exciting! While the overall standings won’t change, it is extremely prestigious to win the last stage of the tour. Teams with sprinting specialists who have survived the mountains of the tour will be desperately trying to set them up to win the last stage. The way a team can help a sprinter is by racing really, really fast (but not as fast as he can go) in front of him until the very last moment when he bursts out from behind his teammates and powers himself up to almost 50 mph. As a consequence of all these teams attempting to lead their sprinters out at precisely the right moment, the peloton (large group of cyclists) looks like this massive, lunatic monster that is trying to burst out of its own skin. It’s a sight to behold.

The final stage of the 2014 Tour de France will air live on NBCSN beginning at 9:00 a.m. EDT, Sunday July 27. Tune in at 9:00 for pageantry and scenery but if you want to see the final sprint, 12:45 p.m. EDT might be a good time. The race is predicted to end somewhere between 1 and 1:20 p.m. EDT.

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

Understanding Tour de France TV Graphics – Department Numbers

Dear Sports Fan,

While watching LIVE broadcast from Tour de France, from time to time there is a note with the name of place, city where particular racers are. And there is always a number in brackets. And I’m wondering, what does that number mean?

Best Regards,
Michal

Tour de France Number — What does the 88 mean?

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Dear Michal,

Thanks so much for your question and for sending a screenshot of the TV graphic you’re asking about. I had no idea what those numbers are but this morning, I woke up and searched around on the internet for a while and I think I’ve figured it out.

The number in brackets next to the name of the town the Tour de France riders are racing through is the department of France the town is in. For example, in the image here, the riders are traveling through Saint-Etienne-les-Remiremont. Saint-Etienne-les-Remiremont is a small commune or township in France which is 70% covered by forest and has around 1,500 households in it. It sounds like a very nice place except for the periodic tragic floods it withstands due to being at the base of a water-system from a glacial lake in the mountains above it. The town was first settled in 870 by a monastery of women. Most importantly to our discussion though is that it is within the Vosges department.

A department is one of the tiered level of regional government in France: regions, departments, and communes in order of size. The history of the department is fascinating. It was created during the French Revolution and was intended to be a rational way of dividing the country. Each of the 83 (there are now 96) departments was designed so that its farthest inhabitants would still only be a day’s trip on horseback from the capital of the department and its borders were intentionally drawn across traditional boundaries to break up older political identities. The departments were named after geographic features instead of ethnic or political ones. A pessimist would say that this was because the leaders of the French revolution had recently seen just how vulnerable a government can be if it can’t control its people but an optimist would reply back that a certain amount of central control and assimilation is necessary to establish the identity of any nation.

Of course, at this point, all we’re trying to do is enjoy watching the Tour de France on television! Today’s stage 20 will travel through the department of Dordogne [24,] so watch out for the number 24 as you go! If you want to know more about Dordogne or almost any department of France, you can go to its website which is usually www.cg[department number].fr. Dordogne’s is www.cg24.fr.

Thanks for reading and enjoy the rest of the Tour,
Ezra Fischer

Understanding Tour de France TV Graphics

I’ve been watching the Tour de France since I was a little kid and it’s still often hard for me to figure out what the heck is going on during its television broadcast. A bicycle race is a complex thing. There are dozens of riders, riding in teams of nine, each with different uniforms and riding with different goals in mind. The riders start each day in a big clump, called the peloton, but before long, they have split up into groups that may be miles apart from one another. The television coverage jumps from group to group with cameras on motorcycles and helicopters. The announcers do their best to keep viewers informed about who and what they’re watching at any given moment, but even they sometimes have a hard time (remember that they, like us, are elsewhere watching the race unfold on screens,) telling the difference between one powerful tiny cyclist and another powerful tiny cyclist. Added to all this chaos are graphics on the top and bottom of the TV screen packed full of information. If you learn how to read these, they can actually help you keep track of what’s going on. Let’s go through a couple screenshots from yesterday’s stage.

