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Timestamp: 2018-07-23 01:49:58
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Analysis | Team World
Does the Latest Russia Decision Make Sense?
February 3, 2018 February 3, 2018 / James Medhurst	/ Leave a comment
The McLaren Report and the Court of Arbitration for Sport
When the Court of Arbitration for Sport overturned the disqualifications and bans of 28 Russian athletes, the natural reaction was one of anger. It is hard to reconcile the decision with the McLaren Report, which concluded that Russia had been involved in state-sponsored manipulation of doping tests, during the last Winter Games in Sochi.
However, it is possible to make sense of it all, and it is important to do so, to ensure that the fundamental role of CAS is not undermined by public and media misunderstanding.
The answer is to appreciate the difference between legal conclusions about individuals and legal conclusions about groups. For example, imagine that the police are called to a house from which a gunshot has been heard. Inside the house, they find a body, the gun which fired the fatal shot, and two suspects. There are no fingerprints on the gun but it can be established that nobody else has entered or left the premises since the murder.
In this situation, we can be sure beyond reasonable doubt that one of the two suspects is guilty of murder, but there is no way to know which. If they were put on trial, the jury would have no choice but to acquit them both, even though one of them must be guilty.
The latest CAS decision does nothing whatsoever to undermine the main conclusions of the McLaren Report. The IAAF, the IPC and the IOC have all imposed bans on Russia in reliance on that report and, although aspects of these decisions have been litigated, Russia has never once challenged the factual basis of the McLaren Report before CAS.
It follows that the bans remain in force and, as far as CAS is concerned, there is no basis for questioning the reasoning behind them. The latest case was simply about observing a smoking gun, and trying to determine with certainty who has fired it and who has not. Nobody in court, not even Russia, was seriously arguing that it has not been fired at all.
Because Russia is still banned by the IOC, there is no reason to suppose that any of the affected athletes will be in Pyeongchang. The IOC must consider making exceptions for them, as it has done for other Russian athletes but, if it does, it will be rather a surprise.
In the long term, the most significant lesson for anti-doping is likely to be that national bans are an important weapon in the fight, which should probably be used more often, especially in cases where there is overwhelming evidence of national wrongdoing, but the evidence of guilt is not quite as strong for every specific individual who is involved.
Next: Apologies for the delay – part 2 of South Korea’s democratic transition is coming
When Genes Decided Gold…
January 29, 2018 January 29, 2018 / James Medhurst	/ Leave a comment
…and mountaineering was an Olympic sport
At the 1924 Winter Olympics, medals were awarded for mountaineering, or Alpinism as the Olympic organisers described it. The gold went to a 1922 expedition to Everest (above), which was led by Charles Granville Bruce, but also included George Mallory.
Most of the credit, and most of the medals, went to the British and Australian members of the team, and Nepal’s Tejbir Bura, who remains his country’s only Olympic medallist. The dozens of Sherpa porters were largely unheralded, except for a few who received medals at the insistence of the expedition, after seven had been killed in an avalanche.
Because It’s Still There
Sherpas have played a key role in Himalayan expeditions every since. Tenzing Norgay was one of the first to reach the summit of Everest in 1953, alongside Edmund Hillary of New Zealand. More recently, over 80% of the climbers who have scaled Everest 10 times or more are of Sherpa origin, including joint record holder, Apa Sherpa (below), who announced his retirement in 2011 after an astonishing 21st ascent of the peak.
Physical proximity clearly has a role to play, but there is evidence that there is more to Sherpa mountaineering success than geography alone. A range of recent studies have shown that Sherpa people are much more likely to have genes which make them better at processing oxygen efficiently, and make them better adapted to life at high altitudes.
So there do appear to be a small number of Olympic medallists who benefited, not only from an individual genetic advantage, but also from one related to their ethnic origin.
Among other things, this research shows that there is no conspiracy among scientists to ignore or suppress evidence for group-based differences. Examples do exist and, if few are found, it is not because nobody is looking for them, but because they are rare.
It also supports the idea that extreme environmental circumstances, which persist for thousands of years, are required before significant genetic differences can emerge.
