Games Workshop – White Dwarf’s publishers (hence the pimping) – had placed certain bets on the direction the HOBBY OF THE 80S was going to swing in. Their bets involved carefully painted dioramas rather than minibus rides to wet caves, so the magazine spent a lot of time taking the piss out of LARP. Some of this was also the unslakable thirst of the nerd to find someone they can look down on – sad we may be, but we don’t wave rubber swords around (we only paint lead ones). And some of it, it must be said, was justified. Like a lot of geek businesses in the 80s, LARP attracted a few thrusting young Thatcherites whose bold entrepreneurial spirit was matched only by their willingness to scarper with the money at the first opportunity. It gained a reputation for spivviness.

By the time I actually tried it, LARP was struggling towards respectability. It had a moderate following, enough to fill a stretch of Chislehurst Caves every weekend. It had a rules system of sorts, and punters dedicated enough to invest time in grinding their alternate self up levels. On the way there, my friend – who had been before – introduced me to an impressive figure, a boy of 13 or 14 who was now a Level 8 Ranger. What would I be, my friend asked. I wasn’t sure. Of course this meant I ended up as a Cleric – the “playing in defense” of the LRP world. My job would be to thump a monster or two with my rubber mace and to cast healing spells on some of the other boys.

Thrilling stuff nonetheless! With 6 or 7 other 12-year-olds and two grown-up referees, I set off into the dungeons. After that I mostly remember running around and shouting.

The grown-up referees, unsurprisingly, had a lot to do. An example of play might run as follows.

GROUP: Runs around and shouts.
MONSTERS (yet more 12 year old boys): Run out shouting.
ALL: Whack! Thump! Ow! Mister – are we dead? Are we?
Repeat.

It rapidly became obvious why nobody wanted to be the cleric. To cast your Cure Wounds spell you had to stand still and recite something. If you did this, you would get hit on the head. So you didn’t. The dungeon was no place for fair play.

Or for open combat. In a tabletop RPG, even one with miniatures, fighting tended to occur in the form of miniature battles or brawls. A group of adventurers would come upon a group of monsters, perhaps they would be DICING or DRINKING GROG. The monsters would sieze their arms and the MELEE would begin.

This did not happen in Chislehurst Caves. What you learned very quickly is that in a closed environment of corridoors and small rooms, all combat is hit and run guerilla fighting. Soon the whole country would learn this, virtually on FPS games and physically in Laser Tag. This was little consolation when my noble cleric got cut down like a rat by some little fucker reaching through an opening in the wall and stabbing me.

Still! My party’s loss was my gain, for now the real fun could begin and I could play a monster for the second half of the day. This was considerably better. For a start, there was no penalty for dying, so all monsters were suicide troops, happy to take preposterous risks to fuck the players up. You also got some great make-up and masks (which could fall down your face in a fight: a real kobold would not suffer such indignity).

I obviously impressed the referees with my monstering enough to land the apparently plumb job as a Vampire Lord. I was – so I believed – to be the final boss in the dungeon. I was given a coffin to lie in, and told to rise when the players came in. I waited, in anticipation of a starring role. What I wasn’t told is that they’d found an enchanted stake, so no sooner had I risen than the referee curtly told me to lie back down, for good this time. But it was fun while it lasted.

I never LARPed again, but I enjoyed my little taste of it. It was ramshackle and enjoyable, like British Bulldogs for the scrawny, stout or weak kids. A few moments were genuinely thrilling, and it taught me an important lesson: that it was very hard to simulate the rush and panic of physical action in a tabletop game. So the lesson was to accept the limitations, or to downplay it entirely. Or – and this is what I decided to do – to get a bit more creative…

(I Was A Goblin returns after a several-year absence, and I’ll be taking it to the conclusion always intended – looking at my experiences in the indie RPG scene in the 90s. So stay tuned.)

I have another blog where I can dig into the details and issues around that, but I thought it would be interesting on Freaky Trigger to delve a little into the history of the “levels” idea. So this is a bundling of sources – comments from anyone who can fill in more or have other ideas would be extremely welcome.

A brief recap of what we’re talking about – “level” is used in multiple senses in games: to talk about player rank, specific game areas, and the ambient level of challenge in the game universe. We’re interested here in personal ranking. The idea is that a player (or avatar) earns points through successfully carrying out actions or tasks: get enough points and you go up a level, which generally involves an increase in your in-game abilities or access to new ones. So where does that come from?

MILITARY RANK: This is the obvious place to start, since a) there have been military ranks as far back as we can trace military history and b) D&D’s roots were in wargaming, which would often use ranked units with different weights in gameplay. So case closed? Well, not quite: the thing about military rank is that it’s a relationship of command – a decurion reports to a centurion who reports to the geezer who sits in a tent with a big cloth around his shoulders. So rank is defined not by one’s actions but by the relationship between ranks, and there’s also not necessarily a sense of progress, at least not between the officer and non-officer classes. “Gygaxian” game-ready levels don’t really work like this, so we’ll need to draw in other ideas.

LEVELS OF SELF-IMPROVEMENT: Buddhism seems an obvious place to look for the idea of an individual’s progress in stages (and the era when D&D was developed was also the peak of Western pop-culture interest in ‘Eastern philosophy’. Of course, I know very little about Buddhism so my understanding that the path to enlightenment is a matter of going from step to step might be completely misguided. But here’s a possible philosophical root for the idea of levelling as an individual journey.

HIERARCHIES OF EXPERTISE: Dungeons and Dragons is a game set in a medieval world, and the professional life of towns and cities was deeply hierarchical, with guilds creating and enforcing a simple structure of levels: apprentice, journeyman, master. So here we’ve got an obvious source for the D&D style idea of levels as a function of “class” – the nature of the abilities you gain depends on the profession you’re in.

EXPERTISE AS ENLIGHTENMENT: When you combine the idea of mystical self-advancement and the idea of formalised hierarchies you get cults and initiatory organisations, most pertinently the MASONS, whose initial three degrees are the guild levels redux, but whose Scottish Rite involves levels 4 to 33, ascending orders of knowledge and revelation (and much more besides, according to airport revolving racks). Here we see the number of available levels increasing to a degree that suggests some kind of abstraction as well as simple organisational hierarchy. Also pertinent here: Scientology, whose upper levels overtly promise magical/supernatural powers.

