Paralympic Scheduling Conflict

Yesterday marked one year to go before the opening of the 2006 Commonwealth Games, which will run from the 15th to the 26th of March. The unusual timing is due to the fact that this summer sports competition is being held in Melbourne, Australia.

There was an interesting story on CBC radio this morning pointing out that the dates overlap with the 2006 Paralympic Winter Games in Torino, Italy, which are being held from the 10th to the 19th of March.

You'll notice, if you explore the web site above, that the Commonwealth Games are very progressive when it comes to athletes with a disability. The events are integrated into the schedule and the athletes are awarded the same medals as everybody else. No other major games are as inclusive and, as a result, the Commonwealth Games carry a great deal of prestige. For winter sport athletes, the Paralympic Winter Games are a rare opportunity to compete on the world stage. Although the Winter Paralympics are still relatively small, there are efforts underway to add more sports. Furthermore, the 2006 edition are being held during (not following) the Winter Olympics — I believe for the first time ever — which should have helped to catch the world's attention.

It's a shame that these two events are going on concurrently. Even more than most amateur athletes, athletes with a disability only get into the spotlight once every four years. Due to the scheduling conflict, the media coverage will be stretched even thinner than it would be otherwise.

It would be tempting to accuse the Commonwealth Games organizers of being insensitive to athletes with a disability, except for two things. One, they have a great track record in that regard; and two, the 2006 Commonwealth Games are also in conflict with the Winter Olympics. My guess is that they just don't think about winter sports much at all. Which makes sense, really, since only one Commonwealth nation makes any significant investment in winter sports.

More Uniform Fluff

Earlier I made some mildly derogatory remarks about Zellers, and I may have to eat those words. According to this story, Zellers outfitted the Canadian team at the 2002 Commonwealth Games, and those uniforms were voted the nicest of the games in a poll of athletes.

I am unable to confirm the part about the poll.

Less About Canada

I suppose it's natural that my thoughts and ideas would have a Canadian bias, but recently I've been on all-Canadian-sports-all-the-time. In the faint hope of attaining some balance, here are a few recent stories from around the world.

Insert Your Country Name Here

The Athens Review, a report into the success of Ireland at the 2004 games, called for substantial, sustained and targeted investment over many years to ensure Olympic and Paralympic success … It claimed Irish sport needed a restructuring of funding for top athletes and a more cohesive partnership between sporting bodies in order to compete at a higher level. — The Evening Echo, Cork, Ireland.

Except for the words "Ireland" and "Irish," this could have been written about any one of two dozen countries.

The Motivating Effect of Prizes

Many countries offer their Olympic athletes cash prizes for winning medals. It turns out India is one of those countries. Who knew?

I never really understood the theory behind this practice, anyway — are Olympic athletes suffering from a lack of motivation? It doesn't seem to be doing much for India, for sure … they've won a total of three Olympic medals since 1980.

Note: Rs 23 lakh is 2,300,000 rupees, or roughly $65,000 Canadian.

African Bid Intentions Announced

Well, the Kenyans are still promising that they are going to bid for the 2016 Summer Olympic games. No big news there, since they've made public noises about it before (post). More bizarre is this story that Ghana intends to bid for the Summer Olympics, too … in 2032. At least they won't be doing everything at the last minute …

Modern Greek Proverb: Haste Makes Waste

… which is something the Greeks are going to regret, apparently, according to these two (one, two) stories.

Also in Greece, the new president of the Hellenic Olympic Committee has had to abolish four "illegitimate" winter sports federations. The federations were allegedly invented just to create more puppet votes within the HOC.

Nobody Loves A Superpower

Finally, here's an interesting article about the US Olympic Committee, its budget, and what a mess the organization has been in the past. So not only have they been kicking everybody's butt at the Olympics, but they've been doing it with one hand tied behind their back. Typical, eh?

Olympic Programme Fact and Fiction

There's always talk about adding (golf) or subtracting (baseball) sports from the Olympic programme, and that will always be the case. I have some strong opinions on this issue, and some day I am going to write more on this subject. But for today, Around The Rings is reporting that the IOC Programme Commission has been "stripping bare" the programme at their meeting this week. I don't know exactly what this means, and I'm not an Around the Rings subscriber, but it sounds like the programme commission has some big plans. I guess we'll find out soon enough, as the commission will submit their final report in a few weeks.

