The Commonwealth Games, one of the largest multi-sport events in the world, has added a new twist for the Melbourne 2006 event.

The Queen's Baton, the Commonwealth version of the Olympic Torch, will be outfitted with global positioning system technology and cameras, so that one can pinpoint the baton's exact location at anytime and view video footage of the relay.

Can we invoke Virilio here, and contrast the Olympic Torch as duration with the Queen's Baton as light-speed?

Who is in control of this cyborgian coupling (emphasis added)?

The fact that "Sauber had approached Anthony Davidson emphatically tells us one thing: Sauber is preparing for life after Jacques Villeneuve," Autosport deputy editor Jim Holder told CBC Sports Online.

. . .

"The car isn't giving Jacques the feedback he needs to get a feel for the braking, which at least in part led to his Malaysian mistake," stated Holder. "Jacques says the team needs to work harder to get the car suited to him, but the team feels, at least in part, it is Jacques who should be adapting to their car."

. . .

How does Villeneuve account for his less-than-stellar results for Sauber? Prior to the Malaysian race, he told reporters he was struggling to adjust to the electronics and mechanics of the car.

"F1 has evolved a lot, mainly on the electronics side, and it takes a long time to get used to everything," he told a Formula One news conference. "The other thing is that with the electronics you have now, you don't feel everything that is happening.

"You become a bit of a passenger in the car and that is very different from what I'm used to."

(via CBC Sports)

The latest news from the military-entertainment complex, in which we see the evolution from human, to human-animal coupling, to human-animal-machine coupling (and just in time to help us forget about steroids!!):

On the defensive side, manufacturers try to design a lighter, more durable glove to give players better control and responsiveness in the field. By sampling hundreds of new and classic materials, Easton decided Kevlar, the material known for its use in bulletproof vests and flak jackets, had the properties — lightweight, nonabsorbent, incredibly strong and pliable — to become part of their newest line.

After more than two years in development, its Stealth gloves would ultimately combine a traditional leather palm and webbing with a Kevlar backing, as well as an Easton-designed combination of wool and foam board inside. The gloves are now billed as the "lightest on the market."

(from Wired)

Conspiracy theorists and civil libertarians, fear not. The U.S. government will not use radio-frequency identification tags in the passports it issues to millions of Americans in the coming years.

Instead, the government will use "contactless chips."

(from Wired)

Man implants RFID tag in hand. We are also seeing non-implanted RFID tags in sport. What are the political considerations of this new technology at the level of the human body, beyond those of leisure?

(via pasta and vinegar)

The Sports Guy reviews the latest reality-TV entry, The Contender:

[Unlikeable contestants aren't] a problem with "Contender," not with 16 boxers all plugging away for the same break, sharing the same hopes and dreams. You can't pretend in a boxing ring when somebody is trying to pummel you. You just can't. And with the way it's edited ? gratuitous family shots, gut-wrenching music, almost like one of those old Sally Struthers commercials with the hungry kids ? you're emotionally invested in each fighter before his big showdown. Does it come off like a bad Hallmark commercial sometimes? Absolutely. But it's impossible not to feel something for the loser of the big match every week, as he walks back to the darkened locker room, faces his disappointed family, questions his career and dreams, then limps out of the building with a gonging noise in the background, like the 10-count of a bell.

(Note: Last week's show was especially poignant since it was the one when Najai Turpin, the boxer who committed suicide just five weeks ago, got knocked off. His show turned out to be hauntingly manipulative and I'm not entirely sure they should have shown it; I couldn't get him out of my mind on Sunday night. Too many questions left unanswered after the fact. Did he kill himself because of the show? What were the circumstances? Was he more troubled during the taping than they made it seem? There was something sneaky about the way they presented it, like they were holding back information from us. Still, I can't remember a show affecting me like that in a long time. It was like watching someone die right in front of you, even though he wasn't dead yet.)

. . .

In case you haven't seen the show, they edit the matches into a few action-packed minutes ? giving them leeway to add a pounding soundtrack, cuts to the crowd, reactions of family members and slow-motion punches ? so it plays like a scene from a boxing movie. Sure, it's impossible to get a feel for the ebb and flow of the fight. But I'm not sure you need it. With the way they edit these matches, they could turn the Ruiz-Holyfield trilogy into a replica of the three Gatti-Ward fights.

