And it’s going to be “gold, gold to Australia, gold” quite a lot at the Beijing Games, if the predictions of US sports magazine (and annual cheesecake purveyor) Sports Illustrated hold up. They’re predicting 22 gold medals for Australia, five more than Athens, and a couple more than the Australian Olympic Committee’s estimates.
As well as the usual gaggle of swimmers, the magazine is pencilling in gold medals in the women’s triathalon for Emma Snowsill, shooters Warren Potent (I’m sure the headline writers are already preparing for that one) and Michael Diamond, a trio of sailing events, and the men’s pairs rowing.
I know I’ll be hanging on every tacking duel, as the smog-blurred images of 470-class dinghies cut their way through the algae-ridden sludge at the Qingdao Olympic Sailing Center, yelling at the screen. Of course, what I’ll be yelling is “get this crap off the television and show me the hockey tournament, you twits!” I may actually start throwing things at the screen after the second replay of Grant Hackett’s 1500 meter heat…
UPDATE: It has been pointed out in comments that LP has not discussed the Rudd government’s continued determination to introduce ISP-level internet filtering this week. To redress that lack I’ll quote a post I made at Hoyden About Town a couple of days ago in its entirety below:
No surprises: internet filtering test results show products block legitimate content
We said it would. Despite a cheery press release from Communications Minister Stephen Conroy that all is going well, an analysis of the actual test results shows that the tested filters slow connection speeds significantly (which means ISPs would have to increase capacity, the costs of which would be passed on to consumers) and have a false positives rate that would block at least 10,000 legitimate sites (and that’s for the best product result - most would block more). It gets worse:
None of the products could effectively filter instant messaging, streaming video, peer-to-peer file sharing like BitTorrent, newsgroups or newly-invented Internet protocols except by blocking them entirely. Let’s count them again. None.
How long will the Rudd government continue to pretend that having this cumbersome, costly and ineffective product shoved at us under an opt-out scheme is in any way a good idea?
Amongst the commentary on the Tour de France, Emma MacDonald has used the opportunity to draw out a theme that appears periodically in the press - why aren’t there women competing some particular elite sporting event, in this case the tour?
“Women do not get a fair shake in our industry and this has got to change,” Jet Tanner, owner of JET Cycling, told the US Women’s Cycling Challenge in May. Notwithstanding the obvious physical advantage many men have over women, shouldn’t a world proud of its equal rights allow women to try out for any event if they want to?
Doesn’t anyone wonder how far women could go, since, according to cycling.com, “experienced female riders have been known to kick the backsides of good male racers”. This month a female cycling team — the BRADAGirls — competed for the first time against men in the gruelling one-week Tour of Jamaica, all hardened road racers who have won the respect of their male counterparts.
Cadel Evans had a terrific Tour de France stage in the Alps last night (our time). He didn’t win the stage. He didn’t gain any time on the two riders a few seconds ahead of him in the overall standings - Frank Schleck and Bernard Kohl - nor did he look like doing so. But, at this point, he’s probably the best-placed to win the Tour. Evans, you see, is not the best climber in the Tour field. Schleck, Kohl, and Carlos Sastre - about 40 seconds behind - are better climbers, particularly in their ability to sprint for a short distance on the climb. Evans can maintain a steady pace equal to them over a long climb, but he struggles to match their acceleration. The other riders and their team managers - particularly team CSC, containing, Schleck, Sastre, and several other expert climbers - try to exploit this chink in Evans’ armour, which they did on Sunday night where he lost a few seconds to Kohl and Schleck. But, over the top of the Cime de la Bonette - the highest through road in Europe - Evans was able to sit comfortably in the middle of a small group containing all those riders. One important rival - Christian Vande Velde - was not, and another rival, Denis Menchov, sat with the leaders pretty much all the way up the hill, only to fall a few seconds behind in the crazy descent down to the finish.
That’s probably not good enough for Schleck, Kohl, and Sastre. They need to beat Evans by a substantial margin over the mountains. On Saturday, the riders will race, one by one, against the clock over a 50-odd kilometre course in a flatter region of France. Evans and Vande Velde are superb time-triallists, as is Menchov. Schleck, Kohl, and Sastre are not quite as good. They’re expected to lose a couple of minutes to Evans in that stage. So they need to gain those couple of minutes in the mountains. They have one more chance, and it’s on the most famous mountain in all of cycling, the Alpe d’Huez.
In contrast to the media coverage earlier in the year when the People’s Republic of China suffered such an overwhelming public relations disaster in the context of protests from human rights and Tibetan activists against the Olympic torch, very little has been heard of Tibet in the mainstream media of late. All that we’ve seen lately in the Australian press is the solemn warnings from the Australian Olympics Committee that any athletes wearing an innocuous t-shirt with a generic human rights message offered to those interested by the Australia Tibet Council would be immediately sent home. Lest they annoy the Chinese government, and violate the “spirit of the Olympics” presumably. The corporate sponsored Olympiad brooks no petty “mixing” of politics and sport, of course.
Terry Hill and Gorden (Raging Bull”) Tallis were not the brightest sparks who ever played State of Origin rugby league, but their 1999 confrontation provided perhaps the most emblematic photo of the ferocious interstate rivalry. That’s Laurie Daley’s then receding hairline in the background, now miraculously restored.
And so it has come to this. New South Wales and Queensland with one win each in the 2008 State of Origin campaign. ANZ Stadium in Sydney is the host for Origin III, the decider. It is a ground for which Queensland has little love. But after blowing New South Wales off the park in Origin 2, the Cane Toads are deserved favourites (though they will still try and claim underdog status).
Thurston, Inglis, Prince, Folau. A dream combination which could be a nightmare for New South Wales. Thurston enjoys the extra room at five-eight and so does Inglis. He was sent on many a raid down the left side of the field by Thurston in game 2. An obvious tactic for New South Wales is to keep Inglis quiet. And that means shutting Thurston down.
