Day 17: Closing Ceremonies (Part 1)

Earlier in the week I posted this conversation about the medal count that I had with my German Friend. I would like, as part of my own closing ceremonies, to make a few remarks on the medal count.

The U.S. has won the total medal count with 37, followed by the Germans with 30 and the Canadians with 26. In terms of gold medals, the Canadians come out on top with 14, followed by the Germans with 10 and the U.S. with 9. Now, many favor the gold medal count as the preferred measure for Olympic success. And, I will not deny that this measure has merit. For instance, it acknowledges that silver and bronze medals are not the same as gold medals. It is not, however, the only one, and my reasons for problematizing it are not, strictly speaking, biased (at least in terms of patriotism). I would like to suggest a few other measures and offer reasons for their value over the "Gold only" measure.

1. Total Medals. We should recall that until very recently both summer and winter games were contested in the same calendar year. I would thus argue that for total medals we should combine this year's Winter Olympics with the 2008 Summer Olympics (we could, or course, wait until the 2012 London Summer Games). Doing that we come up with the following totals:

   U.S.A.: 45 / 53 / 49 // 147
   China: 56 / 23 / 32 // 111
   Russia: 26 / 26 / 3 // 87
   Germany: 26 / 23 / 22 // 71
   South Korea: 19 / 16 / 10 // 45
   Canada: 17 / 16 / 11 // 44

   We see that China leads overall in gold medals, but the U.S.A has a clear lead in overall medals. I would also add that no other nation is as balanced in terms of representation in the medals for both the Summer and Winter games. Russia and Germany are close, but nowhere near as dominant in both Olympics.


2. Total Points. Another measure, and one that gives full due to all medal winners, which the "Gold only" argument does not, is to award values to medals and combine those totals (i.e., 3 points for gold, two for silver, and one for bronze). For this year's Winter Olympics it works out this way:

   U.S.A.: 68 points
   Germany: 63 points
   Canada: 58 points

   
   For both the 2008 Summer and 2010 Winter Olympics we have the following totals

   U.S.A.: 290 points
   China: 246 points
   Russia: 165 points
   Germany: 146 points
   South Korea: 99 points
   Canada: 94 points

While, for personal reasons, I might prefer the total medal count translated into points, the larger point is that there are multiple ways of assessing the games. I prefer this last way of accounting because it counts silver and bronze medals without making them equal to gold medals, which addresses one of the reasons I feel the "Gold only" assessment method is preferred. It also highlights consistency and excellence across the entire Olympic spectrum. Clearly, one could use another measure when and where appropriate (e.g. if one wanted to make geographical claims). I make the following range of assessments available to suggest the need for alternatives and to contextualize these now completed 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

Day 16: Curling Time

To explain why, over the last couple of Games, curling seems to attract some attention I would argue that it is because it is very much unlike the other Olympic sports, which are, we must admit, largely like each other. A majority of the sports from skiing to bobsled to speed skating are go-fast-and-be-timed-on-a-sheet-of-the-cold-stuff sports. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the Super G as much as the next casual viewer, but after awhile even I get bored watching the clock. This is not say that doing the sport is boring or that skiing isn't in many many important ways not the same as bobsled (or that I am always "bored" watching them). Again, I am talking about spectators.

Curling, in large part (there is a clock even here), takes place out of time, or, better said, in a different sort of time. There is no rush. A lot of it is, to be honest, four men or women standing around staring at and talking about a rock. And this is precisely what makes it interesting. Some have explained that fans like curling because it looks like something we could do. While there is merit to this argument, it seems far more likely that we like a lot of Olympic sports, particularly the go-fast-and-be-timed-on-a-sheet-of-the-cold-stuff sports, because they look precisely like things we would never ever do unless we were dared or otherwise tricked. The Winter Olympics, which have been very popular this time around, have a much higher percentage of utterly "insane" sports relative the Summer Games. So I don't see curling as the Everyman sport because we like the rest that surely are not for us.

Curling is attractive because it offers a rhythm different from the rest of the Games. We get to see the athletes' think about what they are doing because their thinking happens out loud and in public. For the opposite reason, however, I like things like speeding skating and skeleton because you watch the athletes' think through their bodies. For the casual viewer, as well, curling does not require constant engagement. I can miss a rock or an end (I may miss something cool, but I am not out of it completely). This level of commitment makes curling the Olympic sport designed for the long haul. I feel engaged in the games, interested in the spirit of competition, and the engagement, because of comprehensive television coverage, is nearly constant. It is the sport I know and love between and behind the sports that excite me through terror and time. In this way, the go-fast-and-be-timed-on-a-sheet-of-the-cold-stuff sports are not boring (or do not become boring) precisely because I have curling to watch in between them.

