Monthly Archives: December 2021

Sport and Solidarity

The Tokyo 2020 Games were an unprecedented demonstration of unity and solidarity as the world came together for the first time following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic for an Olympic Games focused on the pure essentials: a celebration of athletes and sport.

This sense of solidarity was critical to the success of the Tokyo 2020 Games following their historic one-year postponement, especially in the establishment of the Tokyo 2020 Playbooksguidelines for safe and secure participation and operations. The Playbooks set a new standard for large-scale sporting events and ensured that everyone from athletes to the media would be able to safely take part in the Games.

Youthful, Urban, and Gender-Equal

The Tokyo 2020 Games showcased the evolution of the Olympic programme, introducing new sports and events that strengthened the timeless appeal of the Olympic Games for a new generation. Tokyo 2020's 339 events in 33 sportsthe most in Olympic historyincluded the Olympic debut of sports such as skateboarding, sport climbing, surfing and karate, as well as events such as BMX freestyle and 3x3 basketball.

The expansion of the programme also included an increase in gender-equal competition opportunities. The Tokyo 2020 Games were the most gender-balanced in history, with a nearly 50/50 ratio of male and female athletes.

Sustainable Operations and Legacy

Almost 60% of Tokyo 2020 venues utilised existing facilitiesincluding six legacy venues from the Olympic Games Tokyo 1964. Tokyo 2020's Toward Zero Carbon push resulted not only in reduced emissions but also in offsets that more than equaled the emissions produced, driving the Games beyond carbon neutrality.

Tokyo 2020 also pioneered innovative projects to include the Japanese public in concrete sustainability actions. The approximately 5,000 medals cast for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games were created from 100% recycled metals sourced from small electronic devices donated by the Japanese public. Meanwhile, the Victory Ceremony podiums were created from post-consumer plasticonce again donated by the Japanese publicand recycled marine plastic waste.

Read more from the original source:

Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics - Athletes, Medals & Results

7:40 AM ET

Greg WyshynskiESPN

The concept of "can't" hasn't really applied to the NHL during the COVID-19 pandemic. When faced with adversity, it has shown undeniable and admirable ingenuity.

This is a league that halted its 2019-20 season, restarted it in two Canadian "bubble" cities and rewrote its postseason rules to allow 24 teams to participate while temporarily adding an entirely new round to the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

This is a league that, as an encore, realigned its 31 teams into four new divisions while scrapping conference play in 2020-21. It reduced its regular season to 56 games, changed its schedule to intradivisional play and once again rewrote the rules for its postseason format on a temporary basis.

The NHL doesn't hesitate to shatter traditions to get things done.

Unless that thing is allowing its players to participate in the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing while also finding a way to make up postponed games in the 2021-22 regular-season.

I agree with Brad Marchand: It's beyond frustrating to watch a league that just made stuff up on the fly for two seasons refuse to find solutions in order keep a (CBA-negotiated) Olympic promise to its players.

"The NHL and NHLPA can change the rules of the CBA to add a taxi squad so that they don't miss any games and don't lose any money -- which has already been agreed upon that the players will pay back in escrow until the owners are made whole from what they have lost during this pandemic, regardless of how many games are missed," Marchand, Boston Bruins star and expected Canadian Olympian, wrote on Twitter this week.

"Yet they can't do a taxi squad during the Olympics so they can honor the agreement they made so the NHL players can go [to Beijing]," wrote Marchand. "Please tell me that's not bulls---."

The focus here has been on "taxi squad," but I think that misses his larger point: That the NHL and NHLPA have made several in-season changes to the CBA in a time of pandemic crisis to allow teams to ice competitive teams this season. That includes emergency goalie recalls and emergency player recalls, as long as that player makes under $1 million. That includes the return of taxi squads of reserve players, through at least the NHL All-Star break. Not to mention changes to testing protocols announced this week.

Marchand's "yet they can't do a taxi squads during the Olympics" is shorthand for "yet they couldn't bend the supplemental roster rules so players could go to Beijing while their teams make up postponed games while they're gone?"

Of course they couldn't. Because they didn't have to. Because they wouldn't want to.

But I agree with Marchand: They should have.

Read more:

Why Brad Marchand is right about the NHL's Olympics decision - ESPN

The U.S. Olympic team for freeski halfpipe could come into focus after two more selection events, the top slopestyle snowboarders gather in Calgary for a World Cup contest, and Jessie Diggins attempts to defend her Tour de Ski title. Here's what's happening over New Year's Weekend on the road to the 2022 Winter Olympics

A pair of mens and womens podiums in freeski halfpipe will be awarded this week in Calgary, Canada, the second of three stops on the disciplines 2021-22 World Cup circuit. Weather conditions are forecast to be frigid, perhaps dipping below zero. Canada Olympic Park, home venue for several events during the 1988 Winter Games, will host.

