Classic Sports Thursday: The Greatest and a Scottish Clambake

A full length of a FINA regulation long-course swimming pool is 50 meters, or just over 164 feet.  The length of a short-course (indoor) FINA pool is 25 meters, or just over 82 feet, about 10 feet shorter than a FIBA basketball court (just two inches short of 92 feet).

Michael Phelps is now regarded as the greatest Olympian of all time, both Ancient and Modern, with more victories in individual competition than anyone else.  But this incident at the 2012 Alfred Dunhill Links Championship, the European equivalent of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am for celebrities, put the greatest Olympian ever's accomplishments to full fruition.

At Kingsbarns Golf Links in Scotland, which next year will host the Women's Open Championship, Mr. Phelps, playing as an amateur with Paul Casey, made his second shot on the sixth, a driveable Par 4, 53 yards away with a putter.  This shot ended up as one of golf's most memorable shots of the year.

Talk about an Olympian task...

It's come to my attention that the Summer Olympics apparently start tonight; Note that I say "apparently," because, well, you know - Rio. If you're not sure why that matters, let Charles Pierce remind you with this fine article from a couple of days ago. Now, when it comes to politics, I don't agree with Pierce at all, but he's still a helluva writer, and when he's right it's that much more entertaining. Anyway, read it all, but here are some highlights:

The Games should have been pulled from Rio a year ago. The Games should have been pulled from Rio on the entirely practical grounds that the government of Brazil, and almost all of its institutional public infrastructure, is a pile of splinters on the ground. The Games should have been pulled from Rio on the grounds of human decency because the optic of staging a plutocratic athletics hootenanny in the middle of some of the worst grinding poverty in any hemisphere is enough, in the words of the late Molly Ivins, to gag a maggot.

The list - I'd call it a laundry list, but I doubt any laundry could clean this mess up - of Olympic shortcomings reads like a who's who of calamity. Just a short list would include the following:

• Zika;
• The deaths of two people when the Olympic bike path fell into the sea;
• The venues for rowing and sailing and open-water swimming "are overgrown biology experiments containing God alone knows what and also more than a few independently operating anonymous arms and legs;
• An "uninhabitable" Olympic Village;
• Threats of violence and ecological devastation;
• Threats of strange viruses;
• The possibility of strikes by police;
• The dismissal of the company providing security screening last week;
• Human sewage;
• Unclaimed body parts washing up on the site of the beach volleyball competition.

As I said, this is just a partial list; your results may vary. But at least there won't be a condom shortage.

I was in Chicago on the day that the Games were given to Rio; the country was still in the first flush of Obamamania, and everywhere you could see signs promoting Chicago as the obvious choice. We'd flown into town just a couple of hours before the voting was scheduled to be held, and the cost of watching on local TV as the city was eliminated on the first ballot was, as they say, priceless. As was the sight of all the discarded Olympics signs from the rally in Daley Plaza laying in the gutter later that day. But just because Chicago failed didn't mean the International Olympic Committee had to give the Games to Rio. What kind of an organization would do something that stupid?

Speaking of human sewage, let’s talk for a moment about the IOC. In addition to trying to sell the world on a Roger Corman movie masquerading as a sporting and cultural extravaganza, this pack of buffet grazers so completely bungled its handling of the Russian doping scandal that it managed to make Vladimir Putin seem like the wronged victim of capricious authoritarian regimes. That’s quite a feat.

Now, I know there are a lot of you out there who are probably looking forward to the Olympics. You don't care about all the politics behind the scenes; you're interested in the grace of the athletes, the drama of competition, the stirring human interest stories. And for your sake, I hope this things aren't so bad that the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat can still show through. However:

These are Games that never should have happened. No matter what glories we may see over the next 18 days, the Olympic Games of Rio remain a reckless operation run by people who never get near the social problems into which they have dropped their party. Almost as revolting as the Games themselves is the inevitable whitewash of all the problems that will occur if, somehow, the entire city of Rio doesn’t vanish under the waves over the next couple of weeks. We will hear nothing but amazing stories about “overcoming adversity,” and how the plucky Brazilians managed to pull off a logistical miracle after an (admittedly) rocky start. Then the world will leave. The favelas will fill again. The government will continue to be a phantom. The fishermen will keep getting killed and the flesh-eating bacteria will once again, well, eat flesh.

