Tag: olympics

Take me here. Now.

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Spotted this yesterday. A report from a photographer at the Olympics: he’s Jeff Cable, and he took the pics below. But they’re not sporty pics.

No. Because he’s an official ‘tog at the Games, and he’s using a Canon camera, here gets access to the Canon Professional Services (CPS) area.
What’s that? Oh, just a place with a full on Canon technical team to look after your camera and glass.
Oh, and where you can borrow just about any Canon camera body (yes, including the R1 which hasn’t even been released yet) or any lens to assist you with your photography of whatever you are photographing.

It’s like a photography candy shop.

Oh wow.

But wait! There’s more!

These things aren’t cheap:

As you see when you watch TV, all of us photographers rely on really big lenses here, to get photos close to the action. Each of these lenses that you see here costs thousands of dollars. These start around $6,000 and go all the way up to $20,000 (for the Canon 1200mm lens). You can see three of these on the second shelf from the bottom, far left, below.

$20,000 is a cool R365,000 as I write this post.
But if you want to buy that lens locally, you’re looking at R400,000.

The gaps may look unsightly, but it’s where stuff has been loaned out already.

Each of these camera bodies goes for R100,000 at Orms in Cape Town.

Can you even imagine how much fun you could have at this place?

Take me here. Now.

Here’s Jeff’s full blog post.

Tent camping in Australia

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If Geoguessr was an Olympic sport, I’d be all over it. I already enjoy watching the regional qualifying for the upcoming World Cup. If you have a few minutes, take a look at some of these games. The skill level is right up there with anything it would take to be an Olympian. Incredible stuff.

But Geoguessr isn’t an Olympic sport. So I’m watching handball instead.
France 22-27 Norway. Thanks for asking.

But that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been playing Geoguessr.
And today, I got dropped here:

Easy for you to say.

Actually, easier for everyone to say when you realise that Google Maps has maybe added an extra syllable again. But why hasn’t it added anything to the second line.

I’m confused.

Anyway, it’s up in the Northern Territory of Australia, in case you were wondering. I came pretty close from the name (whatever that is), and the vegetation: just 22km away.

The two main things to do there, according to their website, are “birdwatching and croc spotting”.
And not swimming, presumably.

Crazy name. Crazy place.

Dead Heat

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Filing under Interesting, Really Rather.

After the three way tie for second between Michael Phelps, Chad Le Clos and László Cseh in the 100m butterfly, you might wonder why the swimming authorities don’t work to thousandths rather than hundredths of a second to separate these athletes.

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Well, the simple answer is: they can’t.

For the record:

In a 50 meter Olympic pool, at the current men’s world record 50m pace, a thousandth-of-a-second constitutes 2.39 millimeters of travel.

And while that might not seem like a lot (because it isn’t), we are talking about the best swimmers in the world, at the most important swimming event in the world, so these tiny margins count for a lot.

The trouble is, while our swimmers are pushing boundaries all over the place, our pool builders haven’t quite attained the same sort of levels.

FINA pool dimension regulations allow a tolerance of 3 centimeters in each lane, more than ten times that amount. Could you time swimmers to a thousandth-of-a-second? Sure, but you couldn’t guarantee the winning swimmer didn’t have a thousandth-of-a-second-shorter course to swim.

I’ve been doing some rudimentary calculations, and that potential 3cm variation amounts to 12.5523012552 thousandths of a second. That’s 1.25523012552 hundredths of a second. And that explains why timing to thousandths of a second wouldn’t actually be fair. But it’s not like we can do anything about it:

Attempting to construct a concrete pool to any tighter a tolerance is nearly impossible; the effective length of a pool can change depending on the ambient temperature, the water temperature, and even whether or not there are people in the pool itself.

Of course, there are some sports that do time to thousandths of a second – like track cycling and bobsleigh – but the important difference here is that all the athletes compete on the same track. No danger there of Lane 4 being 3cm shorter than Lane 5 (or whatever). If the track isn’t quite the correct length, well, there’s no advantage for any one athlete: it’s the same for everyone.

One anomaly here: speed skating: Yes, they use the same track, but they’re so backward in using a starting pistol to begin races that some competitors definitely start at a disadvantage…

Anthem Goosebumps

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Samsung are known for some good stuff (I have a lovely Samsung TV) and some not so good stuff (Mrs 6000 has appalling battery life) (on her Samsung phone, that is). (Mrs 6000 doesn’t have batteries.) (She runs on wine.)

And now, Samsung are going to be known for this advert ‘The Anthem’, which you’re going to be heartily sick of by the end of the Olympics, but which you’ll like right now. Goosebumps time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEfIzL2cVCg

Local folk will recognise that some (or more) of this advert was filmed in Cape Town. But that’s actually beside the point. This is just a very nice advert which almost makes you forget the terrible FUBAR state of the world at the moment.

Almost.

Big Boys

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I was reading this article (which I linked to from here) when I spotted this article and I thought it was worth a look.

Ricardo Blas Jr: Competing in the +100kg judo, Blas Jr. is a whopping 34st5lbs – more than 10st heavier than any other athlete in the whole Olympics and 6st10lbs heavier than the entire Japanese women’s gymnastics team put together.

They make them big in Guam.

Popping that into metric for you, Blas Jr’s page on the official London 2012 Android app states that he is 185cm in height and… er… 218kg. That’s 63kg heavier than the 203cm tall Rafael Silva of Brazil (also a judo competitor), who is just a puny 155kg. Pfft.

And talking of that Japanese women’s gymnastics team, step forward Asuka Teramoto in that Japanese team: 21 years old, 136cm tall and 30kg. So less than one seventh the weight of Blas Jr and about 4kg heavier than my 6 year old son.

Now that their respective events have been completed, I would pay big bucks to see Blas Jr and Teramoto swap sports for an entertaining demonstration session.
Please could someone make this happen and have the necessary medical personnel on standby?

Thanks in advance.

Also – read about the oldest 2012 Olympian here.