LEVELS OF SKILL: We’re now starting to break away again from the merely organisational model, where the upper levels are somehow in charge of the lower models. The idea of levels of pure individual skill is embedded in the martial arts – like Scientology, the Masons and Buddhism big news in 70s pop culture and a massive influence on D&D. The idea of different levels of “belt” seems to be a relatively late (19th century) construction of a tradition, but for anyone doing “martial arts” at school or watching on TV it symbolised the entirety of the discipline. It’s important because it’s a very explicit recognition of levelling happening not because there’s a vacancy above, or because it’s time to understand the next mystery, or because you’ve petitioned your guild successfully, but because you’ve earned it by being good enough at something.

SCHOOL: Perhaps the most important thing of all, especially given the agegroup these games caught on with. The dynamic of tabletop games is of a group of individuals working together and typically advancing at roughly the same rate through the game. This owes less to guilds, or Buddhism, or karate than it does to school – the US system of years as “grades” as explicit a system of real life levelling up as you’d find. As you advanced to the next level you’d meet new challenges, tasks, and gain new skills. The sequence of grades – 1st to 12th – matches the levels most official D&D adventures focused on: once you got to “high level” the degree of challenges became vaguer, harder, and ultimately it was hinted your character should leave the life of adventure behind and get a job building magical artefacts or running a kingdom.

DETOUR 1: WHAT ABOUT DANTE?: When I asked about this topic on Twitter Stevie T suggested Dante as a source. The Divine Comedy is, obviously, all about levels, but it’s the other meaning of the word – levels as places. Said places of course symbolise different degrees of sinfulness or virtue, so there’s an element of human progression – and decline, much more unusual in these kind of models – but as a game mechanic Dante is unusual: you find out your final ‘level’ AFTER you’ve finished playing, and you have no chance of changing it.

DETOUR 2: POWER-UPS AND POWER-DOWNS: Hazel mentioned jousts and tournaments as another example of medieval game mechanics, where Knights would take part in tournaments and use the spoils as a means of upgrading, replacing and improving their armour and horse – a real-world system of power-ups and power-downs. This doesn’t have a lot to do with the “levelling” element but directly or not the ideas fed into these games in a big way – the problem with most systems of levels is that the amount of actual power differentiating each increment is pretty low, which is why it’s so often expressed in terms of hierarchy. So if you can include some kind of physical upgrade so much the better.

INDIVIDUALISATION: Almost all these “levelling” systems (except Buddhist enlightenment I guess) take place within an organisational context – even if being a higher level doesn’t give you automatic authority, there’s always somebody who has to ratify the fact of advancement. The real innovation in D&D was the moving of this ratifying authority into the person of the referee. This means that levelling up is now not a property of a body within the world but an automatic property of the world itself.** And this is the breakthrough in terms of gaming – if levels are a property of the gameworld, they can be automated and individualised. (The tension between individual reward and co-operative play is one of the things that makes RPGs fascinating).

I don’t know whether digging around in the roots of the “level” idea has much practical use for people designing “game-like” experiences today – I just think it’s interesting. But maybe exploring where these concepts came from is a good way to think about what subconscious expectations people might have of them, and how those expectations can be reinforced or confounded.

*as I said on Twitter, the fervour with which the writer is pronouncing one scene dead and another scene arriving is very reminiscent of the UK music press in its pomp, though I don’t think any NME writers styled themselves “Chief Ninja”.

**D&D itself took a lot of care in NOT fully realising the implications of this – there were an awful lot of rules about converting points to levels via study, ratification by the “Thieves’ Guild”, formal training etc. This was, in essence, an attempt to preserve the problem the game had already solved and I know very few players who stuck to them.

Fabio Capello’s still somewhat limited English vocabulary may not yet incorporate the term “invidious position”

must have been the turning point where Fabio decided that he had to go. Not because of Ms Taylor herself, but, I think, because of the following piece of genius from Freaky Trigger’s very own Patron Saint of Sport, Lord Harry of Bassett:

Dave Bassett endorsed [Glenn] Roeder’s view that a Rubicon has been crossed. “The problem is John Terry’s a wrong-un. He’s masquerading as one of the chaps but he ain’t because this shouldn’t happen,” the former Wimbledon and Sheffield United manager said. “Of course you have players misbehaving when they’re married. But they aren’t doing it to a team-mate’s missus. That’s off bounds.

“It sticks in the throat. There’s an unwritten rule that you don’t start messing with players’ missuses. I’ve had players who have left their missus or had bits and pieces on the side but they’ve not gone off with a team-mate’s bird. That’s crossing a line and where it comes unstuck with Terry. I don’t recollect it in all my years in football.

Gawd Bless yer Harry!

William Shatner’s version, given a little extra ‘treatment’ for the YouTube generation by videoist Paul Heriot. I remember Lee and Herring describing this as Shatner believing that he had to be on LSD in order to sing the song, and Heriot certainly seems to be running with that ball (and also the Star Elephant that will forever be in any room Shatner inhabits). Personally, I love Shatner’s vocals and I think this might be the perfect song for his somewhat unique stylings… but this is a series about Beatles Rock Band and not Shatner Session Band so we’ll move on.

According to the factoids, this is not about drugs. It’s in fact about a child’s drawing, which just happened through a cosmic coincidence to refer to Lucy being in a Sky with some Diamonds, which spells LSD. Which is a drug. Obviously some people might draw a link there but not Harmonix. They point up the Beatlebots’ sobriety by having their sleepy, chortling, hippy-moustached faces lit up with pink, the colour of innocence, before they ‘come up’ on something – up into SPACE, on a TELEPORTATION BEAM, of course! No wonder Johnbot is screaming AAAAAAHHH he is plunging into a wormhole. Obviously this interstellar jaunt, during which the Beatles sing merrily about things growing ‘incredibly high’, represents a straight-laced career in the astronaut field, astronauts being kept on a tight rein and not allowed to stuff their faces with blotting paper.