Say what you will about SG, but he is nothing if not competent at taking the pulse of the 30-something male pop culture consumer. And as soon as I read his words, I was reminded of Baudrillard's analysis of the Loud family in Simulacra and Simulation:

The End of the Panopticon

It is again to this ideology of the lived experience, of exhumation, of the real in its fundamental banality, in its radical authenticity, that the American TV-verite experiment on the Loud family in 1971 refers: 7 months of uninterrupted shooting. 300 hours of direct non-stop broadcasting, without script or scenario, the odyssey of a family, its dramas, its joys, ups and downs - in brief, a "raw" historical document, and the "best thing ever on television, comparable, at the level of our daily existence, to the film of the lunar landing." Things are complicated by the fact that this family came apart during the shooting: a crisis flared up, the Louds went their separate ways, etc. Whence that insoluble controversy: was TV responsible? What would have happened if TV hadn't been there.

More interesting is the phantasm of filming the Louds as if TV wasn't there. The producer's trump card was to say: "They lived as if we weren't there". An absurd, paradoxical formula - neither true, nor false: but utopian. The "as if we weren't there" is equivalent to "as if you were there". It is this utopia, this paradox that fascinated 20 million viewers, much more than the "perverse" pleasure of prying. In this "truth" experiment, it is neither a question of secrecy nor of perversion, but of a kind of thrill of the real, or of an aesthetics of the hyperreal, a thrill of vertiginous and phony exactitude, a thrill of alienation and of magnification, of distortion in scale, of excessive transparency all at the same time. The joy in an excess of meaning, when the bar of the sign slips below the regular water line of meaning: the non-signifier is elevated by the camera angle. Here the real can be seen to have never existed (but "as if you were there"), without the distance which produces perspective space and our depth vision (but "more true than nature"). Joy in the microscopic simulation which transforms the real into the hyperreal. (This is also a little like what happens in porno, where fascination is more metaphysical than sexual.)

This family was in any case already somewhat hyperreal by its very selection: a typical, California-housed, 3-garage, 5-children, well-to-do professional upper middle class ideal American family with an ornamental housewife. In a way, it is this statistical perfection which dooms it to death. This ideal heroine of the American way of life is chosen, as in sacrificial rites, to be glorified and to die under the fiery glare of the studio lights, a modern fatum. For the heavenly fire no longer strikes depraved cities, it is rather the lens which cuts through ordinary reality like a laser, putting it to death. "The Louds: simply a family who agreed to deliver themselves into the hands of television, and to die from it", said the producer. So it is really a question of a sacrificial process, of a sacrificial spectacle offered to 20 million Americans. The liturgical drama of a mass society.

TV-verite. Admirable ambivalent terms: does it refer to the truth of this family, or to the truth of TV? In fact, it is TV which is the Loud's truth, it is it which is true, it is it which renders true. A truth which is no longer the reflexive truth of the mirror, nor the perspective truth of the panoptic system and of the gaze, but the manipulative truth of the test which probes and interrogates, of the laser which touches and then pierces, of computer cards which retain your punchedout sequences, of the genetic code which regulates your combinations, of cells which inform your sensory universe. It is to this kind of truth that the Loud family is subjected by the TV medium, and in this sense it really amounts to a death sentence (but is it still a question of truth?).

I think the fundamental change a few decades after the Louds is that we, the spectators, are far more complicit in the hyperreal production of reality TV. Deep down, the audience knows that the process is manipulated — we wink-wink, nudge-nudge with the producers — and then turn around and consume the output as if it were real.

ESPN.com's Eric Neel opines on style vs. fundamentals:

I come not to bury fundamentals, but to praise style, if you know what I mean. My text is our collective devotion to the pure value of "good fundamental basketball" and our sometimes knee-jerk damnation of anything that has that little bit extra. There's something a little too buttoned-down about our fascination with fundamentals, I think. They can appeal in the same way robotics do: perfect execution. But they can repulse in the same way robotics do, too: cold, heartless performance.

If you're a head coach hoping to control everything that goes down on the court, maybe the fundamentals, from basic skills to well-run sets, are all that you preach, pray for, and cling to. But for anyone else, for fans and players, style is a big part of what connects us to the game.

Think about the guys you carry around in your head and your heart. Doc, Bird, Magic, MJ, Dominique … they all had a little mustard on the hot dog. It was their flavor that captivated.

Sure, style can be showy, even cocky; but before any of that, it's fun. The bits of creativity and flash players add to what they do are about play, about the game being a game. There's an infectious sort of joy about them. When players enjoy themselves, we enjoy them. And when that sense of fun loosens them up enough to try something spectacular, we're right there with them, exhilarated, amped, hungry for more.

