NikeSpeed.com.

Dromology, Paul Virilio's term for the logic of speed, shares a common root with the word dromos, Greek for 'running' or 'race'. So it comes as no surprise, then, that dromology finds its sportocratic manifestation in Baron Pierre de Coubertin's modern revival of the ancient Greek Olympic Games.

Citius, altius fortius — the Olympic motto urging one to be swifter, higher, stronger — is in each of its facets a quest for speed: citius, the flat out speed of a race over some geographical distance; altius, the accelerating speed of an individual in search of escape velocity on a vertical leap; fortius, the ability to twitch a bundle of muscle fibres to move an object and then quickly recover for the next potential action. The imperative element of the Olympic motto — swifter, higher, stronger — suggests that the Olympic Movement, and its modern notion of Progress, commands us to ever-higher degrees of speed.

For the most successful in their quest, speed and capital become interchangeable in a process that began at the climax of Cold War sport and politics, the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics. With the Cold War's denouement, and the corresponding acceleration of global capitalism, successive Olympic Games have come to embody a new de facto Olympic motto: citius, altius, fortius, copiosus. As Maverick and Goose exhorted in the hypermilitary Hollywood movie Top Gun, which hit theatres shortly after the L.A. Games ended, we must "feel the need, THE NEED FOR SPEED!"

Their message is far-reaching.

Our chrysalis digitalis, the silicon silk that numbs us to conscious engagement with the new Olympic motto while protecting us from comprehending our posthuman metamorphosis, does not currently extend to the developing nations of the planet, which makes the sight of the African marathoner all the more poignant. He understands the message.

The marathon, that tragic run of the soldier Pheidippides, who brought news of a Greek military victory over the Persians before his collapse and death, is today equally as dramatic as a quest for speed, though this quest for speed is measured over a much greater distance than the fast-twitching, explicitly techno-scientific cyborgism of the sprint races.

Citius, altius, fortius, copiosus still holds true over the 26.2-mile distance, and in this regard the African marathoner serves as a metaphor for the developing nation: multitudinous at the front of the pack, each one vanishingly lean, desperately, stoically, questing for speed/capital, but having such great distances to overcome relative to the hypermuscular sprinter and the lipidinous spectator. The more desperate this particular quest for speed becomes, the more this multitude disintegrates before our very eyes.

Some notes from my first ever visit to Woodbine Racetrack the other day:

Powershift at the Races

Interesting example of Toffler's Powershift thesis at work. In the case of Woodbine, it does not charge admission to the racetrack, instead making its money on gambling and concessions. Of particular note in the latter category is the Official Race Day Program, which promotes on the front cover that "Admission And Parking Are Always Free" and is symbolic of the shift from Toffler's second stage of power — wealth — to his third stage of power — information.

Woodbine derives neither its power nor its profits from the capital that is concentrated in the racegrounds proper. Rather it is through the control of information that Woodbine asserts itself: it is flatly impossible to do a decent job of wagering on the horses without the sophisticated information contained in the daily racing form; it is equally assured that the majority of track goers do not want to share their programs — and their scribbled meta-analyses of the information contained therein — so that they may retain as much of an edge as possible against the betting odds.

So Woodbine, then, possesses intelligence that its patrons absolutely must have and are unwilling to share amongst themselves. The sheer volume of information contained in the Woodbine track database virtually guarantees that competitors won't be able to threaten its monopoly. And at a couple of bucks a pop, printed on cheap newsprint every day, its margins are extremely high. Combine this with the gambling that takes place at various electronic terminals around the complex and it becomes apparent that Woodbine does not operate a racetrack but rather a sophisticated financial exchange market.

Now that is power.

Watching the Race

We spend most of the race watching the competing horses on the big screen television in the centre of the infield. It is only when the horses come down the home stretch that we shift our focus to the live action (aka a different camera angle). Is this final few seconds of the race the sole difference between being at Woodbine and consuming the event from an off-track betting parlour elsewhere in the world?

