If you want to be the best, you need to train like the best. Here is a link to a great self-help article on the strength and flexibility exercises that Olympians use. In trying to understand these exercises, I did an image search so that you can see what the article is trying to describe.
Recommended by Carrie Gaerte
Carrie Gaerte is a physical therapist and athletic trainer for USA Gymnastics, and she recommends the seated spinal stretch, the reclined half-pigeon and the achilles extension.
Exercises recommended by Team USA water polo athletes
Water polo athletes, Kami Craig, Courtney Mathewson and KK Clark build their strength and endurance with these routines: the leveled plank, the dumbbell step up, and the step jump.
Exercises recommended by coach of gold medal-winning wrestler Helen Maroulis
The coach of gold-medal winning wrestler, Helen Maroulis, recommends push ups, the dumbbell row and the pause squat in Maroulis’ training regimen.
She was sixteen. She was a world record holder. And she had a face that would grace magazines and newspapers like few others.
Christine Caron of France, who went by the alluring appellation, “Kiki”, was one of the most well-known athletes of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. When she won the silver medal in the 100m backstroke in Tokyo, losing gold to Cathy Ferguson of the US by the narrowest of margins, she hit rock-star status. Wherever she went, she was photographed. Japanese would give her the giggling Hollywood star treatment. She would be showered with gifts and letters of marriage proposal by people she didn’t know.
Before coming to Tokyo for the Olympics, Caron had already established herself as a national star in France, a young swimmer who set national records in the backstroke and butterfly and won national championships. In fact, four months prior to the Tokyo Olympics, she set the world record in the 100 meter backstroke. Thanks to her youthful sensuality and her world-class performance, Caron was one of the most photographed and well-known people in France.
From the magazine Asahi Graf_23Oct
After her return to France, she met French President Charles de Gaulle, who remarked to Caron that he saw her on the television more often than himself. Caron would compete at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. She would then go on to a career of acting in French feature films, enter into marketing arrangements with organizations that wanted to leverage the “Kiki-mania” that endured in France.
She was a star, and she knew it. As she explained to Le Monde, “I swam in South Africa at the time of apartheid, I was received in Cambodia by Sihanouk, I met Jimmy Carter, kings, queens, you know what I mean?”
From the book Games of the XVIII Olympiad_Photo Kishimoto
Expect incredible drone shots of surfing at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
One of my favorite toys as a kid was Verti-bird, a Mattel product from 1973 in which you operated a mini-helicopter to stop the bad guys. You had to control the helicopter’s lift and descent as well as speed, but it was connected to a wire so its flight was limited to a circular route.
But it was very cool!
Today, drones are the modern-day Verti-bird. This is a very weak comparison because drones today are in the middle of cutting-edge advancements in logistics, the military, security, news and sports coverage.
I remember talking with a photographer who covered the sailing events at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and he mentioned that it is hard for people unfamiliar with yacht competitions to show interest because of how hard it is to capture these competitions visually. Perhaps drones will change that.
Fox Sports made a commitment last year to provide broadcasts of golf and super cross using perspectives provided by drones. This has been made possible by adjustments to Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) guidelines in the US, which now allows the use of drones for commercial use.
Because drones, when controlled by a skilled technician, can provide unique angles, particularly from above a stadium or an athlete, or close ups of athletes who are far from areas where cameramen or spectators watch.
Drones can currently move at speeds of 64 kph (40 mph). They can venture as far as 1.2 kilometers (.75 miles) away from the controller, which is a pretty wide berth. And battery life for a drone is about 20 minutes. These specs are true as of this writing, but I’m sure it’s already an outdated reality as this technology will advance rapidly.
Yes, there are fears that a drone will plop out of the sky and interfere with an athlete’s performance. People will point to the drone falling just behind a skiier at the Sochi Olympics. But the benefit, in terms of the birds-eye-view images and up-close perspectives in sports where such access was not possible, will outweigh the risk.