Bravo, Beatles Rock Band! Say no to drugs!

(Although if you were out of your head on something you’d likely have no problem here as this is one of the easiest tracks in the entire game. Difficulty is zero or close to it across the board, so much so that my guitar ran out of batteries in the last verse and stopped working, and I still finished it with four stars. Is this a case of Harmonix tailoring the difficulty for the potential audience of stoners? Surely not.)

So anyway, some people think this song might be about drugs and the video would, to be fair, probably not disillusion them.

If anything, this video seems restrained to me, though. I’ve never taken LSD myself, and I don’t think I’d even heard of it when I first heard this song, so I took it completely at face value – as a disturbing  dream/nightmare landscape where the singer seemed to be trapped without hope of escape, following/being followed by a girl whose eyes have been replaced by multifaceted lenses filled with bits of coloured paper and glass. The whole thing seemed at the time to ring with the dream logic of books like the Phantom Tollbooth or the Magician’s Nephew  or the Oz books or Roald Dahl, or TV series like the Box Of Delights or the Magic Roundabout. A lot of kid’s TV and fiction was of that nature as I was growing up – filled with the idea that there were other worlds close to this one, and the wrong step could take you into them. Mr. Benn had his costume shop, Conrad walks through a wardrobe on the 35th of May, the celebrities on The Adventure Game take the wrong path and end up floating in the void, Turlough enters the TARDIS, John Lennon traps you in his world for the length of a song.

Listening to this, I would obediently picture it in my head, imagining something strange and colourful, dangerous, with rules I understood even less than those of the ‘real’ world – a world extrapolated from the cover of the album, rich and strange, a magical world I could almost see. Part of me was thinking I’d get something like that from the Rock Band video, a way back into that experience especially after the Pepperland vibe of the last one, and the mystery march of monsters in the intro sequence. Instead… well, these things are never just handed to you on a plate.

We got a starfield.

Yay!

That’s great.

Well, all those old kids shows were on drugs anyway, right? Jimmy Carr said so! That reading of things is well funny ‘cos drugs are funny, yeah? They’ve been funny since I was 14 and they’re funnier than ever! Thank you Jimmy Carr! Plus it lets us call all these old things that don’t fit in cool in a kind of ironic way that doesn’t need us to look into ourselves and realise that we’ve lost something essential and indefinable, some way of looking at things, and we don’t know where it’s gone or how to get it back and we’re stuck like this. And that’s mint and that.

I mean, drugs, right? Will Shatner must have been off his face!

NEXT: Getting better, although not getting better at putting these out in a regular fashion.

It’s enough to set your teeth on edge. The privileged golden boys of baseball – Derek Jeter, Andy Pettite, Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada and his mentor Joe Girardi – all of these guys first won the World Series way back in 1997, when owner George Steinbrenner was still giving great quote to reporters, when the World Trade Center was still standing, when the Yankees were still on WPIX every day through the summer and the “YES Network” (“Yankees Entertainment Sports”) was still just an agitprop gleam in Steinbrenner’s crinkly eye.

People talk about the World Series “coming home to Yankee Stadium” as if that’s the natural habitat of professional baseball’s most prestigious championship.

But the ridiculously wealthy Yankees haven’t sniffed a Series since 2003, when they lost to some team called the Florida Marlins and then you all know what happened the year after that. They were 3-0 in a best-of-seven series against the Red Sox, for a chance to go to the World Series. At the end of Game 4 they had both the lead and their best pitcher pitching – but somehow the Sox squeaked out of it, squeaked out of all of it, coming back to win the game, and then the next game, and the next one, and the one after that – the most epic choke in all of Yankee history, maybe in all of baseball.

The ace of that 2004 Boston team was a diminutive Dominican named Pedro Martinez. There is something about players like Martinez – their confidence, their fire, their unworldly ability – that makes games they play seem of outsized importance, makes the ballpark feel electric. When a player like that lands in the middle of a rivalry as hot as Yankees/Red Sox, the hype-ometer goes through the roof.

But Pedro rarely failed to deliver even on these expectations.

A year removed from this current Yankee dynasty’s best season (after which the team received rings that were, in a modesty typical of Steinbrenner’s Yankees, emblazoned with the legend “Best Team Ever”), Pedro pitched a game his manager called “the best pitching effort I have ever seen” against them, an effort that had Yankee manager Joe Torre reaching for comparisons with Sandy Koufax.

That was back in 1999, when congenital coke-head Darryl Strawberry was somehow still playing baseball, and playing for the Yankees (his first swing at a major-league pitch was as a New York Met, when Let’s Dance was at the top of the charts). But as time went by, the Yankees seemed to catch up with Pedro. At one point he said, “I just tip my hat and call the Yankees my daddy.” Bad move. Baseball fans have a jackal’s instinct for pouncing on weakness and can hold grudges into the afterlife.

Yankee fans have certainly never forgotten him, and his reappearance at Yankee Stadium is a thrilling throwback, a suggestion that sometimes life does have a kind of continuity after all.

Now Pedro is 38 years old and playing for the Philadelphia Phillies. He’s still tender from a major injury – he missed most of this season – but he’s still absurdly confident, telling reporters that he’s “probably the most influential player to ever step into Yankee Stadium.” He acquitted himself brilliantly in his first start of the Series, holding the Yankees to a run in five innings, but he finally gave up a two-run homer when his manager left him in the game too long. Yankee Stadium went nuts.

Tonight he goes again, against all the New York firepower that money can buy: Mark Texeira, Hideki Matsui (aka “Godzilla”, my personal favorite Yankee, who will probably be departing New York after this season), Nick Swisher, Robinson Cano, former Red Sock Johnny Damon, A-Rod – who’s still looking for his first World Series ring – and all the holdovers from the winning years of the last millenium, facing a Phillies team that’s strong on starting pitching, very weak at the end of the game, and with some surprising pop in their bats. Chase Utley currently has hit as many home runs in this World Series as the greatest World Series home run hitter of all time: Mr October himself, “the straw that stirs the drink”, Yankee slugger Reggie Jackson.