Declining Horsepower

The horses are in many ways irrelevant to the race. It is only the information that the punters are concerned with: the handicapping data in the daily race program, the short pre-race forecasts on the in-house TV, the ever-shifting odds on the race board. Despite the sport's efforts to imbue these "athletes" with personality (in parallel to what Benjamin pointed out occurring with film actors), and although physically only a short distance away, they are actually far removed from the true locus of horseracing consumption.

In this sense, does the horse prefigure the future of the professional athlete, with its overwhelming reliance on information for its identity?

"Spiming is an ideal technology for concentration camps, authoritarian regimes, and prisons." — Bruce Sterling, 'When Blobjects Rule the Earth', SIGGRAPH 2004.

Chuck Klosterman, author of Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, discusses potential sports scandals in his email exchange with The Sports Guy.

But I think there is a possibility of something even bigger: What if it turned out that an entire baseball season was scripted?

Like … let's say the nation was really depressed and troubled, and everyone became obsessed with alienation and despair. And let's say the government realized this was happening, so they decided to buoy the national spirit by secretly fabricating an incredible baseball season (the whole year — every single game). Some big, dumb white guy would hit 80 home runs; some unknown rookie from the inner city would hit safely in 60 straight games and bat .400; some aging beloved pitcher would throw 20 no-hitters. This would captivate the world, and America would forget its troubles and just embrace the National Pastime. We would all be able to feel good about something. Yet it would all be a mere construction; it would just be the government's way of distracting us from what was really going on. Reality would not exist as we know it.

Granted, this is unlikely. But it's not that different from trying to go to Mars.

Another example of what John Bale referred to as "the problem of spectators": a Canadian spectator, bare-chested and sporting a blue tutu, climbed a diving board and jumped into the pool at the men's synchronized diving competition in Athens.

Olympic organizers told The Associated Press the man was trying to send a love message to his wife by getting on TV. However, the message painted on his chest appeared to be the website address for an online gaming website.

Update: The Toronto Star continues the story today:

Bensimhon [the prankster] first made headlines in March when he burst onto the ice at the skate meet in Dortmund, clad in goggles, a tutu, ice skates and the Web advertising on his torso. His appearance shocked five-time U.S. champion Michelle Kwan, who was about to begin her final program.

"My first instinct was to look for a weapon," Kwan told reporters after the meet. "I thought safety first and got off the ice. Who cares about the long program if somebody is shooting at you. It's the kind of nightmares you have. Thank God he wasn't that crazy."

Bensimhon was detained briefly but not charged following the incident in Germany, which had online skating chatrooms abuzz over whether the "tutu factor" ultimately caused Kwan to fail in her quest for a sixth world title.

Monday's Olympic infiltration came early in the blunder-filled fifth and final round at the 3-metre synchronized diving springboard. The normally flawless Chinese pair, widely expected to capture gold, collapsed when diver Wang Kenan lost his concentration, landing flat on his back. The Russian team also buckled when Dmitri Sautin slapped the board with his feet, ultimately hitting the water on the back of his shoulders.

The bizarre sequence cleared the way for the host nation Greece to come from nowhere, taking its first gold medal of Athens 2004 and its first-ever diving medal.

That will certainly make things more difficult for this man, who I am rooting for harder than I am for most of the Olympians.

An extended sample from sports geographer John Bale's Virtual Fandoms: Futurescapes of Football that really seems to tie a lot things together for me:

"In The Transparency of Evil, Baudrillard (1993) devotes several pages to the Heysel disaster and other aspects of football stadiums. At Heysel football was perverted into violence. In Baudrillard's words, 'there is always the danger that this kind of transition may occur, that spectators may cease to be spectators and slip into the role of victims or murderers, that sport may cease to be sport and be transformed into terrorism: that is why the public must simply be eliminated, to ensure that the only event occurring is strictly televisual in nature' (Baudrillard, 1993). In Baudrillardian sport, however, the expulsion of spectators from stadiums also serves to 'ensure the objective conduct of the match, … in … a transparent form of public space from which all the actors have been withdrawn' (Baudrillard, 1993, emphasis added by Bale).