Curling, the sport that should be the "boring" one, serves the important function of keeping all the other sports from becoming so. Curling is evidence that "excitement," like "boredom," is relative, and that all kinds of things have value if only we find a way to experience them as valuable.

Day 15: The Crushing End

As the Olympics wind down (or wind up to a series of great gold medal finals), it seems fitting to recall how much disappointment is a part of the Olympics. In several important and productive ways, the Olympics are haunted by the specter of defeat, disappointment, and anguish. In fact, if the awarding of gold medals were not made so prominent, the whole thing would be too damn depressing. You wait for four years (and prepare for even longer), and then you stumble out of the starting block, slip on the ice, or crash your bobsled. The the small sliver of success that motivates an enterprise that will more often than not break your heart.

Which is probably why most of us don't even bother. To devote yourself utterly to something that will more likely result only in a certificate of participation does not seem worth it to people who would rather lead lives of quite desperation. I do not mean to downplay simply having competed in the games. Having participated in the Olympics is nowhere near analogous to the certificates of participation that litter my own sad scrapbooks (or what I assume would litter a scrapbook if, in fact, I had one). Having participated is itself reward for many athletes. However, earning their way to the Olympics most likely required a desire beyond simply wanting to be there. The risks are too many and the rewards too few to simply want to be there.

The risks, however, are what give the Olympics meaning and value. If they are haunted by defeat, disappointment, and anguish, then, the ghost we might imagine is Slimer from "The Ghostbusters." While disgusting, disruptive, and painful to look at, Slimer is ultimately a benevolent force in the universe of the Ghostbusters. He provides value for the order that the Ghostbusters create from spectral chaos by forever sliming those efforts. Slimer reminds us that not all demons can or should be exercised.

This is not to imagine Olympic "losers" covered in slim, but they are the ghosts that give meaning to the gold. And they should not be forgotten.

Day 12: Cultures in Sports

As I mention in my Day 9 post (Bodies in Sport):

For reasons that will become clear, I appreciate the way NBC covers the Olympics: they frequently jump from sport to sport. [...] The reason I happen to like this, given my own research interests, is that we get to see the variety of bodies (body types) that participate in sports and, from this, the relationship between body and sport. Moving from the Bobsled [...] to speed skating [...] and then to short track speed skating [...] is an exercise in the varieties of human embodiment.

It is likewise interesting to the see the move from sport to sport in terms of nationality. That is, what nations excel at what sports? As I write, America and Germany go down the wire in Team Nordic Combined. A few channels over, Canada is destroying Germany in hockey.

I don't have much new to say here, as I have already been dealing with this issue tacitly throughout my Olympic posts. It does, however, corroborate my points about bodies. It would be silly to argue that Germany simply doesn't have inherently talented hockey players; that the genetics of Germans have not mixed in just the right way to produce hockey excellence. It probably isn't simply access to ice either. Germany does not suffer from tropical climes that might work against success at cold, winter sports. They are currently in second place in the overall medal count. And as my German friend has reminded me, because of Germany's population this is rather impressive medal production. It seems far more plausible that Germans, by and large, have simply not invested in hockey for whatever reason. A cultural "decision" has been made with respect to hockey, and that call means that tonight Germany went down to Canada 8-2.

Day 7: On Streaks, Hot and Cold

In a brief aside in his The Invention Air, Steven Johnson argues (with respect to people who suddenly become exceptionally productive):

We are naturally inclined to see a hot hand here, some extra dose of inspiration that triggered the streak in the first place, but in fact the streak would just be an offshoot of that random distribution, no more magical than a repeated coin toss that every now and then turns up heads ten times in a row.

He builds on this with an example of statistical research in sports:

the fact that a player has just made a free throw makes him no more or less likely to sink the next one. (42)

I will grant Johnson his numbers. However, we could argue that made shots and the perception that made shots lead to more made shots must certainly affect other players (teammates and adversaries alike). I would like to know, for instance, that if the defense assumes a shooter is hot will they leave her teammates open for easy shots?