And stylish play isn't as reckless and non-traditional as some folks make it out to be, either. There's a sense of history in it. Think of the way Josh Smith donned the Dominique jersey at the All-Star Slam Dunk contest. Improvisors are in the tradition; they tend to acknowledge and riff off each other. They build on what's come before. J-Kidd is a descendant of Magic, who was a descendant of Clyde, who'd followed on the heels of Cousy.

. . .

The flourishes and funky elements distinguish guys, lend them expression. You hear a lot of "No 'I' in team" talk about the value of anonymity and self-sacrifice. That's all true and all good. But hoops, more than any other sport, is the place where that idea doesn't have to come at the expense of individuality. Hoops, more than any other sport, is where a player can be both an integrated part of the collective and a unique presence, recognizable for his signature approach, for his style.

That's what I love about basketball. I love the collaboration, grounded in the fundamentals. But even more, I love the spectacular achievement of the player, the artist, grounded in some inherent will to create and some crazy courage to do it right out there in front of God and everybody.

Brenda Laurel, at the recent Game Developers' Conference:

I want to talk about the spectacle. The meanings created by images that hold us in webs. My thesis is that we are contributing to the damage that the spectacle does to human beings by suggesting the interactivity of a joystick is real agency. We entrain people to understand that imitation has personal power. The spectacle trains us to be consumers. We are urged to keep the economy healthy, pay our bills. Did you ever notice there's not place for the earth on the bottom line? We cancelled the Voyager mission for less than the cost of a video game! The dream of space appropriated by George W Bush? How can we stand for this?

. . .

GTA [Grand Theft Auto]. I talked to 22 little boys in LA, all of them wanted to see that game. With only one exception, the thing that they wanted to see was to be able to drive by their house. They weren't interested in stealing cars. Or the criminals. Or the back-story. They weren't interested in that, they wanted the simulation of driving by the house.

(from Wonderland, via Scott Rosenberg)

We have seen that instant replay has become an integral part of professional sport, not only of the game's representation, but of the actual game itself, which has led to a non-linear experience of time during the contest. Now, Rogers Wireless is using this idea in a new commercial to hawk videocamera-enabled cell phones.

A bunch of guys are temporarily at a pause during a game of road hockey, when all of sudden the impartial third-party observer dramatically comes out after consultation with his buddies, holds out his Rogers phone, and invokes what is now becoming an old chestnut in sports: "Upon further review, the goal has been … DISALLOWED!" As the commercial closes, cheers and groans are heard in the background while we see the indisputable evidence on the screen — the goalie kept the ball out.

So what is the problem with this spot (besides the fact that it's further proof the only way advertisers can sell a product to men in Canada is through hockey)? The problem is that it normalizes the use of instant replay technologies during our non-structured play. Instead of the beauty of creative and unscripted shinny with its messy rules and rule interpretations, we are taught that participation in the surveillance society is the only legitimate path to truth. And that Rogers can bring this complicity to your local neighbourhood.

I have noted earlier that simply by attending a professional sporting event, a spectator waives all legal rights to the reproduction of their image or voice — without receiving any financial compensation or even having to give authorization.

While it is true that many want to be on the Jumbotron, or make the 11pm highlight reel on SportsCentre/er, this obscures the fact that it normalizes a society, via the ludic, where cameras are surveilling us from everywhere. Is there room for resistance to the gaze?

One possible solution is not to go to the game. This is not true resistance, however, but non-engagement — I still want to see the game. So when the Jumbotron camera points my way, I make the socially unacceptable choice to stick a digit or two up my nose. A rule of thumb? I would say rule of finger …

As ESPN.com's Darren Rovell reports, the NCAA is planning to clarify rules regarding the marketing and merchandising of its student-athletes. Legislation is being proposed that would prohibit an institution, conference or the NCAA from using the name or likeness of an individual student-athlete on retail products such as jerseys and video games.

Schools currently sell jerseys of specific athletes by featuring their numbers only, as the NCAA has maintained that the numbers are technically interchangeable and are property of the school. In video games, athletes appear at their appropriate positions in college football and basketball games but are known only by number and don't include names or the look of the athletes.

"We draw the line at facial features or names on jerseys," NCAA president Myles Brand said recently.

. . .

Video game makers, which have previously agreed not to use names, have a greater issue than the jersey manufacturers since the piece of legislation will prohibit them from using names and facial features of players in the future. Because they can't do so, their games are less realistic than games in other professional sports. In recent years, producers of games have done all they can to get closer by including mascots and cheerleaders and even signing deals with college coaches.