On a related note, I saw a story on Yahoo! News today suggesting that the next addition to the Olympic program should be ... poker. This is what happens when you broadcast that much Texas Hold'Em on ESPN! On closer examination, the source of the story is this public relations firm — it's essentially an advertisement for an on-line poker service, dressed up to look like a news story.

Own The Podium — What Are The Chances?

So the COC wants to win 35 medals in 2010; in other words, they want to finish first in the medal table. At the same time, they've set clear priorities for supporting certain sports over others, a decision which I support, but some others do not.

Can this work? Given Canada's sporting strengths and weaknesses, is it even possible to finish first in the medal table?

The table below lists the winter Olympic sports, with the total number of medal events in 2002, and the priority (1, 2, or 3) assigned to each sport in the Own the Podium plan. There were 78 medal events in 2002; that number may change slightly by 2010, as events are added and subtracted from the program. The last column gives a vague impression (mine) of Canada's medal chances in the sport. This is, admittedly, based on current successes, which may or may not be valid in five years time.

Canada's winter sports priorities and available medals.

Discipline	Medal Events	OTP Priority	Canada's chances
Curling	2	1	Very Good
Figure Skating	4	1	Fair
Ice Hockey	2	1	Very Good
Speed Skating	10	1	Very Good
S.T. Speed Skating	8	1	Very Good
Total Priority 1	26	1	Very Good
Alpine Skiing	10	2	Improving
Cross Country Skiing	13	2	Improving
Freestyle Skiing	4	2	Good
Snowboard	3	2	Good
Total Priority 2	30	2	Improving?
Biathlon	8	3	Poor
Bobsleigh	3	3	Fair
Luge	3	3	Very Poor
Nordic Combined	3	3	Very Poor
Skeleton	2	3	Fair
Ski Jumping	3	3	Very Poor
Total Priority 3	22	3	Very Poor

So, how is Canada planning to get to 35 medals?

Although Canada is historically a strong performer in all of the priority 1 sports, the total number of medal events is only 26. I think that 20 medals in this category would be an overwhelming, stunning success. Canada is dominant in ice hockey and curling, but there are only four medals up for grabs. Let's assume that we can hold onto one in figure skating; that makes five.

How tough would it be to win 15 medals in the two speed skating disciplines? Very tough. In Salt Lake City, Canada won 3 medals in long track and 6 in short track. The top countries in long track (Germany, the Netherlands, and the U.S.) won eight medals each; the top country in short track (China) won seven. The top combined total in 2002 was 11 by the U.S. So to get to 15 Canada would have to be the best in the world in both disciplines. This is not an impossibility — we're already pretty good — but it's a big step up.

On the other side of the coin, it's pretty clear that Canada can't count on getting any medals in priority 3 sports. We once won a medal in ski jumping — in 1924. In biathlon, all three of Canada's medals were won by one athlete, long since retired. There has never been a Canadian medallist in luge or nordic combined. There are Canadian contenders in bobsleigh and skeleton, but that talent pool is aging and not very deep. Now that Own the Podium has placed a lower priority on these sports, they are not going to get the funding they would need to make a sudden turnaround.

That leaves priority 2, where all hope of reaching 35 medals rests on the cross-country and alpine ski teams. Canada will probably pick up a couple of medals in snowboard and freestyle, but there just aren't that many medals to go around. You can't be the top country at the winter Olymics without a top-tier cross-country or alpine team — preferably both.

Canada has won a total of one medal in cross-country skiing. Ever. We have had some recent success, but that's all relative. It's great that Canada's atheletes are now legitimate contenders on the world stage, but can we translate that into a handful of medals by 2010? I have my doubts. The top country in Salt Lake City was Norway, with 11 medals. Italy won six.

The Canadian alpine ski team, meanwhile, has won ten medals in the history of the winter Olympics ― the last in 1994. Recently, there has been a clear upward trend, but consider this: the top country in 2002 was world powerhouse Austria, with nine medals. Nobody else won more than four.

