Rob's Blog » Sport

Excessive Prize Money to Tennis Players

Rob Wood — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 09:07:37 +0000

The 2012 Australian Tennis Open starts today, and is set to offer the highest prize money in the history of Grand Slam tennis around the world. The total prize pool will be A$26 million, with the men’s and women’s champions taking home a record A$2.3 million (US$2.18 million) each. Does that sound excessive to you? It may be because I am not a great tennis fan, but I cannot see why we need to give them that much. As it is a grand slam event, you don’t need to offer large amounts to entice players to come and play. The winner of any tennis grand slam event will probably boost their off court earnings more than that anyway by being more marketable. Some of you probably will not agree with my next comment (and that’s OK). Another thing that bugs me is that the event organizers have decided that both the men’s and women’s champions will earn the same amount (in 2007 Wimbledon decided to do the same), despite more interest in the men’s side of the tournament, with longer more entertaining games, and consequently better revenue raising potential. I’ll still be watching the men’s final, and afterwards I hope they can give a little back of their millions to the grass roots of their sport.

Related Pages: Australian Open, Tennis

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How Low Can the Marathon Go?

Rob Wood — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 13:08:59 +0000

The sub-2 hour marathon is a track and field barrier as talked about as the 4-minute mile. The world record in the marathon was broken this week, with Kenya’s Patrick Makau setting a new mark of 2:03:38, beating the old record of Haile Gebrselassie by 21 seconds. Even assuming improvements at the same rate, there has been a drop of 21 seconds in three years meaning it will take another 30 years to break the two hour mark. See the progression of marathon world best times, where you can see that reducing the record from 2:16 to 2:12 took seven years, 2:12 to 2:08 took 19 years, and from 2:08 to the current mark took another 27 years. Actually using scientific analysis of the trend of actual performances, Professor Francois Peronnet at the University of Montreal has calculated that the first sub two-hour marathon will be run in the year 2028. We have had a poll online asking which world athletics benchmark will be broken next, the 100m in 9.5 seconds or a marathon in 2 hours? The marathon is currently leading the race, though 7 percent of respondents think neither will reach those marks. It may be true that many of us will not live to see those times beaten, though I think one day they will. These records tend to have significant and unexpected jumps in improvement, we just have to wait for the time a sporting freak chances upon the right training and nutrition, prepares for the event perfectly and runs under ideal conditions on a flat and fast course with good pacemakers. That wont happen very often.

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Is an AFL 10th Umpire needed?

Rob Wood — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 12:25:28 +0000

I have previously discussed whether soccer should have a video referee and after being at an AFL game last night I believe there is a good argument for using video or other technology to adjudicate close goal line decisions in AFL too. Not far from me I saw two incidents where it was a close call whether the ball actually crossed the goal line, and from my position the umpire did not seem to get it right. I have not had the opportunity to see a reply which was surely shown to the home viewers of the match. If the TV viewers can get to see a slow motion reply of such situations immediately after the fact, why can’t they refer close calls to an off field umpire who can watch the same video and then refer their decision back to the field umpires. Rugby union have had such a system for a while now, and international cricket and tennis matches are also using a referral system. It is time for the AFL to join the other major sports.

There are already nine umpires on the field in AFL matches: three field umpires, four boundary umpires and two goal umpires. There is an emergency umpire, who is the tenth. He is currently there as a possible replacement if needed, and also responsible for monitoring behind the play incidents. It would not be too much to ask this umpire to also be responsible to reviewing the video replays when they arise. I have a personal reason for these views – last night my team the Blues lost by 3 points and are out of the finals, if only a video referee system was in place the result may have been different.

Related Pages: About AFL, Technology in Sports

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World Cup Team Names

Rob Wood — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 09:31:23 +0000

I was compiling a list of rugby union national team names and was surprised to find out that Ireland and Scotland don’t really have one, and that England’s name of the Red and Whites is also not commonly used. Here in the southern hemisphere the terms Wallabies and All Blacks are practically the official names of the national teams of Australia and New Zealand. However, have you ever heard of these teams that are in the current Rugby World Cup: Bati (Fiji), The Brave Blossoms (Japan), Welwitschias (Namibia), and the Oaks (Romainia)?

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More Fallen Heroes

Rob Wood — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 13:05:47 +0000

A Russian ice hockey team the ‘Lokomotiv Yaroslavl’ , one of Russia’s top teams was practically wiped out yesterday in an airplane accident. Thirty-five players and staff of the team and eight members of the crew died in an accident where their aircraft burst into flames after hitting the ground near the airport immediately after take-off. The team had been en route to the Belarusian capital Minsk to play against Dinamo Minsk in the opening game of the season’s Kontinental Hockey League (KHL). This is not the first time a sporting team has endured such as disaster.