"We talk to these athletes and they are all playing our game," said Chip Lange, vice president of marketing for EA Sports. "They want to be featured in the game. That's part of the fun factor of being a successful athlete. But the NCAA is looking at it from a standpoint of protecting the image or status of their athletes and that's something that they hold as one of their pillars."

. . .

"My biggest concern is strictly from a technology perspective," Battle said. "The best features in today's games center around facial features and if the collegiate market doesn't match their pro counterparts in this area, the disparity in the quality of the games will continue to increase."

Parkour, also known as free running, could be described as a hybrid of street skateboarding, orienteering and martial arts, in which the goal is to navigate a route through an urban environment with fluid, forward movement and no pauses or breaks (think Permeability in the sB post "A Foundation for Sports Geography"). The aesthetics of various body positions along the way, as well as the aesthetics of the entire journey, are of utmost importance to the sport's philosophy. As PLSJ's Anne Galloway notes in her "Advanced Studies in Urban Cultures" course at Carleton University, there is a strong link between parkour and skateboarding's "performative critique" of the urban environment.

(click on the image for a Flash introduction to parkour from CBC Radio 3)

From Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 119.:

We got by for a long time with an energetic conception of motion, where there's a point of contact, or we are the source of movement. Running, putting the shot, and so on: effort, resistance, with a starting point, a lever. But nowadays we see movement defined less and less in relation to a point of leverage. All the new sports - surfing, windsurfing, hang-gliding - take the form of an entering into an existing wave. There's no longer an origin as starting point, but a sort of putting into orbit. The key thing is how to get taken up in the motion of a big wave, a column of rising air, to 'get into something' instead of being the origin of an effort.

The Olympics are nomadic. Time is more important than space. Legacies are a conceit of the IOC and the respective national organizing committees. And the Paris 2012 bid illustrates this nicely for me:

In part because Paris has its would-be Olympic stadium, Paris organizers have opted for an unusual twist, one that may play a key role in the July 6 vote for the 2012 Games: 13 of the structures that would go up for a Paris 2012 Olympics are temporary pavilions.

The use of such temporary venues is in keeping with a 2003 IOC study that noted the soaring costs of Games-related building as cities increasingly view the Olympics as a catalyst to fast-track urban regeneration.

Beijing will spend more than $30 billion readying for the 2008 Games. Athens spent more than $10 billion gearing up for 2004, and now is confronting the bill.

…

For $225 million, according to detailed financial records that the five cities have supplied to the IOC, Paris would deliver temporary venues for basketball, boxing, weightlifting, table tennis, wrestling and taekwondo, handball, fencing, equestrian and modern pentathlon, archery, triathlon, cycling, beach volleyball, baseball, softball and the start of the marathon.

For $225 million, Madrid would build a permanent tennis center.

(from Los Angeles Times, via The Sports Economist)

No, this isn't a post about Castro and the Communists in Havana. It's about a story at the other end of the economic spectrum, featuring everyone's favourite billionaire-of-the-people, Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks and publisher of Blog Maverick.

The story begins with a post by Mr. Cuban entitled "The Sport of Business", in which he declares that business is the ultimate sport. Besides being a patently ridiculous premise that totally misunderstands the meaning of the term 'sport', I felt that the post was, unlike most of the quality material on his blog, fairly self-promotional. As I've noted before on sportsBabel, he does have a history of self-promotion.

So I let him know about it. The beauty of the blogosphere is interstitial, to be found in the comments and trackbacks that link various ideas and spaces together. To get permission to post on Mr. Cuban's blog (which is run by Weblogs, Inc.) and identify myself as non-spam, I had to supply my email address. After clicking on a URL, my comments were activated:

Mark, usually you have some really insightful and interesting things to say on this blog, but today's post was pure self-indulgent crapola. Is it difficult to type and look in the mirror at the same time?

A little harsh? Maybe. But I don't really think it was that bad, and I certainly tried to temper the negative with the plaudits at the beginning of the comment.

When I re-visited the blog a few hours later, though, I was shocked and peeved to find out that my posted comments had been deleted. Gone. Without a trace. Just like I had never voiced a word of dissent.

Naturally, I sought an explanation:

Dear Mark/Weblogs Inc.,

With all due respect, I am wondering if you could perhaps elaborate on the censorship practiced by deleting my comment from the Blog Maverick post on "The Sport of Business". Was the content so inappropriate? Even though I praised Mark in general, was it so wrong to call him out this one time for what I felt was a self-indulgent post?