Tonight the Yankees can win it all, again.

All they have to do is beat Pedro.

a) Pies at football
b) People going to the toilet during a movie

Both of these are predicated on the same issue really. Football matches take less than two hours. They take place, usually, in the afternoon – cannily timed between usual meal times. And yet at half time there are queues for the pie stall you cannot believe. You would think they were knocking out tubs of Ambrosia (foor of gods not rice pudding) for the stampede for a piss poor Pukka. Can’t you wait or do you have to graze at every opportunity?*

Ditto, films are usually about two hours long. I was taught, post potty training, how to hold it in for at least that long. Perhaps you had a few beers beforehand, perhaps you are drinking a VAT of coke. Perhaps this will add strain but you only have yourself to blame. Nevertheless for NAMBY PAMBIES with peanut sized bladders there is now a useful i-Phone App. Introducing RunPee: an application that tells you the best time in a film to have a wee. HAS IT COME TO THIS?

So this app tells you when the dull bits are, what you’ve missed (since dull bits are often, you know, dialogue and how long you have before something good happens). You can even since a timer to the start of a film and have it notify you of the dull bits. BECAUSE THE ONLY THING MORE ANNOYING THAN SOMEONE LEAVING THE CINEMA FOR A PISS IS SOMEONE USING THEIR MOBILE PHONE JUST BEFORE.

In some ways this is an interesting development. It has clearly invented a new, piss friendly, way of reviewing films. (The example above would present a possible problem: what are the dull bits in Crank 2?) But really. If you cannot go two hours without have a whizz, then you shouldn’t really be allowed out of the house without a catheter.

*This rule does not apply to Cricket which is designed to drink and have a picnic, or baseball where the food poisoning associated with the hotdog is the only suspense you might get all night.

During Wimbledon’s inaugural set of night-time tennis on Monday night, played under what’s become the most famous roof since the Sistine Chapel, I found that I loathe every particle of Andy Murray.

Now, I realize Andy Murray is a professional athlete. Macho theatrics and being as interesting as a pile of firewood come with the territory. But Wimbledon is not just a collection of freakishly fit young adults whacking things between each other, it’s a drama, and in this drama he pushes buttons I didn’t even know I possessed.

I can’t stand his super-psyched mom.

I can’t stand his periwinkle-eyed girlfriend.

I can’t stand the way he throws his wrist bands into the crowd, like Jimmy Page blessing his fans with a plectrum.

I cringe at his whiny tantrums after every mis-hit, the snarled barks at himself to “FOCUS!” (I would have thought focusing was a given.)

And the fierce fist-pumps that accompany every single point he wins — and he wins a lot of them — are tiresome and bathetic.

People whose opinions on tennis I respect say that despite all this they love his game. And it’s true that he will occasionally dink in a nifty drop-shot that leaves his opponent basically pissed off at him (which is the default reaction to Andy Murray anyway as far as I’m concerned). And he does run after every ball like a singed hyena. And yes, he’s Scottish, so I guess that’s something, though it’s difficult to hear it through the braying monotony of his voice.

But mostly I see a guy who is content to hit soft backhand slices at you until you lose all zest for life and find yourself strategizing excuses to forfeit the match out of sheer boredom — feign knee injury? eat some amphetamines? say that you actually really need to call your sister right now cause it was her birthday yesterday and you forgot? — and boom your shot goes wide.

You look across the net and there’s Andy. Fist pump! BARK! C’MON!!

Last night however, when England beat Pakistan comfortably I felt a little robbed of a close game. But again I was more than happy that the result meant that England definitely qualified. From despair to elation, via Maths. Because the other beauty of the 20 20 World Cup is that its 3 team league structure leaves us open nicely for surprisingly complex maths to work out who can do what. At which point I shall bow to out betters at the terrific cricket blog Kridaya to explain exactly how England qualified, and What the Dutch need to do to get through.

Note however the reason why I want Pakistan to qualify is in the bottom left hand side of this pie-chart from Friday’s game (like I say Kridaya is good for the maths and the graphs).

Young Pirates 2 Real Madrid (not that Real Madrid) 26

Namaqua Stars 50 Kakamus Cosmos 0

Extraordinarily, the South African FA is suspicious, and is investigating. They’ve already suspended all the match officials. My favourite bit, from this story from Kick Off, is from the spokesman for Namaqua Stars: “It’s quite possible to get 50 goals in one match. I wasn’t at the match, but the score at half-time was around 25-0. It is a genuine result, not fake, but we are concerned because how can Real Madrid score 26 times against such a good side as Pirates?”

Yes, 25-0 at half-time explains it all.

As we reached the climatic battle, and all the training sequences showed just how hard it is to fight someone when blind, I thought it might be the antidote to Zatoichi. The food taster wasn’t that handy with a sword in the first place, so by rights he should have been diced to pieces. SPOILERS:

He wins. Not in convincing heroic fashion, with a bit of a lunge and luck. Nevertheless I have never seen a blind swordsman lose a battle. Much like I have never seen a team with ten men lose a match of football*. The power of the underdog is a vibrant myth in human society, most usually demonstrated in the tenacity of teams reduced to ten men. Particularly if you think the sending off was unjust.

All that said, in reality blindness is a serious disadvantage in a swordfight, unless you can tap into the force or something. (Martin talks a bit more about this phenomenon here). Which reminds me of a Ruud Gullit quote when his Chelsea did not manage to beat a team who had had two men sent off. In his post match interview Ruud managed to croke out the following deathless quote: “You have seen how hard it is to beat a team when they are reduced to ten men. Imagine how much harder it is therefore when they are down to nine”.

*Unless the other team have ten men. Or if they were already losing. Or, well actually I probably have seen it but it wasn’t really all that notable. Well except in the World Cup when Beckham got sent off. Or Zidane come to think of it. But both of them deserved so there was no moral high ground.

Whatever. Leave me to my generalisations.

