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Olympics and medal tallies

The other thing I will do when I take control of the Olympics is to ban any publication of medal tallies by nation (regardless of whether won sitting or standing).

It seems to me to be an irrelevant statistic. Yet people seem to see it as important to know if China "medalled" more than USA. Why? Does it prove that communism is better than capitalism? Or that eating a lot of rice is good for sport?

National success at the Olympics seems to relate to:

* the size of the population -- a big population will have more "natural talent" than a small one
* having the sport so popular in your country so that potential champions are likely to be identified while young (e.g. Australians can easily find their talented swimmers and Norwegians their skiiers but not vice versa)
* the amount of money spent on the training of potential champions and the purchase/development of high tech equipment
* having lots of different events in sports that your country is good at (gymnastics with a ribbon/ball/etc, different weight divisions in weight lifting, all the different strokes in swimming) rather than having just one or two events (why not have 50kg men's soccer, 60kg men's soccer, 7-aside soccer, etc)

Reviving some historic sports for the Olympics

Having discussed at some length all the sports I would throw out of the Olympics, it's worth considering if anything should be added back in.

Having considered the list of dropped Olympic sports, I think a couple are worthy to come back.

I think golf could come back. It's very similar to archery. It tests your ability to get an object to a target using a piece of equipment.

I think tug-a-war (provided it's one-on-one and not a team sport) could come back. It is a test of strength similar to weight lifting.

We could also look at inventing some new sports. If we are happy to lift and pull weights, why not push them? International weight pushing? Think of all those trolley boys in training in the supermarkets of the world!

What about running up stairs? Swimming upstream (we've got the whitewater kayaking course available for the event)?

Olympics - a celebration of the extent of human ability?

I think Jim is heading in the right direction with his views on what is and isn't a "sport" in terms of inclusion in the Olympics Games. I agree entirely that sports that are judged on "style" should not be there. Out go gymnastics, diving, synchronised swimming, etc.

However, I would go further. I would argue that the Olympics is really a test and celebration of what the human body is capable of. How fast can we run? How high can we jump etc?

So on that basis, the following sports will be the fundamentals at my Olympics: running, jumping, throwing, weight lifting, etc. All the sports that test how "good" can a human body do something.

However, while swimming fits this category (how fast can a human travel through water), a lot of its events will have to go. The only events I will permit are "freestyle" (in the original meaning of "any style"). I don't think it is quite so interesting to find out how fast the human body can travel through the water while restricting the movements to conform to the rules of breaststroke, etc. Backstroke goes until someone can persuade me that running backwards would make a great Olympic sport too.

Similarly walking will be right out. It's one thing to run, but quite another to not quite run in a very silly way! Why not have hopping as an Olympic sport? Or the 800m cartwheeling?

Then we come to the category of "how fast/high/etc can the human body go with the aid of some equipment?". This brings in things like the pole vault, cycling, rowing, archery, shooting. The problem with these sports is twofold. Firstly we have to argue about what restrictions apply to the equipment: size, design, etc, which may advantage one competitor over another. Secondly the risk is that the competition becomes about the technology for the equipment and not the abilities of the competitor. But then arguably, unless we return to the classical Olympics where they competed naked, we also should worry about the clothing and footwear used in many of the athletic sports and swimming as having the same problems as equipment. Since I like watching cycling, I think I will allow the "equipment sports" into the Olympics, provided the equipment is solely powered by the competitor. The kerin will have to go from the cycling (no following a motorbike). Archery is in, but shooting is out (gunpowder provides the power). If we have shooting, we'd really have to open up the Olympics to the use of machine guns and tanks.

Then we come to "team" sports. I am not sure that team sports really have a place in the Olympics, they are really more "games" than tests of human ability. Out goes football, handball, basketball, softball, baseball, hockey, volleyball.

What about team events in things like running, swimming, cycling, rowing, sailing? Hmm, they tend to measure a composite human ability rather than individual ability. I am a bit undecided about them, but I think they should go in favour of individual events. The catch with rowing is that you need two people (one oar for each side), but then there is sculling and canoeing and kayaking which can all be done with one person so rowing bites the dust under this policy.

Having disposed of team events/sports, what about the one-on-one sports? Table tennis, taekwondo, etc. My feeling is that the ball games are just that: games, so out go tennis, table tennis and badminton. Boxing, wrestling, fencing, taekwondo and judo are measuring the human ability to kill another person, but in these civilised times, we seem to worry about the competitors being killed and so we create a lot of complicated rules for how you can sort-of-pretend-to-kill another person, which gives rise to the various beat-em-up sports. For example, TKD invites you to kick people's heads but not punch their heads. Really they have to go. Or if they stay, lets introduce a new event freestyle killing (no rules and to the death).

So, I think I have considerably reduced the number of events in the Olympics to those which satisfy the intrinsic requirement: that they measure and celebrate the ability of the human body to do something measurably better than anyone has done them before. I have probably eliminated everybody's favourite sport, including a few of my own, but they can run their own international competitions.

Now all I have to do is get onto an Olympic committee or two and implement my masterplan.

Loan $25 to change lives through Kiva

I've signed up and made some loans through Kiva. It's a programme of lending into the "third world" on a "hand up, not a hand out" principle. Basically you contribute US$25 (or multiples) towards a loan to help a farmer or market stall or ... to expand their activities. Most of the loans are around US$1000, but when you look at the Gross National Product (or other economic indicators) for those countries, you see that what is a relatively small sum of money to us represents a number of years of income in those countries.

There is no interest payable on these loans, and no guarantee that they will be repaid (although statically most are repaid). So this is not an "investment" in any financial sense. It's investment in a better world.

kittens - so much joy

Our two kittens Sunny and Cloudy fill me with joy. Watching these two balls of fur travel at high speed around the house, destroying the furniture, the wallpaper and random pieces of paper is pure bliss. Bad news for the house, but good news for my heart.

Cadel Evans didn't win the Tour de France

Well, as a good Aussie, I suppose I should be sad that Cadel Evans didn't win le Tour.

But frankly he rode such a defensive race, I don't think he really deserved to win. Every day we got told that Cadel's strategy would be to ensure that none of the other GC contenders gained a time advantage over him. Never did anyone say "today's the kind of course in which Cadel should try to win the stage". That just didn't seem to be the strategy. I don't know if this strategy was Cadel's or the team management's, but it just didn't seem the strategy of a man wanting to win. It seemed the strategy of a man who would prefer to come second.

In constrast Carlos Sastre rode like a man who wanted to win. He took the yellow jersey after a great stage win and he hung onto it like glue, even to riding the "time trail of his life" after every commentator had pretty much said that he was a lousy time trialist and Cadel Evans would overtake him in the GC standings for sure in the time trial. Sastre deserved his overall win.

Correction, he deserves the win so long as he doesn't turn out to be yet-another-drug-cheat, which has tainted some past Tour results. Lets hope it was a clean win.

Official Sandwich of Trent

I notice that all around Brisbane billboards have appeared advertising Subway with the slogan "Official Sandwich of Trent" (or insert other given name of choice).

All I can say is "huh?".

Is it supposed to drive people called Trent into their stores? Is it supposed to drive all people not called Trent away? If the latter, it worked for me.

Medicare surcharge threshold and discrimation

Prior to last week's federal budget, the threshold for the Medicare surcharge was $50K for singles and $100K for couples. Now it is $100K for singles and $150K for couples. Isn't this discriminatory against couples?