Okay, there’s a lot going on here. Start with the obvious. We’ve got two dudes with their shirts undone, wearing spandex, and bicycling really, really hard. Forget all that, let’s focus on the information at the top and bottom of the screen.

On the top left is a black and white checkered flag and a distance, 5.9 miles. The checkered flag denotes the finish line, just like it does in car racing, and the distance is how far the cyclist leading today’s stage of the race is from the finish line. The Tour de France is broken up into 21 days or stages of racing. Each stage has its own winner but the person with the lowest combined time at the end is the overall winner.
Continuing on from the top left, the rest of the information at the top shows how the riders have broken up during the day of racing. We can tell that two cyclists (maybe these two guys,) are leading this stage of the race. The next group of riders is fourteen strong and includes a rider wearing a yellow jersey, which is an honor only the leader of the overall race (at the end of yesterday’s stage) is given. A minute behind the front pair, and somewhere behind the group of fourteen (usually they’re pretty good at getting timing on all the riders, but this was going up a steep, winding mountain, and I guess they lost track of some of it) is another group of three riders. Behind them is poor Mister Gadret, cycling all alone, and behind him is the peloton. The peloton is a name used to refer to the biggest group of riders on the road. At the start of each stage, there is only the peloton and everyone is in it. Sometimes though, by the end, there isn’t a group big enough to be referred to in that way. The race has broken the peloton.
I mentioned at the start that not all the riders in the Tour de France have the same goals. In addition to the yellow jersey of the overall winner, there are other prizes to fight for. One of them is the white jersey competition for the best young rider. How young do you have to be to qualify for this competition? You must be under 26. At the bottom of the screen, the scroller is showing the standings for the white jersey. Michal Kwiatkowski is in third place, only a minute and thirty eight seconds behind the leader. That’s a minute and thirty eight seconds overall, not in today’s stage.

Let’s try another:

This is earlier in the race — there’s 42 kilometers left, which even I know is more than 5.9 miles.
The race has yet to develop and there are a string of solo riders out in front of the main group, the peloton, which still includes the yellow jersey clad overall leader of the tour.
In this shot, you can see that each of the riders has a time next to his name at the top. The times are all how far behind they are from the rider leading this stage. So, L. Mate is only 13 seconds behind J. Bakelants and a 1:34 behind the lead not 1:34 behind J. Bakelants and 2:55 behind the leader.
Down at the bottom, the scroll is simply reiterating the information at the top, showing that the third chase group, which we know from the top consists of J. Pineau, is 2:40 behind the leader, A. De Marchi.

The Tour de France is the ultimate challenge for its riders but it doesn’t have to be for its viewers. I hope these pointers about how to make sense of the TV graphics will help you enjoy watching the Tour de France.

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!

Sports Envy — Strange Televised Sports in Europe

One of the things I love about the Olympics is the totally obscure sports that pop up for a few weeks every four years before disappearing into the mist. Aimlessly clicking through channels in my hotel room in Genoa the other night I came across perhaps the second most obscure professional televised sport I’ve ever seen: floor hockey on roller skates.

It was awesome. Fast moving, exciting, competitive, and totally ridiculous. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s the fact that I associate roller skates (not blades, those are definitely the 1990s) so strongly with the crew-cut 1950s and floor hockey so strongly with gym class in high school. In any event, it was really hard to take them seriously but it was fun too.

It was pretty clear that the culture of Italian professional roller hockey shares more with Italian soccer than the Canadian/American/International hockey culture of the NHL. These guys were diving left and right!

As far as I could tell, the rules were not too far from ice hockey rules but less permissive of contact. No body checking, for sure. There were power plays when a foul was committed although there were also cards (blue though, not yellow or red) handed out for flagrant fouls. The most obvious difference, aside from the surface, was that the sticks were a blend of sticks you would find in ice hockey and field hockey, with shorter, more rounded blades.