The gradual territorialisation of spectators has been progressively enforced in British stadiums during the course of this century. From relatively open spaces to enclosed, all-seat stadiums, the football environment has become increasingly panopticised, subject to an increasing number of hierarchical and disciplinary gazes. Televised sport continues the general trend. The banning of spectators furthers the domestication and the spatial confinement of the spectating experience. In an empty stadium, the world could watch on tv 'a pure form of the event from which all passion has been removed' (Baudrillard, 1993). The shape of the future is recalled by Baudrillard in his allusion to a football match between Real Madrid and Naples - a European Cup match in 1987 when the game took place in an empty stadium as a result of disciplinary measures against Madrid from a previous game. This 'phantom football match' is described by Baudrillard as

…a world where a 'real' event occurs in a vacuum, stripped of its context and visible only from afar, televisually. Here we have a sort of surgically accurate prefigurement of the events of our future: events so minimal that they might well not need to take place at all - along with their maximal enlargement on screens. No one will have directly experienced the actual course of such happenings, but everyone will have received an image of them. A pure event, in other words, devoid of any reference to nature, and readily susceptible to replacement by synthetic images (Baudrillard, 1993).

Television sport produces a sport landscape of sameness. Drawing on the writing of Virilio (who, in turn, drew on the writing of Marcel Pagnol) we can note the difference between spectating at a sports event and watching it on television (Virilio, 1991). At a football game no two people see the same event (because no two people can occupy exactly the same place) whereas the game on tv is exactly what the camera saw. Spectators see this wherever they sit. Television re-places spectators. More significantly, however, Virilio and Baudrillard draw attention to, and provide the solution to, one of the problems of the sports landscape already alluded to in this chapter - that the intrusion of spectators transforms what should be a sports space into a sporting place - sometimes a sport place of disport. Virilio (1991) notes that the potential exists for the placelessness of sport to become literal - stadiums can be abolished and live performers be replaced with televisual images that would be shown in a video-stadium without sports players, for consumption to tele-spectators. To some extent this already exists: the presence of jumbo-tron video screens inside stadiums, which relay slow motion replays and the fine detail of the action, has become the defining reality for many sports fans - a postmodern condition where the image is superior to the reality. It is also uncannily predicted in the recent television advertisement for Adidas, the sports clothing firm, which displays a futurescape of football in which the game is 'played' in a tightly enclosed concrete box with what appear to be simulated spectators, programmed, presumably, to applaud skill but lacking in any partisan sentiments. This also reminds us of the commercial imperatives of modern sports for which sanitised and safe places, combined with a synthetic environment which, as far as possible, should be 'weatherless', are highly desirable. It would not be totally inappropriate to describe the scenarios I have been outlining as the 'mallification' of football.

The one thing that Baudrillard and Virilio do not recognise (or do not make explicit) is that such scenarios would also satisfy perfectly the norms of achievement sport - the 'surgical' space in which this event takes place provides the placeless environment insisted on by the achievement and fair play norms of sport. Virilio's prescription that the architecture of sports places 'would become no more than the scaffolding for an artificial environment, one whose physical dimensions have become instantaneous opto-electronic information' (Virilio 1991), is the dystopian milieu but one which is predicted by my sport-geographic model."

So now the Olympics, with its collection of sleek, muscular, and nubile bodies — the 99th percentile — is being billed as the world's "most exclusive VIP club", where those without a chance to win or who have already been eliminated from competition engage in a carnal form of bacchanalia in which sexual escapades with one another — or others — occur with regularity.

Once freed, many athletes simply cannot control themselves. They are slaves to an irresistible physiological force called "tapering" that works like this: many competitors in endurance sports consume as many as 9,000 calories a day at the height of their training cycles. But they swim or run or pedal seven hours a day to burn these off. In order to peak for the Games, however, they reduce their training time to mere minutes in the days preceding their events while keeping the calorie count virtually constant. Thus an athlete is spring-loaded for his or her moment in the sun: lots of rest, lots of energy - boom. The results, particularly within a large, like-minded population, can be electric. "When you have 10,000 people walking around who are amped up on their own glycogen you can almost see the sparks flying off their skin," says BJ Bedford, the American backstroke gold-medallist at Sydney.

