Power Line points out that one of the world’s great sporting events is underway: …[a] dog-sled race from Willow to Nome, Alaska. … The beauty you encounter everywhere in Alaska is stunning …

A race over 1,150 miles of the most extreme and beautiful terrain known to man: across mountain ranges, frozen rivers, dense forests, desolate tundra and windswept coastline. Add sub-zero temperatures and blinding winds, and you’ve got the makings of a legendary adventure. That’s the Iditarod.

Baseball Crank recently finished reading an advance copy of The Mind of Bill James: How a Complete Outsider Changed Baseball, by Scott Gray, due in stores March 14.

The book is a sort of biography of James, mixing in details about his life with a sprawling look at his thinking on many subjects. I enjoyed the book, and if you are either a certified Bill James fanatic or want an introduction to what the fuss is all about, it’s worth a read. But the book had three fundamental problems.

The first problem is that Gray is on well-plowed ground here. Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, released in 2003, put James’ story in the context of the implementation of his ideas by the Oakland A’s. Alan Schwarz’ The Numbers Game, released in 2004, told James’ story again, this time in the context of a historical review of baseball statistics and analysis and their devotees. …

ČTK/AP

A Czech trickster took part in last month’s Winter Olympics after borrowing a starting number from a Japanese competitor. The Czech newspaper Sport carried a photograph of 38-year-old Josef Panuška from the Turin games wearing number 365 in the men’s 50km cross country skiing event. … Among Panuška’s previous antics was his participation in the 2004 Athens Olympics marathon …

When USA Baseball offered the Atlanta Braves’ Chipper Jones a roster spot in the inaugural World Baseball Classic, he quickly accepted. Yet Jones feels conflicted about the 16-nation tournament, which started Thursday night in Tokyo and ends March 20 in San Diego. “I love the idea,” he said. “I just don’t love the timing.”

… In some ways, the tournament does look more like a glorified exhibition than a true world championship. …

TiVo has released its list of the most-watched Olympic vignettes. … it took a random, anonymous cross-section of the moments that 20,000 of its customers have been replaying. TiVo’s gold-medal winner? Apparently, what the Germans—with 29 medals—call schadenfreude.

… the most popular moment was the fall by Canadian skater Marie-France Dubreuil during the ice dancing competition. … TiVo’s No. 2 slot was taken by U.S. skater Sasha Cohen: Fans pored over her inarguably virtuoso performance in the Short Program. …

Björn Borg, one of the greatest sportsmen of all time and the only person to win five consecutive Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championship titles, has instructed Bonhams to sell all of his Wimbledon-winning trophies and two racquets from his 1976 and 1980 final matches. No other tennis player has sold a Wimbledon-winning trophy at auction before.

The five silver gilt trophies representing five Wimbledon Championship wins during 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979 and 1980 will be sold on 21 June at Bonhams’ salerooms in Knightsbridge. They will be sold as one lot and are collectively expected to fetch GBP 200,000-300,000. …

Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour, by Helmut Schoeck

Envy is pain occasioned by the good fortune of others. —Aristotle

Pity the athletes who come from the country where envy is considered to be a dominant cultural trait and the national disease (“den kungliga svenska avundsjukan,” the Royal Swedish Envy).

The Swedish Olympic Committee is upset that the hockey team chose to celebrate with their fans in the middle of Stockholm — instead of humbly submitting to the Committee’s diktat and letting the curling team join in an egalitarian party at the airport.

Swedish gold-winners who did not play ice hockey have been complaining that their own achievement should have gotten equal play (“out of solidarity”). Now some bureaucrats are threatening to sue.

Should one wonder why so many successful Swedish athletes have been leaving the country over the past decades?

Just four days after the Swedish ice hockey team’s stunning achievement in the Winter Olympics, the sweet smell of success has been overshadowed by a bitter dispute which could result in the team’s disqualification.

The Swedish Olympic Committee (SOC) is threatening to sue the Swedish Ice Hockey Association over the celebrations in Stockholm’s Medborgarplatsen which, says the SOC, broke sponsorship regulations.

“This is a serious infringement,” said the SOC’s chairman Stefan Lindeberg to Svenska Dagbladet. … “The ultimate consequence of the Hockey Association’s actions at the welcoming party is that the team is disqualified,” Rosengren told SvD. …

As I write this I am looking at a most beautiful view. Through four long casement windows fixed with opened blinds, I am watching fat snowflakes descend straight down with a pretty, almost stage-effected uniformity. The branches of the white maple tree are long and low and covered with white. …

So, in the midst of all of this peacefulness, all this wonder… why is it I am longing for baseball?