Hopefully in Rome I will find some more strange sports to report on. Until then,
Ezra

Winter Olympics: All About Ice Dancing

All About Ice Dancing

Ice dancing has its roots in ballroom dancing. It was a demonstration event in the 1968 Olympics in Grenoble and then became an official medal Olympic sport in 1976 in Innsbruck. Historically, ice dancing has taken a back seat to pairs figure skating, but this year, there is a lot of buzz about ice dancing at the Olympics because Americans Meryl Davis and Charlie White of the United States are favored to win a gold medal, a feat no American ice dancing couple has ever accomplished.

How Does Ice Dancing Work?

In ice dancing, the man and woman dance together to the rhythm of the music. There is an emphasis on dancing while holding each other or at least being very close to each other (no more than two arm-lengths apart). Ice dancing differs from pairs skating in ice dancing’s different rules for lifts and spins and the exclusion of throws and jumps. For example, in ice dancing, the man, while lifting his partner, may not lift his arms above his head. In ice dancing, “half-turns” are permitted, while in pairs skating, multi-revolution jumps are allowed.

There are two segments in ice dancing: the short program and the free program. In the short program, the dancers must dance a required pattern for half of the program and may use their own choreography with specific assigned elements for the other half of the program. The program’s theme or rhythm is given to the dancers, but they may choose their own music. In the free dance, the dancers choose their own music, rhythms, and themes, and create their own choreography. They are given specific elements, such as step sequences, lifts, dance spins, and twizzles. Usually, dancers try more difficult positions in order to gain more points.

Why do People Like Watching Ice Dancing?

People enjoy watching ice dancing because it combines the disciplines of ice skating with dance. There are many types of music, including 1930s standards, Broadway musicals, traditional folk music, classical music, and contemporary pop music. Ice dancing is romantic, with both partners skating close to each other and totally trusting one another. The costumes that the ice dancers wear add to the artistry of their dances. As the dancers athletically and artistically float along the ice, they create a beautiful visual story for the audience to enjoy. If you are or have been a recreational ballroom dancer or ice dancer, as I have, watching the best of the best ice dancers is a thrill. And if you haven’t ever tried dancing or ice dancing, you still will be drawn into the talents of the athletes along with their graceful movements, lovely costumes, wonderful music, and stories they tell.

How Dangerous is Ice Dancing?

Ice dancing is dangerous because of the proximity between the two partners. If the dancers are not careful, it is easy for one person to trip over another person’s skate or get gashed by a sharp blade. Because of the lifts involved, there is also potential for injury.

What’s the State of Gender Equality in Ice Dancing?

Since each ice dance team involves a man and a woman, we can give a plus to having men and women participate equally in the event. The content of the ice dance itself usually conforms to traditional gender roles and themes.

What are Some Olympic Ice Dancing Stories?

Ice dancing was developed in the 1930s in Great Britain and many of the competitions were won by British teams. In the 1960s, Eastern European skaters changed the style of ice dancing, demonstrating more speed. In the 1970s, the Soviets developed a theatrical style of ice dancing, incorporating ballet and narrative themes. In Sarajevo in 1984, Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, from Great Britain, won gold with perfect 6.0’s in presentation with a theme danced to Ravel’s Bolero. By the 1990’s the majority of ice dancers were dancing theatrically-styled dances rather than ballroom. Since then, ice dancing has shifted between theatrical dancing and ballroom dancing. Since 2000, ice dancers from North America have been more competitive. Tanith Belbin/ Ben Agosto from United States won silver in 2006 Olympics, and Tessa Virtue/ Scott Moir of Canada won gold in 2010 Olympics.

This year, all eyes are on the American team Meryl Davis and Charlie White, who grew up living within 10 minutes of each other and have skated together since they were in elementary school. When you watch them ice dance, you will see how well they know and respect each other and what an amazing, talented, and compatible team they are. Their closest rivals are the Canadian team Virtue and Moir, another exciting pair having skated together for a long time.