Bet on some horses today. Ended up picking two winners, but lost all my money (10 bucks…poverty steeze) in the end.
The year is 1968. The place: Mexico.
The 19th Olympic Games have just started and the crowd holds its breath as a little-known American high-jumper, Dick Fosbury, attempts his first jump. To the crowd’s amazement, as he approaches the high-jump bar, Fosbury turns his back towards the bar, instead of the customary way of turning one’s body towards it. He flips over the bar backwards, brings his legs up and sets a new world record of 7 ft. 4 inches. For decades, no high-jumper thought this radical jumping method was possible or could even be successful but guess what? Dick Fosbury thought the opposite and the Fosbury Flop has since become the “conventional” technique for high-jumping. Literally speaking, Fosbury has turned a flop into a success.
What happened to lighting the Olympic torch by bow and arrow? Witnessing this as a kid was such a holy shit moment.
Olympic Fencer refuses to leave the floor after being robbed 
This is on that “Never Forgive, Never Forget” tip. Similar to when Roy Jones Jr. was robbed in 1998 by South Korea in a shameful scandal.
Anyone else excited about The Olympics?
Waiting game
By: Frank Partnoy, Financial Times, June 22, 2012
During superfast reactions, the best-performing experts in sport, and in life, instinctively know when to pause, if only for a split-second. The same is true over longer periods: some of us are better at understanding when to take a few extra seconds to deliver the punchline of a joke, or when we should wait a full hour before making a judgment about another person. Part of this skill is gut instinct, and part of it is analytical. We get some of it from trial and error or by watching experts, but we also can learn from observing toddlers and even animals. There is both an art and a science to managing delay.
A tennis court, baseline to baseline, is 78ft long. First serves are launched at well over 100mph. Some volleys come even faster. That means a player returning a shot has just 400 to 500 milliseconds from when the ball leaves their opponent’s racket until it hits his or her own. Just half a second.
Hitting a tennis ball at this speed is a paradoxical act. On one hand, it is a largely unconscious physical reaction. It has to be, given the speed of the ball. There is not enough time to consider spin or angle. Conscious contemplation takes at least half a second, so anyone who even tries to think about how to return a shot will end up helplessly watching the ball fly by.
On the other hand, tennis involves a range of sophisticated and creative responses. Ideally, a player should react to both the placement and trajectory of an incoming ball. The position and movement of an opponent are also crucial. Great tennis returners respond to the information cascade of an incoming ball as if they had taken time to process it consciously, even though we know that is not possible.
Professional tennis players are no faster than we are at pure visual reaction time. Imagine that you and Novak Djokovic are playing a video game. We can measure visual reaction time by having both of you simply press a button when you first see the ball leave an opponent’s racket. Both of you would take about 200 milliseconds. Most people are about that fast, and no one is much faster.
That means virtually anyone who can see a distance of 78ft can react visually to any tennis serve or shot in plenty of time. As even the slowest video gamer can attest, if all you have to do is “see” and then press a button to swing — if you don’t even have to get off the sofa — anyone could return a professional-speed serve.
In real tennis, the difficulty arises in the second stage of the service return. The remaining period of, say, 300 milliseconds is the time players have to react physically – to adjust themselves to what they know about the ball’s flight and then try to hit it how and where they’d like.
Having just 300 milliseconds to hit a ball is a serious problem for most of us. Amateurs cannot move to the correct spot and produce a swing with accuracy or power in 300 milliseconds. Most of us can barely adjust our rackets by a few inches. Many solid professionals cannot do much more.
Even Djokovic does not successfully return every shot. But for most returns, he has plenty of time. He is so skilled and practised that he can produce near-instantaneous muscle contractions to move his body and execute a swing in perhaps 100 milliseconds. For him, the physical part of hitting the ball is almost as easy as pressing a button.
Djokovic’s physical speed frees up time for him to prepare during the phase tennis coaches call “ball identification”. This is when he absorbs the crush of data generated after the ball leaves his opponent’s racket. He splits up the time available during a return shot; because he is so fast, he has extra time to gather and process information. Finally, at the last possible instant, he commits to his choice and swings. He can sandwich a lot of preparing between seeing and hitting.
Because Djokovic needs less time to hit, he has more time to gather and process information. He sees, prepares and, finally, only after he has processed as much information as possible, he hits. His preconscious time management and his extraordinary ability to delay enable him to stretch out a split-second and pack in a sequence of interpretation and action that would take most of us much longer.
Everybody poops, even competing athletes
ESPN “goes there” with a piece about how, sometimes, athletes are so busy competing that they do not stop to poop.
Jesus pooped.
Tim Tebow does too. LeBron James poops. Derek Jeter, Maria Sharapova, Drew Brees — they all poop. Most of these stars will never have a Julie Moss moment or even a Serena Williams scare. And if they did, it’s highly unlikely they’d ever talk as openly about it as Paula Radcliffe does in discussing her own Defcon 1 incident. The British distance runner and Nike spokesperson was four miles from winning the 2005 London Marathon when she stopped suddenly and darted to the side of the course. Radcliffe had been losing time for several miles because of gastrointestinal disturbances — the kind that, according to one study, affect 83 percent of marathoners and that are usually preceded by gaseous outbursts that runners call walkie-talkies.
Radcliffe’s solution? She simply placed one hand on a metal crowd barricade for balance, used the other to curtain her shorts to the side and perched, precariously, over her shoes. Then, as they say in England, she proceeded to “have a poo” right there on the street and in broad daylight, within two feet of a startled spectator. “I didn’t really want to resort to that in front of hundreds of thousands of people,” she says, unfazed. “But when I’m racing, I’m totally focused on winning the race and running as fast as possible. I thought, I just need to go and I’ll be fine.”
She was fine. Radcliffe finished her pit stop, adjusted her shorts and floated through the next four miles to win by more than five minutes and set a world record for a women-only marathon. The most telling part of the whole scene was the BBC announcer’s description. He insisted Radcliffe was just stretching out “a cramp” during her brief detour. Cheeky bastard.
Afterward, there was no public backlash. That’s a tribute, Inglis says, to the supreme cultural power of sports. He offers this scenario: If Radcliffe had been out on the street in London a day earlier, walking with her kids or her dog, and stopped to relieve herself on the sidewalk, she would have been arrested, shunned and dropped by Nike within an hour. But the fact that she did it in the middle of a race made it not just okay but, in some weird way, kind of awesome. “You truly begin to get a sense of how influential sports are only when you realize it’s one of the few activities where society’s willing to override such strong feelings about defecation,” Inglis says. “We make something so taboo acceptable, for a little bit at least, because it’s being done for the sake of what we see as a higher sporting ideal.”
(Editor’s note: Discovering the “one knee pee” during soccer practice changed my life.)