Given the numbers, there are only so many ways that you can get to 35. So here's what has to happen to accomplish the Own the Podium goals:

• Cover all the bases in ice hockey and curling (4 medals)
• Make sure you pick up a handful of medals in figure skating, freestyle, and snowboard (4 medals)
• Become the world's best speed skating nation, for long and short track (15 medals)
• Become a top-two nation in cross-country skiing (6 medals)
• Become a top-two nation in alpine skiing (6 medals)

I'll be accused of being "too Canadian" for saying so, but: there's almost zero chance that this is going to happen in five years.

Of course, it is still worthwhile to make the attempt, in my opinion, and Canada's winter Olympic performance will almost certainly improve as a result. I can see the COC's difficulty, really: you can't step up to the microphone and boldy state, "our goal is to finish second in 2010." Sometimes, to be successful, you have to set an unrealistic goal. I wonder, though, if the public really understands just how unrealistic this one is.

Hudson's Bay Company to Outfit Canadian Olympians

The COC announced today that the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) will be providing the clothing and luggage for the Canadian Olympic team in 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2012.

Canada's winter Olympic teams wore HBC gear for more than three decades, apparently including the famous Hudson's Bay Blanket Jacket on at least one occasion in the sixties. But in recent years Roots has really sparked the public interest and turned the Olympic uniform into a very popular line of merchandise. Roots will still be providing several Olympic team uniforms in 2006, including the U.S. team.

My wager is that our athletes won't be thrilled about the change. The Bay is nowhere near as cool as Roots, no matter how you look at it — and don't even talk to me about Zellers. Sure, Roots made a few boners now and then — I really didn't like that hockey-jersey podium suit in 2000 — but overall the clothing was attractive and well-made. Hopefully HBC can maintain that standard.

Kids' Fitness in the News

Last week in my local paper there was a good editorial by Chris Cochrane concerning the Nova Scotia government's committment to youth health and fitness. Cochrane is the Herald's front-page sports columnist and writes most days about the biggest game in town — university football or the Halifax Mooseheads. Living in a town without a major professional franchise means that amateur sport gets better coverage than it does in bigger cities. Still, it's unusual (and refreshing) to see a keynote columnist addressing public health on the front of the sports section.

Some more positive local news emerged last week on the public health front, as a study found that students at certain Nova Scotia schools were significantly less obese than their contemporaries. Those schools were participating in a project, partially funded by Health Canada, that encouraged healthy eating and physical activity. This is welcome news indeed amid the doom-and-gloom about the poor physical health of our youth. You can read about the policies in this 2002 document.

Of course, you win some, you lose some. Offseting the good work done by the fat-fighting schools, certain high schools in the same region still have designated on-campus smoking areas for students, despite the fact that tobacco possession is against the law for anybody under the age of 19.

Note to CTV: Skilled Announcer for Hire

A week ago I wrote about CTV's recent successful bid to broadcast the 2010 and 2012 Olympic Games in Canada. One of my concerns about the CTV/TSN package is that their play-by-play announcers and analysts are poor compared to the staff at the CBC.

Yesterday, the CBC let one of their good ones go, announcing the surprise termination of Chris Cuthbert's contract. The official story is that there isn't enough work for Cuthbert, now that the NHL season has been officially cancelled. Yesterday on CBC radio there was some speculation that the real reasons may have been more personal, as Cuthbert apparently had a rocky relationship with boss Nancy Lee. William Houston at the Globe and Mail reports that Lee notified Cuthbert of his dismissal through his agent. The Toronto Star is reporting that the employees' union at CBC is investigating the circumstances of the termination.

Assuming that Cuthbert is done with the CBC, he could be a significant upgrade to the CTV team. Aside from his high-profile hockey duties, Cuthbert was also CBC's top announcer for CFL broadcasts, and (more relevant to my topic) played a high-profile role at the last few Olympics. He covered figure skating at the winter games in Salt Lake City, and did an excellent job at the rowing and flatwater canoe/kayak venue in Athens.

For the moment, Cuthbert's profile is still available on the CBC web site.

Lady Stanley's Cup?