It remains highly implausible that such group-based differences will explain Caribbean sprinting or East African distance running and, even where credible genetic differences are found to exist, as with height, they might not always predict Olympic performance.
The Sherpa studies have been thorough, methodical and procedurally sound, and raise the bar for research of this kind. It should no longer be considered acceptable to base scientific conjectures on a combination of speculation, political motivation and whimsy.
In 2010, a paper published in a creationist-leaning journal purported to explain why there are relatively few black swimmers. Compelling though the Sherpa research has been, it provides no reason whatsoever for journalists to take such silliness seriously.
Next: Part 2 of how South Korea became a democracy, just in time to host the Olympics
How the Olympics Brought Democracy to South Korea
January 29, 2018 / James Medhurst	/ Leave a comment
Part 1: Protest
There appears to be a new Olympic tradition, in which the host country impeaches its president months before hosting the Games. It happened to Dilma Rousseff of Brazil shortly before Rio, while Park Geun-hye of South Korea was removed in March 2017.
But even with this failure of leadership, South Korea has come a long way in the last 35 years. Park’s democratic credentials were still far better than those of Chun Doo-hwan (above), a general who took power in a military coup in 1979. His presidency was not subject to constitutional oversight, and could only be challenged by the bravery of the South Korean people, who went onto the streets in 1987 to protest his dictatorial rule.
In doing so, they honoured another Olympic tradition. There had been a similar protest by Mexican students before Mexico City held the 1968 Games, which the government met with violent reprisals. Dozens were killed and there were more than 1,000 arrests.
If this precedent created a sense of foreboding about the June Struggle, as the protest of 1987 became known, the events of seven years earlier made it even more ominous. After an anti-coup protest in 1980 (below), Chun had ordered troops to be dispatched and, when they inevitably fired on civilians, it resulted in a massacre killing hundreds.
The International Olympic Committee awarded the 1988 Games to Seoul at its 1981 Baden-Baden Congress. This was after Chun’s coup and the massacre which followed it, a decision which now seems astonishing. It is unclear why the IOC snubbed the more credible candidacy of Nagoya in Japan, but it seems in part to be because Nagoya made the same mistake as many a failed bid, before and since, of believing it had already won.
After a decade of financial calamities and political boycotts, and a terrorist attack, the Olympic Movement was arguably at the most precarious point in its history. Yet, newly led by the charismatic but single-minded Juan Antonio Samaranch, it chose to take a punt on a country which seemed to be on the brink of disaster, with little thought of the risk to itself, and with an even more callous disregard for the risk to South Korean lives.
By June 1987, many of the assorted noblemen and bureaucrats of the IOC must surely have regretted their decision. Their best hope was that Chun would show mercy but, as the world of sport would have taught them, form is the best guide to future results, and they knew that Chun’s form was to hold onto power at the expense of moral concerns.
If Samaranch, the smooth-talking diplomat, thought that he could charm his way out of this one, he was about to face his biggest test, certainly the one with the most at stake.
Next: An unusual sport makes an unusually good case for geographic genetic patterns
How Brazilian Shoes Explain the Olympics Part 2
July 24, 2016 July 30, 2016 / James Medhurst	/ Leave a comment
The Caribbean Sprinting Cluster
At the 2009 World Athletics Championships, the women’s 100m final (above) included four sprinters from Jamaica and two from the Bahamas. The athletes from the United States were the only two not from islands with populations of less than three million.
How could such small countries compete with the medal-producing miracle that is the US college system? Well, actually, they couldn’t. An even more amazing statistic is that seven of those eight finalists studied in the United States, including five of the six from Caribbean nations. Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, who won the race, was the only exception.
Until recently, the Caribbean strategy was not to develop Olympic quality athletes, but rather to make them good enough to get track scholarships to US universities. This will allow them to move up to international class at little cost to the countries of their birth.
The Craftier Games
One reason why so many of the region’s sprinters get picked up by American agents is its geographical proximity, which makes scouting them easier, but there is much more to it than that. When it comes to making life easy for agents, the Caribbean goes a lot further.