In my page on Fallen Heroes, I have listed some of the similar stories from the past. The most well-known similar accident was the Munich Air Disaster in 1958, in which a plane carrying the Manchester United football team along with a number of supporters and journalists crashed, 23 of the 44 people on board the aircraft died, including eight Manchester United players. More recently, in 1993, the entire Zambia National Soccer team perished on a flight en route to Senegal for the 1994 USA World Cup Qualifiers. All 30 passengers and crew, including 18 players as well as the coaches and support staff, were lost in the accident. Another such disaster for a football team was in 1949 when a plane carrying almost the entire Torino A.C. football squad crashed into the hill of Superga near Turin killing all 31 aboard including 18 players.

I firstly feel sorrow for the families and friends of each of those killed in the accidents, but the effect on the sporting club is hard to comprehend. It must be so difficult to build up the team to be competitive again, though I can imagine that the support and drive to do so would be overwhelming. I wish them well.

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Starting Early

Rob Wood — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 06:11:08 +0000

Athletics fans were not able to watch their star Usain Bolt in the final of the World Athletics Championships 100m sprint. The Olympic gold medalist and world record holder was disqualified after false starting. In new rules which came into play in January 1 2010, a false start means automatic disqualification. Previous to that, after one false start a warning was given to all runners, then the next person to break was out. And before that, the long standing rule was that each runner was allowed to break early once. The false start rules needed to be changed as the athletes began to purposely break to put off other runners, and watching a 100m sprint final became a joke with ongoing restarts.

There are calls for the rules to be changed – but to what? Return to what did not work before? I have been to many track meets and had to sit around watching the sprinters (I was one myself) ply their gamesmanship. Bolt actually backed the rule introduction last year, so he can’t complain. Athletics meets will be better to watch under the current rules, and maybe we just have to put up with occasionally missing seeing a champion race. Rules don’t suddenly need revision just because a high-profile athlete has fallen foul. The rule makers need to be consistent, and the athletes need to play by the rules and accept them.

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Is Basketball the World’s Most Popular Sport?

Rob Wood — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 01:28:21 +0000

I have seen a lot of articles online trying to determine what are the most popular sports in the world, and almost without exception Soccer ( World Football) is listed on top. I came up with the idea of looking at the page view stats on Wikipedia to see what sport pages are the most popular. Surprisingly, the highest ranked Sport page was in fact Basketball. This would partly be due to the high US based traffic to the English version Wikipedia site, but mostly it was because the stats for Soccer is split between Soccer and Association Football pages. When these stats are combined, it regains it title of the most popular sport in the world! See more analysis of the World’s Most Popular Sports According to Wikipedia.

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Swimmers Blast Back From The Past

Rob Wood — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 02:37:27 +0000

What is with all the Australian swimmers coming back from retirement? First it was butterfly swimmer Geoff Huegill, who made a successful comeback to the Commonwealth Games, including shedding a huge amount of post-competitive weight, then announced he would continue until the 2012 London Olympics. More recently, Ian Thorpe told us he has been secretly training for three months, losing a bit of weight too no doubt and is back on track for the Olympics too. Not to be left behind, ex-teammate Michael Klim has also announced he is coming back from retirement. Can’t these guys make up their mind? I always thought that retirement is just that, let yourself go and enjoy just being a spectator. Of course the desire to be out there competing may still be there, but usually the body has made the decision for you. Come on, move over and let the next batch of swimmers do their thing. They are not going to be satisfied with anything less than what they achieved in their previous career, and they are only setting themselves up for embarrassment. Well at least that will be entertaining.

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The Beep Test Can Kill

Rob Wood — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 07:21:51 +0000

The beep fitness test should not be taken lightly. It is a maximal test, which means the participants are required to go as hard as they can for as long as they can (though they do not always do this). This was highlighted recently when 27 year old Welsh man Adam Rumming died while performing the bleep test as part of an army fitness test at the Sandhurst Academy where elite British Army officers are trained. He is believed to have had an undiagnosed heart problem, which is often the case for sudden death during exercise in seemingly healthy young people. If you are ever in charge of conducting fitness testing, particularly exhausting tests, you should exclude anyone with a fever or other risky medical condition, or even better get them to complete a PAR-Q (Physical Activity Readiness Questionnaire).

My Gymnastics Clipart on Soap

Rob Wood — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 23:45:36 +0000

My clipart has been used for websites, logos, t-shirts, posters, and many other purposes, but this is the first time that I know of it being used to illustrate soap! I don’t know how it was done, you will have to visit a canuck in Oz and to find out how to do it for yourself. To see the original clipart images, go to the gymnastics clipart page.

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