The showdown!
The showdown!
Month: August 2015
“You see?” Meiler said. “It’s never too late. I’m 81 years old, and look what I did. I didn’t sit in my rocking chair and say, ‘I got a pain here and a pain there, and I can’t do anything.’ I get out there, and I work out the pain.”
Flo Meiler, according to this New York Times photo essay, broke the world record in the heptathlon for women aged 80-84. She was competing in Lyon, France at the World Masters’ Athletic Championships that just ended, a regularly held international competition that brings together people of 35 years and older whose love for competition has not diminished with age.
The world is graying – we all know that. People are living longer, and with fewer babies being born in the industrialized nations, the percentage of people 60 years and older is accelerating.
This post celebrates the idea that no matter your age, if you burn with competition, you burn forever. As these pictures by photographer, Angele Jimenez show, these athletes go all out.
Do you?
Yeah, you’re the fastest man in the world. But you’re running in the first lane, the most beat up sodden lane after two weeks of competition, and you can’t find your shoes.
This was the predicament that “Bullet” Bob Hayes found himself in, according to Bob Schul, in his book, “In the Long Run”.
Just in front of me was Bob Hayes, who seemed to be searching for something. “Bob, what are you doing?” I questioned. “Aren’t you supposed to run the next race?”
“Bob, I can’t find my shoes!” he said in a very worried tone.
“Can’t find your shoes! Where did you leave them?”
“Here, right here!” he answered frantically. “Every day I leave them under this bench while I warm up.” Then he stopped and turned to me. “I know where they are! They’re under my bed at the village! I forgot to bring them!” He looked at my spikes and I knew what he was thinking.
“I wear size 10 and a half, Bob,” I said.
“Too big! What am I going to do?” Just then Tom Farrell entered the area. Tom was in the 
800 final, which followed the 100 meters. It was apparent what Bob was thinking, and he ran over to Tom and asked what size spikes he word. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but within seconds Bob had Tom’s shoes and was running for the check-in room.
As I waited for the bus outside the stadium I heard the final results of the 100 meters. Bob Hayes had set an Olympic record in winning the gold medal. “Way to go, Bob,” I said out loud.
Bob Hayes set a world record running the 100 meters in 10 seconds flat.
Bob Schul had already won gold in the 5,000 meters, the only American Olympic champion in that event.
Tom Farrell would find glory four years later in 1968, wining bronze in the 800 meter race. He graduated from Archbishop Molloy High School, which is a 5-minute walk from where I grew up in Queens. I spent many a summer day playing stickball in that high school parking lot.
Coe beat out another Olympic champion in a vote.
He was the best at the triple jump in the 1960s. He held the Olympic and world records in that discipline. He hopped, skipped and jumped his way to two gold medals, one in Rome in 1960 and the second in Tokyo in 1964.
And yet, there’s not much available in English about Jozef Szmidt, triple jumper extraordinaire from Miechowice, Poland.
In addition to being the first human to ever triple jump over 17 meters, Szmidt held the world record for an incredible 8 years from 1960. At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, Guiseppe Gentile of Italy extended 2.75 inches further than Szmidt’s mark. Gentile held that record for moments before Viktor Sanyeyev of the USSR, Nelson Prudencio of Brazil and then Sanyeyev lept progressively further for record marks.
Copying is a key component of learning. There is nothing new under the sun, and we stand on the shoulders of giants…to shamelessly borrow these words of wisdom.
Many well established writers may have started off by mimicking Ernest Hemmingway’s simple, direct tone. Microsoft’s Windows GUI was borrowed from Apple’s Macintosh GUI which was borrowed from Xerox’s PARC research.
As James Abegglen and George Stalk wrote in their classic book on the Japanese corporation – Kaisha – “In the high-growth U.S. economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans took great pride in what was termed ‘Yankee ingenuity.’ By this was generally meant the taking in of European discoveries and developments, adapting and commercializing them, and building on these imported technologies.”
The line between copying and creativity is fine. My favorite example is George Harrison’s 1970 “My Sweet Lord“, which was the center of a copyright infringement lawsuit where Harrison was ruled to have subconsciously plagiarized Ronnie Mack’s 1963 song “He’s So Fine“.
George Harrison has such a body of work that screams creativity that no one will begrudge him this.
And to be honest, I was going to give designer, Kenjiro Sano, the benefit of the doubt when his Tokyo 2020 logo was thought to be a copy of the Theatre de Liege logo, created by Olivier Debie. But the recent revelations that Sano’s firm essentially traced designs of another firm for use in a major marketing campaign by giant Japanese beverages corporation, Suntory, is sad. Suntory ended up pulling those blatantly copied designs from their marketing campaign.
You can see in this illustration below recent designs by Sano where he
One reason was to avoid the typhoons of summer in Japan, which could possibly wreak havoc on a tight two-week schedule. Another reason was possibly to avoid the heat and humidity of August in Tokyo.
That is the reason raised by Terrie Lloyd, a Japan-hand who currently writes and consults on tourism in Japan. In his latest post, he wondered why officials set the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo in late July, early August. As Lloyd pointed out, we suffered through horrible heat in that period this year, with temperatures ranging from 35 to 38 degrees celsius (95 to 100 degrees fahrenheit). He claims that the actual feel on the street averaged something closer to 47-50 degrees!
The Wall Street Journal stated that “since 1964, average July-August temperatures in Tokyo have risen several degrees, as heat radiating off asphalt and buildings and coming out of car exhausts and air conditioners remains trapped at night.”
Lloyd claims that if temperatures hit an average of 38 degrees at this time in 2020, the Tokyo Summer Games would be the hottest in 120 years.
So he asks, why July/August? Well, that may seem more obvious if you follow the money. NBC has paid a king’s ransom to broadcast the 2020 Games in the U.S., and would rather not have to compete with the NBA championships in June, or the NFL season that starts in September, or the World Series that plays out in October.
By the way, if you visit Tokyo in August, it’s hot and muggy. The only good thing about that? A cold beer tastes absolutely heavenly!
An Olympian I interviewed told me about a time he returned from the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 and gave a talk at a Rotary Club. He spoke about how wonderful the experience was, and how friendly and helpful the Japanese were. The Olympian’s father who was at the presentation had a friend who remembered the Japanese differently, and resented the Olympian’s talk.
1964 was only a couple of decades removed from World War II. For those who served in the Pacific War on either side, atrocities were the product of everyday life, particularly in the latter years of the war.
A book I am currently reading, “The Narrow Road to the Deep North“, tells the story of an Australian POW, Dorrigo Evans, who worked on the infamous “Line”, the construction of the Burma Railway. Hundreds of thousands of slave labor, made up of PoWs and captive Asian civilian labor, perished in the effort.
This Man Booker Award winning novel by Richard Flanagan is extraordinary in its descriptions of the human psyche, not only from the hero’s survivor complex to the sword-wielding, poetry-citing slave-driving commander.
Dorrigo Evans is the surviving protagonist of the novel, and I was struck by this reference to fleeting nature of life and beauty. He and his lover Amy are lying on the beach, an idyllic time prior to the horrors that awaited months later.
Dorrigo held his arm up to the white-streaked sky and thought he had never seen anything so perfect. He closed one eye and with his other watched his finger touch the beauty of a cloud.
Why don’t we remember clouds? He said.
Because they don’t mean anything.
And yet they’re everything, thought Dorrigo, but this idea was too vast or absurd to hold or even care about, and he let it drift past him with the cloud.
Is it reference to Basho? This was one of
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