Top 8 of 08: Number 8

Number 8: The experiment that never happened... dangerous pollution in Beijing

As promised, today begins a short series which also serves as our summary of the year's sports science news. I'll be looking at the Top 8 stories of 2008, with a sports science spin (in case you were wondering, eight is the lucky number of the year - just ask the Chinese who started the Games on 8/8/08, and Michael Phelps, who bagged 8 golds! That, plus the fact that I couldn't think of 10!).

At a later stage, I'll look back at my own personal highs and lows of the year in sport, the more news-oriented post, but for now, it's the stories with the sports science angle that take the limelight. And we begin with NUMBER 8.

Beijing pollution: The world held its breath

One year to the day before the Games would begin, back on the 8th of August, 2007, the Beijing pollution problem hit the news for the first time, when the IOC President Jacques Rogge cautioned that some events may need to be rescheduled because of Beijing's notorious pollution problem. The events in 'danger' were the endurance events, like the road cycling and marathon events.

In anticipation of this problem, Beijing's organizing committee initiated all kinds of strategies to reduce the problem - a timetable that would allow only odd-numbered licence plates on the road on certain days, even-numbered plates on other days was one example. Factories were relocated, though this would later cause controversy when it emerged that initial promises to do this were not kept.

As potentially damaging as this situation could be, it didn't capture the public's attention too much, until about March this year. That's when the new world record holder in the marathon event, Haile Gebrselassie, announced that he was considering WITHDRAWING from the Olympic marathon because of this pollution issue.

That announcement, predictably, caused an enormous stir. Gebrselassie suggested that he did not wish to risk his health by running Beijing, and would instead compete in the 10,000m event (for the record, he followed through on his word, and did exactly this. Many people, including me, felt at the time that the pollution was a convenient excuse to miss the Olympics to focus on the Berlin Marathon and attempt the world record. He did this as well)

Other athletes had weighed in on this debate (Meseret Defar apparently called the conditions "disgusting"), but it was the sports science reaction that was most interesting.

Elite athletes in the "laboratory" - reminiscent of 1968

Back in 1968, the Olympic Games were headed to Mexico City, at an altitude of 2,240m (7,349 ft). There was much debate about the effect of the altitude on the elite athletes, and because of physiologist's experience (and the obvious experience of athletes) with exercise at altitude, it was known that performances would be affected. Few knew, however, just how large the impact would be, because the level of athlete in question had never been observed in laboratory studies.

Some were suggesting that the altitude would be dangerous to athletes' health, others suggested that elite athletes would be better able to handle the change, and the effects would be minimal. As it transpired, perhaps the biggest effect was on the sprinters and speed athletes. Bob Beamon just about jumped right over the sand pit to set one of the most amazing world records in history in the long jump (8.90m). All the sprint records fell at the meeting. It was a sprinter's paradise.

The other major impact was that East Africans started their dominance of events on the track. Every single medal from 1500m upwards was won by an African who had been born and raised at altitude. Time has shown that these African athletes would probably have dominated running regardless of altitude, but 1968 was their coming-out party, no doubt aided by the altitude, to which they were far more adapted (as Ron Clarke found out - see picture to the right. Clarke was favoured to win the 10,000m, but he collapsed after the final and had to be hospitalized, medal-less)
So Mexico City answered the question. Beijing didn't.

Precautions were taken...diplomatic disasters and scientific preparation

The big nations certainly took every precaution to avoid the potential effects of the Beijing haze and smog. The Australians announced an asthma-specialist in their 50-man medical team. The Great Britain team, along with the USA, Japan and Germany, developed much spoken about "gas masks" that athletes should wear when warming up and around the village. The USA had a head start, because they adapted masks that had been developed by the CIA in response to terrorism threats for the Athens Games four years earlier.

It was one of these masks that caused some of the early controversy in Beijing, when one of the USA's track cyclists arrived in the Beijing airport wearing the mask (see picture on the left). The minor diplomatic crisis was averted by a heartfelt letter of apology from the athlete and the US Olympic Committee!

And then, just as suddenly as the smog had started dominating the headlines, the controversy disappeared (unlike the smog cloud over Beijing typically does).


August 2008 was, however different. In the end, the pollution may have played a very tiny role in performances, and no doubt some athletes were affected. But once the action began, the pollution issue was (perhaps rightly) relegated to an afterthought, replaced by on-field action. To this day, I've not yet seen a research paper on the effects of the pollution (though I'm sure someone was monitoring the levels and athlete's symptoms - if you did, and you're reading this, we'd love to hear from you!).

As for the distance events, the following results were achieved:

• Men's 5000m - new Olympic record
• Men's 10000m - new Olympic record
• Women's 10000m - new Olympic record (and perhaps fastest and second fastest "clean" times in history?)
• Men's Marathon - new Olympic record

The women's marathon, meanwhile, was run in cool conditions, with light rain, meaning that the pollution levels were unlikely to be especially high, and so the slowish time was a function of tactics, not the limiting air quality.

So on a pure-performance basis, Beijing will be recorded in history as "ideal" for long-distance running! That of course does not tell us whether or not the pollution made a difference. Perhaps nothing will, and we'll be left to guess forever?

We did receive some emails from within the village, from scientists who were working with some of the teams (the teams who actually bother to send this kind of expertise - you can be sure it was not South Africa). Their reports suggested that some of the athletes were having some problems, with sinusitis, breathing difficulties, headaches, burning eyes etc.

Quite how this translated into on-field/track performance is impossible to know. If there is a study out there, please let me know, I'll gladly report on it!

But until then, the Number 8 Sports Science story of 2008 was the lack of any noticeable impact of pollution on performance, probably because the experiment never happened! I would guess that the measures taken by Beijing's organizing commitee, combined with the frequent rainfall during August, meant that Beijing's pollution levels were probably pretty close to "normal" for the Games. And that, in turn, meant that the theoretical problems, were never encountered. Much hyped, much spoken about, blamed for Gebrselassie's absence from the Marathon, the controversy disappeared as suddenly as the Games began.

So, we were denied our "experiment", but we got some fantastic performances instead. A fair swap, and our Number 8 story.

Join us tomorrow for Number 7!

Ross

Swimsuit controversy

Swimming's credibility crisis: How FINA's blind eye is affecting the purity of the sport

The Beijing Olympic Games have come and gone. And with them, aided by technology including a uniformly deeper pool, improved wash-off areas, and high-tech swimsuits, so have 70 world swimming records this year.

In fact, swimming now suffers from such a dramatic credibility crisis that a race in which a world record is NOT broken is a disappointment. I dare suggest that you will be able to recall such a race in Beijing (though you may have to try hard, because there were not many). If an Olympic Gold was one without a world record being broken, it was met with rather disappointed silence.

Olympic fever - how bad was it?

The table below demonstrates just how easily records were broken in Beijing.

Out of a total of 32 events (16 men's and 16 women's), an incredible 21 events had world records broken a total of 25 times, and 66 Olympic records were set. Only ONE SINGLE Olympic record managed to survive for men and women. It was a complete clearing out of the Olympic (and World) record books.

That is, in my opinion, a problem for the sport of swimming - 70 world records in one year, and 66 Olympic records in one Games is not a symptom of a credible sport. I'm sure that some will disagree, but bear in mind that these 70 records are only the times of the WINNERS. There were races in Beijing where the first 5 finishers were swimming faster than the old world record! The South Africa 4 x 100m relay team, for example, swam almost a second faster than they swam only four years earlier to win gold in Athens, and they finished seventh!

Swimming records - an endangered species

Admittedly, there are other factors involved, and people will argue that this is a positive sign of progress. But consider the following:

The 100m freestyle record first went under 48-seconds in 2000. And then for eight years, 48-seconds was the magical "barrier" which only one man could break (Peter van den Hoogenband). Since the start of 2008, ELEVEN men have swum faster than 48-seconds. The result is that legends of the sport, whose position in all-time lists was secure, are suddenly line items in the swimming record books, forgotten and displaced almost overnight thanks not to improved swimmers, but improved technology.

