Delivering Sporting Excellence

The DeliveryDemon is not a natural spectator. Since it’s difficult to avoid reading about the Olympics, she has been indulging a habit of playing with statistics to get a different perspective of the medal tables.

All things being equal, a country with a large population has a greater chance of producing sporting greats. In a large population, there’s a greater likelihood of finding the extremes of sporting prowess, and the more excellent performers there are, the greater the competitive opportunities, so high performing athletes have the impetus to stretch towards their limits in order to excel at home. That means that a populous country which can afford its good athletes a degree of financial security is likely to figure high in the medal tables.

Conversely, a small country may produce a small number of excellent athletes but it is unlikely to have the breadth and depth of skills which a large country can produce.

The DeliveryDemon decided to explore the medal scores on the basis of which countries require the least  heads of population to produce a medal and to produce a gold medal. The results are interesting. On August 4th:

• New Zealand comes top on golds and overall, with Slovenia in second place
• The next few places in the gold table are occupied by various Eastern European countries
• Eastern Europe also does well in the all medals table, but different countries appear, and Australia is quite highly placed
• UK is 13th in the gold table and 14th in the medal table
• USA is 19th in the gold table and 34th in the medal table
• China is 30th in the gold table and 47th in the medal table
• Slovakia, with no golds, is fifth in the medals table
• It takes between 1.478 million and 192.376 million people to produce a gold medallist
• It takes between .633 million and 403.398 million people to produce a medallist of any sort

So is there any meaningful insight here? Possibly.

• Numbers matter but are not a guarantee of excellence.
• Warrior countries seem to do well, whether the warrior characteristic comes through a nomadic and hunting culture or recent conflict
• An outdoor lifestyle produces good sportspeople
• Assuming that a medallist sits at the apex of a pyramid of active people, then the UK is probably not one of the most sedentary countries in Europe

Two areas the DeliveryDemon has not explored:

• How does the medal count reflect the cost to a country of having a team in London
• Does footballing prowess mirror or counterbalance athletic prowess, or is there no correlation.

Was this a useful exercise? The DeliveryDemon doesn’t really care, it was fun playing with the statistics.

Olympics…..We’re Dooooooomed!!!! Jubilee….We’re Dooooooomder!!!!

The Delivery Demon isn’t really much of a spectator so she didn’t bother tying up her credit card limit in the fiasco of Olympic ticket sales. Why put all that effort into a lottery level probability of seeing an event that might be of some slight interest? She stood back from that, leaving the remote chance of getting a ticket to those who really wanted to watch. As the chaos was delivered, she felt a few pangs of sympathy to those sportspeople who, even if they managed to get tickets, had very little opportunity of getting tickets to see the sports they actually participate in. The whole setup seemed pretty half-baked.

Beyond some vague plans to avoid the areas of transport mayhem during the Olympics, the DeliveryDemon has tended to ignore the media hype, but a recurring theme has been carping for her attention in news reports. There seems to be a developing assumption that the Olympics, like the equally-hyped Jubilee, will damage the economy. The DeliveryDemon recollects some reference to think tanks in those reports but a cursory web search hasn’t provided any hard evidence, so perhaps the reporters concerned are inventing or misinterpreting. Whatever the case, the DeliveryDemon has become interested in what those reports imply.

The general theme is that workers will be taking holidays and days off, will be surreptitiously following the events on their mobiles and their work PCs, will be spending long lunches in pubs, watching events unfold. Transport chaos will make people late for work. Workers will be tired and hungover from late night TV watching and alcoholic celebrations. Production will plummet, customer service will suffer, the economy will drag its way into another recession. Two big events in a single year? We’re all doooooomed!!!

So what are the facts behind the scaremongering?