The 70,000 condoms provided to athletes at the Sydney Olympics disappeared so quickly that organizers had to order 20,000 more. Two years later, 250,000 condoms were handed out at the Salt Lake Olympics, despite the city's predominantly Mormon base. And 130,000 condoms will initially be given out to open the Athens Games, the largest Trojan onslaught there since Antiquity.

Our sporting deities, then, though steeped in the Hellenic tradition of the Games, do not cavort on the bedrock of Mount Olympus in their post-sport play. Instead, they engage in their festivities, prophylactic layer intact, in the ever-shifting nomadism of the Athlete's Village, a rootless existence that parallels both the placelessness of hypermodern production and consumption, and the essentially disposable nature of our sporting deities.

For the global village congregation of spectators, meanwhile, the Olympic mythos and its simulated sex serve as a catalyst — via the digital prophylactic of the screenal economy — to release the tensile bondage between the libidinal and the lipidinal, and the circulation of capital continues anew.

The CBC, one of many broadcasters covering the Opening Ceremonies of the Athens Olympics, innovatively breached the membrane surrounding the procession of athletes and other team members by phoning Canadian wrestler Christine Nordhagen and interviewing her during the ceremony. I will guarantee that she becomes one of the Canadian feel-good stories over the next two weeks.

Hoosiers, 1952: Hickory versus South Bend, Indiana state finals. 20 seconds left to play. Hickory runs a clearout for Jimmy Chitwood, who calmly watches the clock run down, takes two dribbles and buries the game-winning jumpshot. The crowd goes crazy, and Jimmy is carried off the floor as a hero.

Now, if Jimmy lived today, what kind of ripple would that jumpshot have caused?

Let's begin tracing the polyvalent effects here by looking at Jimmy's line from the game, and the sports information market in general. (For the purposes of this analysis, let's pretend that there is some sort of congruency between the high school and professional basketball worlds, and that the data flows would be shared between them. Game statistics are from The Sports Guy's Hickory vs. South Bend projected box score.):

CHITWOOD, JIMMY
Player	Min	FG-A	FT	Reb	Ast	Stl	Pts
Jimmy	32	14-18	2	6	0	2	30

Videogames

Hyperreal representation: Information imported from the "real" leagues, then paired with virtual likenesses of the players themselves (the pseudonimage) >> the model of the game is hyperreal; that is, it is created in such a way that the most exciting elements happen more frequently, or that negative elements (ie. injured athletes) occur less frequently or perhaps not at all >> athlete fear: having a poor rating when season begins (or when product is released), rookie not being signed before the game release date — though these fears will be mitigated as real-time statistical updating may offer the athlete relief from previously poor performance.

Hoosiers outcome: Jimmy's incremental player rating increases slightly. Kids are more likely to use his identity when they are playing the latest pro basketball videogame title. Due to the increased exposure, Jimmy is able to command higher endorsement dollars.

Gambling

Cybernetic information flow: Professional sport contest has ceased to be about winning or losing, but rather the market correction that places the two teams on an "equal" footing in order to re-establish the determinance of Truth: the spread >> athlete fear: not covering the spread.

Hoosiers outcome: South Bend was heavily favoured in this game, so Jimmy's shot would have sent a spasm through the sports gambling market … bettors would be cashing in and out, and the house would be revising its initial line for the next Hickory game.

Fantasy Sports

Genetic proliferation: Each professional league generates the code, the genetic material, to produce other leagues >> the logic is recombinant, however: no two leagues are alike, except by pure coincidence >> athlete fear: being waived/traded in virtual space.

Hoosiers outcome: The "owners" of Jimmy Chitwood in their fantasy pools would be happy with his output from the night before: even if they hadn't actually witnessed the game, they would have done very well in the PTS, FG%, and REB categories.

* * *

Much like the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings chaotically, then, Jimmy's jumpshot triggers a maelstrom of events globally, the sum of which serve to sustain the sportocratic apparatus.