That this should happen is not the problem - Paavo Nurmi and Jim Peters, two great long-distance runners from the past, can hardly expect to remain in the record books given the advances in technology over the last 50 years in their sport. The problem is the pace with which it has happened. Within one year, records have been forgotten, and the swimming world record is now an endangered species. And that is not good for the sport.

The lifespan of a swimming record

To look at this a little more objectively, I looked at the AVERAGE AGE (in days) of world records in the swimming events. The tables below show the age of men's and women's world records on the day that the Olympic Swimming events began. The arrows on the left hand side show which events had their records broken in Beijing (these records are then "aged" zero days old for this analysis), while the red arrows on the right show the records that had stood for longer than 2 years going into the Beijing Olympics.



For the men's analysis, the average age of the swimming world records BEFORE the Beijing Games was 680 days. As a result of the carnage in Beijing's Water Cube, it fell to 382 days (because 11 events had their records reset to zero days). There are now only THREE records older than 2 years - the 100m Butterfly (Ian Crocker), the 400m Freestyle (Ian Thorpe) and the 1500m Freestyle (Grant Hackett).

On the women's side, it's even worse. The average age BEFORE Beijing was 921 days, though that was massively skewed by one record - that of Janet Evans in the 800m freestyle. That record was broken in Beijing (by Rebecca Adlington), and the result is that a female swimming record now has an average age of only 247 days. In other words, women's swimming records have on average been set in the last year. Only one record is older than 2 years - the 8 year old record of Inge de Bruijn in the women's 100m butterfly.

You may still believe this is not a problem, and that is, I guess, personal choice. The essence of the sport is the competition - the race - and so the times are the fineprint, you may argue. Does it matter that a gold is won in a time that does not rewrite the record books? Perhaps not. But as someone who comes from a track and field background, where world records are special and meaningful, swimming really does face a crisis of credibility. It can certainly not boast about a meeting in which 66 records are set - that's not progress. Rather, it makes a mockery of the past, or the present (depending on your point of view).

Who is to blame? FINA, quite simply

So the obvious question is who do we put this down to? And the answer, as we have actually been saying this whole year (this is a topic we covered extensively in the build-up to Beijing), is FINA, swimming's governing body.

FINA showed very weak leadership when first presented with the issue of the Speedo Swimsuit, and they have followed this up with even worse leadership on subsequent suits. You can read one such example here - it talks about the Rocketsuit, which very openly promises to make swimmers more buoyant. The article is well written and direct, and I agree entirely with its conclusion: "the sensible thing for FINA to have done would have been to call for a moratorium on suit approval so that sensible debate can ensue..."

The founder of the company that makes the Rocketsuit is quoted as saying "The Rocket Skin has already been used in triathlons for non-wetsuit legal races and we have seen performance advantages of up to 6 seconds per 100 meters and 1500 meter races done in 87 degree water with no issues of overheating". I feel safe in suggesting that this is probably marketing hype speaking, and we won't see a 42 second 100m freestyle in this suit!

But the point is, the technology exists, and FINA failed miserably to impose its admittedly weak laws on suit design back in April when they met about the suit. Now they must face the consequences. The trouble is, they don't seem to care.

Fortunately for swimming, some people do. The big nations, notably Australia and the USA, are actually pushing to have these suits banned, and hopefully, they'll carry enough clout to do something. Otherwise, every single time a big meeting is held, we'll see a repeat of the Beijing result, and swimming's world records will move from one meeting to the next with little chance of survival. Again, that may be fine with some. I find it hard to swallow...

Ross

P.S. Looking at those lifespans of the swimming world records raises some interesting thoughts, and perhaps you've already begun wondering how swimming compares to track and field? Never fear, I've done that analysis too, and I'll post on that next! And it throws up a few very interesting implications! So join us then!

The Paralympics: What to make of it?

Paralympic heroes: Evaluating success (or failure) and avoiding minefields

Last week saw the curtain call of the Olympic cycle for four years, and the Paralympic Games came to an end amidst a spectacular closing ceremony. It brought to an end the biggest Paralympic Games to date - in terms of atheltes, support staff, media coverage, and financial incentives (both direct and indirect for athletes), and it was a fitting end to a spectacle of sport in Beijing over the last 6 weeks.

The Paralympics are themselves a fitting way to end the Olympic cycle - I dare say that the original Olympic ideals are embodied MORE in the Paralympic Games than they are in the Olympic Games, with the triumph of the human spirit evident in every one of the participants of the Games. That will possibly incur the 'wrath' of those who are intimately involved in the Olympics, and I certainly don't wish to discredit either Games - just look at our comprehensive Olympic coverage and you'll see that the Olympic Games are THE pinnacle of the world of sport. But the Paralympics brings something else, an angle that can't be matched by the Olympics, though for different reasons.

Different, but equal - why we should avoid comparisons

And therein lies the key - "different", and that's really what this post is about. Much has been made in the media back here in South Africa about the fact that the South African team did so poorly in the Olympic Games (only 1 silver), yet managed an incredible sixth place in the Paralympics (30 medals, 21 gold). In response to this disparity, the South African media have asked the question: "Why are the Paralympic team so successful, whereas the Olympic team is such a "failure?" (apologies for the SA-centric post today, but hopefully interesting discussion points will emerge no matter where you are...read on!)

That's a very difficult question to answer, and sometimes, the problem is that if you ask a difficult question, you won't like the answer you get. You should not, in fact, be asking the question...And this is the case here, particularly when the media choose to sensationalize this by taking it completely out of context. This happened to me last week, unfortunately, when a daily tabloid (Die Burger) took some quotes completely out of context and I was vilified for "criticizing" the Paralympic Team. Much of the last week has been damage limitation thanks to that article.

However, the one good thing that came of it is that it got me thinking about what we can learn from the difference in performance between our SA Olympic team and the SA Paralympic team, and just how one might compare the two Games, if at all.

Success in both Games: A given, except for SA

First of all, one has to objectively analyse performance, otherwise it's emotive, subjective guesswork. South Africa finished 71st on the medal table in the Olympcis, and 6th in the Paralympic medal table. But what of the other nations? It's helpful to figure out whether this change is common or completely unusual. So the graph below shows the finishing position of nations on the Paralympic medal table plotted against the finishing position in the Olympic Games.


I've had to change the scale of the axes to fit it all in, but you can see that the correlation is fairly tight - in other words, nations who do well in the Olympics tend to do well in the Paralympic Games. China won both, the USA were second and third respectively. Great Britain were top 5, Australia top 6 in both. The outliers to this correlation are the "poorer" nations, where disabled athletes are not prioritized - that was China until very recently, I might add. In 1996, they finished only ninth. Twelve years later, they won double the number of medals of the second best country, thanks to a focused effort on the Paralympic Games! However, there are still nations, like Ethiopia and Jamaica who are missing from this comparison - that's a functon of ACCESS, which I'll get to shortly.

The green line represents where the nation would lie if it finished in EXACTLY the same position in both Games. If the country is in the yellow shaded area, then their Paralympic performances are superior, whereas if they are in the orange, their Paralympic performances are inferior to the Olympic performances. So the Ukraine are strong at the Paralympics - they finished 11th on the Olympic table, and 5th in the Paralympics. In contrast, Italy had a good Olympic showing - 9th, but only finished 28th in the Paralympics.

However, the "winner" for big improvers is South Africa - 71st to 6th, which is an enormous difference. So therefore, the SA Paralympic Team is deserving of all the praise it can get. We should be celebrating, it is an astonishing performance when viewed this way.

