The Virtual Stoa

I didn’t watch the Olympics closing ceremony — that kind of thing doesn’t really float my boat — but I was pleased when I heard that the Shipping Forecast would be featured in the British bit of the pageantry. (If Gordon Brown’s Britishness crusade was all about things like the Shipping Forecast, I’d be much more enthusiastic, especially if we could have Finisterre reinstated in place of that godawful Fitzroy.) But if they wanted British icons, I think lots and lots of Daleks would have been even more fun, although I admit that Dalek values are perhaps not entirely in tune with those professed by the International Olympic Committee (or Gordon Brown).

(I enjoyed the Olympics. Much more than I thought I would. I pretty much ignored the Games in 1996, 2000 and 2004, and I was expecting to do the same this time around. But that thing on the BBC website that allowed you to stay focused on the sport you were interested in made it all bearable, and, as I’ve said before, tehgraun’s internet coverage was, I thought, superb.)

The Onion, over here.

I’ve been enjoying the track cycling events at the Olympics (and ignoring most of the rest of the Games). Hitherto, I’ve only watched road-racing in general and the Tour de France in particular. Well done, the British team, etc. (Actually, they’ve been remarkably good, and it looks as if they’ll all be winning at least one medal — assuming Mark Cavendish and Bradley Wiggins can pulls something off in the Madison. I hope they get to sit next to the Judo team on the plane on the way home.)

But what I was going to say was this: aren’t all the track events basically very silly? I was watching the team pursuit earlier today, and thinking what a silly event that was, before reflecting that there were at least four sillier events (the sprint, the points race, the Madison and the Keirin — and, arguably, a fifth, the team sprint, which is, let’s face it, pretty silly). Has velodrome cycling always been silly, or has it become progressively sillier over time?

From tehgraun, earlier this morning:

2.28am: If Paula Radcliffe was to peel off her own skin and hand it to a child-murdering sadist in return for the safety of 34 orphans, she couldn’t be more brave than what she’s doing here, according to Brendan Foster and Steve Cram in the television commentary box, who have never ever seen anything braver, nor can conceive of anything braver than her finishing ninth or tenth in this race. She’s now drifting way behind the leaders, who are busy winning the thing, but we wouldn’t know about it at the moment, I’m afraid, because it’s all about bravery today in Beijing.

Emma Pooley, who made a thrilling attack at the start of the final lap of the women’s road race and today won the silver medal in the women’s time trial, isn’t just a terrific cyclist. She is also the co-author of a scientific paper on “centrifuge modelling of the behaviour of double porosity soils”. More champion cyclists like this, please.

(Or, indeed, like the indomitable Gaul, Jeannie Longo, the 49-year old French rider, who missed out on the bronze medal in the time trial by two seconds, and who incidentally also seems to be racking up the academic qualifications.)

From tehgraun’s minute-by-minute Olympics coverage this morning [at 4:32am]:

Jessica in Connecticut provides an insight into superpower manipulations: ”You may not be aware of how the medal count is being tallied over here. Instead of using the official IOC medal table, which places the greatest emphasis on the number of gold medals earned (and thus shows China in the lead), US media outlets are determining standings based on total medals won. No prizes for guessing who’s in the lead when you count it that way.”

Americans, is this true?

For much of the Summer I’ve found Test Match Special pretty hard to listen to; yesterday and today I’ve been hooked. It could just be that the compellingness of TMS directly correlates to the compellingness of the match, and when the cricket’s not that interesting, then all the reasons that make you think, “God, the commentators really annoy me” come to the fore and you switch off the radio. Or it could just be that they haven’t had Geoffrey Boycott on this morning, so it’s a lot less irritating than usual. Does Boycott not work on Saturdays? Or have they realised he’s really annoying and sacked him?

Also - why on earth is the final day of Test cricket this Summer  Monday 11 August (assuming the game makes it to the fifth day)? That’s preposterously early. Grr.

Paul Collingwood’s just hit a century, in what’s turning out to be a smashing Test Match.

In the quarter-finals and semi-finals of Euro 2008, I have supported Portugal against Germany, Croatia against Turkey, the Netherlands against Russia, Italy against Spain, Turkey against Germany, and Russia against Spain. I have, nevertheless, enjoyed myself enormously.

Since I shall be cheering for the Spanish on Sunday night, people who like to gamble may think this is reason enough to bet heavily on Germany to win the competition. (On the other hand, see this post.)

Although it’s impossible to dislike the German team entirely when they have a player called Jansen.

Why do the (male) Russian fans, but not the Dutch fans, insist on taking their shirts off in the stands at Basel? Or does the cameraperson just have a thing for topless Russian men?

Today, tehgraun’s arts critics are writing about sporting events, so we have theatre critic Michael Billington on darts and rock critic Caroline Sullivan on the Second Test Match.

Tomorrow we’re promised “chief football writer Kevin McCarra on Finnish contemporary dance” and “golf correspondent Lawrence Donegan on the San Francisco Symphony’s Brahms cycle”.

I like this kind of thing.

On 3 April 1938, at any rate. Very interesting article in the New Statesman (and it’s not often you can say that).

We have a TV at home, which isn’t switched on very often. I watch the Tour de France in July on Eurosport, Doctor Who in the late Spring on BBC1, football matches when there’s a World Cup or European Championship on, the Eurovision Song Contest each year in May, the Six Nations and other rugby internationals, a general election every four years or so, and I used to watch Test Match cricket until that disappeared off to Sky Sports, which we don’t get. And that’s about it. Now I read that the BBC on Saturday put on a surprising number of programmes that I do want to watch, and as a result is apologising to the viewing public at large. Bah!