The structure of elite-level cricket competition is virtually unique. Soccer, rugby, the various American codes - you name it, they’re all based around clubs which are free to recruit players from where they choose, rather than representation from the country or state where one was born - though at the sub-elite level, England’s county teams have been full of Australian players for decades.
The recent Indian Premier League Twenty20 competition was strikingly different, with many of the world’s elite players distributed around the various teams like a schoolyard pick-up game. And, according to cricketer-turned-businessman Neil Maxwell, it’s the way of the future, and the cricket establishment must deal with it or miss out:
WORLD cricket is on an irreversible path towards a franchise club system in which players will be free to participate in three Twenty20 competitions and earn millions from contracts alone…Maxwell also believes that if Test cricket and player development are to feature in the revolution, governing bodies such as Cricket Australia must act fast.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,
Or close the wall up with our Queensland dead!
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood.
Apologies to The Bard!
Yes, it’s time for State of Origin 2 in the year of our Lord 2008.
The time has come, the walrus said… Oops! I’ll start again.
The time has come to begin the the greatest contest, the longest stoush, in the greatest game of all. Well that’s the view of the 0.0000000001% of the world population that follow rugby league. Tonight we have the first State of Origin match, where the cane toads take on the cockeroaches from south of the Tweed in the opening stoush in enemy territory where the reviled Blues have won 10 out of the 12 matches played. This on one of the most unsuitable venues for the game in the country, a round field for a rectangular game, for Chrissake, and a slippery surface unsuitable for grazing cows, or anything useful really.
It’s part of the dark plot by the game’s governing body, where NSW always has the numbers, to tip the odds their way. As is the adoption of the 10 replacement rule, specifically requested by the NSW coach, as against the 12 replacement rule used in international competition, when any donkey knows that SOO is faster and more furious than any international game we are likely to play.
Andrew Bartlett dissects for us the official goals of the “Olympic movement”:
* “Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.”
* “The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of man, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.”
* “The practice of sport is a human right. Every individual must have the possibility of practising sport, without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.”
* “Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement.”
But sport has nothing to do with politics, does it? Thorpey said so. And a gaggle of superannuated IOC bureaucrats/marketing men. (They all appear to be men. What’s with that?)
Andrew goes on to detail the fact that human rights abuses in China go far beyond Tibet. It’s a great post. Go read!
The dense booklet, which was overseen by former prime minister John Howard, describes the uses of the stump-jump plough, the emergence of the Heidelberg school of art, the location of Phar Lap’s heart and depicts Australia’s first governor, Captain Arthur Phillip, as “firm but humane”.
It’d be nice if the Rudd government grasped the bit between its teeth and just scrapped the citizenship test. Do we really need a Rudd-era one to supplant the Howard-era farce? Would anyone care except Planet Janet?
I’m fairly sure Chris Evans - the Immigration Minister - doesn’t believe it has any value. What will be gained by setting up a review panel? And, incidentally, why is there a “former Olympian” on the panel anyway? To put a word in for teh sport? To carry the torch for that warm and fuzzy feeling of the unity of humankind we get when we think about sporting contests? If there’s any political pain in getting rid of such a nonsense, surely taking it now rather than stretching out the debate would be good politics. After all, when you’re riding so high in the polls, you can afford to take a few decisions which might be right but not universally acclaimed.
China’s Foreign Ministry have warned against protests in Canberra because the torch “belongs to the whole world”. That the corrupt thugs who run China (latest effort – dispatching a boatload of weapons to fellow despot Bob Mugabe) object to expressions of dissent even in other countries is no surprise. But let’s get over this fetishisation of the Olympics.
Year after year the same faces, the Kevin Gospers and John Coateses who are apparently on the Olympics gravy train for life, stand up to declare that it’s all about the sport, or world peace, or the youth of the world. In fact it’s a giant media event designed to generate massive revenue which, this time around, is being employed to promote one of the world’s most brutal regimes.
And you can see where these sports administrators come from. Just about every athlete or sports person parrots the same lines about sport having nothing to do with politics or, for that matter, morality, as if sports – professional, international sport, in all its cash-generating glory – is somehow a priori disconnected from basic ethics and standards of civilized behaviour.
For those planning to have a crack at disrupting the relay, or who just want to marvel at some wonderful security overkill, the event kicks off at 8.30am tomorrow morning.
The location? Reconciliation Place. That’s Olympian-level irony.
While we (or most of us at any rate) were asleep, the Guardian’s Eleanor Schor was liveblogging the progress of the Olympic torch relay/rally through San Francisco. Or rather, on a boat circumnavigating San Francisco.
Watching from Kiwiland, No Right Turn asks a pertinent question:
Is it a relay if no-one can see it?
According to the Guardian’s liveblog, the torch has since returned to land, a significant distance from its original route, and it may not even finish at the original location. So, they have no protestors - but no spectators either. So much for taking the torch to the people…
Update: According to the Students for a free Tibet liveblog, one of the torchbearers pulled a Tibetan flag, and had the torch taken away.
Meanwhile, Kevin Rudd has got up the goat of the leader of the Tibet Autonomous Region, Qiangba Puncog:
Asked about previous criticisms by Mr Rudd, Mr Qiangba, a Tibetan Chinese, said: “Australia and other countries should have a better appreciation and understanding that people in Tibet are now enjoying democracy and wonderful human rights protection and those remarks are totally unfounded.”
Whatever. They can’t expect anyone outside China to take that seriously. Obviously it’s part of their typical Maoist-era information control tactics, and to warn Rudd not to press them too hard on human rights. It’s to his credit that he’s undaunted.
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
In contrast to the media coverage 
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