Why the difference? What can we learn from the success of the Paralympians? Or is that the failure of the Olympians?

Now here's where it gets tricky. People in SA have asked this question with the intention of trying to label the Olympic Team as failures, and because they want to prove that the "Sporting System" for Paralympic sports is so much better. Both are grossly unfair, because, and I'll be as direct as possible here...you cannot compare performances BETWEEN the two Games - the comparison between Olympic Games and Paralympic Games is completely erroneous.

Why? Because they are such completely different "phases" of their lifecycles as events. Sport undergoes a certain evolutionary process, which sees the number of competitors, the depth of competition, and therefore the intensity of competition change over its life.

Off the top of my head (I'm sure this has been done "properly", forgive my over-simpification), the phases are:

Formation is the starting point, where the event or sport begins. In the case of the Olympic Games, I guess we could argue the semantics, but I think it's safe to say that it began in 1896, although in 2008, we could also say we saw the formation of 10km swimming, BMX cycling, and women's steeplechase events, for example.

The Paralympics began in 1960 (officially), although they can be traced back to 1948 for soldiers injured in the war. It was in the 1960s that other categories were added, and the Paralympics really began their growth. However, a key point is that the Games we see today really only began in 1988, when the Paralympics were placed immediately after the Olympic Games. That juxtaposition has driven the growth of the Paralympics, and so my feeling is that "Formation" of the Paralympics is much more recent than the 1960's. Regardless, it's clear that the formation of the Paralympics happened long after the Olympic Games were well established - at least 60 years later. This has important implications...

The next phases might be described as Foundation, Explosion, Plateau and Stagnation. Foundation is really where the "pioneers" come along and chart the previously unchartered waters. We see this is sport all the time - there is a period of improvement which can be rapid or gradual depending on the sport, but the point is that this is almost always followed by an "Explosion" in performance. Suddenly (for a number of reasons) the sport becomes popular, and more and more athletes turn to it. It gets more professional, training improves, financial incentives increase, and performances explode. Eventually, it reaches a plateau, where improvements are much smaller and infrequent.

Finally, there is stagnation, where the sport loses impetus or requires modification to keep interest levels up. This is a general illustration, of course, and you'll be able to pick 'outliers' to this trend - swimming, for example, has recently undergone another explosion, thank to technology of swimsuits, pools and training methods. But I'm sure you can think of other examples that fit - women's pole vault is a good one. It's in an "explosion" phase right now, thanks to Yelena Isinbayeva who followed on from the foundation phase's "pioneers". Eventually, others will bridge the gap, and the event will hit a plateau. The marathon goes a similar way.

However, the key point is that the Paralympics are in a completely different phase - I believe they are still in the explosion phase, where performances are improving rapidly. The Olympics, on the other hand, are in the plateau phase, where the sport has reached a level of performance that makes it difficult to find further rapid improvements. A lot of this has to do with access and maturity of the sport.

Access and maturation - the drivers for growth

This life-cycle model partly explains why the margins of victory in the Paralympcs are so much larger than in the Olympic Games. In 200m swimming events, for example, the winning margin in the Olympic Games was just under 2 seconds. In the Paralympic Games, it was over 6 seconds. There were two 200m races that stand out - one was won by 11 seconds, another by 12 seconds. Natalie du Toit, the athlete of the Games, won a 400m race by 25 seconds!

That is clearly not "normal" when compared against the Olympic Games, but in the Paralympics, it happens because we're still in that Explosion phase, where it is perfectly normal. What will happen over the next 20 years is that more and more athletes will bridge that gap, and by 2028, we'll see a very similar standard of competition between Games.

The other excellent example of this is the emergence of the Kenyan men. Beijing was really the first time that a GROUP of Kenyan men dominated middle and long distance events (by dominated, we're talking five gold medals. We're accustomed to seeing this at the Olympics, but for the Paralympics, it is a major step forward, because it shows that ACCESS to the Games is increasing. The fact that those Kenyan men broke world records by in excess of 20 seconds (in a 5000m event) is yet another indication that that Paralympic Games are in the "Explosion/Evolution" phase - such margins do not (or should not) happen in mature competition.

The next step is that these "pioneer" Kenyan men will be succeeded by even better Kenyan athletes, and the records will fall even faster. Then the Ethiopians and Ugandans will emerge, and pretty soon, perhaps two generations from now, the Paralympic distance events will be in their "Plateau" phase as well - natural progression raises standards.

So what will happen in future, as the Paralympic Games matures, is that ACCESS will increase. More nations will send more athletes, and as a result, the "gene pool" of the Paralympics will begin to resemble that of the Olympics. This will drive even more of an evolution in performances, and it will also increase the depth of competition enormously. We can therefore expect, as a normal course of events, to see that by 2012, there are already closer races and improved performances. By 2028, I suspect that the level of competition will be very similar, and you will also have a very similar demographic of competiting nations - remember, there was not a single athlete from the Caribbean in the men's 100m finals in the Paralympics. They dominated the Olympic Games.

Now, does this mean that competition is weak? Of course not, you'd be an idiot to suggest this, because Paralympic competition can only be evaluated against previous Paralympic competition. Also, the level of preparation and commitment of the top Paralympic athletes is often equal to, or greater than that of many Olympic athletes, so to dismiss it as "weak" is condescending and blinkered. In South Africa, if you did this, you'd miss out on some valuable lessons as well. But you still can't compare them...

Therefore, with specific reference to the South African situation, you cannot compare the 30 medals won by the Paralympic team with the single medal won by the Olympic team, because those medals are won in a completely different context, against different backdrops of competition and with different criteria for evaluation. Both medals are equally worthy, but when you start making the comparison between the two, then you paint yourself into a corner, because the reality is that Paralympic competition lacks the depth of the Olympics right now. That's not a bad thing, it's just a natural consequence of maturity, access and development issues.

Other considerations - classification and size

There are, of course, numerous other issues at play here - the classification system of the Paralympics is fraught with difficulty. It's an almost impossible task to classify the different levels of disability without compromising the "integrity" of competition somehow. Sport, at its very core, has "equality of competition" as its most valuable characteristic. We know this is never true, of course, but it's implicit on the starting line. The Paralympics has to manage the fact that this is never the case, and it does pose challenges.

Then there is the size of the competition - 4000 athletes represents a large percentage relative to the Olympic Games. 10,000 athletes (out of 6 billion) make the Olympic Games, and only 300 win Gold medals. In contrast, 4000 competed at the Paralympics (out of perhaps 100 million - a much higher percentage), and 473 Gold medals are awarded. Purely by numbers, there is a difference.

That difference is a function of spreading the participation base out across a much greater pool for the Paralympics. If the Paralympics were limited to the same relative size as the Olympic Games,there'd be fewer than 1000 competitors. The fact that it is not is a positive, which we should be pleased about, not something to defend and criticize. Hopefully, it's clear that the future holds much growth in store for Paralympic competition, and the way we evaluate our success NOW should not be reflected in an "it could be better" attitude."

The future - professionalization around the corner. Are we ready?

Then finally, it would be careless not to point out that success today does not guarantee success tomorrow. That is particularly true in this case, because of the growth of the Paralympics - more nations are competing and more are focusing on Paralympic sport and that means that progress is going to be rapid. China's 2008 investment will spur on other countries, and the demand for these Paralympic golds will rise. This is driven by the increasing media attention on the Paralympics, which means more money to the Games, and more money means a more professional approach, as the standard of competition rises.

This is important because South Africa's success is NOT the result of its sporting system - it is the efforts and talents of excellent coaches, administrators and athletes working together. But it tends to happen in isolation and so we need to figure out how to harness the obvious expertise and use it to produce more of the same. Unfortunately, learning from success is very difficult, and proves impossible for most. But we need to do this now, precisely because the Paralympics is ready for the professional era. We might not be...