Most print publications run far worse in the Letters to the Editor, and the Internet grew because of people on electronic bulletin boards who called a spade a spade, a fact of which I am sure you are both aware.

At the very least, doesn't a responsible micro-publishing empire have an obligation, if it accepts a comment and posts it, to notify the author as to why the editorial decision has been made at a later time to censor a dissenting opinion? You do have my email address, after all.

I'm sorry to learn about your decision, and wish you the best in your ventures. I, however, will no longer be following.

Respectfully yours,

Sean Smith

Mr. Cuban's terse reply?

My
board,
my
decision

He's right. It is his board, and it is his decision, and he is certainly welcome to take his ball and run home with it. But he does tend to dish out the negative quite heavily himself, so it seems quite interesting that he is not willing to take it as well. Has he not been called worse in the boardroom? Is he surrounded by sycophants at work? Does Mr. Cuban, sponsor of the Fallen Patriot Fund, truly believe in the American First Amendment rights that these patriots have defended?

And finally, where does the role of dissent rest in his world?

Though the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 must primarily be understood as attacks in space, it is true that there was a symbolic time component as well: the choice of day itself. In the outpouring of media that has come since then, "the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001" became too bloated of a meme for regular usage. It is necessary to compress this down to as small a chunk as possible for media transmission, thus 9/11.

Though we say and hear "nine-eleven" when 9/11 becomes speech-act, there is subconscious violence that takes place when the meme is viewed in print. As every phone directory in North America tells us, 911 is the telephony code for EMERGENCY, so a cognitive association of panic is made at the subconscious level every time the numbers are seen in print — the forward slash is irrelevant. Obviously a lot of thought went into planning the specific symbolic details of the attack.

As noted earlier on this blog, the same sort of information compression takes place in sports reporting. "Create an engaging, information-dense meme for the athlete to swirl around the matrix, and it will become more easily remembered by John Q. Sixpack, and therefore more valuable in a marketing sense."

So who controls these memes?

To answer that question is to understand the heart of symbolic warfare.

(props to Dewq for s[t]imulating the post title)

A year and a half ago, I asked "Will energy-producing cybernetic couplings between human and bike/stairmaster/ergometer become the new form of civic duty?"

It appears that we are one step closer to that reality: like slave oarsmen powering a ship, we can now power our mobile phone while riding a bike.

(via Futurismic)

More evidence that the Olympics are less about space than about time, or more specifically, about duration:

When Greece hosted the Balkan indoor athletics championships two weeks ago, the obvious location was one of many state-of-the-art indoor facilities built for the Athens Olympics last year.

But the championships were held instead at a second-rate hall with a leaky roof in Peania, half an hour's drive from the capital.

The out-of-town and out-of-sight venue illustrates the sorry legacy of the Athens Olympics, hailed at the time as a triumph.

Almost none of the spectacular 36 purpose-built stadiums, which cost more than EUR3 billion ($5 billion), have been used since.

Most have remained shut since last September while ministries and local authorities squabble over ownership and the Government ponders their post-Olympic use.

Even the vast main Olympic complex with its surrounding parks and sports fields is closed to the public.

Built in record time and at a cost well beyond the estimates, dozens of venues and other works face the consequences of what critics say was ill-planned and hasty work.

With no ownership or management plan in place, there is no real maintenance to secure the venues from decay.

Broken glass at the Galatsi indoor arena, serious drainage problems on the marathon route, leaking windows at the indoor hall of the main complex and damage to the Peace and Friendship Stadium are among problems the Government has to tackle.

(from The Age, via The Sports Economist)

On the emergence of steroids in America, from Justin Peters in Slate:

Bob Hoffman and his bodybuilders were already accustomed to popping supplements. Hoffman made millions peddling a soy-based protein powder called Hi-Proteen, and Barbell Club members were heavy users of the stuff. It didn't take much persuading for them to give John Ziegler's pills a try. The results were stark and sudden. By the early 1960s, the York lifters had become the beefiest in the country. Though Bob Hoffman gave all the credit to a new training regimen called isometric contraction, the real secret soon came out. After failing to make any strides using isometric contraction, powerlifter Terry Todd kept pestering his York buddies. "Finally they showed me a small brown bottle that contained 100 five-milligram tablets of Dianabol," Todd wrote in Sports Illustrated in 1983. " 'This is the secret,' they told me."