It almost makes American politics seem palatable, doesn't it?

Note that I say "almost."

Classic Sports Thursday - remembering 1984

It's only fitting Classic Sports Thursday goes back 30 years to the Olympics . . .

BREAKING . . . .Pauley Pavilion, the venue in question for today's article, was flooded by a water main break in California. The main floor is damaged and will be out of commission as a temporary floor will likely be used on campus for the time being.

With the Soviets out of commission at the Olympics, Edwin W. Pauley Pavilion (the gymnastics venue) seemed to become an East Bloc battle of Romania, the sole survivors from the boycott. What we didn't know then was the Romanians were falsifying ages just to compete, as it took 18 years, the fall of the Iron Curtain, and an innocent marriage licence application in Cobb County, Georgia to confirm the truth. (Daniela Silivas entered senior gymnastics competitions at 13 when the minimum age had just been raised to 15; after her engagement to Scott Harper, and during the time leading to her wedding, she admitted the the age falsification, as she was 31, not 33 as her international competition passport said, in order to comply with Cobb County authorities.)

Yet when Romanian coach Bela Karolyi defected on a tour of the United States in 1981, he and wife Marta settled in Texas. Little did they know how a 13-year old rising star from West Virginia, the daughter of Jerry West's teammate on the 1959 West Virginia basketball team, and a Hershey's National Track and Field Games participant would become the most celebrated project, with recovering from arthroscopic knee surgery just six weeks beforehand, and with a superhuman recovery, she made it back to the Games. Little did we know the legacy that sixteen year-old did thirty years ago, on August 3, 1984. She defeated Ekaterina Szabo with that perfect ten on the vault, by the slimmest of margins, and being nicknamed the matriarch of American gymnastics.

How would we have known Mary Lou Retton now, at 46 and the mother of rising American elite gymnast McKenna Kelley, who tied for the win at an elite meet in February?

We celebrate her victory at Pauley Pavilion this week.

US-USSR hockey, 1960 Winter Olympics

A little late perhaps, but I just ran across this footage today: CBS' coverage of the first period of the US - USSR hockey game at the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, CA, with - I believe - Bud Palmer at the mic for the play-by-play.  (There are several versions available; this one appears to be the complete game.)

A few observations: first, Bud Palmer isn't exactly an unbiased announcer, is he?  But I always enjoyed listening to his work.

As was the case with the 1980 Miracle on Ice, this isn't the gold medal game; the medals were decided based on the overall record of the teams in the medal round.  The US finished with a perfect 5-0 record in that round, followed by Canada at 4-1, and the Soviet Union at 2-2-1.  The US actually clinched the gold with their 9-4 victory over Czechoslovakia the next day.  (By the way, the corners on the ice surface are really deep, aren't they?  It makes the rink look almost rectangular.)

And did you notice the sunshine streaming across parts of the ice and the crowd?  Olympic regulations of the time required all events to be held outside (or, more precisely, they couldn't be held "under a roof"); thus, Blyth Arena  was constructed with one complete side open (the one facing the camera).  The Olympic rings were attached via cables, and ropes were hung down in an effort to cut down on the sun's glare on the ice.  I don't know how you all feel about it, but I think it's kind of neat.  And with the success of the NHL's Winter Classic, why not have all the skating events outside?  The arena in Cortina for the 1956 games did this to great effect.*

*Not to mention it's appearance in the James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only.


Al Michaels, eat your heart out!  ◙


Cross-posted at It's About TV!

Wish I'd Written That

Now that the Olympics are over, maybe it's safe to share what I really think.  From Paul Lucas at Uniwatch:

Hmmm — artistry, theater, glitz, glamour, storytelling. Those are all perfectly valid terms, and they do indeed seem to be central to figure skating’s ethos, and even its scoring rules, which are completely subjective and include grades for “Composition and Choreography” and “Interpretation and Timing.” All of which reinforces a simple point I’ve been making for years (and feel obliged to make again, now that the winter Olympics are taking place):

Figure skating is not a sport.