Our outspoken Governor General has made news again, this time suggesting that the best women's hockey teams in the world should compete for the Stanley Cup.

This would be a delightful revenge against the greedy people (read men) who have forced the cancellation of this year's NHL season. Of course it will never happen, and our women's team would probably not appreciate being treated as a one-time novelty act, anyway.

A much better idea, I think, is being advocated at FreeStanley.com. If you haven't heard of this yet, go on over and take a look. The idea looks doomed, unfortunately, barring a legal turnaround, but can you imagine a British FA Cup-style challenge tournament for the Stanley Cup? That's much closer to the original intent of Ms. Clarkson's predecessor.

More Funding for Canadian Amateur Sports

The Canadian Press has leaked this news about tomorrow's federal budget (a Canadian tradition). According to the CP's sources, the Sport Canada budget will be increased to $140M CAD for the upcoming fiscal year.

If I have my facts straight, last year's Sport Canada budget was $90M, which was then boosted by a "one-time only" $30M infusion in May of 2004. So the new total could be interpreted as an extension of this $30M, plus $20M in new money. It falls significantly short of what the COC was pitching to Parliament earlier this month, but is still a significant increase.

As discussed previously here, the "excellence" portion of the Sport Canada budget, targeted at the programs that produce high-performance athletes, will not be distributed evenly to all sports. The high-performance programs of all summer and winter sports are currently under an in-depth review, to identify those sports where Canada's medal chances are best.

Bring Back the A Card!

As part of the budget increase, the CP is reporting that the monthly living allowance given to Canadian national team athletes under the Athlete Assistance Program will rise from $1100 to $1500. This will be a nice increase for our athletes, who have now seen the maximum monthly stipend go from $650 to $1500 in the last eight years. At the beginning of that period, Sport Canada did away with the "graded" carding levels (A, B, and C) that rewarded the top performers on the national team with a bigger allowance. Personally, I would like to see that come back, so that athletes who have proven podium potential get a bigger piece of the pie.

Bid Evaluations in Full Swing

Lots happening in the 2012 bidding wars in the past few weeks. The IOC's evaluation committee is in the middle of its site tour, having just arrived in New York. The committee has already completed their inspections of Madrid and, most recently, London, where the Queen did her part by waving.

Earlier, I wrote that we could probably write off New York's bid, and not a lot has happened to change my mind. There is still a lot of public negativity about the bid (see NewYorkGames.org for some of the details), and the U.S. is going to be a long shot anyway. There will probably be a bit of a bounce in optimism after the visit, but I still think that the real chances are pretty slim.

The odds on London have improved since the committee visit, but early favourite Paris hasn't had theirs yet. The IOC's decision will be made this summer. Meanwhile, you can follow all the press releases at GamesBids.com, if you're interested.

Rogers/CTV Win Olympic Rights

Last week, Canadian broadcast rights for the 2010 and 2012 Olympic games were awarded to Rogers/CTV. The bid group includes english broadcasters CTV, TSN, OLN, and the regional Rogers SportsNets, which makes the possibilities pretty intriguing:

The plan is for CTV to carry the opening and closing ceremonies, plus the major sports events on its free, over-the-air channels. Sportsnet's four regional cable channels plus TSN will have the ability to show entire events, from start to finish. "The tastes are changing in sports," said CTV president Rick Brace. "People want to be able to watch the events they want to see and they want to be able to watch them in their entirety and they want to be able to watch them live."

All true. Not mentioned, however, is the fact that people also want to watch the events with decent commentary and analysis! According to past experience, this is much more likely to occur on CBC than it is on CTV (all my previous complaints about Brian Williams aside ...).

It's possible that I am being unfair to the on-air staff at CTV/TSN/OLN/Rogers. Maybe they are not nearly as bad as I remember from the last time CTV hosted the games. At the very least, I will look forward to the increased coverage of the events — even if I have to watch with the sound turned down!

FINA Gets Their Way. Man Dies.

So I guess it was just an extreme pressure tactic, after all.

Today FINA announced that the 2005 FINA World Championships will be held in ... Montréal. This after cancelling the same event — scheduled for July — in January, and convincing three other cities to present their short-notice bids.

