Posts Tagged ‘sport’

I remember London 2012. It was magic. We smashed our medal predicts and earned ourselves third in the medals table. It was brilliant. Coming into Rio 2016, this made for a bit of a downer though. Without the home crowd, how could we hope to hold on to our spot as third in the world?

That all seems silly now. We’re smashing our medals target in Brazil as well. In fact, we were predicted to come third with 20 gold medals, just behind China who were predicted to score 22. Both of those targets have now been revised by Gracenote Sports who are now predicting Team GB to finish neck and neck with China.

They are predicting both countries will now finish on 25 gold medals.

China took their predicted gold in the badminton so they remain on track for their predicted totals.

Team GB is now exceeding these predictions however. Nick Skelton’s gold in the individual show jumping today was an unexpected result: Britain was not predicted to win any medal in that competition. Joe Joyce, predicted bronze in the boxing, has just won through to the final too.

Of course one defeat for a British athlete expected to win, or one win from a Chinese athlete expected to take silver, could change everything around. It is going to be a nail biting finish.

I’ll keep this page updated as we go, if I can be bothered.

Day 14

19:31 China continue to follow their predictions: Liu Hong wins the women’s 20km walk by just two seconds, while Yin Junhua takes silver in the boxing, also as predicted.

21:56 Lutalo Muhammad was predicted to lose his semi-final taekwondo fight. He won, and so is through into the gold medal match.

22:46 Well blow me down, England have won a penalty shoot-out! Maybe we should play football as Team GB. Our women coming good in the hockey final mean we move two golds ahead of our predicted total.

Overnight We have teams running in both the men’s and women’s 4x100m relays: bronze predicted in each. China’s other medal hope for today was synchronised swimming, which they hit their silver in.

Day 15

Absolutely heartbreaking for Lutalo Muhammad in the taekwondo final, losing the gold in the very last second. Still, silver is better than his predicted bronze. Our women took bronze in the relay, unfortunately our men could not.

Today, both GB and China are predicted three golds each. We also have Joe Joyce (predicted bronze) in the boxing final and Liam Heath being the fastest qualifier in the K1 final (predicted not to place).

13:08 Liam Heath wins in the 100m kayak! Another unpredicted medal means we are now on 25: giving us three clear over China. We’re four silvers ahead too, so China would need four to catch up. With three predicted goals each for today, that is a tough ask.

15:58 China clean up in the badminton, keeping them on target for 25 with two golds and two more silvers predicted.

16:16 Here is the schedule for our remaining medal hopes today:

18:00 Nicola Adams
01:30 Mo Farah
02:00 Bianca Walkden (if she qualifies, China’s Zheng Shuyin also in contention)

Tom Daley is also fighting for a place in the men’s 10m diving final. He is predicted to make the final and earn a bronze, finishing behind China’s Qiu Bo and Chen Aisen. That starts at 20:30.

No predicted medals for Team GB tomorrow. That’s now impossible though as Joe Joyce is through to the men’s boxing final, and therefore guaranteed one. That starts at 19:15.

16:26 It is looking good for Team GB. Here are the remaining predicted medals for Team GB and China:

Gold: Nicola Adams, Mo Farah, Bianca Walkden
Silver: Joe Joyce
Bronze: Tom Daily, women’s 4×400 relay

Gold: Qiu Bo, women’s volleyball
Silver: Chen Aisen, Zheng Shuyin

We’re currently two golds and four silvers ahead. Given the gap in silvers, China can only overtake us by winning more golds, which would mean three. This is the maximum they can win: Qui Bo and Chen Aisen are both in the same diving competition, so they would need to take gold in all three events to overtake us.

Even if that happened, we would only need a single gold to seal the deal.

16:59 Well done Vicky Holland for taking bronze in the women’s triathlon. Bianca Walkden easily through the round of 16. Unfortunately Tom Daley failed to get into the 10m diving final. China finished one and two in that the semi-final.

We can wrap up second place with a gold for Nicola Adams in the boxing. Just over an hour to go for that.

Some people are simply brilliant salespeople. They have a gift for persuasion. I have always thought physicists must be some of them. They persuaded grant funders that the only place they could put observatories was in the tropical paradise of Hawaii.

Watching the Olympics, I think even they have been outdone though. Consider the successful pitches that must have been made in order to secure our current line-up of events.