Paul goes on to answer a few objections he knows people might have to his opinion - or, as I would put it, statement of fact:

Having winners and losers makes skating a competition, not a sport. Lots of things are competitions but not sports: ballroom dancing contests, battles of the bands, chess tournaments, American Idol, video games, fantasy baseball leagues, Uni Watch design contests, bake-offs, and so on. At least one of those things is athletic, but none of those things is a sport, and neither is figure skating. 

(Of course, we could probably say that about half the events in today's Winter Olympics, but never mind that.)

Read the whole thing here.  ◙

Владимир Путин is right about Banni

Proverbs 22:6, "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it," was posted on letterheads of the parochial school where I was raised.  It effectively warns us that teaching children from a Biblical worldview matters.

Meanwhile, the President's decision on his Delegation to the Olympic Games raised furore, as he chose sexual deviants in an attempt to advance his humanist, anti-Christian propaganda that we have seen throught his Presidency, a complete opposite to the previous Administration, whose Olympic delegations have featured a man who made the Great Outdoors into his business, the man who would have painted the CCCP locker rooms for USA-CCCP game pink, baseball's Iron Man, and winners of the Daytona 500 and Indianapolis 500.

His reasoning was to protest Russia's law that prohibits sexual deviants and their from teaching propaganda promoting their sinful lifestyle that is against nature's law and nature's God, as David Barton called it in our SC Citizens for Life Proudly Pro-Life Banquet last month, to youth.  The law makes sense when you think of it from a Proverbs 22 perspective.  What the Russians said in the law that has the President and others protesting was children must be kept safe from harmful propaganda being pushed by activists that want to normalise and promote ideas that are against God and the things He established such as pedophilia and the entire playbook of sexual deviancy activists; agenda.  As the old saying goes, "O be careful of your eyes (and ears) what to see (and hear)."

Protecting children from the filth of propaganda pushes is crucial, and that's what the Russian law in question does.  Children should be trained on a solid Biblically based moral ground, and when when Russia has it right and the President has it wrong, we have a country on the downfall.  We have seen the results of rewarding child molesters in college (Sandusky), and we cannot pass the bill that would reward child molesters as a federally protected class;  we must teach the standards our Founding Fathers were taught, not the humanists. And now look at the push to force Olympians to conform to humanist worldview, and in effect abolish Christianity.

This morning following my morning workout, I saw a report on Common Core, or as an educator calls it, “Commie Core,” as it is also a fight against textbooks attempting to advance filth. The newfound federalisation shows its true colours in advancing left-wing propaganda when mathematics books were used to sell home the liberal point that Vice President Gore should have won the 2000 election. I saw after being forced to leave parochial school by family, in the first of the years at the same school as The Governess when I was bullied to submission physically, the math books were promoting Environmental Propaganda of the Greens. Folks, this problem isn't new -- but we cannot be pushing left-wing propaganda in our textbooks, especially math books.  It is the intentional dumbing down that has helped other nations surpass us, and make us the laughingstock of the world.

What will liberals think next to advance their propaganda and make us into the New CCCP?  Sadly, Владимир Путин is right about the absurdity of the sexual deviancy activists.  They, however, are making a protest because they want to force their view of the world that would shut churches down.   ◙

Olympics Preview: Interview with Marc Ryan, author of From Berlin to Beijing and London: A Look at TV and the Olympics

My interview this week at It's About TV is a return engagement with Marc Ryan.  Back in November we talked about his book on TV coverage of the JFK assassination; this time we discuss his book From Berlin to Beijing and London: A Look at TV and the Olympics.  I think you should take a look at it, but then I'm prejudiced.

But did you know that the first telecast of the Olympics was the Summer Games in 1936?  Yep, it's true.  And you would have known that if you'd read my article here. ◙

Reflecting on the flame

Thoughts from the five-ring circus as everyone comes home and the Paralympics are coming (great report on Speed Center Sunday about the Italian handcycle competitor).
    