The "hot streak" is kin to the various superstitions one finds in sports, particularly baseball. I am sure that a wearing the same dirty socks for the entire playoffs itself does not affect the outcome (although I am sure that my standing with one foot in the kitchen and one foot in the living room won the Atlanta Brave the World Series in 1995 - and find a stat that disproves that, Mr. Johnson). However, I am also just as sure that washing those socks might vary well affect the performance of the superstitious player. That is, "real" effects can take various sometime unquantifiable forms (the placebo effect is invariably an effect).

This all (if you can believe it) leads me to John Shuster, the unfortunate skip of the American Curling Team who has now lost four straight matches on missed last shots. He is on one hell of an Olympic cold streak. And he is clearly shaken. Now, I don't know of any research on cold streaks (and I haven't looked that hard), but I assume, based on the Johnson's logic above, that missing a shot makes it no more likely one will miss the next one. But the cold streak strains the statistical argument against streaks even more. Whether it can be charted statistically, and what human behavior can be reliably charted statistically, things accumulate in the human mind. Statistics may have not have memories, but human beings certainly do. And those memories matter.

Shuster remembers each missed shot with each subsequent one, and those memories (emotional as they are) form a part of his decision-making process. He becomes like drivers who die in head on collisions after trying to steer back onto the road from the shoulder. This syncs up with arguments about high performing athletes who are said to be high performing precisely because they can forget previous mistakes (forgetting - repressing - isn't always a bad thing).

And we remember what other people have done. As I argue above, the perception of a hot streak could change defensive approaches. Anyone who watched downhill skier Lindsey Vonn win the gold could safely assume she benefited twice from the crash of the skier who followed her. The next competitor after the crash, who was the last and greatest threat to Vonn's gold medal, clearly played the mountain safer after a serious of crashes before her run.

The statistical argument downplays human memory and human frailty. However we describe the pattern after the fact, we must admit it only becomes a pattern after the fact. In the moment it is humans acting with bodies, memories, and the emotions they spawn. It isn't magic; it's human.

(Re)Figured Skating UPDATE

I have updated my Day 2 post on figure skating. Check out the Dick Button addition here.

Day 5: Olympians and the Rest of Us

Part of my dissertation research examined the success of Usain Bolt in terms of his cultural context. Mainly, that because one can earn a significant reputation as a track star in Jamaica, it makes it more likely that more individuals will embark on such a career and stick with it. This is confirmed by research in the sociology of sport, which shows that one of the defining features of athletic success is an athlete's social network. Christopher L. Stevenson argues that athletes become athletes through "processes of entanglements, commitments, and reputations and identities." Stevenson examines how athletes are recruited into the sports and by whom. He then describes how, through a series of deepening entanglements and commitments, the athlete’s identity becomes bound-up in the sport through these relationships and through the reputation he or she earns.

These webs of relationship entanglements drew the athlete into the sporting activity, and the athlete allowed him/herself to be drawn in because of the value he or she place those relationships.

I argued that Bolt comes from a country whose national attitude means reputation for track athletes. Jamaican journalist Colin Channer offers a distinctly non-biological explanation for the strength of Jamaica’s sprinters. He traces the focus on sprinting to elements of Jamaican culture and history. While he admits that the love for speed “seems at odds with its hard-nose commitment to nonchalance,” “to be Jamaican means to move.” The Jamaican-born Channer argues that the love of sprinting “is rooted in the notion of flight, in the notion of defiance and aspiration expressed in the grammar of the body." The Jamaican track phenomenon is not directly traceable to either its geography or to the “unique biology” of its inhabitants; Jamaicans share both with countries with far less success in sprinting. Channer further argues that “sprinting is the physical argot for the runaway slave. For a slave, escape was act of defiance, a loosely punctuated treatise, with commas and no full stops, on the topic of being free.” Running as an act of defiance reflects the deeply rooted narrative of the maroons, resistance groups constituted by runaway slaves who fought the British from 1655 to 1796. So while Channer argues that Bolt “has been fast ever since we’ve known him,” he is from a place culturally committed to cultivating speed.

What I make of this is that athletic and, thus, Olympic success depends, in part, on a culture that cultivates it. Having access to mountains and snow is certainly important, but there must likewise be a cultural climate that values and rewards it. That is, Olympians need other people interested in their sport to make excelling in that sport rewarding in terms of reputation and identity. They likewise need cultural pressure to do the same (the cultural risks inherent in failure). This becomes important in acknowledging and explaining the absence of success in a sport and how policies around sports matter. This is particularly relevant when sports are discussed in terms of gender and race. Do we as a society make it worthwhile for individuals to choose to compete in certain sports? This connects to my earlier post about the IOC's decision to excise softball. If there is no chance of Olympic gold, what "entanglements, commitments, and reputations and identities" will exist to cultivate athletic excellence?

