When you think you have seen everything

As my regular readers certainly have noticed I am a great fan of the south-African sport physiologist Ross Tucker and from time to time I go through his tweets, in order to catch up. This time I was looking for news on the transgender front (more on this in some future post) and stumbled upon something I could not even imagine would have existed. 

The key word is "transage". Here is a summary of what is meant by this. (Apparently the non-transage situation is not cis-age, as in the case of gender, by chrono-age. Well, live and learn).

In the urban dictionary, where I looked up the term transage, they write "Transage is NOT [emphasis in the original] a term used to justify the abuse of children. The term has never been used this way by real transage people". (I, somehow, am not convinced by this last statement. "Never" is too strong a word and should not be used lightly).

Transage activists claim that age is a social construct and, according to them, transage individuals need to be accepted into society. This started with transgenderism. First transgender people claimed that they should be allowed to use any toilet room they liked. And the whole thing mushroomed to the point that it is now frowned upon to speak about pregnant women. 

I don't really care about what people are doing with themselves. If they feel more at ease with a sex different than the one they were born into, well, why not. But there is a line that I draw somewhere and I have a zero-tolerance on this point: men who transition to women should never be allowed to participate in sports as women.

And, if transage people feel that their age is not their "chrono" one, well, in for a penny in for a pound: let them behave as toddlers or nonagenarians if they feel like. But, again sports, are a no-no. Otherwise we could have a 25 year old transage person decide that he is 18 and demand that he be allowed to compete in the U20 category. Or declare that he feels like 60 and vie for the world title in the corresponding master's age group.

And of course some transage people fluctuate between ages, so what is there to prevent somebody to compete both as a junior and as a master. We live, alas, in an era where the idea that things can be objective and are not a matter of personal decision is considered totally "passée". So, since we should not presume an advantage (as per the IOC guidance), let us welcome the future transage champions. 

The Allen incident or how I always hate milliseconds

The 110 m hurdles race final in the recent Oregon-22 World Championships was marred by a no-show (of none other than the current olympic champion H. Parchment) and two disqualifications. S. Brathwaite was disqualified after the race: he hit the 6th hurdle, lost his equilibrium and could not jump over the 7th one. Unfortunately for him, he was fighting for the bronze medal at that moment. But what came as a shock was the disqualification of D. Allen for false start. Allen had run an amazing 12.84 s in June (third performance ever) making him de facto a favourite for a medal, a medal that had barely escaped him in the Tokyo Olympics the previous year. Allen protested and I was intrigued by the fact that he insisted even after he was shown his anticipated start. And then people started talking about what happened, I went back to the official results and the explanation was waiting there. Once again, the witless insistence of World Athletics to attribute credibility to milliseconds was the culprit. Before I give any analysis, please look at the video and see for yourselves what is taking place. 

Can you assert that Allen anticipated his start? Certainly not. Now, please have a look at the official results. The technical rule in question states that there is a false start when the reaction time of the athlete is less than 0.100 second. (The three decimal places  would imply, at least to my physicist's eye, that a precision of a millisecond is taken into account in the reaction-time measurement). And Allen's reaction time was 0.099 s, one millisecond smaller than the accepted one. 

Now, some specialists claimed that the cut-off has to be somewhere and if the reaction-time is below the cut-off then there is a false start. There are two answers to this. The first had to do with the "below the cut-off" and the second with the "cut-off" itself. The automatic system for the detection of the reaction time is a physical apparatus and, as such, prone to measurement errors. Obviously the apparatus is calibrated at the beginning of the competition and probably regularly checked. But is there any guarantee that the measurements are systematically precise with a precision better than 0.001 s, throughout the competition? I seriously doubt that. Believing that an apparatus always gives accurate answers is something that would garner a "fail" for any Physics student. And World Athletics does just this: they tell the judges to close their eyes and believe whatever number the apparatus is spewing out.

At this point you may ask yourself what is there to be done if we start mistrusting the accuracy of the apparatuses. I will come back to this in a moment but, before, let us see what happened in Allen's semifinal. Here are the official results. 

And this time Allen's reaction time was 0.101 s. Since it was above 0.1 s everything was OK. So the first conclusion is that Allen is a great starter. But is he the only one? P.J. Vazel made an interesting study and it turns out that the number of excellent starters is increasing. And the rules must take this into account. 

The problem is that the 100 ms cut-off is a convention based on competition recordings performed in the 60s and not a scientific finding. It was adopted by the IAAF in 1989 and is remains in effect since then. Is World Athletics aware of the problem? Absolutely. In fact a IAAF-sponsored study by a Finnish team showed that auditory reactions can be as fast as 80 ms. They concluded that the cut-off time for false starts should be lowered to 80 or 85 ms. In an independent study Van Hooren reached the conclusion that, theoretically, it is possible to react within 84 ms to the start signal and, while it takes longer to exert the necessary pressure (25 kg of force) in order to trigger the start detection plate, reaction times faster than 100 ms are physiologically possible. 