Couture, I soon found out, is the top man: the only five-time world champ, already in their Hall of Fame and so on. He has legitimate claims to be the greatest ever. But it was always clear, in the WWE, that Lesnar was an impressive athlete: big and very strong, extraordinarily athletic and quick for someone his size, and skillful too – he’d been a champion amateur wrestler. Then again, UFC fighting, it became clear when watching the rest of the card, does not resemble either amateur or professional wrestling. There is some grappling, and the occasional submission (never with as fancy a move as the WWE stars offer), but mostly when you get someone on the floor the purpose is to get in position to punch or elbow him in the head repeatedly. A lot of it is done standing up, more like boxing – Couture was some kind of martial arts champion, so that was his speciality. Also, Lesnar had had a total of three fights in the UFC before this big title match.

Their match was scheduled for five five-minute rounds. The first featured lots of wrestling, Lesnar on top, looking for openings, not finding any. He’d have won them on points, but no one was damaged. The opinion was that Lesnar, carrying something like 50 pounds more weight, would tire quickly as the match continued. The second round was quite different, a boxing match. After a couple of minutes, Lesnar landed a heavy punch to the side of Couture’s head, Couture went down, Lesnar climbed on and started hammering fists into his head and the ref stopped it.

It was barely a contest – Lesnar never looked in any kind of trouble at all, and it didn’t last a third of the scheduled time. I was pleased, in that this severely damages the “they wouldn’t last five minutes…” line, and it confirms my repeated claims that many (though certainly not all) of the biggest WWE stars are genuinely great athletes.

as for Ted Williams’ frozen head, it’s all true. it doesn’t have the same ring as “Andre the Giant has a posse” but times have changed and memes move on. Williams, the slender and irascible baseball player once known as the Splendid Splinter, author of The Science of Hitting, and generally agreed-upon greatest hitter of the last 60 years, was swindled by his son on his deathbed to sign his body over to Arizona-based Alcor Life Extension Foundation, who, upon the death of Teddy Ballgame in 2003, froze him up real good so that perhaps one day he could redon his spikes and dig his heels into some futuristic batter’s box. in the meantime, his frozen head rants on myspace.

Following Newcastle United chairman Mike Ashley’s Ashburton Grove appearance in the Toon end with pint in hand, the Football Supporters’ Federation is looking for any fans ejected and/or prosecuted for drinking in sight of the pitch this past weekend to come forward.

Why should the law abiding majority of football fans be singled out? If you’ve been ejected, banned or prosecuted for drinking in sight of the pitch, particularly this past weekend, get in touch with the FSF NOW at: info @ fsf.org.uk or on 08702 777777 (Mon-Fri office hours).

And yet. I feel like there has been more Olympics around. Clearly this is the problem of success, the news clogs up with Super Saturday, Super Sunday and other days where the word super is less alliterative. We managed to annoy the Australians by being better than them (despite lacking the moral high ground of having a smaller population). The Australians manage to annoy us by saying that all our medals were in sports where we get to sit down and are almost correct. Everyone is nice about the Chinese and ignores their human rights violations much like you pretend to have fun at your racists grandfathers 80th party. We worried about Boris Johnson being a knob. Somethings at least don’t change. But with the spotlight now falling on London 2012, that is a whole new level of avoidance. It strikes me that this fifty one minute record will be impossible in 2012, as the Olympics will be everywhere. Unless I leave London, the next four years it will be impossible to avoid the Olympics. So its a bit of a hollow victory.

Better than failure though, as the UK diving team will tell you.

preamble: the chinese capitalised (er haha) on A: a known gift for fireworks, B: a known gift for people prettily running with flags, C: spectacular oriental spectacle, D: a population as numberless as the pixels in the ocean — and the Brits limp far behind on all counts; my suggestion is that we should make a virtue of necessity and scrobble our counter-spectacle up round the sense of grumpy, lumpy, stubborn, dry-witted, weird-crop SMALLNESS, the aesthetic legacy of a small crowded windy greenfield crag dropped into the north sea

hence my answer:

something else one doesn’t normally associate with ice skaters is clothes you might actually want to wear yourself. but in 2006 russia had it goin on. their motif was a kind of cross between a paisley shape and a garland (or a zapf dingbat), and when applied to a straight-up indie gas-station attendant vibe i found the russian outfits almost as irresistable as a certain ice skater who wore them. (they also had their own twee mascot, the venerable cheburashka, who may have contributed to a new Olympic trend.)

it’s unnecessary to detail the hours i spent trying to track down the hoodie in the above photo. oh i was desperate, had taken leave of my senses. 1/2-inch enamel souvenir pins on ebay with the above garland/paisley design were enough to start me salivating. in the end i forgot about it. but here come the olympics again, taunting me with their inaccessible vestments, reminding me of the ones that got away. it appears that the company which made those russian outfits still have a web site and it’s being revamped. a dormant spark of hope flares up. are you out there, boscosport? do you do trackbacks? i’m an easy mark.

It was not ever thus – take Britain’s performance at the Barcelona Olympics. Five golds, and four of the athletes involved became more or less household names. But the Beijing mob surely won’t fare quite so well: in fact looking at the media you can already see who’s being groomed for future stardom (in the British sense of the word, i.e. a comfy berth on a daytime TV sofa whenever needed).

What is the FAME FORMULA for Olympic success? In the grand tradition of bogus equations I give you this:

F = (A * C)/R

F, clearly, stands for FAME. The level of F determines your later station in life, whether it be beloved sporting ambassador, tut-tutting commentator, or advertising WellMan supplements on the tube.

A stands for ACHIEVEMENT. Winning an medal is an achievement, obviously, but this also includes factors like age, overcoming adversity, winning our first medal in something for a grillion years, losing it completely on the podium, etc.

C stands for CELEBGENICNESS, a complex word for a complex concept, as it encompasses things like future potential, down-to-earthness, audience being able to relate to, audience finding hott, and so on.

Finally, R stands for RUBNESS OF SPORT. This is a technical term involving the sport’s esteem in the eyes of the Great British Public, and the extent to which they can understand what happens in it.