The key is the CARIFTA Games, a youth event similar to the Jamican Champs. Just like Champs, it is a magnet for scouts but, unlike Champs, athletes from all of the Caribbean take part. Much as recruiters from US colleges would like to spend many weeks cruising around small islands, they do not have time – CARIFTA means that they do not have to.
By accident or design, CARIFTA replicates the model of the Brazilian shoemakers. By co-operating and pooling resources, in a way which is attractive to those who can help them, they have all benefited. It succeeds because it is a cluster, not despite being one.
Of the six Jamaican and Bahamian sprinters in that 2009 final, all had competed at the CARITA Games and three had won the Austin Sealy Award for its outstanding athlete.
Savatheda Fynes, a star of the Bahamas’ Golden Girls relay team, did well at CARIFTA too but no scout picked her up. Fortunately, her high school coach got her a scholarship through her contacts. Going to school in the Bahamas is as useful for aspiring sprinters as going to Eton for aspiring British politicians (even if they may say that it is all genes).
It is romantic to believe that being small, and lacking in resources, confers some kind of advantage, for example that training on grass tracks is actually helpful. However, Kirani James (above left) succeeded only because he went to the University of Alabama, away from the grass tracks. James is another former winner of the Austin Sealy Award, and is a fine example of how CARIFTA is even more important for small nations like Grenada.
Jamaica has discovered that it does not need American help any more. Fraser-Pryce is one of a generation of Jamaican athletes trained at home by local coaches, many who have learned from their counterparts at US colleges. But hopefuls from other islands will still go overseas. Shaunae Miller of the Bahamas was at the University of Georgia.
And some of the smaller Caribbean countries are keen to share the spoils of Jamaica’s success. Daniel Bailey of Antigua and Barbuda, and British-Anguillan sprinter Zharnel Hughes, both share a coach with Usain Bolt, Glen Mills. The shifting centre of gravity, from the United States to Jamaica, could give the CARIFTA Games yet more influence.
Next week: Why do Kenyan marathon runners come from such a tiny geographical area?
How Brazilian Shoes Explain the Olympics Part 1
July 17, 2016 July 10, 2016 / James Medhurst	/ Leave a comment
On 8 July, the Olympic torch visited the town of Novo Hamburgo. It is an unusual place, founded by German settlers in the nineteenth century, with lots of German architecture still surviving (above). But it also holds a secret, one which can not only explain much of global trade, but also sheds light on Caribbean sprinting and Kenyan marathon running.
The people of Novo Hamburgo began to make shoes to sell to the rest of Brazil, but they wanted to export them internationally as well, and they came up with a clever solution. Instead of competing in the spirit of capitalism, they decided to work together instead.
In the 1960s, the local producers set up a trade fair, invited foreign export agents to visit and paid for trips to the United States and Europe to look for buyers. Their co-operation made life easier for export agents, helping them to sample many manufacturers at once. They cobbled together a relationship into which their potential buyers could snugly fit.
As competition intensified, particularly from China, and export agents demanded higher quality, the shoemakers had to lace their offerings with a bow. They did so through even tighter collaboration, between manufacturers and the suppliers of their raw materials.
These raw materials are all sourced locally: leather comes from Brazilian cattle ranchers and even the machines used to make shoes are built in the area around Novo Hamburgo.
The result is an industrial “supercluster” of businesses, dedicated directly or indirectly to the production of shoes. By 1992, Brazil was the third largest exporter of shoes in the world, and 80% of those exports came from Rio Grande de Sul, the state in which Novo Hamburgo is situated. This was not random – it was a consequence of economic forces.
One problem with many analyses of, say, Kenyan marathon running is that they start from the premise that such phenomena are rare, aberrations which require a special explanation. But economics provides numerous other examples of similar clustering. Silicon Valley in California and banking in the City of London are just two instances.
Shopping is a typical case. It is unusual to see two big supermarkets in close proximity but the same does not apply to clothes shops, which are often found in groups. There are entire streets such as Rodeo Drive (above), which are wholly set aside for fashion.
The reason for this is the way that shoppers behave. Very few people visit more than a single supermarket in one trip, so having two close together just exposes them both to extra competition. But clothes shops are different. A wise owner wants to stay close to competitors, because customers prefer to shop around, and will avoid isolated stores.