(As it happens I wasn’t at home to watch, anyway, and missed most of it, except for the second half of Ireland v Scotland in a pub in St Andrews.)

P.S. Oh, and I watched the finals of both Strictly Come Dancing and the X-Factor just before Christmas. So that’s a little bit more TV to add to the annual viewing cycle.

Here’s the French football team and the better part of a hundred thousand fans singing the Marseillaise before the start of the 1998 World Cup Final. (Starts at 5 minutes in; jump forwards to 5.48 or so for Jacques Chirac in full-throated song.)

David Runciman, over here.

Well, not really. But I’m terribly pleased to see that England have drawn Croatia again for their World Cup qualifying campaign. (And Andorra, too.) The BBC seem to have produced the best subtitled version of Tony Henry’s notorious performance of the Croatian national anthem the other night; the video link is from this page.

I don’t follow the baseball as closely as I used to, after years living away from New England, but I’m nevertheless pleased to see that in the ALCS against the Indians the Red Sox won Game Six 12-2 and Game Seven 11-2 and are now their way to the World Series against the Colorado Rockies. (Go, Sox.)

What’s the connection between Rugby World Cup success and beardedness?

[Thanks, SF]

tehgraun has a big pic of Jonny Wilkinson on its front page (webpage, haven’t seen the paper version) with the headline “The man with the golden boot”. Were we watching different semi-finals? His kicking wasn’t actually that good last night; and while the drop-goal he landed at the end wasn’t bad at all, (i) it wasn’t a match-winning kick of the kind to get properly excited about, and (ii) the kind of possession England had at the time meant that he was pretty much assured of a regulation drop-goal opportunity some time around that point in the match.

Pretty scrappy game, I thought, especially after it settled down after a very high-tempo opening fifteen minutes or so. I’m not sure that England deserved to win it, but I know that France didn’t, and I’m sorry we didn’t really see Michalak get to do anything special.

Norm has posted on Eric Hollies’ dismissal of Don Bradman for 0 in the latter’s final Test Match at the Oval in August 1948 — you know, the duck that ensured that he only averaged 99.94 over the course of his international career (YouTube over here) — and he discusses the phenomenon of inherited cricket memories, of events that took place before you were born, or that you couldn’t possibly have experienced firsthand yourself, but of which you possess the most vivid of memories. And this example and this phenomenon makes me think of my dad.

As it happens, he was in the crowd at the Oval during that match as a twelve-year-old, though he didn’t see Bradman bat (not that he batted much), and I think his only memory is of Bradman fielding on the boundary.

(Australia, as it happens, didn’t need Bradman’s runs, as in the first innings England had been all out for 52, with Lindwall taking 6 for 20; Australia replied with 389, with 196 from Morris; and England only managed 188 in the second innings, with Hutton top-scoring with 64, Australia winning by an innings and 149 runs.)

But I thought of my dad more because I’m going to hazard a guess that his is the generation that is most familiar of all with powerful memories of cricket matches it never saw, owing to the Second World War. Men in their seventies now were boys during the war, when there was no significant domestic cricket and certainly no international cricket to follow. So they read up about games that had been played before the war, and very possibly about games that had been played before they were born, and can now talk about them as vividly as I can remember Test Matches that I saw on TV when I was younger, and above all in the early 1980s, with the England team of Ian Botham, David Gower and Bob Willis.

And I think this also helps to explain just why Dennis Compton’s runs in 1947 were quite so celebrated, or why the visit of Bradman’s Australians in 1948 was quite so exciting. During the war people could only read about past heroics, and here were the heroes finally playing again, and heroically, too.

So I’m not sure I’ve got any severely inherited cricket memories. I think I just belong to the wrong generation. The 1970s moment I’m most familiar with is when Fredericks hit Lillee for six but then trod on his stumps in the 1975 World Cup Final at Lord’s, but that’s just because that was the best game ever to screen highlights from during rain breaks in TV broadcasts in the 1980s. (It’s the third ball in this clip, coming after less than a minute.)

Readers! Any inherited cricket memories of your own? Or just cricket clips from YouTube you want to recommend? Fire away in the comments.

England v India, yesterday.

It’s been done three times before, by Gary Sobers, Ravi Shastri and Herschelle Gibbs.

David Millar (just signed for Slipstream) ought to be absolutely furious with Iban Mayo.

On the first day in the Pyrenees, Millar and David De La Fuente of the Saunier-Duval team drove the peloton over the Port de Pailheres at a crazy pace, in the hope that team-leader Mayo could do something on the way up to the stage-finish at Plateau de Beille. But he couldn’t, and lost nearly ten minutes on the final climb. And now we learn he was on drugs too.

Mayo had a terrible tour, finishing 16th at 27′09″. I thought the drugs were supposed to prevent that kind of thing.

I don’t think I’ll try to become a professional sports photographer any time soon. But here are three images from this afternoon’s racing, anyway.

Quite by chance I seem to have got Alberto Contador in the middle of this pic, on the second half of the first circuit of the Champs-Élysées, flanked by the rest of his Discovery Channel team.

Here comes the peloton!

The Lampre riders, on their way to set up the stage win for Daniele Bennati.