True sporting spirit

It is good to note those moments during the Olympics when sportsmanship won out over the intense drive drive to win.

Days later, at the Olympic Stadium, Gianmarco Tamberi of Italy and Mutaz Barshim of Qatar found themselves in a situation they’d talked about but never experienced — they were tied.

Both high jumpers were perfect until the bar was set to the Olympic-record height of 2.39 meters (7 feet, 10 inches). Each missed three times.

They could have gone to a jump-off, but instead decided to share the gold.

“I know for a fact that for the performance I did, I deserve that gold. He did the same thing, so I know he deserved that gold,” Barshim said. “This is beyond sport. This is the message we deliver to the young generation.”

After they decided, Tamberi slapped Barshim’s hand and jumped into his arms.

“Sharing with a friend is even more beautiful,” Tamberi said. “It was just magical.”

Watch the moment.
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Long haired sprinters

I usually only watch the track events at the Olympics and that too only after it is over. I was watching the finals of the women’s 100m and noticed that the top three medal winners (all from Jamaica) all had long ponytails, with the silver medalist’s hair an eye-catching yellow and red.

I wondered whether having long hair might slow them down just a fraction due to increased wind resistance. It is true that resistance is not as significant as in swimming where everyone wears caps. But in an event where one-hundredth of a second can make all the difference, wouldn’t sprinters want to minimize drag as much as possible?

Since almost all the eight finalists had long or longish hair, I have to assume that they have concluded that it does not matter and that does seem to be the case.

Flowing locks increase air resistance insofar as they boost a runner’s surface area. More hair creates more opportunities for friction between the runner and the air, so a full-headed athlete would have to work harder to maintain the same speed as a bald one. And since Olympic sprinters are already close to maxing out in terms of effort, any situation that requires them to do more work has the potential to extend their times.

But hair is pretty light, so athletes know it’s the styling, not the quantity, of their tresses that could dash their hopes. Hairdos like ponytails, braids, and or buns, which comb the mane behind the neck, have little effect on overall surface area, while hair that sticks out from the sides of the head increase it (and might also whip into the runner’s eyes).

All the sprinters had their hair in ponytails that stayed behind their backs and did not swish back and forth.

Why English spelling is so weird

The origins of languages are buried deep in time and teasing out why they have the features they do is not easy and hence often speculative. For those of us whose language is English, one mystery is the way things are spelled, which is a source of humor for comedians like Eddie Izzard.

Arika Okrent says that English is unusual in the level of weirdness of its spelling
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How to raise children not to be jerks

I have described before that I think a good philosophy to live by is “Try not to be a jerk”. While it is more limited in scope and not as elegant or high-minded as some of the more well known ones like treating others as you would like them to treat you, it has the advantage that jerk behavior is easily recognizable in pretty much every situation and thus can be more easily avoidable if one wants to.

So naturally my attention was caught by this article that had the title How to Raise Kids Who Don’t Grow Up to Be Jerks (or Worse). It consists of an interview with Melinda Wenner Moyer, the author of a book that discusses how to raise children to not be jerks. (The book’s title is actually How to Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes which is pretty much the same thing.)

Moyer says that the key is helping children develop a theory of mind.
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The horrific abuse of female gymnasts

I hadn’t heard the terms ‘yips’ and ‘twisties’ until reading some of the many articles following Simone Biles’s withdrawal from her events at the Olympics. This article explains what the terms mean.

People who watch the types of sports that are broadcast on a regular basis are more familiar with the yips than the twisties because generally, we only gather to watch champion gymnasts compete every few years. However, people mainly associate the yips with uncharacteristically poor performance on fields or courts leading to errors and low scoring.

However the twisties, which involves a sudden loss of spatial awareness mid-air, can result in serious injury, possibly even death. Most of us heard about it for the first time after other athletes came forward to defend Biles from attacks accusing her of a weak mental fortitude, citing feats from past Olympic medalists as evidence that pushing through physical pain is what makes a champion a champion.

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The pressure encountered by top athletes

The shocking news that gymnast Simone Biles has withdrawn from her events at the Olympics due to mental health issues, following Naomi Osaka’s withdrawal from two Grand Slam tennis tournaments for the same reason, has turned a massive spotlight on the pressure that these top athletes are under. Biles was seen as the marquee athlete of this Olympics, like Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps in previous games, and expected to win accordingly. Those of us who have never come close to being in such stratospheric levels of athletic achievement may find it hard to appreciate the pressure these people are under, expected to perform at their peak under the close scrutiny of large numbers of people. The cameras are on them all the time, even when they are just stretching or chatting to people.
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Meet the Guardians

The Cleveland baseball team has finally announced the new team name, replacing the Indians with the name Guardians. While I was glad that the old offensive name was gone, I was underwhelmed by the new one, seeing it as somewhat unimaginative. I imagined that it was chosen because the new name rhymed with the old one and thus looked similar when written in cursive script as the new logo

But Steven Litt writes that the name has a deeper meaning and is very appropriate.
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The bathroom bills that we actually need

Conservative state legislatures around the country have been trying to pass bills that will prevent access to bathrooms based on gender identity, specifically restricting access for trans women. This is hateful, aimed at a tiny minority that is already discriminated against in so many ways. But on my travels over the weekend, I thought of a bathroom bill that would benefit everyone and passing it would be a much better use of everyone’s time.

There used to be a time when I could drive for long distances without having to stop to use the bathroom. I recall on one occasion driving non-stop from Cleveland to Philadelphia, a journey that took about seven hours, without stopping for anything at all. But I was younger then. Those days are long gone and on my trip to Los Angeles and San Diego I found myself having to stop to use the facilities several times.
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Break from blogging

I will be going this weekend to Los Angeles and San Diego to visit old friends. It will be my first road trip since the pandemic shut downs began in March of 2020 and in addition to the pleasure that seeing old friends always provides, it will also be nice to get out on the open road and drive down the western coast. As a result, blogging will be light to non-existent.

I expect to resume on Tuesday.

Tie breakers in sports

I am not a football fan but follow the game in a casual manner and so learned that Italy beat England in the European Cup yesterday. The score was 1-1 at the end of regulation time.

I did not watch the game and my opinion on it would be worthless anyway but what I want to discuss is the way that the game was decided, by means of a penalty shootout that Italy won 3-2. Whether a goal is scored or not depends a lot on whether the goal keeper manages to guess correctly the intentions of the penalty kicker as to where in the goal the ball is being targeted.

While I understand the need to find a way to quickly end a game when the scores are tied, this seems to me to be a particularly bad method. Given the difficulty of scoring goals which makes ties likely, this form of the tiebreaker has been used in many high-profile games, even deciding Olympic gold medals.
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