Conclusion: Don't compare, rather celebrate, and let's fix the other problem separately

So the point is: Let's not compare the Games. There are lessons to be learned about why the SA Paralympic Team did so well, but I won't go into those here, because most of you reading this are not in South Africa. Those lessons should be learned (they won't be, given SA's history, but anyway...), but dealing with the SA Olympic problems is a completely separate problem. It's not about the systems and the attitude of athletes and the "will to win" - it's about celebrating Paralympic success on its merits, and we need to focus on celebrating the performances of our Paralympic athletes, who are worthy of that recognition. And then let's deal with the Olympic problems separately.

Ross

Usain Bolt 9.55s? Yeah, right

Could Usain Bolt have run 9.55s without his celebration in Beijing? Not a chance...

Thank you for visiting The Science of Sport. If you've arrived here searching to find out what Usain Bolt is capable of after his amazing 9.58s, you've come to the right place!

Click here for our detailed analysis of Bolt's 9.58s time, including Bolt's splits, speeds and a comparison with his previous world record in Beijing.

And check in at our homepage for more in the coming days!

Late edit to this post (NB):

If you've arrived here in the aftermath of Usain's amazing 9.58s WR in Berlin, I must emphasize a very important point: This post was written back in September 2008 to answer the question "Could Bolt have run 9.55s without celebrating in BEIJING?". It was NOT written to say that Bolt would NEVER run 9.55s. So if you are here to point out that he just ran 9.58s, yes, you are quite right. And yes, 9.55s is on the cards. But this post, I must stress again, looked at the very specific issue of Bolt's 100m in Beijing, and whether he might have been able to run 9.55s in BEIJING. The post was written in September 2008 - we are now a year on, so to use this to prove your point...well, you're in the wrong place.

If you would like to read the latest thoughts on the Bolt 9.58s WR, and if you're wondering what Bolt is really capable of, as well as the rest of our coverage of athletics, please click here.

Yesterday, the news wires were buzzing with the news that scientists in Oslo predicted that Usain Bolt, Jamaica's triple Olympic champ, would have run 9.55 seconds had he not celebrated prematurely in his 100m final in Beijing.

It was on the radios, internet, TV news, all over. A while back, just after that race, we speculated that a 9.61s time was about the limit, given the split times that were available.

So this 9.55 s is quite different from that. And far be it from me to criticize the physicist's assumptions, and calculations, but what we have here is a classic case of losing sight of the wood for the trees. Their method involved looking at the final 2 seconds of the race, where Bolt began his celebrations, and compared his acceleration to that of Richard Thompson, who finished second. They looked at two possible outcomes: One is that he maintained the same acceleration as Thompson (that is, slowed down, because all athletes slow down at the end of a 100m race), and the second is if he maintained an acceleration 0.5m/s2 greater than Thompson.

It was in the second of these scenarios that they worked out that he'd run 9.55 s. But the problem with this emerges when you consider the official 10m splits from the race, courtesy the IAAF analysis and a website in which they discuss the race.

So let's look at the analysis, and let me start by asking a simple question: Where in this race are you going to find 0.14 seconds to help Bolt run 9.55 seconds? The answer, as you'll see, is that you won't find it at the end of the race, in the celebrations. It's just not physiologically possible...

The splits:

These are the split times from Bolt's race, according to the IAAF analysis. The graph below it shows the times making some basic assumptions (apologies for the lack of integration and physics equations, but I wish to make a point using simplicity as the vehicle). Again, ask the question: Where are you going to help Bolt knock 0.14 seconds off his time?


The RED line represents the ACTUAL PERFORMANCE. It adds up to a time of 9.685 seconds, considering also that Bolt's reaction time was 0.165 seconds. You'll note that Bolt's fastest 10m interval was from 60 to 70m, taking 0.82 seconds. I must point out that no one has ever measured a human being running a 10m interval faster than this. In our analysis of the race, we got a lot of interesting discussion and data from people, and of all the recorded 10m split times, this is the fastest ever measured. To speed up for the remaining 30 m would represent not only the fastest splits ever run, but also the longest period for which they are ever run.

That's not to say, of course, that Bolt would not be able to run a 0.80s segment. But the key is the pacing strategy - nobody speeds up progressively all the way to the finish line. Nobody. There are mechanical and metabolic reasons for this, but the point is that even holding that speed would be unusual, and speeding up would be highly, highly unlikely. Note, for example, that Bolt has already started slowing down BEFORE he starts celebrating. According to the splits, Bolt slows from 70m to 80m. The celebrations started at 80m. So speeding up? I don't think so.

The BLUE line, to simplify, represents Bolt's projected splits if he continues to accelerate. This is effectively the assumption made by the physicists when the calculate his 9.55 second time. I must emphasize that if you want to find 0.14 seconds at the end of the race (and answer my simple question), then you HAVE TO project that Bolt continues to speed up.

According to this assumption, Bolt would run faster and faster - he has to, in order to do what was projected by the analysis. Again, I must stress that this has never been done - I believe it to be impossible to speed up this much after 70m, and even Bolt would have slowed, or at the very best, held his speed. The whole basis for the argument by the physicists is flawed because there is no reason to believe that Bolt would continue to run faster than Thompson, or accelerate.

The GREEN line represents what I would in fact consider a more likely scenario. In this case, Bolt maintains that top speed that he hits between 60 and 70m. He thus runs the final 30m at 0.82 seconds/10m speed. If he does this, then he run 9.605 seconds.

In reality, I suspect that Bolt would slow down at the end anyway, even without his celebrations. His most likely performance is thus somewhere between 9.61 seconds and 9.69 seconds.

Now, I know there's no fancy physics here, no integration. Just split times, and a very simple question: Where in this race are you going to find 0.14 seconds to help Bolt run 9.55 seconds?

Answer, you can't find that time at the end of the race. Unless you assume that Bolt is going to run a 0.79 second 10m interval somewhere in the race. But that, I'm afraid, is not possible, and therefore, you cannot conclude that he would have run 9.55 seconds without celebrating.

What is possible? There is still time to be made up, but it wasn't the celebration

Having said this, I make the suggestion that Bolt's CELEBRATIONS cost him only about 0.05 seconds. However, that's not to say he cannot still run under 9.60 seconds.

One area for improvement is the start - a reaction time of 0.165 seconds can easily be cut down. Asafa Powell, for example, had a reaction time of 0.134 seconds in Beijing. Therefore, we can estimate that Bolt might get a 0.140 second reaction time.

If that happens, then suddenly he's down to 9.66 seconds. Add to this the fact that there was no tail-wind in Beijing, and it has been estimated that a tailwind of 1m/s improves 100m times by 0.05 seconds. Therefore, on an ideal day, with a tailwind of 1m/s (it could be as much as 2m/s, recall), a super fast reaction time, Bolt could run 9.61 seconds, and still celebrate. Take away those celebrations (another 0.05 seconds, in my estimation), and we have a 9.56 seconds.

But there is no way the 9.55 second time would have come without those celebrations - the trees just got in the way.

Preview of forthcoming attractions. The Coyle-Armstrong debate:

A big debate has flared up in the last few days, ignited by Lance Armstrong's comeback. It turns out that Ed Coyle, he who published a paper that "proved" why Lance Armstrong was superior without doping, has admitted that he may have made "some mistakes" in that paper. He only did so under pressure from the University of Texas after fellow scientists lodged a formal complaint of scientific misconduct against him.

The paper, which you can find here, showed that Armstrong improved his muscular efficiency over the years, but it was fraught with problems. In fact, it became a running joke within sections of the scientific community. That didn't stop Coyle from using his data to testify at a legal hearing that Armstrong had a physiological reason to have dominated without using drugs. It was a shameful display of science meets money meets tacky indulgence, and loses all credibility.

