Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Wednesday, October 20, 2004 Will the US Team sprint?The U.S. Team has an annual meeting at the U.S. Champs every year and I sat in on part of it this time.Some of the discussion was about sprint orienteering. After Brian May’s success at the WOC (qualifying for the sprint final), there seems to be some interest in putting some emphasis and effort into preparing for the sprint. It looked like there was some serious interest in the idea. There was even some discussion of having a sprint camp. Great idea. I hope the team works on sprints. For a bunch of reasons, I think focusing some effort on the sprint might just pay off. What interested me about the discussion was that it didn’t take place three years ago, after the first WOC with a sprint distance. After the 2001 WOC, I wrote about how I thought the sprint would be a good race for American orienteers to focus on. I got very little response, but the response I got was mostly quite negative. So what has changed? I think it is two relatively small things. First, Brian qualified for the final. That gives Americans a sense that maybe we can do well in the sprint. Second, Peter Gagarin brought up the idea. Peter has a lot of credibility. If Peter says something, people will give it some serious consideration because of who he is. Thinking about all of this reminded me of something Malcolm Gladwell (one of my favorite writers) said in an interview with Rob Neyer (a baseball writer and former employee of another of my favorite writers, Bill James). Here is Gladwell talking about sports: One of the things that always interests me in sports is how extraordinarily sensitive athletic performance is to social expectations. My favorite example is the four-minute mile. For years, no one even comes close. Then Roger Bannister breaks the record in 1954, and suddenly, everyone can break four minutes. Did runners get "better" in 1954? Not really. They simply became aware that running four minutes was possible. Same thing with baseball players and the Dominican Republic. Dominicans are not "better" infielders than everyone else. But if you are a nine-year-old kid playing in San Pedro de Macoris, you know that it's possible to be a major leaguer, in a way that the same kid growing up in Maine does not. When symbolic barriers are broken -- the first man from the Dominican Republic to make the majors, the first person to break four minutes -- the context in which we think of achievement changes dramatically. That's what I think happened after Sosa and McGwire. Hitting lots and lots of home runs became conceivable in a way that it wasn't before. Incidentally, that's why Bonds should never be considered the equal of McGwire or Sosa, because the truly heroic and difficult achievement is to have been the first of your generation to break through a particular mental and physical barrier. Bonds, to me, is John Landy, the Australian who was the second to break the four-minute barrier. posted by Michael | 8:24 PM 
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