As I extoll and enjoy this silence, I know I am already antsy to hear the crack of a bat, the whiff of a ball into a glove. …

Champion chap

An Olympic gold medal doesn’t come with an instruction manual, a tube of metal polish or even a box. Shaun White, nineteen-year-old snowboarder champion, earned his golden medallion with a bravura performance on an Italian halfpipe. Now he’s trying to figure out: What do you do with the damn thing?

… he’s seen snowboarding evolve from outlaw sport to extreme-athletics juggernaut. Not long ago, it seemed like an awkward, pandering idea for the Olympics to have snowboarders at all. Now snowboard events are a highlight of the schedule.

Snowboarding, once a good way to get ejected from ski resorts, has gone mainstream. In no small part, that’s because of White’s shaggy charm and the amazing feats of twisting airborne ballet he can perform with a plank of wood strapped to his feet. White is a master of the 1080 …

… for the Olympic Games, where citizenship is key, immigration law can be of the utmost importance. Just ask Ben Agosto and Tanith Belbin, the US ice dancing pair that won the silver medal. One of the first thank yous they delivered was to their lawyers.

Without that legal team … Agosto and Belbin would have been forced to sit out their second Olympic competition in four years. Belbin, a native of Canada, had a citizenship problem … she faced a five-year residency requirement, which meant she wasn’t eligible for citizenship until 2007. She and Agosto needed a miracle by Dec. 31, 2005, to make the U.S. Olympic team. …

[from 2004-Aug-20]
… After a successful bid in 1997, citizens of Greece were pleased to find the Olympics returning home in 2004 after 98 years (actually 108 years because the 1906 Olympics weren’t official). However, much to their surprise, hosting the 2004 Olympics has sucked $10-12 billion (in U.S. dollars) out of the Greek economy. That’s more than five percent of the country’s annual gross domestic product! …

NBC is paying about $800 million for broadcast rights to the Olympics in the U.S. NBC expects to net a record $1 billion in ad sales for its Olympic coverage. Indonesia’s major networks decided a $1.35 million price tag was too much, though they are willing to dish out $10 million to air the 2006 FIFA World Cup. …

Since the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, every hosting country has either broken even or made a profit on running the two-week event, but the costs are getting out of control. … If you think the Greeks overcommitted, the Chinese have budgeted $23 billion for the 2008 Olympic games — seven times more than the Sydney [2000] games, and 32 times what Los Angeles spent for the 1984 Games! …

[In April 2004] Once again I was asked about my position on NBA players and the Olympics. …

In the sports marketing world, advertisers usually have a set sports marketing budget. Each advertiser gets pitched by all the different sports entities competing for those dollars. Among those competitors are both the Olympics and NBA. One of the beauties of the NBA pitch is that our athletes are so recognizable, personable and respected. … It should be a huge selling point exclusively available to the NBA, but unfortunately that is no longer the case.

When the NBA was broadcast on NBC, it was far less of an issue. … The NBA is now on ESPN/ABC and TNT. They are paying us a lot of money in a deal that has been working well for all involved. What in the world are we doing helping our partners’ competition? Why are we giving our most valuable manpower to a huge business, the Olympics, so they can try to take revenue away from the NBA and our partners? …

Over the weekend, someone asked me what I thought about NHL players participating in the Olympics. … I have to admit that, from a business perspective, I’m not a big fan of it. …

It’s also important to remember that the Olympics are not exactly a charitable operation. NBC is paying a ton of money for the right to broadcast the games, but that money doesn’t go to the players, the team owners, or the NHL. … however, the NHL is a player’s league, and this decision is ultimately going to be driven by the players. …

Faster, please!

… Paully’s team is responsible for creating and delivering the more than 50,000 graphics that introduce, frame, explicate, and generally amplify NBC’s broadcasts. … To create so many templates and variations, Paully and … a crew that swells to 50 artists and engineers … storyboarded, tested, and built images to cover sports that many viewers watch only when the Olympics carry them back to our attention. …

“We did the last [Athens 2004] Olympics with a 4 terabytes central server … We wouldn’t go near an HD Olympics with 4 terabytes. It would fill up within the first three or four days.”

Even before deploying for Torino, Paully’s artists had created 9 terabytes of pre-built graphics and effects. …

“During the [Albertville / Barcelona] 1992 games it took us about 48 seconds to render a single frame of video in standard definition. Today we’re doing high-def renders in real time. So we’re doing in eye blinks what it took us a minute to knock out before.” …

By what standard?

I’m not sure why so many people think that the US didn’t do particularly well in the Olympics that just ended. Maybe it’s because Bode Miller never bothered to show up. Michelle Kwan probably shouldn’t have shown up. Johnny Weir failed to show up for the free skate (figuratively and nearly literally). … Yet for all those failures, the US Olympic Team had their most successful showing at a Winter Games staged outside the US. Ever.