Both nighttime competitions will simultaneously serve as U.S. Olympic qualification events the fourth and fifth of six total in freeski halfpipe, ending with the U.S. Grand Prix at Mammoth Mountain. Up to four U.S. athletes per gender can make the team, with nomination hierarchy as follows: the top two Americans in the world rankings, provided they are within the top six overall on January 6; athletes with a top-three finish at one of the selection events; and discretionary selections based on past results or future potential.

The womens field is headlined by U.S.-born Eileen Gu of China, who won recently U.S. Grand Prix and Dew Tour contests at Copper Mountain. However, the absence of Estonian Kelly Sildaru, who finished on the podium at both events, leaves room to thrive on home slopes for Canadas Rachael Karker, runner-up to Gu at this years world championships, and reigning Olympic gold medalist Cassie Sharpe.

Red-hot Alex Ferriera of the U.S., like Gu, also took home titles from both the Grand Prix and Dew Tour competitions at Copper, and the 2018 Olympic silver medalist and two-time X Games winner plans to compete in Calgary. Notably absent from the mens field are reigning world champion Nico Porteous of New Zealand and Ferrieras compatriot Aaron Blunck. Canadian Brendan Mackay, third at both Copper events, could add to the potential host party.

A new year ushers in fresh snowboard slopestyle action as the disciplines World Cup season gets underway this week in Calgary, Canada. It's the first of six stops through late March, only three of which are scheduled to take place prior to the 2022 Olympics. Canada Olympic Park, the home venue for several events during the 1988 Winter Games, will host the opener. Mens and womens finals are Saturday, preceded by two days of qualifying Thursday and Friday.

Last seasons slopestyle crystal ball winners were Austrias Anna Gasser, the 2018 Olympic gold medalist in big air, and reigning world champion Marcus Kleveland of Norway. American Jamie Anderson has won each of the last two Olympic and X Games titles and she wouldve added a first world title earlier this year had it not been denied by New Zealand's Zoi Sadowski-Synnott, who poses a real threat to Andersons bid to three-peat at the Games. Kleveland will contend with an extremely talented U.S. mens contingent led by reigning Olympic gold medalist Red Gerard. Earlier this month, Sadowski-Synnott and Gerard won the 2021 Dew Tour contests at Copper.

The Tour de Ski, an annual multi-stage competition comprising six events over eight days la cyclings Tour de France, kicked off Tuesday at Lenzerheide in Switzerland, and after a stop this weekend in Oberstdorf, Germany, concludes early next week at Italys Val di Fiemme.

Defending champion Jessie Diggins, the first American to claim the title, picked back up where she left off Tuesday at Lenzerheide by capturing the contests yellow bib with an opening-stage victory in the individual sprint freestyle; she then followed up with a 16th-place finish Wednesday in the 10km classical. Wednesday's stage was won by Finland's Kerttu Niskanen, who earned her first World Cup win in seven years.

On the mens side, entering as the overall World Cup leader, reigning Olympic and two-time world sprint champion Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo of Norway took the sprint-free opener. Kerttu Niskanens brother Iivo Niskanen also claimed a Stage 2 victory by winning the 15km classic, while Russian Alexander Bolshunov, last seasons Tour de Ski winner, finished runner-up.

Stages 3 and 4 in Oberstdorf feature mass-start 15km/10km freestyle races Friday and individual sprints in classical technique Saturday. Wrapping things up next week, Stages 5 and 6 at Val di Fiemme begin Monday with mass-start 15km/10km classics and culminate Tuesday with "final climb" variations of Stage 3s events, mass-start 15km/10km races in freestyle.

The 2021-2022 Bobsled World Cup races through the New Year as competition continues in Sigulda, Latvia after a weekend off. Its the sixth event of the season.

Sigulda wont host a four-man race this weekend, but will see double the action in the two-man category. Germanys Francesco Friedrich, the reigning Olympic gold medalist in both the two- and four-man events, continues to dominate: He has won each World Cup race this season (thrice alongside Alexander Schuller, most recently teaming with Thorsten Margis). Meanwhile, rival countryman Johannes Lochner has earned silver at three out of four competitions.

