Link Banana

In a somewhat odd and thoroughly sweeping summary of comebacks — in a variety of fields — throughout history, The Economist says that Lance Armstrong should be careful not to end up like… Enron’s Ken Lay?

But Mr Armstrong must hope not to follow the example of a fellow American who reassumed the top job. Ken Lay retook the chief executive’s role at Enron in August 2001 after a break of six months and shortly before the firm made the biggest bankruptcy filing in American history.

UPDATE (20 minutes later): Perhaps the logic behind the awkward comparison is this: if Armstrong, like Lay, was crooked before the break, it’s possible that upon returning (still crooked) he’ll be caught.

There are a couple pictures of the aforementioned 5-a-side, as well as a number of other sports new to me. Which leads me to the exactly-what-I-was-thinking first two comments on the post:

Awesome - is this being broadcast by anyone?

Sadly, no. And:

I think this is more human and fun, than the other one…

The Paralympics are now occurring in Beijing, and among their events is the new-to-me five-a-side soccer, a version of the sport for the visually impaired. As Passport explains:

Each team has five players on the field — all of whom are blind or visually impaired, with the exception of the goalkeeper, who may be sighted. All except the goalkeepers wear eyeshades to ensure fairness. The ball makes a noise when it moves, and each team has a guide behind the opponent’s goal to direct players. The field is surrounded by walls, so there are no throw-ins.

I’d love to see a game. The photos of people playing soccer blindfolded are themselves intriguing.

Shira Springer captures my hesitance to regard any sport as fair and clean, any athlete as above suspicion:

Instead of fully independent investigations, random drug tests, and cleansing of the record books, sports leagues and their stars are offering tightly controlled exercises in disclosure in which league executives, lawyers, and public-relations personnel still carefully dictate what becomes public and when. The seeming glut of available information - test results, reports, and press conferences - functions as part preemptive strike and part smokescreen, distracting fans from the growing concern that they can no longer trust what they see in competition or in record books.

The psychologists said [taekwandoe] competitors wearing red were awarded an average of 13 percent more points and the points seemed to increase after the blue athlete was digitally transformed into a red athlete and decrease when the red competitor turned blue.

I remember something similar going around about red cars getting more traffic tickets, but Snopes claims that that was false.

(via clusterflock)

A woodworker considers the new-to-epidemic of the bats being broken in Major League Baseball games. It’s an interesting read.

(via kottke)

The New York Times has put together another fabulous interactive chart — or maybe it’s a map — of how many medals countries won in each summer Olympiad since 1896.

(via Passport)

Of all the provocative possibilities raised by Ben Fry’s playing with intelligence (Wonderlic) scores and (American) football positions, the most obvious and interesting may be that offensive players — and especially linemen — are usually smarter than defensive players.

The man just broke 600; his card’s still a popular commodity:

The most famous card in the history of pictures on cardboard is the T206 Honus Wagner, so rare that one of them sold for more than $2 million last year. The most well-known card of the modern era is the 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr., the No. 1 card in the company’s inaugural set. As Griffey nears the 600-home-run landmark, sales of the Upper Deck No. 1 are as brisk as always, with buyers snapping up a couple of dozen every day on eBay at prices ranging from $15 to $300. These two cards, the bookends of the collecting phenomenon, are exact opposites. The Wagner is the white whale of the card trade: elusive, highly coveted, and known to drive men to madness. The Griffey is the childhood lust object that everyone’s mother saved, arguably the most popular, most widely held baseball card of all time.

Daniel Engbar makes a provocative suggestion: they’re three times whiter than the Celtics.

Last spring, economists Joseph Price and Justin Wolfers published a careful analysis (PDF) of league statistics and found evidence of racial bias among the referees. According to their research, the numbers of fouls called against white and black players varied depending on the race of the referees for that game—when there were more white officials on the floor, fewer fouls were called against white players. And since the majority of the league’s referees are white, this puts minority players at a disadvantage. (To be exact, the data showed only a relative effect—so it’s impossible to know which direction the bias went. White refs may favor white players, or they may discriminate against blacks. Or, black refs could just as well be favoring black players or discriminating against whites.)