• Yes, people will want time off – they usually do in the summer. But it may be easier to achieve a spread of holiday dates as a significant number of people may choose to avoid holidaying during the Olympic peak times – much as many people avoid taking their break during school holidays.
• Transport chaos? Commuters are used to this but it’s likely to have a worse than usual impact on venue access routes and the air and rail hubs which serve them. That’s not the whole country, and the areas concerned have a relatively high concentration of work which can be carried out remotely with a little bit of forethought.
• People will spend more than they plan then cut back after the event? Pretty normal for any holiday type event, except that the spend will be in the UK.

So far, so normal. No reason to predict a recessive impact from normal human behaviour. So what might these pundits be suggesting?

• All that well-paid Olympics work will disappear in the aftermath, true. Why should that be a surprise to anyone?
• In some – but not all – businesses, less work will be done during the various events and celebrations. Really?
• There will be a fairly heavy demand for time off during the peak period. A bit like Christmas and the school holidays. After all, people work to live, not the other way round.

Either the reporters who come up with these doom-laden headlines lack the most elementary understanding of business planning, or they are trying to deliver the message that UK management is so lacking in basic business skills that the entire country went down the plughole years ago.

The DeliveryDemon wishes that those recruiting for media positions would realise that those jobs have a need for basic commonsense and the ability to use data sensibly.

Delivering Sports Participation

The DeliveryDemon isn’t hugely fascinated by the 2012 Olympics. She didn’t bother with the ticket allocation fiasco. She hopes she won’t be in London, or near one of the few non-London venues during the event. She has no intention of going anywhere to peer through crowds at anyone trotting along with a badly designed bit of metalwork, which is the nearest many Brits will get to the Olympics. She certainly won’t be watching the Olympics on television, as she still hasn’t found a good reason to go out and buy one.

According to BBC talking heads, this means that the DeliveryDemon is not interested in sport. No matter that she walks for miles in the mountains and across country – that doesn’t count. Nor does bodyflying, an activity which tests muscles most people never get round to using. As soon as she finishes rehab from last year’s skydiving accident, she aims to be back flowriding and doing the occasional bit of running. But she’s not interested in sport. The DeliveryDemon was delighted when recovery reached a point that allowed her back in the gym and the pool – but that’s not sport. She’s looking forward to being able to take winter holidays with ice climbing and snowshoeing and cross country skiing and dog sledging – but according to those in the know, she’s not a sporty person. Obviously not, since she isn’t inclined to sit on the couch, munching and drinking, while watching others do something which may be active – or which may be as inactive as darts or snooker or angling or even poker, all of which are skilled, none of which contribute much to the body’s need for physical activity.

There’s a lot of justification of Olympic costs on the grounds that the fact of the Olympics will increase sports participation. It’s a pity that those who made the decisions to spend shed loads of public money didn’t do some realistic thinking:

• What does participation actually mean?
• How can you demonstrate that it’s happening?

Since the powers that spend our taxes clearly haven’t done this thinking, please allow the DeliveryDemon to suggest a few actions and measures.

Work is spread throughout the country so that people don’t have to spend so much time commuting that there’s no weekday time for anything else and no weekend time because weekends are used up with recovering from the week’s commute and doing all the chores there wasn’t time for during the week.

School offer a range of activities within the timetable with sufficient variety so that all children can particpate without feeling useless or stupid, and sufficient competition to give the competitive a way of measuring their success.

Sports funding includes reasonable support for public facilities which provide ready access for the public at times when people want to use them.

Bylaws and bureaucrats do not use health and safety as an excuse to prevent popular and emerging sports like inline skating and skateboarding and freerunning in public places.

Planning decisions require provision of public open spaces including green space, and sports facilties, with properly thought out arrangements for their long term upkeep.

That’s just for starters. The Olympics will long be remembered for the white elephant developments it leaves behind, but any effect it has on sports participation will be as transient as the annual blip  in tennis court use around the time of Wimbledon – but without Wimbledon’s annual influence. If the powers that be seriously want to influence public health for the better, they need to think more pragmatically than low usage monolithic development and nanny state pronouncements.