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The modern Olympics can’t survive without flag-waving.
Archive for the ‘Sports’ Category
August 1st, 2012
Category: Sports
Olympics Badminton is organized so that a team can improve their odds of winning the tournament by losing the odd early match, which changes their seeding in the final rounds. Badminton rules also forbid “not using one’s best efforts to win a match” and “conducting oneself in a manner that is clearly abusive or detrimental [...]
July 28th, 2012
Category: Sports
The opening ceremony was a treat, with spectacle, humor, history and local tradition all mooshed together and then blown up. It was wonderfully free of militaristic posturing or scary mass unison use of people as automata , regrettably omitted knights in armor and King Arthur, and had a nice combination of British pride and self-deprecation, [...]
June 29th, 2012
The guiding principle of the University of California’s Berkeley campus intercollegiate athletics program is something called comprehensive excellence, an idea or at least a slogan originating in a report from decades back (that I now can’t find) that has resonated through years and years of pointing with pride and viewing with alarm. The idea was [...]
May 6th, 2012
Category: Health and Medicine, Sports
Among my most treasured possessions is a kindly worded hand-written note on personal stationery from Sir Roger Bannister, known in the small confines of my professional world mainly as one of the UK’s most respected neurologists. But of course the larger world knows him better for his extraordinary athletic achievement 58 years ago today. Here [...]
April 23rd, 2012
Category: Sports
This isn’t a sports blog, but I must briefly note what a thrilling thing the English Premier League has been in recent weeks, especially for the people of Manchester. Man City used to be so bad and so unpopular that an old joke ran as follows: City Fan calling the stadium ticket office: What time [...]
April 9th, 2012
Primitive tribes used to sacrifice people to trees and whatnot, but now the California hotbed of creativity, where the sacrifice of oak trees to football began, has inspired imitation in Virginia. Seen one tree, you’ve seen ‘em all, but a national championship is a joy forever until the next bunch of yahoo boosters ponies up [...]
March 24th, 2012
Category: Education policy, Sports
I don’t follow college basketball, but the enormous drain intercollegiate athletics puts on my school in very straitened circumstances has made me painfully aware of the mediocre performance of our money teams, football and men’s basketball, this season. That expense is asserted to bring all sorts of ineffable benefits to our academic program if it [...]
March 2nd, 2012
Category: Sports
What makes Americans special, and better than those unfortunate foreigners? So many things, but a few stand out as core values. Lots of guns? Maybe. Fox News and talk radio, a blessed deluge of ignorance and spite that makes Iranian mullahs and Berlusconi tear their hair in envy? And don’t forget our God-given right to [...]
February 16th, 2012
Here’s a truly odd observation from the usually-excellent Marc Ambinder. Writing about Jeremy Lin, Asian-Americans, and the Republican Party, Ambinder argues: If Republicans were to rid themselves of their anti-immigrant wing, or if they choose not allow their primaries to be controlled by it, there is no real reason why Asian-Americans can’t become a true swing [...]