Of course, Canada's athletes are thrilled that the championships are back on, and they should be. In fact, this decision is probably the best one for the competition, as honourary co-chairman Dick Pound has pointed out:

I've always thought that the best thing for FINA and their world championships would be to take advantage of the two years of preparation that Montreal's already put into this rather than take their chances on what a totally new city, with only five months to prepare, might be able to cobble together.

FINA has publicly agreed, stating that it would be a logistical headache to move the championships with such little notice.

In addition to getting the right venue, FINA also has finally secured the financial assurances they feel they need. Apparently, those assurances are mostly being borne by Montréal's long-suffering taxpayers, but we'll wait and see.

So, was it all a bluff? Here's a segment from the CP Online story on the re-award to Montréal. (Cornel Marculescu, quoted here, is executive director of FINA.)

... when [FINA] met with the [Montréal organizing] committee in January ... [Marculescu] felt the championships were not taken seriously by the committee or the various levels of government. When they pulled the event from Montréal, he said it "gave us a chance to show that this is an important event and that lots of cities want to have it."

Everybody at FINA must be feeling absolutely fabulous, since this worked out just the way they wanted it to; they don't have to move their championships, they extorted their financial guarantees, and they got to feel more important, all at the same time. Meanwhile, a man is dead, after organizing committee chairman Yvon Desrochers killed himself in his car last week. Of course, as Marculescu was quick to point out, "we don't know if it was connected to the championships," even if Desrochers was facing a barrage of public criticism over the failure of the organization he led since 2002. I wonder if FINA feels better now that they're being "taken seriously?"

FINA World Championships Headed For ...

The president of FINA has told Around the Rings that a decision on the new host site for the 2005 FINA World Championships will be made this week at a meeting in Frankfurt.

The FINA World Championships are a multi-sport event, encompassing swimming, diving, synchronized swimming, water polo, and open-water swimming. In case you haven't been following this bizarre story, the event was previously awarded to Montréal, but was withdrawn by FINA due to a lack of funding. A media battle of blame, accusation, and whining has surrounded that decision.

There is unanimous agreement that the organizing committee was millions of dollars short on the revenue side of their budget, but sources disagree over the cause of the shortfall. Various parties blamed the three governments involved (Canada, Québec, and Montréal), FINA itself, and the private sector.

Since the decision, some of the deficit has actually been made up, with various parties stepping forward. There seems to be hope in some quarters that the cancellation is only an extreme pressure tactic by FINA, and that the event will still go on. However, Montréal is not listed among the official candidate cities on FINA's web site, and FINA has publicly insisted that Montreal is out of the running.

Adding a human tragedy to the political drama, the embattled CEO of the Montréal organizing committee, Yvon DesRochers, died on February 2nd at the age of 60-ish (reports vary). The death has received hardly a mention in the English-Canadian press (an exception is sportsnet), but the French-Canadian and European media are widely reporting it as a suicide.

Some have speculated that the withdrawal will hurt Canada's chances at winning host bids in the future. Personally, I don't put too much stock in that; surely the recent successful events in cycling, athletics, triathlon, and rowing won't be completely discounted? Montréal, on the other hand, probably won't benefit from this very public failure.

Many Victor Contes?

Victor Conte, in his infamous interview on 20/20, claimed that there are many more out there like him, making sure that all of the world's best athletes are pumped full of illegal and undetectable drugs. He is not alone in that assertion; even some in the news media are sure that this must be true.

This week, those speculations have been somewhat justified, with the announcement that doping authorities have discovered another designer steroid specifically developed for athletes.

Figure 1

Figure 1 — history of performances in men's 100 m (click to enlarge).

In an earlier post, I commented that I don't buy Conte's self-justification that only doped athletes can be competitive in athletics. I have been wanting to go back and take a look at this issue in some more detail.

Figure 1 (inset right) shows the history of performances in the men's 100 m dash. Of particular interest is the block of green bars on the right-hand side of the plot. These represent the best 10 sprinters in the world for each year since 1975. There's no way to know, of course, which of these performances have been illegally enhanced. But it's "common knowledge" that today, all of the best athletes are on drugs.

