Shoes

By way of an exception which proves the rule, I was taking a look at the sports bit of the Guardian yesterday and my attention lighted upon an interesting piece about expensive running shoes. To simplify, what do we think about being able to buy running shoes from Nike for £1,000 a pop which improve my performance by 5%? Such an improvement being more than enough in top level running circles to make the difference between making the national team or not.

Thinking about this some more over the breakfast wholemeal - from the smart and handsome Tesco's between Ryde and Brading - a Tesco's which made one think that the Sainsbury's at Kiln Lane was looking a bit tired, rather as had the similar sized Sainsbury's at Vauxhall before it was demolished a year or so ago - I thought that there were various interlocking requirements on a good sport.

First, the sport needed to be reasonably open, so that there was a big enough pool of participants.

Second, there had to be a reasonably level playing field, so that any reasonably talented participant who put in the time and effort stood a chance of winning.

Third, there needed to be some noise in the system, so that the outcome of any particular game or competition was not too predictable.

All three of these requirements go to making games and competitions interesting, both from the point of view of participants and spectators.

Big sports are mostly regulated, in part to make sure that these requirements are met and that the sport remains attractive. Sometimes this regulation takes the form of banning certain kinds of dietary supplements, sometimes of banning certain kinds of equipment. Sometimes the idea is that money should not talk. Sometimes - as in the competitions between chess playing computer programs - money was no object and the only thing was winning.

The Guardian jury, in so far as I can recollect my read of nearly 24 hours ago, was out. The article highlighted the issues, but did not come to a conclusion. Perhaps they left that to the big brains of the IOC, an organisation with very worthy looking objectives on the front page of its website, corruption of the higher levels of its bureaucracy notwithstanding.

PS: which all leads to yet another worthy project for a secondary school. Build a spreadsheet with three columns as above and then write lots of rows for all the sports that one can think of. Add more columns as seems appropriate and as data is available. Compute lots of nifty graphics and write some catchy words. Submit to teacher for marking.

Reference 1: https://www.olympic.org/the-ioc.