The womens competitions are less clear-cut, with Canadian Cynthia Appiah topping the Womens Monobob World Series rankings. Team USAs Elena Meyers Taylor, who owns three Olympic medals in the two-woman event, and newly minted citizen Kaillie Humphries, who previously won two Olympic golds and a bronze for Canada, currently place third and fourth, respectively. As for the two-woman race, Germans occupy the top three slots with Laura Nolte (who's second in the monobob standings) in the lead. Humphries and Meyers Taylor currently rank fourth and fifth in the two-woman standings.

Meyers Taylor is only 18 points from the top spot in monobob, and could easily move up the rankings. Unfortunately, Humphries who's just four points out of third place for the two-woman event has withdrawn from this weekend's competitions to nurse a hamstring injury.

Sigulda will also host World Cup events for skeleton. Germanys reigning world championChristopher Grotheer leads the mens standings, while the Netherlands Kimberley Bos a former bobsledder tops the womens rankings. No American man or woman has reached the podium at any World Cup event so far this season.

*Delayed broadcast

The 2021-22 Luge World Cup hits Winterberg, Germany for mens singles, mens doubles, womens singles, and team relay races this weekend. The location is appropriate, considering Germany leads in three of the four disciplines.

Germanys Johannes Ludwig, who won gold in team relay and bronze in mens singles at the 2018 Olympics, now heads the World Cup singles leaderboard. Hes topped three competitions this season most recently at Innsbruck, Austria, where he scored a personal best time of 1:39.605. Ludwigs compatriot Julia Taubitz, the 2021 world champion in womens singles, also leads the rankings for her division. Headed into Winterberg, both athletes enjoy fairly comfortable margins over Austrian runners up Wolfgang Kindl and Madeleine Egle.

After three of six events, Germany is also in the No. 1 position for team relay. Italy edges out Austria here for the second spot by just five points. But team relay provides the best opportunity for the United States at a luge medal the U.S. currently ranks fourth, with speedsters like Summer Britcher,Tucker West,Jayson Terdiman and Chris Mazdzer (the 2018 Olympic singles silver medalist whos now competing in singles and doubles, even as he recovers from a broken foot) potentially racing for a spot on the podium.

Atop mens doubles are Latvian brothers Adris and Juris Sics, who are looking to complete their Olympic medal set after 2010 silver and 2014 bronze in the division. If their World Cup results are any indication, the Sics may be golden at the 2022 Winter Games.

In the world of ski jumping, New Years is synonymous with one thing: the Four Hills Tournament. For the last 70 years, the sports elite male competitors have congregated in Germany and Austria for a quartet of World Cup events spanning the New Year.

Saturday marks the second quarter of the competition, taking place in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. Japans Ryoyu Kobayashi, who in 2018-19 became just the third man to sweep all four events in the same season, will attempt to repeat the feat after winning the first event in Oberstdorf, Germany, on Wednesday.

In the latest encouraging sign of growth in womens ski jumping, this weekend marks the first edition of the Silvester Tour, a New Years World Cup series taking inspiration from the Four Hills Tournament. Back-to-back days of jumping competition from Ljubno, Slovenia will ring in the new year as Austrias Marita Kramer will attempt to continue her dominant World Cup season. The 20-year-old has won five of seven competitions to start the season.

Both mens and womens events can be streamed LIVE on Peacock.

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This weekend on the Road to the Olympics: U.S. halfpipe skiers look to secure Olympic spots - KSBY San Luis Obispo News

In advance of the 2022 Olympics this February, the Chinese Communist Party is on a campaign to whitewash its image. Plastering over the ever-growing list of human-rights abusesincluding the takeover of Hong Kong, the internment of Muslims in Xinjiang, the disappearance of tennis star Peng Shuai, the Covid coverup and threats to democratic Taiwanthe party wields denial, obfuscation and cash. The latest campaign pushes the absurd claim that China enjoys democratic government at home while deriding as undemocratic the worlds real democracies.

The Communist Party shows no inhibition about spreading falsehoods in this new misinformation effort. Published last September, a government white paper broadly publicized in China claimed that the Chinese people experience a broad, thorough and true democracy. In October, Xi Jinping said Chinas National Peoples Congress guarantees that the people are masters. In other instances, Mr. Xi has claimed, that when the people call out, I listen, and dismissed American democracy, saying people go into hibernation after elections and otherwise have no way to exercise their rights to speak.

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No Democracy Should Participate in the 2022 Beijing Olympics - The Wall Street Journal

The Motorola Envoy was a paragon of skeuomorphic design

Open up the Envoy, and the home screen features a tableau of a typical office circa 1994. On your grayscale desk sits a telephone (a landline, of course), a Rolodex, a notepad, and a calendar. Behind the desk are a wall clock, in- and out-boxes, and a filing cabinet. Its a masterstroke in skeuomorphic design.