Expect to see incredibly creative use of drones at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
Quarterback Tom Brady and Super Model Gisele Bundchen are. So are Tennis great Serena Williams and Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian. Then there is golf icon Tiger Woods and ski champion Lindsey Vonn, as well as Olympian greats Nadia Comaneci and Bart Connor. These are Sports’ Power Couples, a duo of envious capabilities and qualities that will cause entire rooms to turn heads.
But perhaps the greatest sports power couple of all time is the love match of tennis legends, Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf.
Andre Agassi, the charismatic, enigmatic tennis tour de force of the 1990s and oughts is one of 8 men to have a career grand slam, having won eight grand slam titles over the course of the four major tournaments: the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open. To win the biggest tournaments on three different surfaces – hard court, grass and clay – is a testament to versatility and greatness. Additionally, Agassi won gold in men’s singles tennis at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, thus making him the first and only man to earn the informal title of Career Golden Slam, until Rafael Nadal accomplished that with combined Olympic victory in 2008, and US Open victory in 2010.
Steffi Graf tops the accomplishments of her husband. The German superstar of the 1980s and 1990s is arguably the greatest female tennis player of all time. Over her career, Graf has won 22 Grand Slam singles titles (tied with Serena Williams), and in one incredible year, she pulled off a purist’s dream. In 1988, Graf won the Australian, the French, Wimbledon and the US Open, capping it off by winning the gold medal in women’s singles at the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
A Golden Slam. Until Steffi Graf, no one, man or woman, had ever done that.
The Tokyo 2020 emblem was announced in July of 2015, the end of an international competition where over 100 designs were entered. When the black, gold, gray and red design of geometric shapes debuted, it was not only greeted with an underwhelming yawn, it was slapped with a lawsuit for plagiarism. The designer of the logo for a theater in Belgium felt that the design, sans the red circle, was essentially the same.
For weeks, the designer of the winning emblem, Kenjiro Sano, twisted in the wind as the poo poo hit the fan. In this day and age of the internet and social media, other examples of possible plagiarism by Sano’s firm popped up. Eventually, Tokyo2020 withdrew its supports of Sano’s logo, and started a second competition for a new design.
What I found interesting is that you can buy a T-shirt with the Sano logo on Amazon. In fact, I did, as you can see above. The quality of the shirt is so so, but for 11 bucks I have a shirt that is essentially vestimenta non grata. (You can’t find this shirt on Amazon Japan.)
What’s the highest grossing film about basketball in history? Ivan Reitman’s 1996 film, Space Jam, featuring the greatest basketball player of all time, Michael Jordan.
Where were the greatest pick-up basketball games of all time played? On the set of Space Jam in 1995, on a custom-made indoor-basketball court built on the location of the studio where Space Jam was shot.
Starring in the movie with 1992 Olympic gold medalist, Jordan, were his teammates on that Barcelona Dream Team, Patrick Ewing and Charles Barkley. Jordan had come out of retirement in 1995, but fell just short of taking his Chicago Bulls to the NBA Finals, which lost to the Orlando Magic in six games.
According to this great ESPN article, Jordan wanted to make sure he was able to train hard and gear up for the following NBA season while filming Space Jam, so he asked for and got the construction of the indoor basketball court, dubbed the Jordan Dome. Jordan put out the word that he was looking for people to play in pick-up games, and the stars made a beeline for LA. In addition to co-stars Ewing and Barkley, all stars like Grant Hill, Rod Strickland, Glen Rice, Dennis Rodman, Juwan Howard, Shaquille O’Neal, Magic Johnson and Reggie Miller came to play some of the most intense shirt-skins matches ever.
Tracy Murray, who played in these games, said “it was like an NBA all-star game every day.”
