When the the stars come out, so do the fans. Just over 93,000 people saw Barcelona play the LA Galaxy club at the Rose Bowl last Saturday. Messi, Pujol, Xavi, Thierry Henry and Beckham helped to swell the gate.
Somebody from Rugby USA asked somebody from the MLS what rugby would have to do to attract that kind of crowd in the States. The answer was: “Rugby would have to become not only the world’s most popular sport, and produce stars whose fame precedes them, but it would have to get into all the schools and colleges where soccer is king and be a popular sport for women, too.
“If it could do all that, it would still have to drastically change the rules so that it flows with minimum interference from the on-field officials and concentrates on ball-carrying and tackling and not penalty kicks.”
All the discussions re the swimsuits at the recent World’s is hardly the first time the issue of technology in sports has come up.
Way back in 1954, Roger Bannister went hunting for a lighter pair of spikes and found some – Italian glove leather with a thin sole.
Nike made an ultra light pair for Michael Johnson in 1996.
ASICS makes a pair that weighs just 4.5 ounces, has a polymeric monodensity spike plate and uppers of perforated synthetic leather.
For tennis racquet,s Babolat makes polyester-based strings that impart more spin than straight gut. Calloway has a golf ball that features hexagonal dimples which helps it fly further.
There are a lot more examples, and unlike the swimsuits, they’ll still be legal this time next year.
An article by Nicolas Brulliard, Wall Street Journal writer in Johannesburg, quotes Peter de Villiers as reponding to Burger’s eye gouging with a recommendation to the offended parties: “Go to the nearest ballet shop, get some nice tutus, and get a great dance show going.”
Does anybody know if the IRB rapped his knuckles for this?
A major figure in world rugby condoning thuggery would seem to call for an official reprimand.
Brulliard claims that since 2000, the Boks have collected 60 yellow and six red cards while their direct opponents collected 25 yellows and three reds. Mark Andrews, a great player, and a very well-spoken one, is quoted in the article as saying, “Whenever we played against England, it was brought up as a motivational war cry that we had to avenge what the English did to out forefathers”. (For humiliation suffered during the Boer War.)
Back to technology.
There are quite a few ties in track and field sprinting and short-distance swimming, judges and timers unable to separate close finishes.
Yet physicists, coaches and sports reseachers say it’s extremely unlikely that two people would touch a wall or hit a sprint finish line on the track at exactly the same time.
The joint finishes come about because timing only goes down to one hundredth of a second. But that’s going to change once they bring in timing that goes down to one thousandth of a second. It’ll be no trouble for the clocks.
A group of Japanese scientists have gone way past the cesium atomic clock. They’re using the strontium atom.
How accurate is it?
It can divide one hundredth of a second into 3.4 trillion parts. That would have been plenty fast enough to separate Cavic and Phelps in Beijing.
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