Skeuomorphism is a term used by graphical user interface designers to describe GUI objects that mimic their real-world counterparts; click on the telephone to make a call, click on the calendar to make an appointment. In 1994, when the Envoy debuted, the design was so intuitive that many users did not need to consult the user manual to start using their new device.

About the size of a paperback and weighing in at 0.77 kilograms (1.7 pounds), the Envoy was a little too big to fit in your pocket. It had a 7.6-by-11.4-centimeter LCD screen, which reviewers at the time noted was not backlit. The device came with 1 megabyte of RAM, 4 MB of ROM, a built-in 4,800-bit-per-second radio modem, a fax and data modem, and an infrared transceiver.

The Envoy was one of the first handheld computers designed to run the Magic Cap (short for Communicating Applications Platform) operating system. It used the metaphor of a room to organize applications and help users navigate through the various options. For most business users, the Office with its default desk was the main interface. The user could also navigate to the virtual Hallwaycomplete with wall art and furnitureand then enter other rooms, including the Game Room, Living Room, Storeroom, and Control Room. Each room featured its own applications.

The Motorola Envoys graphical user interface was based on skeuomorphic design, in which virtual objects resemble their real-world counterparts and suggest their uses.Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

A control bar across the bottom of the screen aided in navigation. The desk button, the equivalent of a home link, returned the user to the Office. The rubber stamp offered decorative elements, including emoticons, which were then a new concept. The magic lamp gave access to search, print, fax, and mail commands. An icon that looks like a purse, but was described as a tote bag, served as a holding place for copied text that could then be carried to other applications, similar to your computers clipboard. The tool caddy invoked drawing and editing options. The keyboard button brought up an onscreen keyboard, an innovation widely copied by later PDAs and smartphones.

Skeuomorphic design began to wane in the mid-2000s, as Microsoft, Google, and Apple embraced flat design. A minimalist response to skeuomorphism, flat design prioritized two-dimensional elements and bright colors. Gone were needless animation and 3D effects. Apples trash can and Windows recycling bin are two skeuomorphic icons that survived. (Envoy had a garbage truck on its toolbar for that purpose.)

Part of the shift away from skeuomorphism was purely functional; as devices added more applications and features, designers needed a cleaner display to organize information. And the fast-paced evolution of both physical and digital technologies quickly led to outdated icons. Does anyone still use a Rolodex to store contact information or a floppy disc to save data? As their real-world counterparts became obsolete, the skeuomorphic equivalents looked old-fashioned.

The Envoys user interface is one of the reasons why the object pictured at top found its way to the collections of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, in New York City. Preserving and displaying the Envoys functionality a quarter century after its heyday presented a special challenge. Ben Fino-Radin, founder and lead conservator at Small Data Industries, worked on the digital conservation of the Envoy and wrote an instructive blog post about it. Museums have centuries worth of experience preserving physical objects, but capturing the unique 1994 feel of a software design required new technical expertise. Small Data Industries ended up purchasing a second Envoy on eBay in order to deconstruct it, inspect the internal components, and reverse engineer how it worked.

Although the Envoys interface is what captured my interest and made me select it for this months column, that is not why the Envoy is beloved of computer historians and retro-tech enthusiasts. Rather, it is the company behind the Envoy, General Magic, that continues to fascinate.

General Magic is considered a classic example of a Silicon Valley heroic failure. That is, if you define the precursor to the smartphone and a design team whose members later brought us the iPod, iPhone, Android, eBay, Dreamweaver, Apple Watch, and Nest as failures.

The story of General Magic begins at Apple in 1989, when Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, and Marc Porat, all veterans of the Macintosh development team, started working on the Paradigm project. They tried to convince Apple CEO John Sculley that the next big thing was a marriage of communications and consumer electronics embodied in a handheld device. After about nine months, the team was not finding the support it wanted within Apple, and Porat convinced Sculley to spin it off as an independent company, with Apple maintaining a 10 percent stake.

In 1990, General Magic kicked off its operations with an ambitious mission statement:

Pretty heady stuff.

General Magic quickly became the hottest secret in Silicon Valley. The company prized confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements to keep its talent from leaking, but as well-known developers joined the team, anticipation of greatness kept building. General Magic inked partnerships with Sony, Motorola, AT&T, Matsushita, and Philips, each bringing a specific expertise to the table.

