Sports
grrlscientist | September 6, 2009
Jockey Calvin Borel rides Rachel Alexandra to victory in the Grade-I Woodward Stakes
at Saratoga Race Course in Saratoga Springs, NY, Saturday, 5 September 2009.
Image: Mike Groll (AP Photo) [larger view]
For those of you who, like me, love watching the phenomenal Rachel Alexandra run, you had a real treat yesterday when the 3-year-old filly beat the boys -- again -- in the $750,000 Woodward Stakes at Saratoga. The purse for this race, traditionally meant to test older male horses, was increased by $250,000 after her entry was announced.
In short, Rachel was tested yesterday, but after…
drorzel | September 4, 2009Summer is drawing to a close, which means we're finally starting to get some actual sports to talk about, after a long, dull stretch of nothing but baseball. So I've started listening to "Mike and Mike" again in the mornings in my office. Which may have been a mistake because I've just had to listen to Mel freakin' Kiper talking about the draft prospects of college players who have yet to play a game this year, and they've rather omninously promised a fantasy NFL update coming up later.
These are both pretty dire portents of the immediate future, and I think they're connected. The unhealthy…
drorzel | August 31, 2009One of the nice things about being a parent is getting to introduce SteelyKid to my own obsessions. Like, for example, the great game of basketball:
"You want me to throw this how high?"
Maybe we'll stick with something a little smaller for now:
(Hey to Todd Clark, who gave us the toy hoop...)
edyong | August 26, 2009When sportsmen use rackets or bats, their best bet is to hit a ball on the "sweet spot", the point where various forces balance out to deliver powerful blows with only very small forces on the wielder's wrist. Engineers have the right tools and models to work out where this spot lies on their instruments. Now, palaeontologists have used the same techniques to study biological hammers that adorn the tails of giant prehistoric armadillos called glyptodonts.
At first glance, glyptodonts have little in common with the likes of Andy Murray and Roger Federer. These armoured beasts lived in the…
ejohnson | August 21, 2009
Human athletic performance has the consistent ability to amaze us--we tend to think of the Michael Phelpses and Lance Armstrongs of the world as nearly superhuman. But in fact, there are physiological limits to our species' strength and speed. On Starts With a Bang, Ethan Siegel calculates the fastest time theoretically possible for the mens' 100 meter dash, which Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt recently finished in a record 9.58 seconds at a championship race in Berlin. If men continue to increase their speed along the exponential path as mapped by Ethan, we can expect them to reach this limit…
edyong | July 16, 2009In the world of horse-racing, the horses understandably get all the attention but much of the thrill of today's races depends on the jockeys. Their modern riding posture - the so-called Martini glass - has led to a dramatic improvement in race times, by making things much easier on their horses.
Modern horse-racing has been going on for over two centuries, but in its earliest days, jockeys would ride vertically. The modern, crouched style was only developed in the late 19th century in the US. By 1897, it has been adopted in the UK and by 1910, it was a global phenomenon. The new posture…
drorzel | July 15, 2009I am a fan of the New York Giants.
I believe that they can win every game they play. I hope that they will win every game that they play. I get emotionally involved in their games to such a degree that my heart pounds and I get short of breath when they face a critical play in the fourth quarter. I yell at the tv, though I know that they can't hear me. When something goes wrong, I will punch things and curse. When they win, I will stay up late to watch highlights of a game I just watched.
I will re-arrange my schedule so as to be able to watch their games as they happen. If I can't manage…
drorzel | July 10, 2009If you're desperate for something to fill your Friday afternoon, and not the comment-leaving sort, you could do a lot worse than spending an hour and a half (give or take) with Chuck Klosternman and Bill Simmons in their two part ESPN podcast. It's nominally about sports, but they spend a good bit of time talking about Michael Jackson (in a sensible way, not a vapid-entertainment-reporter way), the effects of fame, the effect of writing for an audience, and a bunch of other interesting stuff.
It's about a week old, but I only got around to it yesterday. It's worth a listen, though. It also…
ddobbs | July 9, 2009Effect Measure alerted me to this very touching video, which shows the crowd at Fenway coming to the rescue of a kid who starts to lose it while singing the national anthem. Revere's set-up first, then some thoughts of my own:
I don't know what's going to happen with swine flu. I do know that if there is a nasty flu season we'll all get through it better if we help each other, not run from each other. It's national independence day in the US, so I thought this clip of the crowd singing the National Anthem (hat tip, Paul Rosenberg at Open Left) at Boston's Fenway Park (home field of the Boston…
grrlscientist | July 6, 2009tags: Finland, Sonkajärvi, sports, wife-carrying world championships, entertainment, streaming video
I am Finnish by ancestry, and I am in love with Finland, having visited this beautiful country three times now. However, I must warn you all that women who marry Finnish men are asking for a fair bit of humiliation. Finnish men like to indulge in a very peculiar sport: wife carrying contests, which are a modern day carry-over from the ancient pass time of wife-stealing. This is video from the 2009 event, which took place yesterday (5 July) in Sonkajärvi, which is smack-dab in the middle of…
grrlscientist | June 28, 2009tags: Mother Goose Stakes, horse racing, Rachel Alexandra, streaming video
Rachel Alexandra (daughter of Medaglia d'Oro), running away with the
2009 Kentucky Oaks (Grade I; three-year-old fillies)
under the guidance of Jockey Calvin Borel.