Though many of these shouldn’t count — being either illustrations or stills from movies — it’s still interesting to look through.

(via Mark Larson, who points out that Fidel Castro appears nine times)

Where Bolivia’s indigenous women meet the WWE. (The link is to a video story.)

(via Passport, who have some breathtaking images of the sport)

In a simple chart, The Economist makes the interesting point that though the United States, Russia, and China fought fairly evenly for the most medals in 2004 — and most other games — it’s actually countries like The Bahamas, Australia, and Cuba that did the best per capita.

These two things recently caught my eye.

• Kobe Bryant speaks Italian. Now you know. (via Neatorama)
• Chinlone is a traditional Burmese sport, whose ball is about halfway between a soccer ball and a hacky sack. That also approximates what it is. (via Good)

Pretty much all you need to know.

(via kottke.org)

There’s a lot of interesting stuff in Michael Sokolove’s few-week-old piece, but this statistic is certainly the most jarring:

If girls and young women ruptured their A.C.L.’s at just twice the rate of boys and young men, it would be notable. Three times the rate would be astounding. But some researchers believe that in sports that both sexes play, and with similar rules — soccer, basketball, volleyball — female athletes rupture their A.C.L.’s at rates as high as five times that of males.

In case you haven’t been following along:

In January, athletics’ governing body the IAAF banned the 21-year-old South African from able-bodied events.

It was claimed Pistorius’ prosthetic limbs give him an unfair advantage, but he disagreed and went to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (Cas).

“I hope this silences the crazy theories circulating about my having an unfair advantage,” he said.

Cas said in a statement that the IAAF had not proved competition rules had been contravened.

“On the basis of the evidence brought by the experts called by both parties, the panel was not persuaded that there was sufficient evidence of any metabolic advantage in favour of the double amputee using the Cheetah Flex-Foot,” the statement said.

Hannah Karp takes an interesting if frivolous romp through the business practices needed for good management of a professional athlete’s entourage.

The economics vary widely. Veteran sports attorney Fallasha Erwin says he’s seen athletes give their friends lump-sum payments of as much as $100,000. But as athletes discover those types of payments can’t easily be written off their taxes, more are putting their qualified friends on professional payrolls. Salaried entourage members doing personal-assistant work typically earn $30,000 to $50,000 a year, plus a percentage of any deals they put together. Indiana Pacers forward Danny Granger, 24, has an economical one-man team — his former college roommate — who pays his own rent and will make $40,000 this year.

(via brijit)

Actually, I’m not sure if testosterone is considered a steroid, but you understand. I thought this was rather interesting.

Nearly half of the men who carried no functional copies of UGT2B17 would have gone undetected in the standard doping test. By contrast, 14% of those with two functional copies of the gene were over the detection threshold before they had even received an injection. The researchers estimate this would give a false-positive testing rate of 9% in a random population of young men.

Dr Schulze also says there is substantial ethnic variation in UGT2B17 genotypes. Two-thirds of Asians have no functional copies of the gene (which means they have a naturally low ratio of TG to EG), compared with under a tenth of Caucasians—something the anti-doping bodies may wish to take into account.

Also of note: an astounding graph of the rapid drop in performance in throwing events after regular testing began.

Perhaps everyone else knows about this stuff, but in reading this article from Smithsonian I was really surprised to learn all the tools that MLB groundskeepers have that they can use to help their team.

Grandfather Emil, who became known as the “evil genius of groundskeepers,” was a whiz at what is euphemistically called maximizing the home field advantage. Over time he honed several techniques, including tilting base lines in or out so balls rolled fair or foul, digging up or tamping down base paths to prevent or abet stealing, leaving grass long or clipping it short to slow or speed grounders. He also moved the outfield fences back 12 to 15 feet to stymie the home-run-slugging Yankees. By and large, his tricks were employed selectively to bolster home team strengths and take advantage of opponent teams’ weaknesses.