Day 2: (Re)Figured Skating UPDATED

UPDATE: The Dick Button (during NPR interview posted today) agrees with me (basically). Although my point about deductions may be off base, my discussion of the results of the scoring system seem to be on point (if you'll pardon the pun):

"We have to remember that this is a judging system based on points," Button said. "It's the point value that counts [for] each of the individual moves."

The biggest point values come with high-scoring jumps, Button says, so skaters don't take the time for lingering and fluid grace on the ice. Thus, Button predicts, they are unlikely to inspire the kind of innovation he brought to skating.

"They're doing the same moves over and over and over because that's what they get the points for," Button says. "And there isn't enough emphasis put on ... the performance level, the [elegance] level, the music, the interpretation."

Much thanks to my dad for pointing me to this. Hear the complete interview here and read excerpts here.

I want to state up front that I do not much care for figure skating. That being said, I want to carefully chart my opposition lest readers attribute ungenerous or false motives. In so charting my opposition, I implicitly say a few things about rhetoric.

First, I find figure skaters to be amazing, well-trained, dedicated, and athletic bodily artists.

Second, my opposition is not predicated upon some knee-jerk, macho reaction against sequins. For instance, I think this is awesome.

My opposition has to do with the how the sport is cultivated by its judging system. In short, the event has become the Olympic equivalent of the educational phenomenon of “teaching to the test.” And, in Olympic figure skating, it is the worse kind of test. As I understand it (note the caveat), the scoring is predicated, in large part, upon deductions. While this may certainly misrepresent the full nuance and complexity of the scoring system, I am ultimately talking about how it strikes me as a casual viewer. Skaters are punished for mistakes rather than rewarded for successes. Because of this scoring system, and the narratives it spawns on the part of commentators, figure skating becomes about not making mistakes: every jump is appreciated in terms of “stuck landings.”

This is further compounded by another aspect of the scoring system: it is highly rationalized, and it tellingly involves instant replay. The judges can review the particular aspects of each component at an amazing level of detail: “The technical specialist uses instant replay video to verify things that distinguish different elements; e.g. the exact foot position at take-off and landing of a jump.” This is all fine and good for a system designed to be objective and to curb abuses of this sort. It is, however, a terrible system for praising and blaming an artistic performance. When judges can explicitly divorce the technicality of a move from the fluid context of that move (to make the dynamic static), then the performance, as art, must necessarily suffer.* This is likewise true, for me, of gymnastics. I am sure that the balance beam is the perfect stage for artistic enactments of bodies; however, I watch primed to spot wobbles and shaky landings.



I do not claim that figure skating lacks artistry or artistic merit. I assume that most in and around the sport would defend it against the “charges” I here level. I would say, however, that the emphasis on objectivity and technicality must necessarily cultivate the performances and the performers themselves, in addition to mediating how viewers experience the event. Rules are not merely added on to sports; rules cultivate sports and the athletes who compete in them. For instance, this. In conclusion, I feel that in figure skating this cultivation errs on the side of the static and the technical at the risk of erasing the performance as dynamic and artistic.

*I recognize the problem of decisively separating the artistic from the technical. Art is itself a function of technique. I am focused here on the issue of ecology and balance. How carefully tuned are audiences to both aspects of the performance and when are they moved too far in one direction? Back

Day 1: Olympic Rhetorics

The Olympics start tonight. Well, they have already begun, in a sense, with the tragic death of an athlete during a practice session. The Olympics are always ambiguously positioned in terms of their relationship to politics: that is, the Olympics are seen as apolitical in as much as they are attempts at international politics. It’s the oldest political tactic in the book: claim your politics are not political. Hence the ridiculousness of this argument about the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing:

Bush himself and other senior U.S. officials have said on several occasions that the president will attend the Beijing Olympics and believed the Olympics is not a political event but a chance for athletes to compete at the top of their class. ("Bush to attend," emphasis added)