“We are going to train horses to dance.”
“Hmm. Jousting? That’s a sport?”
“No, we just want the dancing included. Maybe a bit of jumping.”

“Well, it’s just hitting each other really.”

“It’s an eight-lap cycle race. But for the first five laps, the cyclists will queue up behind a motorbike.”

“It’s like the long jump, but the athlete will do a hop and a skip beforehand.”

“Well, it’s not quite a javelin and it’s not quite a shot put, but man, will they be able to throw that hammer a long way.”

“Yes, it’s diving. But there will be two of them. Doing exactly the same thing.”

“Exactly, it’s volleyball. Except with a lot of sand, and the women will be in bikinis.”

When you make it to the finals of Euro 2016, you are allocated to one of six groups. The top two teams from each group, after three matches, get a pass into the round of 16. An additional four teams also make it through.

But should we expect to see there? One way to calculate it is to work out how tough each group is. By taking each team’s world rankings and averaging them, we can see how tough each group is.

A lower number represents a tough group and a higher number represents an easier group. This suggests England is in one of the easiest groups: only group A has a lower average world ranking, and this does not factor in the home-field advantage that France has.

We can then compare the team ranking to the average group ranking to see who should find it easiest to quality.

I have shown the top and bottom four here. The other home nations do not find themselves at the bottom of the table, which is positive news too. Having said this, the difficultly of the group makes little difference: all of these teams are in the same order as if you had just taken the world rankings. So how tough your group is, is probably not a factor.

The ice hockey world championships are currently taking place in Moscow. No prizes for guessing who the Worfolk household is supporting. Finland won gold in 2011, and took a silver in 2014, but failed to score any medal last year.

To predict our chances, I took the medal data from the past ten years and graphed it.

The competition has been going for almost a hundred years now. In comparison to the early days, it is a pretty open contest. In the first 26 years, Canada took gold in 18 of them. Great Britain also took a gold in 1936! From 1963 onwards, the Soviets were unbeatable. Until 1987, when Sweden took gold, the only other team to beat the Russians were Czechoslovakia: the Soviet Union took the other 18 golds.

Today, Russia remain the dominant force in ice hockey. In the past decade they have taken as many golds as their nearest rivals, Sweden and Canada, put together. They are far from unbeatable though. In three of those years, they failed to bring home a medal. Sad as I am to admit it, Sweden has the edge over Finland at the moment. Though a gold at this year’s event would put them clear ahead.

The “big five”: Russia, Sweden, Canada, Finland and Czech Republic win basically everything. This is a suprise to many people, who assume that because the United States’s NHL is the biggest ice hockey league in the world, their national team must be really good. But they’re not. Two bronzes, and a silver each for Slovakia and Switzerland are the only medals to go elsewhere.

Moneyball is a Michael Lewis book about Billy Beane revolutionised baseball by replacing the scouting staff of Oakland Athletics with one geek and his computer named Paul DePodesta. They started drafting based on statistics, rather than whether someone looked like a traditional baseball player. The result was that with one of the lowest payrolls in baseball, they became the first team ever to win 20 games in a row.

It is written in Lewis’ usual style of presenting the information in a story narrative and is essentially the same theme as many of his other books – how people have had a huge amount of success by exploiting inefficiencies in the market.

A very interesting read and makes you wonder how many areas of human affairs suffer from such inefficiencies. The answer is almost certainly, a lot.

Recently, the US Patent office revoked some of the patents owned by the Washington Redskins because their name was offensive to Native Americans.

This follows on from a long campaign against the american football team to change their name because it is incredibly racist. Earlier this year the National Congress of American Indians launched a new advert to bring the point home.

Of course, it is not really like the point needs to be brought home. It’s obvious. There is simply no way this can be viewed as anything but offensive:

For example, what happens when you take out one derogatory term for a group of people and put another one in:

As if anyone would stand for that! It’s time for a name change.

What should they change it to? I’m angling for the Washington Filibusterers.

Premier Sports is a television channel that nobody has ever heard of. It’s an add-on to Sky Sports, for an additional monthly fee. Which is really annoying because they have had, for the past two years, exclusive coverage of the Ice Hockey World Championship finals.

Luckily they have now added Premier Player, an online streaming version of the channel. It costs £9.99 per month. Sign up was painless and we were able to watch it straight away. You can use as many devices as you want, but you can only log in with one device at a time, so you need to make sure you actually sign out if you want to switch devices.