Image: David J. Phillip [larger view].
I have been keeping my eye on the amazing filly, Rachel Alexandra, who wowed the public by beating the boys as she won the Preakness Stakes last month. Yesterday, at Belmont Park in New York, Rachel Alexandra did it again. This time, she won the Mother Goose Stakes for 3-year-old fillies, setting not one, but two…
grrlscientist | June 17, 2009tags: Shawn Johnson, gymnastics, sports, humor, satire, Onion News, streaming video
Gymnast Shawn Johnson euthanized after breaking leg. After gym doctors confirmed the her injuries were career-ending, Johnson's trainers said there was no reason to keep her alive. [2:28]
grrlscientist | June 13, 2009tags: book review, Falconer on the Edge, A Man, His Birds, and the Vanishing Landscape of the American West, falconry, hawking, Rachel Dickinson
Like most married people, Rachel Dickinson thought she knew her husband quite well after years of marriage. But one evening, he surprised her by unexpectedly bringing home a small brown paper bag containing an injured kestrel. You see, Dickinson's husband, Living Bird magazine editor Tim Gallagher, was a lapsed falconer without any birds, until this kestrel, Strawberry, reawakened his latent passion. As the bond between her husband and his tiny…
drorzel | June 9, 2009
I'm watching Pardon the Interruption after work, and they're talking about the Belmont Stakes. They show a clip of horses running, and Emmy pipes up: "I like horses!" She does this when she feels I'm not paying her enough attention.
"Horses are okay," I say.
"Okay? Horses are really neat!" She thumps her tail on the floor, to emphasize the point.
"I guess." A really bad idea comes to me. "Say, did you know that all horses have an infinite number of legs?"
"What?"
"Yeah," I say, pausing the DVR. "All horses have an infinite number of legs, and I can prove it with logic."
"How?"
"Well, we know…
drorzel | June 4, 2009When this first came out, I didn't pick it up, despite a glowing recommendation from Jennifer Ouellette, because NASCAR is one of the few things on ESPN that interests me less than baseball. I didn't really think I'd be interested in reading a whole book on the subject.
I saw Jennifer and Diandra on Bloggingheads a little while back, and she made it sound pretty interesting. And then I saw that she was giving a public lecture at DAMOP, and figured it would be good for airplane reading on the way down and back.
The Preface gives a nice description of how she came to write the book:…
drorzel | June 3, 2009For reasons that don't really matter, I learned yesterday that there is a marathon in Antarctica:
On December 12th, 2009, the fifth Antarctic Ice Marathon will take place at 80 Degrees South, just a few hundred miles from the South Pole at the foot of the Ellsworth Mountains. This race presents a truly formidable and genuine Antarctic challenge with underfoot conditions comprising snow and ice throughout, an average windchill temperature of -20C, and the possibility of strong Katabatic winds to contend with. Furthermore, the event takes place at an altitude of 3,000 feet.
That's one of the…
drorzel | May 27, 2009It's that time of year when I check in to the giant methadone program that is the NBA, to help ease my way from college basketball season into the long, dull, summer when nothing worthwhile happens, sports-wise. Thus, I watched the second halves of most of last week's playoff games (I didn't get back to the hotel room until roughly halftime), and have been putting the games on in the evening here. From this, I have learned that:
1) Cleveland's entire offense consists of passing the ball around and hoping that LeBron James will do something spectacular. Nobody else appears to want to shoot the…
ddobbs | May 19, 2009
Found some Koufax footage. About halfway through this short clip he Ks Mantle, looking, and a bit later, in the dark footage toward the end, is a good strip of him throwing the devastating curve. Note there the emphatic downward motion of his shoulder -- which brought down his hand the faster, which (along with big, flexible hands and fingers) helped him make the ball spin 15 times on the way to the plate instead of the MLB-standard 12-13.
Following up my curveball coverage of last week, faithful reader and Cognitive Daily maestro Dave Munger wrote in noting that Arthur Shapiro, one of the…
nisbetmc | May 17, 2009
So I am sitting here watching game 7 of the Lakers-Rockets series with the Lakers up by 20. The fact that the Rockets could take the Lakers to 7 games minus their best two players is just short of miraculous...until you consider a New York Times magazine article that appeared earlier this year. The article spotlights the Rockets and their cerebral swingman Shane Battier, who have invested in a sophisticated use of statistics and quantitative analysis to plot pre-game strategy and to defuse superstars such as Kobe Bryant. It's worth reading.
ddobbs | May 15, 2009
Koufax, bringing the four-seamer. God save the guy at the plate.
I always look forward to the Illusion of the Year contest, but this year brings a special treat: a new explanation of how the curveball baffles batters.
Just a few days ago, during BP, my friend Bill Perreault threw me one of those really nasty curves of his, and though I read it about halfway in, I was still ahead -- and still unprepared for the sudden slanting dive it made at that last crucial moment. The good curves do that: Even when you have that millisecond of curveball detection beforehand, they still seem to take a…