Snickers. Or is it a marathon?
I entered myself into the ballot for the London marathon yesterday. I would have done it Monday had the site been able to deal with my traffic. But it couldn’t; so I didn’t.
If I were successful in securing a place, it would be my first marathon, unless I decide to go for New York in November. (That ain’t happening.) I’ve done a few 10km runs in my time, peaking at 42m 30s a good few years back, my most recent such outing taking 45m 40s a year ago in the driving, driving rain. And 15 years ago I did a half-marathon for fun on my own, catching the Metro to Tyneside with a couple of quid and my house keys in hand, and running back home to west Newcastle, an informal 13 miles or so.
Anyway, my name is in the tombola and come September/October, I’ll find out if I’ve got a place. Fingers crossed, I think.
Three thousandths of a second
Last weekend in the Malaysian Grand Prix qualifying, practice or some such, two drivers completed the circuit in times three thousandths of a second apart. I have no idea which drivers, but apparently it was significant, and led to Eddie Jordan (I think) suggesting that it was the equivalent of the width of a matchstick.
Based on Jenson Button’s pole position time of 1m 35.181s and the circuit length of 5.543km, he covered an average of 17.5cm every 0.003 seconds. Matches are generally 50mm long by 2mm square. So that equates to a match 4.36m in length.
Maybe Eddie meant one of those huge, ornamental matches that you can hang on the wall.
Lewis Hamilton is not a liar
The good ol’ I’m not a liar line from Lewis Hamilton. The statement sits perfectly whether he’s a liar or whether he’s not. If he’s not a liar, then the statement is correct; if he is, then it’s merely another lie.
The new F1 advertising model?
To bring Formula 1 sponsorship to the masses, why don’t they adopt a lottery-style approach?
They invite small companies to buy £100 "lottery" tickets,each with the chance of winning the rights to their logo appearing downthe side of the Brawn GP car when it whizzes around the Malaysian trackthis weekend.
5,000 tickets later and we have £500,000 in revenueand a lucky winner whose logo will be blazened upon TV screens theworld over.
Maybe that’s the advertising model for the cash-strapped sport that it has become.
Just a thought.
Contradictory headlines
BBC News’ headline "Adams ‘poised for administration’" is at odds with BBC Sport’s Arsene Wenger quote: Adams will be a success.
Which is it to be?
Premier League predictions
If at the start of the season you were to predict the finishing positions of the 20 Premier League teams and then compare your predictions with their actual finishing positions, if you had no previous knowledge of teams’ performance, what would be your expected margin of error? The measure here is the sum of the absolute differences between teams’ predicted and actual positions. So if every team was out by one (either over- or under-predicted), then it would be 20.
I’m not sure whether it’s easy to create a formula for n teams, but a random Excel trial of 26,126 such prediction sets yielded a minimum difference of 56 (an average discrepancy of 2.8 positions per team), a maximum of 192 (9.6 positions per team) and an average of 131 (6.6).
My brother’s performance in his work competition based on the teams’ current positions is 80, 0.4% of my random trials bettering this. Is 80 good? And where will he be in May?
Pace by distance
I read an article today on the Freakonomics blog about the relative paces of world record-holding athletes over different distances. Its specific focus was on who was indeed the fastest person in the world, and whether the 100m or the 200m world record holder was, on average, faster. (The point is somewhat moot now that Usain Bolt holds both records.) Anyway, I did some analysis.
Below is a chart I put together showing the average speed of different distances’ world record holders over 100m.
Right-click and View Image for a closer look at the chart in FireFox; there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent in IE7. I’ve given cuts of the data every ten years, working back from 2008. For each series, data starts where records begin. The half-marathon has the steepest gradient in recent history, probably down to the event being taken more seriously in more recent years. (For completeness, the 1908 marathon record equated to 24.93 seconds per 100 metres, but its inclusion squashed the scale unnecessarily.) The 60m record is 9.9% slower in pace than the 100m record, but the 100m and 200m paces have pretty much kept in line with one another, the extra distance and the impact of the bend in the 200m being counterbalanced by the impact the acceleration has on the time of the 100m. Below is a closer look at these two.
No conclusions; merely food for thought. Maybe.
Full Olympic medal analysis
So, the Olympics are over. And here’s a full analysis of the 958 medals won.
In terms of the traditional measure of number of gold medals won, China take the honours with 51, followed by the USA (36), Russia (23) and Great Britain (19). The same order is maintained for the top four if you base it on a scoring method of three for a gold, two for a silver and one for a bronze, China scoring 223 points, USA 220, Russia 72 and Great Britain 47. If you forget the medals’ colour and base it purely on the medal count, then the USA (110) and China (100) switch places, Russia (72) and Great Britain (47) remaining in third and fourth respectively.
If instead you look at medals compared to countries’ populations, then it’s a different story. The Bahamas’ two medals equate to one for every 165,500 people. Jamaica come second (eleven medals; one per 246,727 people); Iceland third (one medal; one per 316,252 people), with the top five rounded off with Slovenia (five medals; one per 405,800) and Australia (46 medals; one per 444,221). The least successful of the 87 medal-winning countries by this measure were India (three medals, one per 376,622,051), Vietnam (one; 85,262,356), Egypt (one; 75,231,000), South Africa (one; 47,850,700) and Indonesia (five; 46,938,799).
Excluding relatively trivial examples (denominators less than seven), the most successful countries in terms of percentage golds were Ethiopia (57%; four of seven), Jamaica (55%; six of eleven), China (51%; 51 of 100), Romania (four of eight), the Netherlands (44%; seven of 16), South Korea (42%; 13 of 31) and Great Britain (42%; 19 of 47).
Ben Dirs: crimes against the apostrophe
During the BBC’s online Olympic coverage this morning, there was the following update at 10.45:
1045: And we’re off – Sarah Stevenson versus Maria del Rosario Espinoza of Mexico. Can the Doncaster lass keep her head while all around her are losing theres’? The 20-year-old Mexican is the current world middleweight champion, a title she won in Beijing last year.
Fortunately, they "corrected" it quickly to:
1045: And we’re off – Sarah Stevenson versus Maria del Rosario Espinoza of Mexico. Can the Doncaster lass keep her head while all around her are losing theirs’? The 20-year-old Mexican is the current world middleweight champion, a title she won in Beijing last year.
A couple of heinous errors from Ben Dirs, whose name is itself a stroke of genius.
Lightning Bolt
A phenomenal graphic courtesy of the New York Times’ Freakonomics blog showing the 252 fastest 200m sprints of all time.
Here is the fully interactive version.
Bolt and Johnson are outliers to a ludicrous degree. There are three whole tenths of a second devoid of any times—from 19.32s to 19.62s. If you except Johnson’s previous world record time, Bolt is 1.63% quicker than the next best time ever (Tyson Gay’s last year). Over such a short distance, that’s remarkable.
When extrapolated to the marathon, it equates to a margin of 2m 4s compared to Haile Gebrselassie’s time of 2h 4m 26s in Berlin in 2007. Three athletes have managed that feat, Khalid Khannouchi doing so twice. On the women’s side, Paula Radcliffe’s 2003 London marathon (2h 15m 25s) was 2.43% quicker than the next fastest, Catherine Ndereba’s 2001 Chicago effort. Again, a ludicrous margin and a record that will surely be tough to beat.
Interestingly, the late Florence Griffith-Joyner’s 200m time of 21.34 during 1988′s Seoul Olympics is 1.39% quicker than her fastest rival, Marion Jones’ 21.62 recorded in 1998 allegedly before her drug phase. Whether indeed either of these times were drug-assisted will never be known.