References

• The "Statistics" section compiled by Rinaldo Zocca has some interesting analysis of trends between 1975 and 2000, including the lists of the top 10 performers in each of those years. (If you want to see something fascinating, take a look at the men's shot put.)
• The lists of top performers after 2000 were obtained from the IAAF's top lists.
• The chronology of the world record came from BiblioSports.
• The times for the Olympic finalists came from The 100 Metre Zone
• This graph at Athletics By Numbers shows that in 2004 only 26 athletes in the world ran faster than 10.10 seconds, and only 7 ran faster than 10.00 seconds

Happily, I don't think that the numbers support this conclusion, unless steroid use has been going on much longer than we thought. Looking at the graph, we can see that the tenth-best sprinter in the world today is roughly as fast as the world record holder in the mid-1960s.

In 1964, at the Olympics in Tokyo, "Bullet" Bob Hayes set a world record of 10.06. So if all of the top ten sprinters in the world today are cheaters, then that would imply that Hayes and his contemporaries (Jim Hines and Charles Greene, to name two) were also on drugs, wouldn't it? Conte claims that you have to dope to compete today, so therefore this kind of sophisticated doping must stretch back at least to the sixties.

Now, it's possible that the best sprinters from the sixties were cheating. We know that Hayes had his problems, later in life, with narcotics. But I've never seen any accusations about steroids in this era.

I think that the opposite conclusion is far more likely, even if it runs contrary to "common knowledge." I am convinced that at least some of the world's ten best sprinters are actually clean. And that's assuming that forty years of advances in training and technology have counted for nothing.

Doping News Update

I haven't talked about doping much lately, so I figure that it's time for an update on the latest developments. You can think of this as an update to my previous entry Doping News (November 16, 2004).

Athletics

In the it-would-be-funny-if-it-weren't-so-sad department, this Reuters story outlines the who's who of recent doping allegations in track and field. Here are the latest news stories on each case.

• Greek sprinters Kostas Kenteris and Katerina Thanou have officially been charged with faking their motorcycle accident on the eve of the Athens Olympics. This week, they also testified at a hearing to investigate doping tests that they missed in Athens, Tel Aviv, and Chicago. The Telegraph is reporting that Kenteris has admitted missing the Tel Aviv test, but is disputing the other two allegations. The two athletes, and their lawyer, are still hoping to escape sanctions.
• Chryste Gains and Tim Montgomery are still awaiting their appeal hearings at CAS, scheduled for June.
• Michelle Collins, former world indoor champion at 200 m, has been suspended for eight years by USADA based on evidence unearthed in the BALCO case. Collins has not admitted to illegal drug use and has not had a positive test. She will also appeal to CAS.
• Speaking of BALCO, Marion Jones is suing Victor Conte for defamation, seeking $25M in damages. Conte, in his interview on 20/20 and elsewhere, has stated in no uncertain terms that he helped Jones administer an extensive regime of illegal performance-enhancing substances leading up to the 2000 summer Olympics (see also Victor Conte on 20/20, December 9, 2004). He has also stated that he saw her inject herself with BALCO's designer steroid 'the clear.' Conte, in response to the suit, has hired himself a high-powered lawyer.

Obviously I don't have any insider information on the Marion Jones case, but I think she is in serious trouble here and will not escape. In addition to Conte's detailed allegations, former husband C. J. Hunter has stated that he saw her use illegal substances in the lead-up to the 2000 Olympics. There is also the damaging association with Montgomery. The IOC itself has now launched an investigation into the allegations against Jones, and Dick Pound at WADA is out to get her.

As for Conte's allegations, I have a hard time seeing what his motivation is to lie. Although the statements against Jones have given him a lot of publicity, that can't be his only interest. After all, he has had plenty of opportunities to directly implicate Barry Bonds, but has refrained from doing so, saying only that he provided illegal substances to Bonds' trainer. Any direct evidence against baseball's home-run king would surely have made an even bigger splash than the allegations against Jones, at least in the American press.