In response to the latest "attacks", Coyle had this to say: “This is a minor waste on my time. However, I don’t understand how they can afford to spend so much time on this. Don’t they have real jobs?”

Well, yes, Ed Coyle, they do have jobs. They are credible scientists, who search for the truth. But then aren't we all?

So the announcement, and the challeges to the Coyle paper are more than welcome. We'll look at the issue early next week. So join us then!

Ross

Sports news: Athletics and Paralympics

Post-Olympic sports news as the Paralympics takes centre stage

Apologies for the break, it's been a busy time at work and the world of sport has taken a backseat, unfortunately. Only in our pages, because it's actually been a very busy time in the world of sport.

Athletics - Golden delight and heartache in the fallout from Beijing

The world's best athletes headed straight out of Beijing and into the final month of the international track season, with two Golden League meetings in Zurich and Brussels. It was more gold for Pamela Jelimo of Kenya, the 19-year old (officially, most people in Africa suspect that's not entirely accurate, but anyway) phenom who has won every 800m race of the year by about 20m.

She did the same in Zurich and in Brussels, running an incredible time of 1:54.01, the third fastest in history. A "slower" 1:55.16 was enough to secure her six out of six in the Golden League series. She is probably, along with Yelena Isinbayeva, the most dominant female athlete in the world today, and it's difficult to believe that this time last year, there was not even a hint that she was on the horizon. There can be few more spectacular debut seasons, especially in a middle distance event for women - the record books, if you look at them, are dominated by Eastern European performances from the 1980's, and Jelimo has record keepers scrambling to update them. It's spectacular, and it earned Jelimo her share of the $1 million jackpot.

It turned out to be a pretty big share - all of it. Blanka Vlasic, Croatia's high jump champion, has seen her superb season fall away badly since the Olympic Games. She was surprised in Beijing by Tia Hellebaut of Belgium, despite clearing 2.05m, and in Brussels, she lacked any edge at all, going out at 2.01m, and losing (on countback, again) to Germany's Arianne Friedrich. The $500,000 she would have won would have gone some way to softening the blow of the Olympic silver, because she had been one of the red hot favourites for Beijing Gold. However, she'll now end the season with not one, but two near misses, both on countback, but such are the margins for error in pro sports.

The Paralympic Games in Beijing

Speaking of professional sports, the Paralympics continues to grow, and certainly here in South Africa, it has received more media exposure than has previously been the case, which is excellent. It's not yet up to the level of the Olympic Games, but it's growing. 4000 athletes in Beijing, up from Athens, and Sydney. It's still "immature" in the sense that it's not accessible to the whole world's population - the "gene pool" in the Games is narrow and so you're not seeing the best naturally talented athletes just yet - no Caribbean athletes in the top 8 of the sprint events, for example. No Ethiopians in the distance events, very few Kenyans, etc. That's an "access" problem. But it will change, and the technology balance and equal opportunities for all disabled athletes is something that will hopefully develop out of this Paralympic growth.

Apart from the increased media exposure, another sign of the growth is that the Paralympics are now producing more frequent positive drug tests. That's an indication that the "Olympic spirit", traditionally defined as courage, determination, inspiration and equality, are now giving way to "higher, faster, stronger...at all costs", and winning is starting to becoming the only thing. That's a shame, but perhaps is an inevitable consequence of the heightened exposure and importance of the Games. The Paralympics remain closer to the true vision of the Games than the able-bodied Games do, but that won't last long - more media means more prestige, which means more sponsorship, and more money, and that invites people to do whatever is necessary to win. One thing it will do is raise the depth of competition, which is a good thing - one of the 200m swimming events was won by 11 seconds. A track final had only four competitors. In time, those margins will narrow, which is good for the growth of the Games.

South Africa will have a good Paralympic Games, far better than the able-bodied Games. The media will compare them, which is unfair for the reasons described above, but all will be forgotten and SA will move onto its next disaster Olympics as a result. On a positive note, South Africa does boast Natalie du Toit, who is the "Phelps" of the Paralympic Games - she'll try to win 5 medals, possibly all gold, and it may have been 6 if the SA administrators hadn't bungled an entry for the sixth event (seriously...). She's a superstar of either Games, having competed in the 10km event at last month's Olympic Games as well.

As for Oscar Pistorius, he's back in the Paralympics which he insists is not a "consolation prize" (his words) after failing to reach the Olympic Games. It's contradictory to the messages of six months ago, where he said he wanted to run in the Olympics to have a "decent level of competition" (his words again). Readers of this site will know my opinion on this one, but for someone else's (which also captures a big part of the problem), this is the best article written on it so far: Pistorius article - Daily Telegraph

For the rest, the media has continued to spew forth garbage about it - "the only one with a double amputation", they say, not recognizing that this is in fact the reason he should NOT be running against single leg amputees - that's a point we made, along with Marlon Shirley (who fell in the 100m final yesterday) and a number of other people during the debate. I've no issue with him competing in the Paralympics (obviously), but he's denying single leg amputees gold medals when he really should be in a separate category. You watch that 100m race and tell me it's possible for one guy to be that much faster over the last 50m than everyone else. Not even Usain Bolt had that kind of advantage...

The Paralympics continues into next week, and should throw up some incredible inspirational stories. Do yourself a favour and watch, and you'll be amazed at how some athletes overcome their disadvantages - a Chinese swimmer, double-leg amputee, and with only one arm, winning the backstroke, for example. But let's hope the Games don't head the same way as the Olympics, where the guy with the most money or least scruples can win - in some respects, it's already happened!

Join us later for a look at some comebacks and "bounce-backs" from the world of sport over the last two weeks...did someone say Lance Armstrong...?

Ross

The Olympic Games Medals analysis

302 golds: The Olympic Medal table analysis

302 gold medals were handed out in Beijing. Add to that 303 silvers, and 353 bronze medals, and you get a total of 958 medals won during the 16-days of Olympic competition.

When you consider that 10,500 athletes were in Beijing, then it's actually quite interesting to calculate that on average, one in 11 athletes leaves the Games with a medal!

Of course, that's not necessarily true, for two reasons. The first is that there are many multiple medal winners, like Michael Phelps, who won 8 all by himself. I guess one might say that his achievements account for 77 people who suddenly fall out of the calculation pool! On the other hand, team medals are counted as one, even though 20 athletes might win one. So, a German hockey team consisting of 20 guys each has a medal, but it's reflected as a single medal, which might eventually cancel out the multiple-medal winners like Phelps, Bolt and co. So it's interesting to note just how many medals there are on offer, once you make it to the Games, of course!

Today's post is a look at where those medals went (not to individuals, but to nations), and to figure out just who the real Olympic champions are. China topped the medal table, by virtue of its 51 golds. That's 17% of the gold medals on offer. But then China has 20% of the world's population, so what does it mean? The USA top the charts in terms of TOTAL medals won (110 compared to China's 100). But they are also the wealthiest nation, so should that be expected? And how do we evaluate Jamaica, Kenya, Ethiopia - smaller countries, with limited resources, who stole the show in Beijing in specific areas? That's what this post is all about.

The Gold-rush: China's remarkable rise

As mentioned, China was always going to be a superpower once it invested in sport. With a population of 1.3 billion to choose from, finding 100 medallists would not seem a mission impossible. But making it happen is no mean feat. For one thing, not all those 1.3 billion are in the "selection pool", and massive talent ID is required to tease out those athletes, train them and prepare them for competition. And this is what China has done so well. An investigating into China's sporting system in 1994 revealed that they have 4000 Coaches at the elite level! In a sport like rowing, for example, they have 1,200 full-time rowers, divided into squads of 60 to 70. That's an amazing system, at a huge cost of course, but it's partly responsible for producing the success they achieved.