So this is the answer. It suffices to lower the false-start cut-off to 85 ms. Thus an imprecision of the order of 1-2 ms in the measurement will not be crucial (and thus we can forget those pesky milliseconds) and the cut-off value is low enough in order to accommodate even the best starters of today (and certainly of tomorrow). On the other hand a real false starter will still be caught by the system, and, although there will be some athletes disqualified with a 84 ms reaction, nobody will find this too harsh a judgement.

While researching this article I stumbled upon a statement by a respected athletics writer who claimed that "the only rule that makes sense has to rely on the tech, not subjective human judgement". And this made me think of the absurdity of the race-walking definition where the official rules stipulate that:

Race Walking is a progression of steps so taken that the walker makes contact with the ground, so that no visible (to the human eye) loss of contact occurs.

I added emphasis on the "to the human eye" part of the rule. This illustrates the deep inconsistency of the World Athletics attitude. On the one hand decisions are based on the eminently fallible human eye and on the other they rely on equipment trusted to millisecond precision. And to add insult to injury the two are combined in the ridiculous use of photo-finish (where a judge must decide where the neck stops and the torso starts with cm accuracy) in order to decide with millisecond precision on classifications in the name of the absurd notion that a tie must be broken, sometimes even accross different heats (while in other cases two medals of the same colour are awarded to athletes with different performances).

de Coubertin's successor, Baillet-Latour: much of a muchness

I was planning for quite some time to write an article on Count Henri Baillet-Latour, in fact since I did some research on him in order to include him in my Gallery of Shame. And I was postponing this enterprise till I stumbled upon a book by F. Carpentier, entitled "Le Comité International Olympique en Crises", where she talks about the presidency of Baillet-Latour. The book is based on her PhD thesis. It is a typical historian's work where the facts are given with only minimal committed position. Reading it one learns what happened but the image of Baillet-Latour emerging from the writings is a rather neutral one. Of course, the author having had privileged access to the IOC archives, could not assume a polemic stance and denounce Baillet-Latour for what he was, a misogynist, nazi-sympathiser and a pure de Coubertin disciple, governing the IOC with scheming and autocratic decisions. I, on the other hand, do not have any scruples.

But let us start at the beginning. De Coubertin was not the first president of the IOC and Baillet-Latour is not the second and in fact not really the third. When de Coubertin launched the idea of the revival of Olympic Games he did not create an Olympic Committee but a Committee for the organisation of Olympic Games. And the president was to be selected among the persons representing the city where the next Games would be held. He was convinced that the first Games would be held in Paris in 1900. But he was not counting with the Greek. The idea of the olympic revival had sprouted in Greece and already the Zappas Olympics (sponsored by E. Zappas) had taken place in 1859, 1870, 1875 and 1888. After the ones of 1888 it was decided that they would be held every four years (but the ones of 1892 were scrapped because of lack of funds, a classical greek situation). Upon learning of de Coubertin's project, Fokianos, who was at that time president of the Panhellenic Athletic Club, asked D. Vikelas, a rich merchant and writer, who was living in Paris, to take part in de Coubertin's congress. Vikelas pleaded successfully the cause of Greece and the congress decided that the first Games of the modern era were going to be held in Athens in 1896. So Vikelas was named president of the Olympic Committee. Of course after the 1896 Games, de Coubertin modified the statutes of the IOC and rose to the presidency, where he would remain till 1925. But, yes there is a small almost unknown "but". During the war and fearing the invasion of France by Germany, de Coubertin transferred the headquarters of the IOC to Lausanne and entrusted the presidency to Godefroy de Blonay (another baron) who was thus interim president from 1915 to 1918. (Of course the name of de Blonay does not appear anywhere in the official history of the IOC).

In a curious move, de Coubertin, after having assigned the 1924 and 1928 Olympics to Paris and Amsterdam, proposed the creation of an Executive Board. De Blonay was going to head it but somehow clouds have been gathering over his relation to de Coubertin. In the end he found himself a simple member, Baillet-Latour assuming the chairman's position. It is funny that the photo on the cover of Carpentier's book appears on the site of the IOC but no names are given. I had to figure them out by cross-referencing and I got the confirmation when I obtained Carpentier's book. So, from left to right, Lewald (he was the one I could not identify), Kentish, de Blonay, Baillet-latour, Edström, de Polignac and Derbez, the later being the secretary of the IOC. (Kentish, a British army general, was soon evicted from the Executive Board after he dared suggest that the IOC establish contacts with the Soviet Union). 