Cycling

Cycling continues to build its reputation as a dirty sport, at least among the pros on the road race circuit. In December, Olympic time trial gold medallist Tyler Hamilton escaped his positive blood doping test on a technicality. Hamilton's A sample allegedly showed signs of a blood transfusion, which is a no-no. Fortunately for Tyler, his B sample was frozen before it was tested, which means that he can't be punished for a doping offense and will keep his gold medal. Greek prosecutors are pressing criminal charges against the testing laboratory for allegedly destroying the sample. Dick Pound of WADA (see also Dick Pound Stays On At WADA, November 20, 2004) told VeloNews that Hamilton "dodged a bullet" at the Olympics, but he will still face a two-year ban for being caught blood doping at the Vuelta in September. Hamilton vehemently denies the charges and claims that the new blood doping test is unreliable.

Meanwhile, French authorities have opened an inquiry into doping allegations against 2000 Olympic cycling time trial bronze medallist and six-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong. The allegations were made by Armstrong's former assistant, Emma O'Reilly, in a book that was released just before the 2004 Tour. Like Hamilton, Armstrong has vehemently denied the allegations.

Personally, I will be very disappointed if the persistent doping allegations against Armstrong turn out to be true. I am a big fan and I find myself wanting to believe that he is clean.

One odd note about the book, incidentally. It is available in French on Amazon.fr, and in English on Amazon.ca, but is not available on either Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. I am not sure what to make of that, but the English version is ranked 100,500 on the Amazon.ca sales list, so perhaps there is not enough demand to support an Amazon offering in England or the US. The French version got lukewarm reader reviews.

Other Sports

Finally, an update on the horse doping story. Goldfever and his rider have been disqualified for using a banned substance, although clearly the horse is an innocent bystander in this case. Germany will have their 2004 Olympic gold medal in team show jumping downgraded to bronze after Goldfever's results are stricken from the record. The U.S. will be promoted to the gold.

Canada to 'Own the Podium?'

Earlier I mentioned that the COC had set a goal of finishing first in the medal table in 2010. Well, this Saturday, Canada officially unveiled its plan for 2010, called "Own the Podium." The story was widely reported in the media (for example this story in the Toronto Star), but without much critical thought.

To me, "Own the Podium" looks pretty good. I think that the mainstream media may have missed an important point here, though. As noted in the offical release, the program sets Canada's priorities for medal potential, so that flat ice sports have the highest priority, snow sports have second priority, and everything else (shooting, sliding, and jumping) has a lower priority. What that's probably going to mean, in practice, is that some of the lower-priority sports are going to see a funding cut. In essence, Canada is going to give up on ski jumping and some other winter sports, and this obviously isn't going to sit well with everybody. I predict that we'll see some outrage in the press in the next twelve months, as the consequences become clear.

Some have commented that there might be cuts on the horizon for summer sports, too, in order to afford "Own the Podium." But I don't expect that's the case. Actually, that's not quite right. I expect that the exact same approach is going to be applied to summer sports; those sports where we think we can win medals can expect to see more money, and those sports where we don't are going to see big cuts. Again, we can expect to see lots of negative press about this when the papers realize that this is a dramatic change in philosophy.

From my point of view, it was also interesting to see the summary of the conversion analysis by Cathy Priestner-Allinger. Even though she used a different definition of "medal hopefuls," her results for the 2002 winter Olympics weren't much different from mine for the 2004 summer Olympics. So it's probably not just bad luck — Canada is consistently poor at converting world-class international performers into Olympic medallists. Priestner-Allinger has some ideas about why that's the case, which are now going to be used to drive the plan.

There's nothing like having a solid quantitative analysis to back up your strategy!

Athens COG President Tackles Obscenity Complaints

Just another quick one (I've got my hands full with other matters these days). Earlier I wrote an entry about the indecency complaints received by the FCC about NBC's coverage of the 2004 summer Olympics.

Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, who was the president of the Athens organizing committee, has written this editorial on this issue for the L.A. Times. Happy reading!

2012 Host Candidates to Debate — Not!

Early in the new year, the AP ran this story noting that BBC World was planning a televised debate between delegations from the five candidate cities for the 2012 Olympic Games. I haven't even gotten around to mentioning it and already the IOC has pulled the plug on the idea. Too bad; it sounded like it might be kind of fun.