But there's something more to China's success - it is not simply a numbers game. Take a look at the following table showing China's medal hauls at the last 3 Games:

Two things jump out:

First of all, China's ascent to the top of the charts has been achieved entirely by winning more GOLD medals. Their silver and bronze medal haul has remained unchanged since 2000. But they've almost doubled the number of golds.

Second, when you sum up the last 3 Games, China wins more golds than it does silvers and bronzes COMBINED! That's quite extra-ordinary, given the number of medals won. In terms of pure statistics, you'd expect some kind of "normal" distribution of golds-silvers and bronzes. The table and graph below shows the USA and Australia's returns, compared to the Chinese:


So it's quite clear that the Chinese have figured out how to get straight to the top, win the Gold, and not win any silvers or bronzes! Of course, home-ground advantage might be a factor, because an athlete in contention may find that extra 2% that pushes them from second or third into first.

But I suspect there's more to it than this. It's still a vague idea in my own mind, but I think this is an indication of massive investment into specific events. There is no half-measure, no stone unturned. The Chinese identify their potential medal winner and invest so heavily in that person or team that they become a clear favourite. That kind of targeted approach produces people with clear gold medal chances, and is testament to massive investment in individuals. Second or third are not options, given the preparation that must go into creating a vastly superior athlete. That's the only reason I can think of - the target is set, to win gold, and then they hit it. Pretty simple in principle, obviously very difficult in practice.

The underdogs: The small nations have their say

One of the more interesting means to analyse Olympic success is to convert the medals into a population per medal value. That is, compare the medals won PER PERSON, rather than an absolute number. This gives the "minnows" a chance to shine, because it's quite clear that unless something is very wrong, a nation of 200 million SHOULD win more medals than a nation of 200,000! So let's have a look at medals won as a function of the nation's population (note: the population figures are up for debate, I suppose, but this is not a census, it's just to make a point, so they're accurate enough!)


The Bahamas, then, are the undisputed champions of population per medal. They regularly win 2 medals per Games, and with a tiny population, have a remarkable ratio. The USA and China suddenly fall off the top perch, and win only 1 medal per 2.7 million people or 13 million people, respectively. That places them outside the top 40 on the population adjusted table. South Africa, meanwhile, fare poorly in Beijing, thanks to the lonely silver we won. Previous Games were much better, and it's understandable why fans are so disappointed.

Australia are the best of the "big" nations. It can be a little misleading doing this analysis, because the relationship between medals and size is not necessarily a straight line. So the Aussies, thanks to their intelligent investment in sport, make the most of what they have and do incredibly well given their relatively small size.

Just a note on this table - strictly speaking, one should try to "weight" the medals by awarding three points to gold, two to silver and one to bronze, and then work out a score. If you do this, then Jamaica come out on top, ahead of the Bahamas, courtesy their sprint domination and 6 gold medals in Beijing.

The source of big returns for small numbers?

So, to generalize slightly, the Caribbean islands tend to dominate this list. They are small, and yet regularly win a handful of medals, mostly in the sprint events (in Beijing, both the Bahamas and Jamaica won all their events in athletics). That is testament to the genetic potential of the atheltes in those countries. That's a debate that was had in the comments section of one our recent posts, and it's worth discussing again in the future - the genes for speed.

But for today, we'll stick to management-related issues. I believe the key to making the most of this genetic potential (which I'll assume exists, though I appreciate that it's not clear-cut) is to facilitate competition with a focus on specific sports. Your emails have informed us that the school athletics system in the Caribbean islands is enormously strong, and this is the big driver of these medals.

Add to this a culture of the sport (which is why the school system is so strong), plus the existence of "aspirational heroes and role models", and you have a mix that will ensure that talent comes through, despite relatively small investment and a small population. If anything, the smaller population helps the athlete come through. Lastly, the focus is not too broad - there is no swimming team, no fencing, no table-tennis to detract from limited resources. The eggs are placed in the basket that will produce results, and that means a much simpler system to run.

There is of course much more to it than this, but the post is running away with me now! So to spare some of your reading time, I'll cut the discussion on the "minnows" short, and also say that we'll pick up the Olympic Medal Analysis in a second post tomorrow. There, we'll discuss medals won per dollar GDP, and figure out which countries get the best returns given their financial resources. We'll also dissect the big failures (South Africa, mostly, since I'm here and biased that way!)

Join us then!
Ross

Olympic Oscars Part 2

Olympic Oscars Part 2: The less serious awards

Yesterday we did the first our Olympic recap "awards" post, which we continue today, in our look back on the Games and some of the stories we might not have covered during the actual Games.

The distance award

Since we have a preference for the distance events, we can’t let this go without giving special mention to the best of the distance events. Beijing ended up being one of the greatest Games ever for distance running. It produced two 5000m-10000m doubles, with three of those four golds won in Olympic Record time.

We also had an Olympic record in the Marathon, and the emergence of Kenya’s women in the middle-distance races. They won the 800m and 1500m titles, and the 800m champion, Jelimo, is probably the most dominant athletes in the world today, yet is still a little under-rated, in my opinion. Last week, in the first meeting post-Beijing, she ran the third fastest time in history in winning Zurich in 1:54.01, and Kratochvilova's world record, almost without doubt a doped record, seems under threat. For that reason, Jelimo will also not escape some cynicism over her own performance, particularly given her age. Nevertheless, the margins of victory in her races is quite astounding, and she is the most dominant female athlete around today.

But the BEST distance athlete of the Games, in our opinion, goes to Tirunesh Dibaba, for her double. The 5000m-10000m double was only introduced in 1996, so it’s not surprising that hers is the first of its kind. But her 10,000m win, in the second fast time in history (and perhaps fastest legal time, given what we all suspect of the Chinese of 1993), followed by a spectacular 5000 m (where the final 1500m was covered in the same time as the 1500m final) give her the nod. But really, it could just as easily have gone to Bekele. Or Sammy Wanjiru, who gave Kenya its first gold in the marathon, with a front running performance in the heat that defied physiological belief.

Biggest “no-show” of the Games

Which athlete threatened greatness and didn’t show up? Well, perhaps the biggest “no-show” was the impact of the pollution on the distance athletes. It was one of the big talking points leading up to Beijing, and no one knew what impact it would have on performances. Many experts had predicted disaster, but in the end, we got 4 Olympic records in 6 distance races, and no athletes were noticeably incapacitated by the famous Beijing smog. Of course, it may have had some impact, time will allow those stories to emerge, but watching the Africans dominate on the track, you got the feeling the body is far more impressive than most give it credit for!

In terms of athletes, difficult to say. We obviously focus only on swimming, cycling and athletics, so our picks come from there. Katie Hoff was expected to be the Michael Phelps in the female division, but she was heavily overshadowed by Stephanie Rice and Kirsty Coventry. So she’s a candidate, and perhaps the US trials were a little too close to the Games to allow their swimmers to hold their form or regain that peak. Hoff did, after all, set world records in the US Trials in June, but wasn’t the same in Beijing. The same could be said of many of the US swimmers, with the noticeable exception of Phelps. They still dominated the swimming medal table, of course, so perhaps this is overly critical...

On the track, Sanya Richards has dominated the women's 400m event for years, apart from at major championships, and she’ll have to try again for her first major title. And then Asafa Powell came, saw, and ran a final that was slower than his semi-final…again. It’s the second major Games where he’s looked good in the semi-final, and then tied up in the final. Not that he would have won gold, but he certainly should have won a medal. He got consolation by anchoring the Jamaicans to the world record.

And then the final one, perhaps the biggest, was pointed out by Erik in the comments below (I forgot about him because I'd commented on the event in yesterday's post), was Liu Xiang. That was maybe the biggest disappointment of the games - we were denied the race between Xiang and Robles (who was discussed yesterday). But Liu was the pin-up boy for the Games, the face of Beijing 2008 since 2001 when the Games were awarded. In the end, he didn't even clear a hurdle...