219 Million at an Event? Comcast claims 219 million watched the Games of the XXX Olympiad, the most watched event in history. Of course, that's spread over 19 days, and coverage was from early dawn (9 AM GMT in some cases) all the way to highlights at midnight ET, including the three days of football tournament coverage before the Opening Ceremony (which we learned only one broadcast team was assigned to football, and only to selected women's games – the men's tournament and most women's games had a Formula One-style broadcast setup that left NBCSN's MLS broadcast teams frustrated.). And it turns out Comcast edited out pieces from the Opening and Closing Ceremony of the Games in question!

Attacking God is Acceptable? During the Closing Ceremony of the aforementioned event (I skipped it fortunately after photos were shown from the event), the theme of the worst music of British history (compared to what we discuss on Our Word) was paraded. Yes, some of the acts were over the top, and some acts were pale, but to push humanism during the event was absolutely appalling when a Communist and Humanist promoting song was played on a recording with children performing sign language to this tune that is acceptable in our society, but if you dare push serious Händel work, you will be censored. It is a sad state of affairs when Händel was ignored, but Lennon was deemed acceptable.

We need to pick it up! A few years ago, CBS shot a pilot for a proposed local adaptation of the ITV stunt show The Cube, an extremely hard game that nobody had completed the seventh, and final, level of the show. Well, one did. Mo Farah, the eventual 5,000 and 10,000m gold medalist at the Olympics, became the first. Is it time this format, with an Olympic champion being the only one to conquer, be picked up for United States television?

Flooring It. Aly Raisman's victory in the women's gymnastics floor exercise event received accolades from Jewish media, and setting it to הבה נגילה (Hava Nagila), a Hebrew folk song, made some think it was a slap at organisers who had refused a moment of silence in memory of the eleven Israeli athletes killed during München 40 years ago by Arab terrorists. It had been used twelve years ago during the 2000 “Summer” Games (held during the spring) by another gymnast, Екатерина Лобазнюк (Россия). But wasn't there a controversy in 1996 when the United States gymnastics team pulled one of its members off the floor because her floor piece was Daniel Emmett's “Dixie” (and that was at the Georgia Dome, the true Bird's Nest (Falcons' Nest actually) of Olympic Games lore)?

Is Title IX Spelling The End of the American Male? Is the government's anti-male policy in schools resulting in the demise of American male sports while the women's sports are growing in winning at the Olympics? We saw it in football, gymnastics, and volleyball most notably, but athletics and swimming are not far behind. ◙

Censored!

I warned friends Friday morning that the Opening Ceremony, which was set for 3:12 PM ET, would not be broadcast in the United States, and only a highlights show would air after the fact.

As it turned out, those words were prophetic. According to BBC reports that were posted as it happened, the Olympic Cauldron was lit around 0035 (7:35 PM ET). And it turns out Comcast (US rights holder, and owner of NBC) had blacked out a tribute to the victims of the 7 July 2007 terrorist attacks in London from the edited broadcast, which effectively made this a "highlights package" while making the East Coast wait until after bedtime to show the cauldron being lit, which took place at dinner time.

And the Socialist propaganda of the opening ceremony reminded me of what has sadly happened to the Olympic Movement -- those who oppose the Far Left's worldviews are censored (such as the Cobb Galleria Centre, set to be an Olympic venue until a certain sexual deviant activist came along and swooped them away, even covering the torch away from pro-family counties) in too many situations now. ◙

The Olympics, brought to you by the UN

I haven't paid much attention to the Summer Olympics for years (and the Winter Olympics only pique my curiosity for hockey and curling), but there's a difference between indifference and contempt, and for me, the London Olympics are more or less morphing from the former to the later.  Remember 1972?  They'd just as soon you didn't, you know.

Considering how much the International Olympic Committee resembles the United Nations, should we really be surprised at such a spineless organization?  ◙

On the 8-Olympiad Anniversary of a famous moment . . .

This should be a Classic Sports column, but considering the importance of the former video and the importance of the latter, they are coinciding with each other.

February 22, 1980, at Olympic Center, now known as Herb Brooks Arena. We've heard the famous finish, but have rarely hard the crucial moment of Al Michaels' famous call, which was edited for broadcast.



In 2006, Disney (by then the parent company of American Broadcasting) traded Mr. Michaels to Universal (owned by General Electric and Vivendi; in 2011, it is now in control of Comcast and General Electric) for Walt Disney's first character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, which was owned by Universal. ◙