Of particular interest to me, however, is the politics of sports (read “rhetoric of sports”). That is, not only do the Olympics as an international event enact a politics, sport is itself shot through with politics (with choices, with policies, with values, with power). And by the “rhetoric of sports” I do not just mean “talk about sports.” Rhetoric is certainly discursive, but rhetorical action operates across bodies and environments as well. For instance, I have an entire dissertation chapter devoted to the cultivation of Usain Bolt. I argued there that Bolt’s physical excellence is not innate or inborn but is an emergent phenomenon cultivated rhetorically across attitudes, commitments, techniques, the preferences of coaches (if a coach thinks you are too tall to the run 100m he or she won't let you train for it) as well as cultural and racial assumptions. The bodies of athletes are themselves political, as the example of Bolt works to illustrate. Athletes emerge from within a complex matrix of bodies, cultures, technologies and environments. What sports are available, what bodies are preferred, and how bodies are shaped by participation in sports are a just a few of ways rhetoric is embodied and enworlded and how bodies are cultivated rhetorically. This is why I really like the above logo for this year's games. The figure in the logo is constituted by the various human habitats represented by the colors of the Olympic rings: bodies are independent from neither politics nor environment.

Finally, excellence in sports (who is good and why) is likewise difficult to finally determine. There is no one reason why someone wins the gold medal and others do not. However, as we start the Winter Olympics we should be on the look out for narratives that attempt just that: hard work and talent are particular favorites, but neither packs much explanatory punch. From the dissertation:

Daniel F. Chambliss, a sociologists specializing in sports, argues that athletic excellence, and, by extrapolation, all excellence, is not “a product of socially deviant personalities,” it does “not result from quantitative changes in behavior,” and it “does not result from special inner quality of the athlete” (72, emphasis in original). Based on his longitudinal study of Olympic swimmers, Chambliss concludes that “athletic excellence is widely attainable, if usually unsought” (78). Rather than assuming, as most do, that Olympic champions simply work harder or that they have innate talent and gifts, Chambliss argues that they simply and mundanely “do things differently” ("The Mundanity of Excellence" 73). “Their strokes are different, their attitudes are different, their group of friends are different; their parents treat the sport differently, the swimmers prepare differently for their races, and they enter different kinds of meets and events” (73). This qualitative distinction is manifested across three dimensions: technique, discipline, and attitude. A case could be made that Chambliss is essentially suggesting that the rhetoric of Olympic athletes is different. In persuasively arguing that individuals are not born champions, Chambliss posits that an Olympic swimmer is persuaded into becoming.

Chambliss argues that we use "talent" to objectify what is actually a complex series of behaviors and attitudes. Athletic excellence is something somebody does rather than something somebody has.

This is, in other words, why and how I watch the Olympics. To return to the start of this year's games, which began with the tragic death of an athlete enacting excellence, it is important to remember what is at stake in the politics of sports: bodies, their cultivation, and, at times, their destruction.

Teacher as Coach

My friend over a Insignificant Wranglings writes this in defense of a classroom workshop that involved him publically assessing the first sentences of his students' writing:

But I am calling Lanham to my defense--don't I, as a writing instructor--have to blame as well as praise? Doesn't my honest assessment lend more value to my feedback? Because I can say that, after the workshop, the amended first sentences I saw displayed far more sophistication. (Here again I nod to my own personal pedagogical narrative, my ties to Dr. David Zern's emphasis on disequilibrium culled from Freudian psychoanalysis-- although this time I am clearly back in the mode of making my students uncomfortable).

He concluded with:

On another note, more and more watching Project Runway influences my teaching persona.

Here was my response: With respect to your concluding remark on Project Runway. I feel the same influence, and, quite related, I often feel jealous of coaches for the liberties they can take in "teaching" athletes. They are able, it seems to me, to be more aggressive and count under their purview issues of effort. I could never circle my class up and tell them to "pull their heads out of their asses" as I once told as a high school athlete.

I think this has to do with how "we" view both intellect and athletic ability. Athletic ability is easier to tie to issues of effort, commitment and habit. We see sport as activity and practice, so it is more like to be a failure in activity and practice that leads to a failure on the field. Intellect ("smarts") are seen as a possession rather than an activity. I refer here to an earlier blog of yours. Most teachers would, of course, that some students work harder than others, but to make a part of their pedagogy would be a bridge too far.

It is no doubt the classroom setting as well that prevents us from treating students as athletes, but there seems to be sometime else at work. Maybe, also that sports are more social (at least team sports) and academics are seen as more personal. To tell a running back that their blocking sucks maybe not be as personal as telling a student their first sentence is terrible.