August 12, 2008
NBC will let you stream what you can't tune in for. Apart from episodic coverage, though, the best post-event holistic view of the Olympics I've found has been... wikipedia. I know the existence of this "wiki"-"pedia" is hardly breaking news, but long bets aside this is one of the first times I've found it a useful recurring-coverage source.
Want to see whether the US can match China's bid for the 119? Schedules, competitors and who is wearing #13 in the Olympic Triathlon? Follow along.
BTW: I *LOVE* the little squiqqly-line sport icons on the NBC sked page. They're iconic, fun and deftly evocative of ideograms.
Also: Boswell's recent piece on Phelps goes right into the '09 Best Sportswriting book (even given its overly-strong "your uncle from Kentucky after two drinks" nationalism):
In 1980, you could hear Heiden's skates make an entirely different sound from others -- screeching as they crushed the ice in the turns. Here, the indelibly individual image may the sight of Phelps in the butterfly (his best event) that is indelibly different. In a 200-meter fly prelim Monday, Phelps' entire upper body seemed to be out of the water, almost exposing his gills. Dolphins resent him.
Reading about the pictograms reminded me of a previous Olympics that had neat icons - the '94 winter Olympics. I wasn't able to find a complete set, but just found this one photo. They are based on Scandinavian petroglyphs. I thought they were pretty cool, but I might be slightly biased.
There's a collection of icons from previous summer Olympics here.
Lillehammer's are certainly the most interesting of the winter olympics pictograms (few more examples). I guess pins were a big deal or something.
Are you sure your warm fuzzy memories of Lillehammer weren't due to Kerrigan/Harding? Nah, for doncarlo it was probably Dave's Mom.
God bless you internet - still goddamn hilarious
Oh crap! someone stole Nate's password when they found out he wasn't using the internet until his thesis was done!
My faves: 
. Apparently Handball 
is Basketball if someone stole your blackboard, and Triathlon 
is running with a hangover.
Sydney's and Sarajevo's are horrible! Sydney's looks like it should decorate a $3 plus-sized shirt from KMart, Sarajevo like a corrupted .gif file. I think yeah: after Beijing, Lillehammer and Moscow are best. None of the other bauhaus-y ones (LA, Munich, Calgary, ...) can get the line weight balance right between the "person" stroke and the "bike wheel" stroke.
Am I the only one who forced to choose among Kerrigan / Hardy / Dave's Mom would go with a 1992, pre-Monica, pre-Iron Lady II Hillary?
Help, my head's fallen off!
Frame-by-frame of Phelps' photo phinish. Apparently the smart thing to do is extend, as Cavic did. Phelps knew he'd lose so in the heat of the race took an ungainly half stroke that had him extend exactly right to win. Absolutely amazing.
======
I already bitched about this on twitter, but many of the reporters writing this up don't know how to do the following devilishly complicated mathematical analysis:
0.01s * (100m/50.59s) ~ 2cm
In words, the swimmers took 51s to complete a 100m course, so their average rate was 1.977 m/s. In a hundredth of a second their progress would be in the neighborhood of (one-hundredth of a second)*(2 meters per second) ~= 2cm.
I'm going to pick on Svurluga's article in the Washington Post, but I saw this kind of thing elsewhere too ("Maybe the width of a breath-freshening strip"):
What can happen in a hundredth of a second? The beat of a hummingbird's wing, perhaps, or maybe sound moving across an imperceptible distance. ... Phelps's victory was by such a margin that placing a sheet of paper between two fingers might not describe it.
A hummingbird's wing beats about 50 times a second, so half a wingstroke is a hundredth of a second -- that's fine.
A sheet of paper is about a tenth of a millimeter thick. At 2 m/s, the swimmers cross this in 50 millionths of a second.
Sound travels at about 340m/s, or about 1100 feet per second. In 1/100th of a second sound travels almost as far as Phelps' outstretched frame. If we call 1mm an 'imperceptible' distance, sound takes 3 millionths of a second to cross that distance. More troublingly, the author seems to think that the faster they're moving the shorter the distance a given time interval implies.
The Omega timing system records to 0.001s but reports only to the 0.01s. (Reportedly this is the uncertainty in the length of each lane.) So this isn't a situation where it's possible Phelps touched at 50.05899999 and Cavic at 50.059000001: the distances are in the neighborhood of centimeters, not tenths of millimeters.
I can't help but notice that 001second.com failed to include a couple photos from the underwater view.
Errol Morris' recent articles in the NYT couldn't be more apt...
Meet Monkey -- Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewitt (of Blur / Gorillaz / Tank Girl fame) did the spots for BBC's olympics coverage campaign.
Natalie du Toit finishes 16th in open-water marathon swim. She has one leg, making her the first female amputee to compete in an able-bodied Olympics.
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Those "squiggly-line sport icons" are not just on NBC's page. They are the official sport icons from the Beijing Organizing Committee:
And yes, they are pretty cool.
posted by doncarlo at 06:30PM CST on August 12