Quality was not great. There are only so much you can expect when you stream a web feed onto a 42″ TV. However, I get good results with Sky Go and iPlayer. The results from Premier Sports were noticeably not as good, especially with the graphics and semi-transparent overlays. However it did offer a continuous stream whereas the free HD stream of a Finland channel we found kept cutting out every 3-5 seconds.

Overall, I am fairly satisfied. It would be great to get a higher quality feed. In a decade or so I imagine we will look back and consider how crazy it was that we watched anything in this resolution. But it was watchable and the whole process was pain free.

The Yorkshire Rams kicked off their 2014 american football season by hosting the Sheffield Predators. The won thanks to a well earned touch down and Sheffield twice snapping the ball over the punters head and into their own end zone for a safety. The Predators scored a late touch down and converted for two, but it wasn’t enough.

The NFL playoffs are finally set! So now it’s time to take a look at each team’s chances to win the Super Bowl based on who they’ll have to play, and where the oddsmakers have them slated. At Betfair online, betting odds are already posted for each team’s likelihood to win the Super Bowl, which gives us a good gauge to use in predicting outcomes. So without further ado, here’s how the match-ups break down, and how each team projects to do.

AFC PLAYOFF PICTURE

(5) Kansas City Chiefs @ (4) Indianapolis Colts
These teams have almost even odds to win the Super Bowl, with the Colts at 33/1 and the Chiefs at 37/1. Given how the Chiefs fell off late in the season, as well as how easily the Colts handled them in Kansas City just a few weeks ago, Indy is the favorite.

(6) San Diego Chargers @ (3) Cincinnati Bengals
At 17/1, the Bengals now have the 6th best overall odds to win the Super Bowl following a 5-1 finish to the season. They have to be considered a strong favorite to knock out San Diego.

TBA @ (1) Denver Broncos
If the preceding match-ups play out as predicted, this match would see the Colts facing a Broncos team with 3/1 odds to win it all. Indy may be one of the only teams to have beaten the Broncos, but in Denver, with Peyton Manning’s offense as hot as it is, the Broncos are heavy favorites.

TBA @ (2) New England Patriots
That would leave the Bengals facing off with the Pats (9/1 odds) in what would be an interesting game. Tom Brady is always a good bet in the playoffs, and with Julian Edelman looking more and more like Wes Welker, the Pats’ offense may be at its best. However, if you’re picking an upset anywhere, the Bengals may be an interesting team to take here.

NFC PLAYOFF PICTURE

(5) San Francisco 49ers @ (4) Green Bay Packers
San Francisco has 10/1 odds to win it all, next to Green Bay’s 22/1 long shot, but due to the strangeness of playoff seeding this game will be in Green Bay. That’s always dangerous, but the 49ers have been strong on the road all season, losing only to Seattle and New Orleans – arguably the two strongest home teams.

(6) New Orleans Saints @ (3) Philadelphia Eagles
Road games are trouble for the Saints, and with the teams at just about even odds – 26/1 for the Saints, and 24/1 for the Eagles – this one should be close. In Philly, that gives the Eagles a slight edge.

TBA @ (1) Seattle Seahawks
If games play out as discussed above, the 49ers would be traveling to Seattle, where they simply haven’t played well in the past couple of seasons. This is budding into a strong rivalry, but we’d give Seattle (with the best odds to win the Super Bowl at 14/5) the nod.

TBA @ (2) Carolina Panthers
Eagles @ Panthers would be an enjoyable game, but the Panthers, with 9/1 Super Bowl odds, ought to have the defense to stop the Eagles, or for that matter anyone else that might get through.

Of course, anything could happen in the end. But the way things are slated, the teams with first round byes look well poised to advance to the semi-finals, with New England perhaps being the most vulnerable should they face Cincinnati. Whatever the case, we’re in for some great football!

Do you like american football? Want to get more exercise? Don’t fancy the idea of a crippling injury? Then flag football just might be for you! Flag is a faster-paced non-contact version of the game in which instead of tackling people you have to strip a flag from their waist. No blocking or kicking either – so you have to move fast!

The Leeds Tornadoes flag football team is starting in January and are now looking for people to get involved, either as players or as coaches, volunteers, cheerleaders and fans. You can sign up to the mailing list on their website or find them on Facebook.