There are parallels here with the way that international shoe agents behave. A trade fair is like a fashion mall, allowing them to window shop for a range of products, try them for size, and consider whether they will make their profits look fat. Clusters occur naturally.
But what is true of export agents is also true of sports agents. Athletes require access to sponsorship and training facilities but the people who can offer these do not have time to watch every potential prospect. The countries that succeed will be those which make life as simple as possible for agents – there are two places which have it down to an art.
Next week: Using the economics of clusters to understand sprinting in the Caribbean
Sliding in Latvia Part 4
January 31, 2016 January 31, 2016 / James Medhurst	/ Leave a comment
The end of the nineteenth century was an age of royal eccentricity. Prince Ludwig II of Bavaria spent a fortune on a series of elaborate castles across Southern Germany. The most famous, the fairy-tale Neuschwanstein, was an expression of his love for swans.
Sigulda Castle (above) was built in 1878. It is now proudly in Latvia but was then part of a sprawling Russian Empire – the castle was was built by a Russian aristocratic family, the Kropotkins. Like Prince Ludwig II, Nikolai Kropotkin sought to add a personal touch, but swans were not thrilling enough for him, so he looked to Switzerland for inspiration.
In St Moritz, the hotel owner Caspar Badrutt had been trying to promote the town as a winter resort. He found that his guests, who were mostly British, would enjoy sliding though its streets on improvised sleds. Wanting to encourage them, but equally mindful of the danger to pedestrians, he built the world’s first sliding track, now the Cresta Run.
The idea snowballed, laying further tracks as it did so. Sliding spread to other parts of Switerland, including Arosa and Davos, which had a very good bobsleigh team (below).
More than a century later, the legacy of this Swiss-British invention continues to be felt. Switzerland still has more Olympic bobsleigh medals than any other country, although Germany is catching up fast. Great Britain is by far the most successful nation without its own track, in bobsleigh and even more so in skeleton, particularly in women’s events.
The Sigulda region is known as the “Switzerland of Latvia” and Nikolai Kropotkin tried to strengthen this association by building a sliding track, modelled on those in the Alps, in the grounds of his castle. This was 90 years before the modern track was completed.
This cannot have been a coincidence. The Soviet choice of Sigulda to host a track surely had much to do with the precedent that the prince had set. And the passion of the locals for the sport must have spread like icy fire from Kropotkin, who they wanted to emulate.
The mystery appears to have been solved. Latvia’s sliding history has been traced back, through the Soviet era, to the moment when it all began, with the fanciful act of a prince.
Nikolai Kropotkin was an adviser to Tsar Nicholas II, the last of the Romanov dynasty, which had eccentrics of its own. The great great great grandmother of Nicholas II was Catherine the Great, who installed an ice slide outside St Petersburg’s Winter Palace.
Catherine might also have been an inspiration for Kropotkin. Not only is the history of sport shaped by unpredictable crazes and capricious decisions, but there are so many overlapping causes that it is impossible to be certain that a final answer has been found.
Sliding in Latvia Part 3
January 25, 2016 / James Medhurst	/ Leave a comment
Drivers in Sweden have to watch out for moose but, in the Bahamas, they once had to watch out for triple jumpers. A fad developed where enthusiasts would hop, step and jump from one back yard to another, often across a busy road. It is difficult to interpret these trends – they seem as crazily unpredictable as a moose stepping in front of a car.
As with California in 1849, the Bahamian jumping rush might not have been entirely rational but it did produce precious metal. The country’s tradition in the event would unearth Frank Rutherford and Leevan Sands (above), both Olympic bronze medallists.
Role models play a part – Bjorn Borg provoked a huge growth in tennis in Sweden, as did Martina Navratilova in Czechoslovakia – but there must also be random factors at play. Ilie Nastase and Maria Bueno inspired Romania and Brazil but were much less imitated.
It is like trying to explain the popularity of colouring books for adults, or why a picture of an ambiguous dress went viral last year. There is a kaleidoscope of reasons, some which are clearly visible and keep coming into view, others which are harder to make out, and a few which can barely be seen at all. A complete answer will never reveal its true colours.