In other bidding news this week, IOC president Jacques Rogge encouraged African nations to put in bids for 2016. Then, to his apparent discomfort, Kenya announced that they would take him at his word. When Rogge put out the call to "Africa," he probably meant South Africa, who are pretty much the only country on the continent with any experience hosting sporting events of comparable size. But if South Africa decides that they want to pursue it, they probably have a decent shot; at least some IOC sentiment will be on their side.

Medal Predictions Part I - Debunking Bernard & Busse

The last couple of weeks I have been thinking about the question of China. As they emerge as a sporting power, are they going to overwhelm the rest of the world? In other words, how good can China be?

I am going to get to that question, eventually, but not today. My investigation has led me down some other paths, though, one of which I thought was worth sharing. Earlier this summer you may have seen some news stories about a pair of American economists who were making predictions of Olympic medal totals. An example from the popular financial press can be found at CNN Money.

If you just read the news articles, it sounds pretty impressive; a couple of eggheads can accurately predict national medal totals using just a few simple statistics, and without knowing anything about sports. Wow. I figured that this was going to make it easy to answer my original question; all I would have to do was collect some economic forecasts for China's future, and presto, out would pop a predicted medal total. If only it were so easy.

The two economists in question, Andrew Bernard and Meghan Busse, have published this peer-reviewed article, including a description of their methods and their 2000 predictions. Bernard also has this "executive summary" of their 2004 predictions on his web site.

I'm not an economist, but I have trudged through the article, and I think I get most of it. The authors have attempted, using the last 30 years of Olympic medal totals, to create a model that will predict Olympic medal totals based on:

• Population
• Per-capita gross domestic product (GDP)
• Host effect (whether a country is a host country or not)
• "Sport economy" type (e.g. Soviet-bloc management)
• History of Olympic performance

The predicitive power of the resulting model, as noted in the press, is actually fairly impressive. It appears that the dead-on predictions mentioned in the CNN Money article were actually wrong, due to an error in the implementation of the model, but even when the model is corrected the results are still good enough to be interesting.

Unfortunately, the predictions of the model are almost completely dominated by the last factor in my list, the history of Olympic performance. As Bernard and Busse note in their article, without the medal history, "the overall predictive power of the current model is lacking."

Let me illustrate how much history dominates the predictions. I decided to do some predictions of my own, to compare with the Bernard and Busse model. My model is called the "status quo" model, and it has one assumption: that every country will win the same fraction of the total medals that they won last time. Since there were basically the same number of medals awarded in 2004 as there were in 2000, this makes the prediction especially easy. Just look up the number from the 2000 medal table, and you've got your 2004 prediction. How did I do?

Figures 1 & 2

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Figure 1 – Total medal predictions by Bernard & Busse and by status quo model, with actual totals, for 2004 Olympics (click to enlarge).

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Figure 2 – Total medal predictions by Bernard & Busse and by status quo model, with actual totals, for 2000 Olympics (click to enlarge).

Figure 1 (inset) shows my "status quo" prediction, Bernard & Busse's "economic factors" prediction, and the actual totals for 2004. As you can see, the two predictions are about the same. I actually do better at predicting Greece, which apparently didn't get much "host effect;" we both underestimated Japan and Spain. Statistically speaking, my prediction was better overall, with an r.m.s. absolute error of 5.0 medals versus 5.3 for Bernard & Busse. Figure 2 shows the exact same thing for 2000, using 1996 as the status quo; in this case, I scaled the 1996 total by the fractional change in the total number of medals awarded (927/842). For 2000, Bernard & Busse did slightly better than my dumb model (6.4 r.m.s. error versus 6.5).

It's not that the Bernard & Busse model isn't a good predictor, because it actually does fine. It's just that the predictions aren't very illuminating. Essentially, we can conclude that a country wins lots of Olympic medals because it has won lots of Olympic medals before.

It would be fascinating to find a model that can give you a rough prediction of how many medals a country will win based on a small number of truly independent indicators. This model isn't it. To be fair, Bernard & Busse have identified a positive correlation between medal performance and some economic factors, which is interesting. But by their own admission, these correlations aren't strong enough, by themselves, to lead to useful predictions.