At its heart, General Magic was attempting to transform personal communications. A competitor to the Motorola Envoy that also used Magic Cap, Sonys Magic Link, had a phone jack and could connect to the AT&T PersonaLink Service network via a dial-up modem; it also had built-in access to the America Online network. The Envoy, on the other hand, had an antenna to connect to the ARDIS (Advanced Radio Data Information Service) network, the first wireless data network in the United States. Formed in 1983 by Motorola and IBM, ARDIS had sketchy data coverage, its speeds were slow (no more than 19.2 kilobits per second), and costs were high. The Envoy initially sold for US $1,500, but monthly data fees could run $400 or more. Neither the Magic Link nor the Envoy were commercial successes.

Rabbits roam free to help spur creativity, personal hygiene seems optional, and pulling all-nighters is the norm.

Perhaps it was the hubris before the fall, or maybe the General Magic team truly believed that they were undertaking something historic, but the company allowed documentary filmmaker David Hoffman to record meetings and interview its employees. Filmmakers Sarah Kerruish, Matt Maude, and Michael Stern took this archival treasure trove and turned it into the award-winning 2018 documentary General Magic.

The original footage perfectly captures the energy and drive of a 1990s startup. Rabbits roam the office to help spur creativity, personal hygiene seems optional, and pulling all-nighters is the norm. Young engineers invent their own versions of the USB and touch screens in order to realize their dreams.

The film also shows a company so caught up in a vision of the future that it fails to see the world changing around itspecifically the emergence of the World Wide Web. As General Magic begins to miss deadlines and its products dont live up to their hype, the company falters and goes into bankruptcy.

But the story doesnt end there. The cast of characters moves on to other projects that prove far more remarkable than Magic Cap and the Envoy. Tony Fadell, who had joined General Magic right after college, goes on to invent the iPod, coinvent the iPhone, and found Nest (now Google Nest). Kevin Lynch, a star Mac software developer when he joined General Magic, leads the team that develops Dreamweaver (now an Adobe product) and serves as lead engineer on the Apple Watch. Megan Smith, a product design lead at General Magic, later becomes chief technology officer in the Obama administration.

Marc Porat had challenged his team to create a product that once you use it, you wont be able to live without it. General Magic fell short of that mark, but it groomed a cadre of engineers and designers who went on to deliver those cant-live-without-it devices.

Part of a continuing series looking at photographs of historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the January 2022 print issue as Ode to the Envoy.

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China Will Attempt First Carbon-Neutral Winter Olympics - IEEE Spectrum

The legendary British sprinter Ron Jones, who captained Team GB at the Mexico Olympics in 1968 and was part of the 4x110yd team that equalled the world record in 1963, has died at the age of 87.

After his illustrious track and field career, Jones moved into football, first as the chief executive of QPR in 1976 before becoming managing director at Cardiff and then Portsmouth.

But he will be best remembered for being part of the British team alongside Peter Radford, David Jones and Berwyn Jones who stunned a strong US contingent to equal the world 4x110yd record in 40.0 secs.

Writing in the Observer, Norris McWhirter said the performance was so good it made the White City crowd explode with joy just like in the old days. The feat was even more impressive given the US team that day included Bob The Bullet Hayes, the worlds fastest man who would later win gold at the 1964 Olympics. It was a measure of Joness quality that when he faced Hayes in the individual 100yd dash earlier that afternoon he pushed him to the line.

The mighty Hayes, who breaks all the rules of fast movement by rocking and rolling as he fights his pigeon-toed way down the track, was expected to pull away, wrote McWhirter. But nothing of the sort happened. In fact Jones fractionally closed on him and was only beaten by two foot on the tape.

Hayess time was 9.5s, with Joness 9.6s. Such was Joness form that year he also set a Welsh 100m record of 10.30s which stood for 27 years until it was beaten by Colin Jackson in 1990.

His great friend Lynn Davies, who won long jump gold in Tokyo 1964 and ran in the GB relay team with Jones in those Olympics, told the Guardian that Jones was an inspirational character on and off the track.

Ron will be remembered for being one of Waless greatest ever athletes, he said. He was one of my heroes growing up and when we raced I could never beat him. He had such a smooth stride. And, remarkably, he did it all while working full-time as an accountant.

Davies said that, when Jones was managing director at Cardiff City, he would even take fitness training with the players. And he also did a great deal for young people in sport in Wales as chairman of Sports Aid Cymru Wales.

He was a very proud Welshman with a very warm and outgoing personality, he added. He loved company, and a glass of red wine. I have many happy memories of sitting with him and reminiscing about the good old days.

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Ron Jones, sprinter and British captain at Mexico Olympics, dies aged 87 - The Guardian