Olympics of 2012 and 1976

Watching the Paralympics 2012 opening ceremony, wondered what the size of a countries Paralympics team, compared to it's able-bodied Olympic team, said about the values of that country.

Perhaps having a relatively large paralympic team demonstrates that a country cares about ALL its citizens?

Perhaps, in contrast, having a relatively small paralympic team demonstrates that a country has a very narrow view of who has worth in the country

Interestingly, comparing the two numbers (paralympians vs olympians) for a country cuts through a lot of the variables like wealth, sporting tradition, conflict etc.

So BFTF took the top twenty(ish) counties (based on number of olympians sent), together with a few wild card entries that seemed interesting and worked out the numbers. ..

Here is the resulting graph.

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The African Boycott of the '76 Olympics
Interesting BBC4 programme about the 1976 Olympics called "The World Against Apartheid".

The programme looks at the battle against Apartheid that was fought on the sporting fields of the world and is an absolute revelation.

One, frankly gobsmacking, story that was told related to Peter Hain, who was a prominent UK anti-apartheid activist in the 1970s. He was accused of robbing a branch of Barclays in 1974 but was aquitted, with his family claiming that he could not have left his house in time. Hain believes that the South African Bureau of State Security was responsible and that they had used a double to carry out the robbery. Hain wrote a book about his experiences called "The Putney Plot". You can read about the incident here and here.

And another event that BFTF has been unaware of occurred in 1976 and was focussed on New Zealand. . .

The 1972-75 Labour government had adopted a policy of blocking contacts with the South African Springboks rugby team. For a country where rugby is the major sport, this caused some division in society and the next election, in 1975 was won by the National Party, led by Robert Muldoon, who had campaigned on a policy of restoring sporting ties with Apartheid South Africa. In 1976, the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team undertook a tour of South Africa. This caused such outrage in Africa that 28 African counties boycotted the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal in protest at the presence of the New Zealand team at the event (South Africa had been banned from the Olympics since 1964).

If you were black, how angry would this make you?

The programme contained interviews with New Zealand sports correspondents at the '76 Games. They explained how they had been shocked to find that many of the black athletes at the Games had simply not wanted to speak to them becaues of the All Blacks tour. The correspondents had trouble understanding why anyone could think that the All Black tour was anything other than a wonderful sporting event! More info about the Sprinkboks in the 60s and 70s can be found here.

On the other hand, a BBC article states that the New Zealand Olympic Committee felt it was unfair to single them out as there had been 26 countries playing sport in South Africa that year.

As an aside, Austalia did not win a single gold medal at the '76 Games and threw such a collective wobbly at this failure that they set up the Australian Institute of Sport - which is one of the reasons they win so many gold medals now !

In more recent times, the All Blacks training has used out-of-the-box techniques such as this Marcel Marceau tribute routine

Image Source : All Blacks, Sign

WW1 from the Air

BFTF recent watched a fascinating programme on BBC called “WW1 from the Air”. It was was based around footage from an airship that travelled along much of the front line, just after hostilities had finished, filming the devastation below.

And “devastation” is the right word, with towns and villages having being reduced, in their entirety, to rubble by the remorseless artillery fire that was a characteristic of the conflict.

The presenter, Fergal Keane, did an excellent job of explaining how the introduction of aircraft into the war gave commanders - for the first time in history - an aerial view of the battlefield and allowed them to direct artillery fire and assess its effects.

Fergal also talked to experts about the conditions that the soldiers faced, painting a grim picture of life in the trenches.

If you read the BBC article about the programme you will notice that there is a picture at the top showing the effects of the artillery bombardment on the village of Passchendale, the image shows “before” and “after” shots of the same area, clearly showing that there was not a single square centimetre of ground that was not now part of a shell crater, and that there not so much as a garden shed had survived the assault intact. A similar image, this time from Wikipedia, is shown below. Note how both images are of the same area, oriented in the same way - so that the reader can quickly and easily compare features in the two images.

Passchendale - before and after shelling.
The white spots in the lower image are water filled shell holes

The reader can see how the the shell craters had become filled with water and it was this kind of mud and water-filled crater landscape that troops had to cross when attacking enemy lines.

Imagine it just for a second.

And then imagine being a soldier in those conditions for months at a time.

What’s with the pop video camerawork.
In contrast to the article, with it’s simple, clear image; the actual programme chose to show these key photographs held by a person, with a camera moving around, and reflections making it hard to see the detail, and only for a few seconds.

"Can you see the Church" - well, no I can't because your hand is in front of it.(Via iplayer)

In another section of the programme, the presenters wished to show how examination of aerial photography had allowed commanders to identify a hidden barracks and then target it with artillery. The presenters then showed the effects of the attack, not by placing the relevant image on screen but rather by displaying it on a wall, having someone stand in front of it and then zooming right up.

Lets inform the viewer by projecting an image onto a wall,
zooming right in and then having a bloke stand in front.
What could possibly be clearer? (Via iplayer)

It was hugely frustrating to see these important sections of the programme being directed as though they were a pop video.

Incredibly, during this section of the programme, the director chose to spend a lot more time showing the audience the presenters talking to each other than the actual images, as illustrated in the chart below:

Time (in seconds) spent looking at the images vs time spend looking at the presenters.

Image Source:
Wikipedia