De Blonay was the natural choice for succeeding to de Coubertin but he had a fall-out with him and was pushed aside. So Baillet-Latour was elected, a count succeeding to a baron. I already wrote about Baillet-Latour and his attitude concerning women's sports. What is really amazing is that, on the page the IOC devotes to him, there is a detailed account of his moves to sabotage women's sports in the Olympics.

(And we'll be coming back later on the events summarised in just two lines at the end of the page).

Faithful to his noble origins, Baillet-Latour managed the IOC in an autocratic way. He reinforced the power of the Executive Board which became the governing oligarchy of the IOC. People who did not agree with the president found themselves forced to resign. The story of commodore Jahncke is instructive. When he was nominated secretary of the US Navy he presented his resignation to the IOC, which was not accepted. A few year later when Jahncke declared himself in favour of a US boycott of the 1936, Berlin, Games. Baillet-Latour asked for his resignation. But this time Jahncke refused. Well, no problem. He was expelled from the IOC during the 1936 session held in Garmisch-Partenkirchen (on the occasion of the winter 1936 Games). 

Baillet-Latour, just as his predecessor and the ones who succeeded him till the 80s was contaminated by the anachronistic ideas of amateur sport. But this is a vast theme and better be left for some other article. Anyhow, Baillet-Latour entered in a direct conflict with, FIFA, the football federation, and with the tennis federation with as a result tennis not figuring in the olympic program till 1988.

But the most crucial point in Baillet-Latour's career was that of the Berlin 1936 Olympics. Berlin was selected over Barcelona in a voting procedure which was far from transparent. In fact those present at the meeting favoured Barcelona but the votes by correspondence, replying to Baillet-Latour's letter, did tip the scales. Baillet-Latour was elected for a second mandate in 1933. That was the year Hitler and the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei came to power in Germany. 

The question of maintaining the Games in Germany was immediately posed. Lewald, member of the Executive Board from 1926, who had worked towards the admission of Germany in the Olympics in 1928, was nominated president of the organising committee of the 1936 Games. In 1933 he was faced with expulsion because he had one jewish parent. The Americans lobbied in his favour and managed to delay this expulsion till 1938. But from 1933 onwards his role was just ceremonial. The question of jewish athletes became more and more urgent as in April 1933 the Reich Sports Office had ordered an "Aryans only" policy in all German athletics organisations. In practice this meant that it was not possible for the jewish athletes to train and thus their selection in the german national teams became practically impossible. 

With Hitler at the Olympic House in Garmisch-Partenkirchen

And Baillet-Latour in all this? He had received "guarantees" from the German government that german jews would be allowed to compete in german teams and for him that was enough. F. Carpentier in her book is of the opinion that Baillet-Latour has been duped by the germans. Alas, the truth is different. In a letter to Brundage, Baillet-Latour writes:

"I am not personally fond of jews and of the jewish influence, but I will not have them molested in no way  whatsoever. I know that they shout before there is a reason to do so and I have always been struck by the fact that all the horrors which took place in Russia for instance, much more barbarous than anything which took place in Germany, has never excited public opinion in the same way. Why? because the propaganda was not made as cleverly".

So, according to Baillet-Latour, the jews were scheming whiners and what was happening in Germany was well orchestrated by the jewish community. We know now that things were totally different. Anyhow the Garmisch and Berlin Games took place, with Baillet-Latour working hand in hand with the nazi regime. After the 1936 Olympic Games, he became an honorary member of Freude und Arbeit, the nazi sports organisation of German propaganda minister Goebbels. In 1938 he entrusted Germany with the publication of the official bulletin of the IOC. In June 1939, after Japan stepped back from the organisation of the 1940 Winter Games, the IOC selected Germany, a short time after the later had invaded Czechia. And Baillet-Latour was proud of this decision because ... "it showed the IOC's independence of political influences"! What is even more shocking is that his wife congratulated Hitler when he annexed the Sudetenland in 1938 and thanked Hitler "for bringing Nazi ideology to Belgium" when Germany invaded Belgium in 1940.

When Baillet-Latour died in 1942 Hitler sent a telegram with condolences, and Karl Ritter von Halt, member of the IOC, deposited on the casket a flower wreath in the name of Hitler.

You can see in my Gallery of Shame article a photo of the funeral with swastikas everywhere. The family was embarrassed and they decided that Baillet-Latour could not be buried in the family tomb but in the small cemetery of Latour. A museum was created by Baillet-Latour's nephew and inaugurated by J. Rogge, president of the IOC, in 2010. And in the museum, which retraces the history of the Baillet-Latour family, the photos of the 1942 funeral are nowhere to be seen.