A final factor is that there are only so many ‘slots’ available in the public consciousness for any given sport – we can win all the rowing medals we like, for example, but Redgrave and Pinsent have a lock on the Famous Rowers slots for now, even though they don’t actually race any more. This significantly limits the chances of any of the new crop becoming famous (at least after these Olympics, but possibly forever: consider the Famous Ice Skaters slot). There are a lot more slots open to track athletes, comparatively few for field athletes, potentially quite a few for swimmers, and so on.

Looking at our medalists in this games and applying the Fame Formula, the blindingly obvious winner is Rebecca Adlington: massive achievement, high celebgenicness, sport we vaguely care about, and an easy (too bloody easy) angle for non-sporting coverage viz. “likes shoes”. You can already see the media getting very excited and I hope she can handle it (this in itself is yet another angle – the oh now her life will change story). Adlington’s high Fame score will have a detrimental effect on some of our other winners, who fit a similar bubbly, down-to-earth bracket. Even though they’re in different sports, I’m guessing if it wasn’t for Adlington, Nicole Cooke would come out of these Games more famous than she will (except in Wales!).

You can see the media sizing up other athletes too – Rebecca Romero’s performance in two different disciplines is awesome, but the angle on her seems to be “she’s a mentalist”: scarily driven and very obviously different from the rest of us, whereas with the ‘nice’ athletes we can sort of ignore all the punishing training schedules and what they might imply about someone’s personality. This will limit her post-Games fame, which is a pity I think.

Who else? Christine Ohoruogu will get a big push as a Londoner, though the raging arguments on the BBC Sports Blog (and elsewhere) over her missed-tests bans suggest that the route to future fame won’t be that easy. The rowers are doomed, as is the Laser class sailing guy since i. his event is deceitfully named and ii. people have only just got their heads around Ben Ainslie being properly famous. Cycling is an interesting case – enormous medal haul means people will know more about it, so the R score decreases and more slots open up – Wiggins and Hoy will both step up a fame grade.

Then we’re into the “minor medals”, where people will also be a bit hard done by owing to the sheer bulk of GB medals around: ordinarily a couple of silver or bronze medalists push on to future fame, but in Beijing Louis Smith looks the only likely candidate so far, and in the current medal-drunk climate Britain winning a men’s gymnastics medal has been downgraded from “HOLY SHIT” to “only bronze?”. No room either for plucky losers, which is probably a good thing for the future success of British sport but I feel a bit sorry for Tom Daley, who’s turned from glorious hope to pub quiz answer inside of a week. (I don’t feel that sorry though, since he reminds me weirdly of James Harries).

I’m sure that come 2012 even the forgotten names will come flooding back to those of us who only pay attention every four years, but – like seeing what happens to Big Brother contestants – it’s going to be fascinating watching the ebb and flow of medalist fame. At the very least, this bumper crop should mean some vicious battles for commentary slots come 2024.

The figures

There’s no doubt that this was the fastest Olympics ever:

World records set: 25 (in 21/32 events)
Olympic records set: 65 (in 30/32 events)
World records set in the LZR Racer swimsuit: 92%
Gold medals set in the LZR Racer swimsuit: 94% (89% of ALL medals)

Here’s the swimming medals table (no. gold medals shown in brackets):

Well done us!

4th is a brilliant placing for Great Britain – three medals in one games is more than we’ve managed since the 80s, and to have two of them be gold, well, it’s absolutely brilliant. Rebecca Adlington broke a world record older than herself, and has automatically become an inspiration to every club swimmer grinding up and down the pool at 5am every morning.

As well as the medals, we also got a couple of 4th places and one or two swimmers in nearly every final – although you might think that’s not something to be particularly proud of, it shows how competitive we are compared to Sydney and Athens, and will make those swimmers who came in fourth even hungrier for medals next time round. Liam Tancock deserves a special mention for making three finals (backstroke, IM and medley relay), as does Fran Halsall who had a real chance to medal in the 50m free, the 100m free, the medley relay AND both freestyle relays. She looked so gutted after her last race (as well as absolutely exhausted).

Looking to the future – Rebecca and Fran are still teenagers, and at least half of the GB squad had never been to an Olympics before. In front of a home crowd, who knows what can happen in four years’ time? Hey, it took Michael Phelps two Olympics before he won gold…

America v Australia

On the whole, the non-Phelps favourites going into the games (e.g. Katie Hoff, Grant Hackett, Dara Torres) did pretty badly in terms of gold medals. Let’s find out just *how* badly they’ve done – in graphical format! Here’s the American and Australian gold medals since 1988:

Oh dear! The American women and the Australian men barely won anything this year! The Australian men failed to get a gold medal for the first time since 1976 – ouch. Where’s Ian Thorpe when you need him, eh? They were banking on Grant Hackett to deliver in the 1500m freestyle, and he just wasn’t up to the job this time. The American men obviously did pretty well thanks to SuperPhelps, and Stephanie Rice nabbed those vital medley wins to bump up the Australian women’s total from previous years. But we still can’t discount both AUS and USA’s enormous depth of talent. Here’s their total medals won since 1988:

Their overall team performances are still improving overall thanks to the demise of the Eastern European and Russian swimmers – the dip in Athens was mainly due to very strong showings from the Dutch, French and German swimmers. If Britain’s medal tally for the last twenty years was plotted on the same graph it would be lurking right at the bottom. We’ve still got a long way to go.

Tell you what though, the rest of the medals were really spread out – Brazil, Germany, South Korea, Zimbabwe and Tunisia all got golds thanks to sterling individual performances. France and China both got six medals each, and a whole bunch of European countries picked up silvers and bronzes. Swimming success is finally starting to be consistently found away from the American/Australian centres, and that’s got to be good news for anyone watching.

*Apart from the 10km open water races on Wednesday and Thursday of course – tune in and cheer on David Davies, Keri-Ann Payne and Cassie Patten.