… Far from being a failure, the Games showed that sports are unpredictable, and that the media-annointed favorites often can’t live up to the hype …

The networks and advertisers have a different frame of reference. They’re looking for the next star and next media attraction. …

… It was a fun game of hockey to watch—as compelling, if not moreso, as anything that you’ll see in the Stanley Cup playoffs this spring, and arguably every bit as meaningful. If you doubt that, you should watch some tape of the pained expressions on the Finnish bench as Saku Koivu, Teemu Selanne and company watched the Swedes celebrate their victory. The great thing about the NHL’s involvement in Olympic hockey is that it gives us an opportunity to watch all of the world’s best players compete on an international stage with pride being the primary motivating factor. And when it comes to playing with pride, Finland and Sweden didn’t disappoint.

… So, while Canada went into meltdown mode and the U.S. shrugged and flipped on American Idol, the Finns and Swedes went on about their business, beating Russia and the Czech Republic in their respective semifinals with relative ease.

The gold medal game, though, was a different story. It was a dog fight, starting with a surprisingly defensive first period which ended with Finland leading 1-0 thanks to a goal from Kimmo Timonen. …

My sense is the choice of new events for the Olympics is based on:

• Easy to televise.
• Good visuals.
• Popular enough to draw sponsors.
• Incremental gain in audience.

So we get “sports” offering the virtues of ski acrobatics … That suggests the ultimate money-maker and audience-builder would be video gamers …

“… marksmanship is an Olympic sport, right? That’s twitching the fingers as well,” says Edward Castronova, a professor at Indiana University who studies and teaches the economics and sociology of video games. …

As I recollect it, big money began to creep into sports into the late 1960’s. …

Celebrating faces

Only 103 days to go now. Seeing that almost every footie fan’s got a mobile phone today, how can FIFA get a slice of the infotainment action? Wouldn’t this be the right time to offer an application that features minute-by-minute game commentary, SMS alerts on scores, ringtones, wallpaper and video clips? Yeah, and the infamous South American commentator’s “Goooaaaaaaaaaal!” clip would need to be there as well.

Well, guess what? …

… There was some debate prior to the Olympics about professional hockey players taking part in the Olympics. There were questions about whether a player’s allegiance should be with his country or the team that pays his bills. Some don’t think you can show allegiance to both. For those who don’t think the pros care about the Olympic games, all you need to do is look at the Finns’ crushed and disappointed faces after the game. …

Sticks, not spears	AP

Sweden and Finland met in a battle reminiscent of hoplites and scenes in ancient epics.

Last of a series looking at just how hard it is to get to the Olympics; see previous posts on biathlon and cross country skiing, ski jumping and nordic combined, speed skating, short track, snowboarding, figure skating, freestyle skiing, curling and hockey, and bobsled, luge and skeleton. …

Any discussion of last-place finishers at the Olympics, particularly at the Winter Olympics, would not be complete without at least mentioning Jamaica’s bobsled team, which drew worldwide attention at the Calgary Games in 1988. … It’s claimed that Jamaica’s strength in the sprinting events in the summer events translates well to bobsledding, where a quick start means a lot. … Jamaica isn’t at the Torino Games; their bobsled team failed to qualify for the Olympics for the first time since they started.

You misunderstand Bode Miller. He had a fantastic Olympics. Championship level. Because he apparently thought he was entered in the giant party, not the giant slalom and other ski races. “It’s been an awesome two weeks,” Miller said after he completed his 0-for-5 Olympics on Saturday. “I got to party and socialize at an Olympic level.” … Has anyone ever partied his way off of five podiums? …

“As far as my own personal involvement, I would not change anything,” Miller told the Associated Press after straddling a gate and skiing off the course Saturday. “I rocked here.”

Miller, 28-going-on-12, even mocked his teammate Daron Rahlves for caring about the Olympics and not spending his evenings drinking beer.

“Look at what happened to Rahlves,” Miller said. “He was holed up in his RV; he’s probably the fittest guy out here and he made a point of talking about how important the Olympics were to him. … And he’s got nothing to show for the whole thing.”

Lost art?

Figure skating’s new scoring system was put to its biggest test during the women’s long program Thursday night, and it did not pass with flying colors. The consensus among coaches and skaters is that the system needs tweaking. The glamour event of the Winter Olympics did not live up to expectations, and the emphasis on piling points might be partly to blame. …

The new system is designed to prevent cheating, but it has drawbacks. Skaters tend to scramble for as many points as possible, … Choreographer Lori Nichol has likened skaters under the new system to “chickens with their heads cut off running around.” …