The Four-years of redemption award

This one goes to Blanka Vlasic, who has been unbeatable in the high jump since about 2 years ago. Yet in Beijing, she was suddenly matched and then beaten by Tia Hellebaut, who has shown nothing of that kind of form all year. Vlasic might be considered a little unlucky – it’s not as though she under-performed. After all, she cleared 2.05m, which is pretty much her norm for the year, but she was unable to raise it higher on the day, and lost on count-back. People have suggested that she was over-jumped, and had competed too much leading into the Games. This may be true, but again, she didn’t come to Beijing and jump anything less than what she typically does. She did, however, fail to jump a season’s best and as any athlete knows, you have to be in the shape to jump your best when it counts on the day, and she couldn’t do it. She’s young enough that in four years, she’ll have another shot at it.

Also in this category is LoLo Jones, who had gold in her sights, within her grasp even, but hit hurdle 9 to do a “Gail Devers” and lose out. She’s since bounced back, and seems quite upbeat about it. But the images of her coming to terms with that result were among the most dramatic of the Games. She’ll also have a chance in four years’ time, health-willing, to set the Olympic record straight.

Biggest surprise of the Games

You'd have been hard pressed to pick that Constantina Dita would win the women's marathon. We're showing our distance bias again, but watching the women's marathon, I had this "expectation" that any momen, one of Ndereba or Chunxiu would take the initiative and chase the Romanian down, and that surely she wouldn't stay out in front for a full 22 km. Yet she survived, and the chasing two settled for silver, in what was perhaps the biggest surprise.

Not that there were others - someone posted yesterday on Rebecca Adlington's triumph in the women's 400m freestyle event, which she followed up with a world record victory in the 800m freestyle. That was an unexpected medal.

Maybe the biggest surprise of all, which we touched on in yesterday's post, was the USA's failure to win a single gold in the short sprints and relays. They were completely outrun by Jamaica, with the Russian women providing the only "variety" by winning the relay. The USA sprint dominance was well and truly broken, and many suggested it's because the stricter anti-doping controls have slowed them down. I don't think that is the case - the truth is everyone else got faster. They were, after all, beaten by two world records, one Olympic record, and two performances that were the fastest in ten years (and of course, two dropped batons). So that's not a weakening, it's just that they've been outrun, and it will be interesting to see whether they return to form in the next few years.

Next up as we look back, a discussion of the medal table!

Until then!
Ross

Olympic Oscars

Looking back on the Games - "Olympic Oscars". The winner is....

It’s been one week since the Olympics, and a slow week here at The Science of Sport (as I try to catch up on time lost to the Games, mostly!). For today, though, to begin a Post-Olympic wrap, I thought I’d do a “Best of” (and worst of) list from Beijing. So here are the “Olympic Oscars”.

Best athlete

It’s a straight shoot-out between Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt on this one. Phelps was always going to be the biggest story of the Games, because even an “average” performance was going to see him surpass the record for most gold medals in history (which was 11 going in – Phelps was already on 6). As it turned out, he delivered on ALL the expectation, and won eight out of eight events, for an unprecedented medal haul in a single Olympic Games. By the time he’d won his fifth gold, he was already equal at the top of all-time gold medalists. He then added a further three, and with London to come (and who knows, maybe 2016?), he could well finish his career with twice as many golds as the next best person!

So, when we one day look back at the Greatest Olympians ever, Phelps is sure to be a name on everyone’s list. However, for Beijing, we’ll give the “Best athlete” prize to Usain Bolt. It reveals our bias slightly (we’re running fans more than swimming fans), but Bolt gets the nod ahead of Phelps because his performance was less expected, I dare say more spectacular, yet just as unprecedented. No one in history had ever won the 100m and 200m titles in world records. Bolt did both, and then capped it off with a third world record in the 4 x 100m relay. It was a Jesse-Owens like performance, and the manner of victory was what made it so spectacular. A demolition job in the 100m, featuring a celebration DURING the race and still a world record, and then breaking Michael Johnson’s legendary 200m world record, were probably two of the five highlights of the Games. Michael Phelps also broke world records – four individual and three team records, but given that swimming records fall just about as frequently as night follows day, I don’t think it’s quite as meaningful (more on swimming in future posts.).

Bolt still has a way to go to add “longevity” to his CV, and he will look to London 2012 and a repeat of the double to do that – if he succeeds then he’ll surely be recognized universally as the greatest sprinter ever. For now, he has the greatest sprint Olympics ever seen behind him. He energized the second week of the Games, and gets our nod as the “Athlete of the Games”.

Best team

I guess the “nominees” in this category are Jamaica, China, the USA and Kenya, each of which has some claim to call Beijing successful. Our pick is the Jamaicans, because for such a small island to have so comprehensively dominated a group of events is an amazing result. When we do our analysis of the medal table, you'll see that they top the charts in terms of success per PERSON.

They also get the prize because their success inspired one of our most controversial and widely discussed posts yet, when we tried to discuss Usain Bolt’s meteoric rise. In that post, we said how astonishing it was for Jamaica to have swept the four short sprints, including a clean sweep of the medals in the women’s 100m, and asked the inevitable question re doping. Had they not dropped the baton in the women’s 4 x 100m relay, they may well have won every sprint title. Add to that a women’s 400m hurdles title and it’s a never-seen-before dominance of the sprint events. Their success denied the USA a sprint title of any kind for the first time in the Olympic Games.

In response to our post, in which I wrote that their success will automatically raise questions regarding doping, we received some indignant, very offended emails from people who accused us of all kinds of ill-intentions. It’s still amusing to me to read the tone of those comments, because people get so indignant and are completely incapable of appreciating that at the very least, a discussion of doping is inevitable in a sport where success without doping is about as rare as South African medals at the Games! The most common argument in defence of Jamaica is that they have always produced great sprinters, and a few people accused me of lacking knowledge or appreciation of the history of sprinting (one even asked whether I’d ever heard of Merlene Ottey).

I must just make the point that while it is true that Jamaica has a rich heritage of great sprinters, what we have witnessed in Beijing is unprecedented, and not part of a normal sequence of historically good performances. Three world records, the fastest time in the last 10 years in the women’s 200m (since Marion Jones, that is), and an Olympic record in the 400m Hurdles. That’s not just part of a “long history”, that’s an explosion in performance! The celebration in Jamaica is testament to that very fact – Beijing 2008 cannot simply be explained away as the result of anti-doping in the USA, it’s more than that. And the debate exists merely to understand where that success comes from. But it was a spectacular sprinting performance, the highlight of the Games, and for that Jamaica is probably the nation with the most to celebrate post-Beijing.

Special mention to China, who we’ll discuss a lot more in our upcoming analysis of the medal table. I think it’s easy to dismiss China’s achievements as the inevitable consequence of having the world’s largest population to choose from. But when you look a little more closely at it, you realize that in fact, they succeeded because they invested very intelligently in their athletes. The medal tables from the last three Games makes for interesting reading, but we won’t give the game away here, but rather say to check in next week for the medal discussion!

Kenya also had their best ever Games, helped in large part by their women – the 800m and 1500m titles, as well as silver over 800m, marks the emergence of Kenyan women in middle distance events. Their men also won the 800m title, the Steeplechase (as always) and won their first marathon. It was, on the whole, an excellent Games for Kenya, and barring Bekele and Dibaba of Ethiopia, they will be satisfied with the health of the nation’s distance runners.

Most under-rated performance

There were so many magnificent performances in Beijing that it’s quite easy to see how some special results did not receive the focus they deserved. For one thing, we had two distance doubles on the track – Kenenisa Bekele and Tirunesh Dibaba won the 5000m-10000m double, but were somewhat under-appreciated (not by the distance community, however) thanks to Bolt’s brilliant running.