So it appears that the “GOLD RUSH” means we are third in the Medals Table, a table where it is mainly about the number of golds (silver and bronze columns see to be there for goal difference purposes). Which, incase you can’t see it with your eyes when they put the medal table up, means we are above Australia and Germany – which some people seem to think is significant. What I would also like to see is an actual medal table, of the actual number of gold medals we will be taking hime, bearing in mind that a few of ours would be in team sports. This would also make sense for those teams taking part in football, hockey and handball – where only one medal is available. It means we’d have six golds in the rowing, four in the sailing so far. It may also skew the other most ridiculous stat that is starting to be bandied around…

In a talkie bit on News 24 with the sports guy, the following assertation was made: “If you take out the achievements of Michael Phelps the UK has the same number of golds as the USA. Indeed if Michael Phelps was a country he would be fifth in the medals table”.

IF MICHAEL PHELPS WAS A COUNTRY? How would this work exactly? Can you be granted membership of the UN just because you are quite good at swimming. The GDP of Phelpsland one assumes would be from the sale of gold medals, which would need regular top ups every four years. And if Russia are so gung ho to go into Georgia, I think they would see an opportunity to regain their Olympic golory days and instantly send a tank in to Phelps to annexe him. Nevertheless feel free to send in what you think the flag if this autonomous, fast swimming nation would look like, so he can hoist it up his flagpole.

STEALTH NEWS MINUTES: Six
TOTAL OLYMPIC MINUTES: Twenty Five

It’s good to see that some people are still keeping this great event alive though:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlaiPf7_iQM

*two of these were in the intercalated games of 1906 which kind of don’t count, BUT ANYWAY…

But there has been so much cycling. And so much swimming. And quite a lot of diving (though considerably less now we are rubbish at it). Put it like this, there has been more than I would expect from sports where you are racing over distances where one would think the medals may go to the best over 100m, 200m, 400m etc like in the athletics. Instead though the minor sports which make up the gravy of the Olympics are well aware that this is their one moment in the sun, every four years. And some of them have worked out the key part of making their sports seem more important: to have more versions of them so more medals are available.

A number of techniques it appears have been developed to do this, and here is your handy guide in case you want to beef up Handball (Hitler’s favourite sport):

Different Weight Classes: A great idea from boxing, it suggests that it is unfair that a shortarse should have to fight a beefcake. And perhaps it is true, but in rough and tumble fighting outside a pub, you don’t get to stop a fight because one of the protagonists is considerably lighter than the other. Nevertheless this idea has been stolen by many of the martial arts and in particular the weightlifting – where it seems that the basic question of this simplest of sports “how much can a human lift” has been bastardised to “how much can a human lift if that human weighs X”. A great way of multiplying the available medals in your sport, it also has the plus point of implicitly suggesting that the short and light people are effectively disabled and should be in the paralympics.

Diff’rent Strokes: This is one of the best innovations of swimming. Not only do they want to know how fast you can swim a certain distance, but they gve you different races for different ways to getting there. So Breast Stroke, Butterfly, Back Stroke, Freestlye (crawl) : WNY NO DOGGY PADDLE! Not only that but they then have a race where you do all of them, the awesomely names freestyle. Which means in total there are five different 400m races! Athletics is missing a trick here, the only time they have nicked this idea is for mincing walking. But imagine the 400m where each hundred is in a different syle. 100m running backwards, 100m hopping, 100m walking and 100m freestyle (probably running!) Get to it.

Synchro: Yes swimming but when I discovered synchronised diving the lightbulb tinged above my head. There seems very little implicit in the sport of diving that suggests that doing it synchronised with another person is anything but a bit hard – but not key to the development of the sport. Except it doubles the number of dives there are. Doing anything synchronised with someone else requires a lot of training, and why there is no synchronised gymnastics, or dressage I have no idea. Synchro pole vault, that would be good.

Multiplicity of equipment: This is posh sport heaven. Rowing and yachting seem to have hundreds of classes based on the number of different boats they can invent. It is almost worth it for the invention of the word Yngling. In gymnastics if they invented a new piece of awesome equipment tomorrow there could be a good chance that it got included – I am very keen on adding a bucking bronco to vault over.

Coached / non-coached: As an old cox myself, I am constantly impressed by the trick rowing played to double the events in their sport. Namely the version of their sport where they have a cox in the boat versus the coxless versions. Bearing in mind that the main job of a cox in river rowing is steering, and Olympic rowing takes place on a straight course, this is even more impressive. But surely other sports could benefit from this. Boxing with the trainer in the ring, cycling with the coach doing a backie.

Let’s team up: I like a good relay race (I like watching people drop the baton). But the “group pursuit” cycling seems like the oddest type of relay I have ever seen. And this suggests that you can make up any relay you like and call it a “team version”. Indeed the eventing and gymnastic teams are a way of squeezing another medal out of individual sports. They really should do it in weightlifting so we can discover the World’s Strongest Country.

So as you can see, I saw more sport in the last two day than I expected. Over ten minutes of blimmin’ cycling. Infact the only way to avoid it properly was to come and write this rant.

FOURTEEN PUSHBIKE MINUTES
NINETEEN OLYMIC MINUTES IN TOTAL

Yun Ok-Hee here is modelling a PINK bow, and a cartoon panda chest guard!

I think I might take up archery!

But before we get to 2012, let us consider last weeks opening ceremony. The Birds Nest Stadium is an impressive venue, and the Olympic district is packed with enough interesting buildings and boulevards to make this ceremony special. And the fireworks were very impressive. The opening synchronised drummers were also stupendous, down to the glow-stick drumming. It all started very well. But, well I think I can sum it up with two complaints.
-No giant inflatables
-No people in giant foam rubber suits. NOT EVEN THE MASCOTS.

The Olympic mascot should act as a clueless MC for the whole event. Oversize in uncontrollable inflatable form, or like a drunk giant in foam rubber, the mascots embody the essential silliness of doing the Olympics in the first place. A celebration of sports which by themselves are not very interesting, the Olympics gives gravitas to kayaking in a world which could not care less. The opening ceremony should be arty, should be ambitious and should be – like any mass art in a sports stadium – a bit silly.