Michael Jordan, a man not satisfied with semi-final finishes, was determined to make sure these pick-up matches got him razor-sharp ready for the NBA season. According to the ESPN article, Don MacLean, a power forward for the Washington Bullets at the time, was being guarded by Jordan. MacLean got hot and scored the majority of his team’s points to help his team to victory one evening. MacLean had to leave town after that match, and Jordan came up to him and said, “Thanks for coming, make sure you come back.” MacLean thought that was cool of Jordan to say that, so he looked forward to coming back a couple of weeks later. Here’s how ESPN explained Jordan’s revenge.
When MacLean did show up a couple of weeks later, he played in the first game of the night. “[Jordan] walks on the court, says, ‘I got MacLean,’ and did not let me touch the ball for the entire game,” MacLean said. “And I was trying. And he was not letting me touch the ball. “Right then and there, I was like, ‘My God.’ For a pickup game in the summer that means nothing, two weeks later, he remembers that. I couldn’t believe it.”
No one was more competitive, or more skilled than Michael Jordan in his prime. And therefore, no was better.
A New Year’s Eve tradition in Japan is to watch NHK’s “Kouhaku”, which is a five-hour songfest of live music that continues on until just before midnight. This is a light-hearted battle between women singers and bands (“kou” or “red”) and male singers and bands (“haku” or “white”).
In 1963 and 1964, the year of the Tokyo Olympics, Tokyo Gourin Ondo would go on to sell 1.3 million records, and in some ways, made the singer of that song, Haruo Minami, the face of the Tokyo Olympics. Minami was already a well known singer in Japan, performing the popular music of the time which would later be referred to as enka. Minami stood out because he performed in kimono, which was not common for men in the 1950s.
But what makes Minami very interesting is his war past, or more accurately, his post-war past. At the age of 20 in 1944, Minami (probably under his actual name Bunji Kitazume), was drafted into the Japanese Imperial Army in Manchuria. Just after the Pacific War ended in August, 1945, Minami and hundreds of thousands of other Japanese were captured by the Soviet Union army. Minami eventually served four years of hard labor in Khaborosk, which is in Siberia.
Repatriated Japanese soldiers returning from Siberia wait to disembark from a ship at Maizuru, Kyoto Prefecture, Japan in 1946Although about 60,000 of approximately 600,000 Japanese POW died in the Siberian labor camps, Minami stayed alive until 1949 when he was allowed to return to Japan.
According to a music critic, it is said that Minami sang this song with such passion because of how hard Japan has worked to re-build after the war, and nobody understood that more than a man who returned from the labor camps of Siberia.
Here is Haruo Minami performing “Tokyo Gourin Ondo” at Kouhaku, on either December 31, 1963 or 1964.
From Sainbury’s Christmas Truce commercial marking the 100th anniversary of this WWI phenomenon
There was a time when war had rules and etiquette. And even between combatants in the trenches, a shared sense of humanity could invoke momentary pauses in our base desires to fight and kill when under threat.
Like the Ancient Olympics, when hostilities between warring states would cease before, during and just after the Olympic Games, there was a similar phenomenon on Christmas Day, 1914, along the Western Front of the war between the French, German and Brits. This was the first year of World War I, one of the most horrific wars in the history of mankind, resulting in the deaths of some 16 million people. But in those early days of the war, the soldiers still held out hope that common sense would win out.
Sainsbury’s, the British supermarket chain, created a commercial in 2014 that re-enacted a scene of the so-called Christmas Truce that may have happened in multiple places along the Western Front, where British and German soldiers huddled in cold, dark trenches, waiting for gunshot or snap of a twig to send them into battle.
Based on diaries from soldiers, the commercial’s producer pieced together an archetypal scene: singing of Christmas songs in the night in German and English, a soldier mustering courage to tip toe into No Man’s Land, others discovering their own need to connect with his fellow man on a day where good will toward men was more than just a bible quotation.
In this beautifully told story, the enemies allow their better angels to rise as they greet each other, share song and drink, and consume their nervous energy in impromptu games of football on land already drenched in their comrades’ blood.
Here’s the re-enactment of that holy night 102 years ago today.
May this day be a very Merry Christmas to one and all.
You must be logged in to post a comment.