However, our award for the single performance that was perhaps least discussed is that of Dayron Robles in the hurdles. Robles won the race in 12.93, but looked so comfortable and “conservative” that it was really a procession. If there was a category for “Biggest let-down of the Games”, then this race would receive it, because Liu Xiang’s withdrawal due to injury robbed us of a potentially epic clash. However, unless Liu had been 100% healthy, he’d have been struggling along with the rest of the world in Robles’ wake. Robles would have seen LoLo Jones smash hurdle 9 the night before, and lose the gold medal – a stark reminder of how fickle hurdles can be. Perhaps he took a “conservative” line into the race, but he ran sub-13s looking almost complacent, and he’s the undisputed number 1 now.

Best race of the Games

The best race of the Games comes from the pool, where Michael Phelps almost had his quest for 8 derailed by a very unlikely source. It came in Phelps’ weakest event, the 100m butterfly, which is the only one of his events where he is not the world record holder. That title belongs to Ian Crocker, but it was not Crocker who almost spoiled this particular party. Rather, it was Milorad Cavic of Serbia, who broke the Olympic record in both his qualifying races and swam in lane 4 alongside Phelps.

I’m sure that most of you are aware of how the race developed – Cavic was well ahead at the turn, and seemed to be holding that lead coming into the final 20m. Phelps was closing very gradually, but Cavic really did look to have the race won with only 5 m to go. He led for 99.90m of the 100m race, but at the end, thanks to one final stroke that Phelps managed to squeeze in before the wall, he was able to touch, 1/100th of a second ahead of Cavic. In slow motion replays, it seems impossible that Phelps had done it. The Serbs protested, and conspiracy theories began – it was rigged, they said, as though “real-time” rigging of something was possible to that extent – the stadium timing system registered Phelps as touching first by 1/100th of a second within 3 seconds of the finish – if that was rigged, then technology really is incredible! Had it gone to a photo finish, with a lengthy process of deliberation, then I might have had time for such theories!

However, the electronic system didn’t lie – Cavic reached for the wall from about 2m out, and Phelps got one last stroke in, and the gold was his. It was number 7, and the medley relay completed the 8. But this was the race that nearly cost him his unique place at the head of the tree.

Honorable mention to another event involving Phelps, though he was not the star of the race – the men’s 4 x 100m Freestyle relay featured the USA vs France in a race for the world record. In the end, Jason Lezak produced the relay swim of the century to close down a 0.62 second gap on the world record holder, Alain Bernard of France, and give the USA the title. The top 6 teams all broke the world record from before Beijing, but the incredible final leg, where Lezak closed down a full body length on the world record holder (who would go on to become the Olympic champion) was extra-ordinary.

That’s it for this wrap-up. More to come in tomorrow’s post, with a few more “Olympic Awards” to give out!

Join us then!
Ross

Post-Olympic prospects

Sport goes on...Post-Olympic prognosis

Well, I must apologize for the complete absence of posting or replying to any of your comments on our Olympic coverage over the last 4 days - I'm going to blame our absence on a "post-Olympic hangover", which saw us drop from 2 posts a day to none in 4!

The comments and feedback we've received have been fantastic, thank you so much for the support during the Games. But 2008 is but 8 months old, and there's a great deal still to come this year - the athletics season, the Marathons in Berlin, Chicago, New York and no doubt loads more sport to write about and start debates on! So stick around for what will hopefully be a good end to an already spectacular season of sport, courtesy Beijing.

Zurich athletics - the Olympics in one day

But we're back on the road again and looking forward to the upcoming sports action. There is no rest for the athletes from Beijing, because the biggest single day athletics meeting in the world takes place this Friday in Zurich. The "Weltklasse" (world class, literally translated) is often described as the Olympic Games in 3 hours, and this year it features 41 medalists from Beijing, as well as 14 Olympic Champions.

There are also some mouth-watering "rematches" to look forward to - Merritt vs Wariner at 400m, Lolo Jones vs everyone in the 100m hurdles, and Blanka Vlasic vs Tia Hellebaut in the high jump. Other athletes looking for post-Olympic "redemption" are Sanya Richards (400m) and Alyson Felix (200m)

There are also appearances by Kenenisa Bekele, fresh from a double gold in Beijing, Yelena Isinbayeva, fresh from (another) world record, and the Kenyan women who took out gold at 800m (Palema Jelimo) and 1500m (Nancy Langat, though in Zurich, she'll be running the 800m, which could spice it up a little). Top of the bill though should be Usain Bolt, who has said he's "not tired" from his triple-medal winning, world-record breaking exploits in Beijing. Whether another world record is on the cards is difficult to say - I doubt it, given the conditions, the travel, the timing of the season, but with Bolt, who knows?

His coach is reported to have said that had he not slowed down, he'd have run 9.52seconds, which I think is on the extreme side of hyperbole, given that he'd have to find probably 0.2 seconds in the second half of the race, and his Beijing celebrations likely cost him no more than 0.1 seconds (though one commenter, who claims to have "an expert eye" reckons it was more than this). I think I'll trust the data, and not the "expert eye" - expert eyes are subject to bias and sensationalism, which seems to flying around lost these days...

The only two remaining contenders for the big jackpot of $1 million are Jelimo and Vlasic. Vlasic looked all but unbeatable until Beijing, so the pressure is on her to regain the ascendancy, while Jelimo looks, well, pretty close to unbeatable unless she falls horribly off the pace (she'd need to dop 2 seconds to be caught by the second place runner, such is her dominance).

In any event, we'll certainly be following the action and bringing you any news - world records in the distance events might be on the cards - Bekele looked so good over the last 3000m of the 5km that I wouldn't dismiss the chance of a real attack on that time. But, the big issues is travel fatigue and the same post-Olympic malaise we've been suffering from!

Looking back on the Olympics

The other thing that needs to be done is to look back on the Olympics a little more reflectively. Everyone will of course take their own top moments out of the Games, and for most, Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt will top their "Highlights" reel.

However, if one looks a little harder at the "whole" of the Games, there are some pretty interesting stories to be found, and over the course of the next week or so, I thought it would be interesting to look at some of those issues.

Among them will be:

The cost of Olympic success?
My country, South Africa, won a glorious SINGLE silver medal, which has caused an outcry over here (hopefully, action will be taken). China on the other, topped the table with a staggering 51 golds, and Great Britain had their most successful Games in 100 years. We'll have a look at the strategies and systems adopted with a bit of scientific and management eye in the coming days.

The great Olympic nations: Who is the most successful Olympic nation for its size and economy?
China won 51 gold medals. Of course, you say, they have 1.3 billion people, they should win a truckload. The Bahamas on the other hand, won 2 medals with about 300,00 people, that's an impressive performance. We'll look at POPULATION PER MEDAL and also GDP PER MEDAL, in what is quite an interesting analysis. The results may surprise -

Swimming world records: Where to next?
Swimming world records fell at an almost unprecedented rate in Beijing - there were 25 world records, and only ONE Olympic record was not broken. But that doesn't tell the real story - there were at least 3 races where the team coming FOURTH broke the old world record but did not win a medal! Of course, we expected that would happen, given the Speedo LZR swimsuit's impact on performance, and the pool, but we now need to have a look at what it means for the sport of swimming.

Our own "top" lists
Of course, we have to make up our own list of reflections - greatest performance, best athlete, biggest disappointment. That's the fun part, but we'll certainly give it a crack in the coming days, perhaps first up.

I'm sure other cool topics will come up in the course of discussion, so we'll keep it open for now and say join us for that in the next few days for more Post-Beijing discussion, and of course, comments from the world of sport. The show goes on!

Ross