China did not do silly. They tried to pack three thousand years of history into interpretive dance and hi-tech staging which was all very impressive but lacked the coherency of a giant inflatable panda rolling across a sea of people. We dreaded ten minutes of five hundred synchronised Ti-Chi martial artists, which we predicted. There were impressive bits: the giant planet at the end and the moveable type: but in the end Zhang Yimou threw manpower at the project and went for respectable. The invention of moveable type is important, but is it China’s killer app? Even when dancing like some sort of out-of-control robot? Or people drilled impressively inside boxes.

Which brings us to the BBC presentation of the opening ceremony. In the past they have been happy with Barry “I’ll commentate on anything for a tenner” Davies. He’s retired though and so the BBC struck some sort of truce between news, sports and arts coverage with Huw Edwards, Hazel Irvine and Carrie Gracie (who she?*). Huw tried to invest the whole thing with majesty – suggesting that we would be pleasantly surprised by how the did the movable type segment. We, rightly, guessed within a second, that there were people in the boxes. We were right and thus not surprised. Commentating on this type of thing is a thankless task, but the overall seriousness of the Chinese effort made it a lot easier than usual. The three presenters managed to find themselves special niches in the process:
HUW: To describe what we were seeing and say the word Undulating (FIVE TIMES)
CARRIE: To say what we are seeing is based on the theme of harmony (TEN TIMES) and Confucius (NINE TIMES).
HAZEL: To explain that in the eighties the contents of her wardrobe were mainly day-glo nu-rave outfits (the only piece of proper bonkers commentary).
So it looked nice, the gigantic scroll was impressive, but it was nowhere near silly enough to go down as a great. When rolling Sarah Brightman on at the end is the strangest part, you know it has failed in the mental. London 2012 will have urban street dance, an animatronic history of grime with a gigantic robot Wiley fighting a gigantic robot Dizzee Rascal and a holographic re-enactment of the battle of Britain. And a giant fellating foam rubber Lisa Simpson, AND BE ALL THE BETTER FOR IT.

(It will if I can get involved with it anyway!)

*She turns out to be another newsreader, this one, whose main qualification for being authoritative on Chinese culture is spending a year teaching English. To which I say Huw Edwards is Welsh, which is where the Inn Of The Seventh Happiness was filmed, so he knows AS MUCH AS HER.

Here’s a short clip of the last length. Katie Hoff (USA) is leading in lane 3, Adlington is in lane 5 (the upper yellow one). Look how Adlington suddenly zooms up from metres behind in the last 25m, and just touches out Hoff at the last inch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI6xrhef-fI

Awesome stuff. Her teammate Jo Jackson had a superb swim as well to nab the bronze, and together their efforts have definitely lifted the British squad’s spirits after a hesitant start. The men’s 4×100 freestyle relay team put in a sterling effort to make the final (they only decided to bother fielding a team at all at the very last minute), and came within a couple of tenths of a second of the previous world record set by the American B-team in Sunday’s heats. Yes, the B-team. The A-team (Michael Phelps, Garrett Weber-Gale, Cullen Jones and Jason Lezak) knocked another four seconds off it again in the final, which is a staggering time, but even without a clock the race itself was a joy to watch (BBC video link). Somehow Lezak caught up Alan Bernard, who must have thought he had it sewn up. You really feel sorry for the French, but it means that Phelps’ eight golds target is still on track.

So what else has been going on in the pool? Well, world records have been tumbling all over the shop and there have been plenty of upsets for the Americans who aren’t in a ‘Phelps’ event:

Men’s 400m freestyle: Tae Hwan Park (KOR)
Women’s 400m freestyle: Rebecca Adlington (GBR)
Men’s 100m breaststroke: Kosuke Kitajima (JPN) – World Record
Women’s 100m butterfly: Libby Trickett (AUS) – Olympic Record
Women’s 400m Individual Medley: Stephanie Rice (AUS) – World Record
Women’s 4×100 freestyle relay: Netherlands – Olympic Record

The Americans were pretty much favourites for all of these events except the 100m butterfly and certainly expected to win most of them. Hard luck! The rest of the world is finally catching up with the USA. :)

Coming up tomorrow we have Hannah Miley and Keri-Anne Payne going in the semi-finals of the 200m Individual Medley, Caitlin McClatchey and Jo Jackson in the 200m freestyle semis, and Gemma Spofforth and Liam Tancock in the women’s and men’s 100m backstroke finals respectively. In recent Olympiads it’s been a rare sight to see a Brit in the final for anything, but right now you can see the confidence dripping off the British swimmers – they no longer seem intimidated by having world record holders or multi-medallists in the lane next to them, and are knocking seconds off their best times (except Rebecca – in her post-victory interview the first coherent thing she said was ‘I’m a bit disappointed with my time”). You can tell that the trusty BBC commentary duo of Andy Jameson and Adrian Moorhouse are having trouble keeping their excitement to a professional level as they watch.

So by all rights Team GB should bag themselves a few more medals by the end of the week! Let’s hope your correspondent isn’t suffering too much from sleep deprivation to bring you all the latest poolside action…

It’s a tough choice, tougher when you have a dude like gold medalist Zhang Xiangxiang in your event, performing first-time lifts which better anyone else’s best with ease. He failed his second lift on the snatch, but that was the only hiccup until he missed a world record lift right at the end – by then he had won gold easily and was doing it more to please the home crowd.

I liked the guy who got silver, a surprisingly rangy Colombian called Salazar (though this lower weight class doesn’t really attract man-mountains) who was the most delighted when he managed each lift, and I felt bad for a Korean who’d taken an early lead before three fails in the clean-and-jerk ended his Games. That’s the starkness of weightlifting: unlike the swimmers, runners, cyclists, etc. there’s no multiple events to promise redemption, and unlike the boxing and tennis you don’t work your way through multiple bouts. In the lifting, you really do only get one moment in the spotlight.

These lower weight classes have, as predicted, been a goldfest for China. Eyebrows have apparently been raised over the initial gold in the lightest women’s class, whose bulky winner managed an improvement in a year equal to over half her bodyweight. But what impressed me about Zhang Xiangxiang was his calm as much as his formidable strength. Oh, and his name, pronounced by the BBC commentator with all three syllables the same, like a weightlifting version of !!!