"Our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security." — John F. Kennedy, The Soft America

A note to follow up on yesterday's post about Olympic security: If it is such a big risk to all those involved in the Olympics, then why not just cancel the event? I mean, <tongue-in-cheek> it is just a sporting contest, right? </tongue-in-cheek>

On security at the Athens Olympics, from ESPN.com (emphasis added):

Original estimates placed the bill close to $1 billion, but the current estimate is $1.5 billion — a number that could go higher by the time the Games close. This represents more than a fifth of the expected final $7.2 billion price tag. To put those numbers in perspective, consider that Sydney's security costs were approximately $240 million, and eight years ago in Atlanta — where a pipe bomb explosion tore into the Olympic tranquility — the tab was closer to $2.5 million.

If the dangers are greater than ever, it must be said, so is the safety net Greece has thrown up to meet them. What are they getting for their money?

The centerpiece is the C4I (command, control, communications, computers and intelligence), a $312 million network of 1,300 infrared and high-resolution cameras (some of them fiber-optic cables underwater in Athens' main port of Piraeus), spy vans, helicopters, and a 200-foot blimp with chemical "sniffers" that are all linked by a sophisticated communications system. However, a Greek daily newspaper reported last week that 20 percent of the images from cameras will be lost because of delays in wiring monitors and flaws in the command center.

Three NATO AWACS arrived last week at Aktio air base in northwestern Greece and will patrol the airspace above the Games. NATO will also provide a 200-person force to deal with any potential chemical or biological attacks and NATO's entire naval fleet will patrol the country's challenging borders. In recent weeks, U.S. spy planes, Air Force RC-135s and Navy EP-3s, have stepped up reconnaissance flights over the Middle East and North Africa. U.S. Customs loaned Greece two $7 million mobile X-ray scanners, which will be used to examine cars and trucks for possible guns, drugs and explosives — perhaps the greatest fear of Athens security experts is a so-called "dirty" bomb, a mobile nuclear device.

So we've come a ways since Haraway wrote about C3I … um, weren't computers always implied in such a scheme? And speaking of security, will The Streaker make an appearance?

Selfishly, it has taken me this long to get around to this, my eulogizing the death of Ralph Wiley, the ESPN.com sportswriter who passed away June 13 at the age of 52. His impact was felt by many, as evidenced by the warm tributes at ESPN.

Basically, I don't have that much to say about him myself, because I didn't know him. I am only familiar with he and his gritty Road Dog alter ego through his Page 2 columns on ESPN.com. I don't even remember any of his writings from his nine-year Sports Illustrated tenure, though I'm sure I must have liked them, since it was my favourite magazine while growing up and I used to consume it voraciously from cover to cover when it arrived every week.

(Side note: our copy of SI almost always seemed to arrive late … we presumed that our mailman was taking it home for a quick read before delivering it, since it certainly seemed to have a used look when I finally pulled it out of the mailbox. A pox upon you mailman!, though maybe he liked Wiley as well…)

What I can say about Mr. Wiley is that he got it. He really understood the world, in my opinion, and could write about it in ways that made you want to keep reading, with a voice of experience and gravitas to back it up. We were actually quite dissimilar, in many ways, what with skin colour, age, life experience, etc. Yet he got it, and I would have loved for him to tell me that I got it as well.

You see, if and when I ever finished my book, the person I had most wanted to send a copy to was Ralph Wiley. I wanted to write a letter thanking him for how influential his writing had been, I wanted to present him with my take on the sports world and beyond, I wanted him to read it and nod approvingly. And I wanted him to tell me that I got it as well. Selfishly.

Fortunately, the enduring legacy of Ralph Wiley's writing is that it used sports as a lens through which to understand human beings, both in our quest for perfection and our inevitable legacy of imperfection. Dog and Dub understood the concepts like passion and honour, but they also acknowledged the selfishness and prejudice that lies within us all.

So I hope you will understand my selfishness in mourning your passing, Mr. Wiley: from now on I will no longer be moved to understand the world in your unique way, nor be stirred to the core during the process. But if I ever do get it, your work will have been a significant reason why. Yours in sport and life…