Even if key individuals can be identified, their actions may not be straightforward – the dress went viral in part because it was retweeted by Kim Kardashian. And her behaviour is no more capricious than that of Mao Tse Tung, who first embraced table tennis as the Chinese national sport, only to discourage it during the Cultural Revolution, and then to regain a love for the game, in time for Ping Pong Diplomacy with Richard Nixon (above).
Equally significant for the history of table tennis was Ivor Montagu of Great Britain, the president of the ITTF between 1926 and 1967. Before Nixon, China had been shunned by the international sporting world, in favour of the democratic regime on Taiwan, but Montagu’s Marxist leanings led him, uniquely, to prefer the Communist state instead.
Great Men and Chaos Theory
Had Ivor Montagu had different politics, China would not be the ping pong powerhouse that it is today. The “Great Men of History” is increasingly unfashionable as a theory of events but, in sport at least, arbitrary decisions by powerful people can have a profound effect. Although, as with Mao and Nixon, “greatness” is not a measure of moral stature.
Sporting history is chaotic in both the poetic and the mathematical sense. Randomness has many aspects, from the unpredictable spread of fashions to the whimsy of heads of state. The Latvian sliding story includes both, and begins in the late nineteenth century.
Next week: The creation of the sliding sports in Switzerland, and how they got to Latvia
Sliding in Latvia Part 2
January 10, 2016 / James Medhurst	/ 1 Comment
Of the 44 Olympic gold medals to have been awarded in luge, only one has been won by a non-German speaker, Vera Zozula of the Soviet Union. And it is extremely unlikely that Russian is her first language either. She hails from Talsi province, the most Latvian part of Latvia, where 95% state that the country’s national language is their mother tongue.
Zozula was equally fluent in the language of luge. Her Olympic debut was in 1976, when the first Soviet luge team appeared. Of the six members of that team, five were Latvian.
Her title came in 1980 and, until the break-up of the Soviet Union, Latvians continued to dominate its luge and bobsleigh teams. As discussed last week, an important part of the reason for this was the existence of a sliding track in the Latvian town of Sigulda (above).
Cool Moneying
When Sigulda became part of an independent nation, Russian sliding ran out of track. It crashed and remained unconscious for several years. But it recovered in typical fashion, throwing vast sums of money at the problem. Russia built not one, but two new tracks, one at Paramonovo near Moscow, and another at Sochi, for the 2014 Winter Olympics.
The investment paid dividends and had a lubricating effect on sliding in Russia. In 2014, it won two gold medals in bobsleigh (below), and one in skeleton, and two silvers in luge.
But there is a chink in the ice, a curious gap in the story, because the Sigulda track was not completed until 1986. Latvia’s early successes, including Zozula’s golden moment, were all achieved without it. The way in which it happened is a truly remarkable tale.
Shall I Carve?
The Soviet Union was just as prepared as its capitalist Russian counterpart, to dedicate state funding to state-of-the-art technology. But constructing a track would take time.
The enthusiastic and impatient people of Latvia were unwilling to wait. They decided to create their own, not a modern artificially-refrigerated track, but a natural track carved out of the snow. They built it in the town of Cesis, less than 25 miles away from Sigulda.
The keenness of the locals to get their hands cold explains why Sigulda was selected to host the track. As will become clear, the region’s bobsleigh history goes back more than a century. Before carving the track, it had already carved itself a niche in sliding sports.
Natural Born Lugers
Practising on a natural track is less beneficial for aspiring Olympians. Natural track luge is a non-Olympic specialism of its own, with a quite different set of successful athletes.
This makes the Zozula’s victory all the more impressive. She will surely lose her record as the only non-German-speaking winner – a US luger could even claim gold in 2018 – but, as countries become willing to spend more and more, it will only get harder to train for gold predominantly on a natural track. This is a feat which might never be emulated.
Next week: The role of randomness in sporting history in the Bahamas, China and Latvia
January 3, 2016 January 3, 2016 / James Medhurst	/ Leave a comment