London 2012 Olympics diary: athletes help Mark Ronson find his rhythm

Duet: Mark Ronson with Russian 400m runner Kseniya Vdovina

DJ and producer Mark Ronson,  famed for producing Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen, has collaborated with Katy B for Coca Cola's Olympic campaign.

Ronson recorded sounds athletes make, including the click clack of the ball hit by British table tennis player Darius Knight.

"But the sounds Darius creates, his grunts squeals and stuff are unusual and great," said Ronson, who has just one athlete left to record, the US hurdler David Oliver.

Ronson said he tempted Russian 400m runner Kseniya Vdovina onto a treadmill so he could accurately record her heartbeat at 120 beats per minute, the speed of the soundtrack.

Ronson said interesting sounds emanated from Mexican taekwondo athlete Maria Espinoza "when she kicks the crap out of people".

Coke erected a huge stage in the carpark of Forman's Fish Island, with the Olympic stadium as a backdrop, for the filming of a documentary about the ad. But no dieters here. Coke bottles and cans were everywhere, with the Diet Coke hidden out of sight.

Secret swim

Next Friday the British swim team members will have a swim in the Olympic Aquaticc Centre. But don't tell anybody. London olympic officials have told the swimmers the event is "top secret".

Televised? To who?

I'm just wondering what the Transport for London managing director Leon Daniels was doing during the Olympic road cycling test event.

Daniels has told the London Assembly that the event "was also a large,televised international event… it provided a number of benfits, not least of which was highlighting London as a cycling city to the world".

As Telegraph Sport readers know, the event wasn't televised anywhere except a few highlights a week later on the BBC.

Sky TV was specifically refused permission to film the race. Daniels also claimed "there was some very localised congestion".. but said it was "managed and minimised".

Hmm, some Surrey drivers stuck in five mile queues for five hours might beg to differ.

Drug cheats airbrushed from Games

LaShawn Merritt, the American runner infamous for use a 'male enhancement product' and testing positive to drugs will discover next Thursday if his appeal against the IOC's mandatory four year ban to the Court of Arbitration for Sport is successful.

If so, Britain's own drug users like David Millar and Dwain Chambers could stage their own legal battle to have the British Olympic Association's life ban similarly disregarded.

Still, that won't help Linford Christie's persona non grata status around Olympic circles. Locog chairman Sebastian Coe has a strict drug-free association for anyone working on the Games.

TV rules OK

What are the chances distance running great Haile Gebrselassie will force a re-think on the start time of the London 2012 Olympic marathon? Gebrselassie wants it two hours earlier at 9am, but broadcasters say that's way too early for the prime US audience.

What TV wants, TV gets: remember the bizarre morning finals for the swimming at the Beijing Olympics?

England's green and pleasant land

Fields In Trust, the authority that oversees the 471 King George's Fields across the country, is looking to expand the numbers of protected national playing fields, trails, play areas and gardens to a total of 2012 to honour the Queen Elizabeth II's diamond jubilee and the London Olympics.

Olympic legal sponsor Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer is helping to formalise the deals.

Day of destiny for 2017 bid

The world athletics body IAAF will be in London next week, running their eye over the city's bid to host the 2017 world track and field championships and signing off the red-coloured athletics track that has been laid at the Olympic stadium.

No surprise the Mayor of London Boris Johnson wanted an immediate response from Tottenham Hotspur to accept a £17 million funding package and drop their legal action against the Olympic Park Legacy Company.

The continual court threats are weighing heavily against the athletics bid.

Bill Plaschke: Baseball has its greatest regular-season finish

 

It was 180 days boiled into 180 seconds.

It gurgled with drama and popped with passion and when it ended, folks were wiping the steam from their eyes and wondering, really, truly, did that just happen?

The last night of the 2011 baseball regular season Wednesday may have been the greatest single night of any baseball regular season. It was two playoff wild-card spots won in final at-bats that cemented the two greatest collapses in baseball history. It was one of those spots won and lost by two separate teams in two separate games in a span of three minutes.

It was a night of gasping and groaning and frantic texting and nutty tweeting and shouting out loud in front of giant televisions all across America. It was a night filled with the sort of riveting emotion that only baseball at its best can still provide and when it ended, Evan Longoria, home-run hitting hero of the playoff-bound Tampa Bay Rays, stood dazed in front of a camera and spoke about the perfect storm that encapsulated an ancient culture.

"It was like we were out there for five hours ... then everything happened in a matter of seconds,"  he said.

How did it end? How do we start?

It was one of baseball’s most historically choking franchises gagging again, in the ninth inning, with two out and nobody on base and their veteran closer protecting a one-run lead against the Baltimore Orioles. The Boston Red Sox were 77-0 in those situations this season before Wednesday, then Jonathan Papelbon lost it and Carl Crawford blew it and the whole lot of them crumbled into history.

Three minutes later and about 1,000 miles away -- yeah, just three minutes -- it was one of baseball’s most delightful franchises stunning again, overcoming a 7-0 deficit to the best team in baseball. The Tampa Bay Rays tied the New York Yankees with a two-strike, two-out homer in the ninth by a guy who had not hit one in five months -- Dan Johnson, I believe -- then they won  three innings later and danced into October.

Wait. It was more. It was much more. It was screaming-in-the-dugout, hands-buried-in-faces more.
In the other league, it was a young and exhausted Atlanta Braves team finishing baseball’s second-biggest collapse by also blowing not only an 8 ½-game wild-card lead in September, but completing the dive by blowing a one-run lead in the ninth inning to the Philadelphia Phillies with star rookie Craig Kimbrel on the mound. The game was so overwhelming for the young Braves, their veteran Chipper Jones actually gave them a football-style pep talk in the dugout before the game. He then grew even grayer watching them run themselves out of big innings and pitch their way into a long winter.

Finally, earlier in the night, about 800 miles away, it was the St. Louis Cardinals racking up their biggest first inning of the season with five runs that pushed them into the sneakiest October entry in recent memory. I thought Tony LaRussa had retired. I thought Albert Pujols had left town. How do they keep doing it?

Walter Payton battled drugs, suicidal thoughts, new book says

 
Hall of Fame running back Walter Payton abused painkillers after he retired, contemplated suicide and struggled with depression, according to "Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton," a new book by longtime sportswriter Jeff Pearlman.

Pearlman says Payton used a cocktail of Tylenol and Vicodin, mainly for the physical pain that he felt after retiring from the NFL in 1987 as the league’s leading rusher.

Without football, he became deeply depressed.

‘‘Payton found himself burdened by a realization that had struck thousands of ex-athletes before him: I am bored out of my mind,’’ Pearlman writes. ‘‘When strangers asked, he talked about how thrilled he was to be free of the burdens of football.... The words were pure fantasy. He would miss it desperately. ‘He went from an abnormal existence as an athlete to a normal one,’ says [daughter] Brittney, now 26. ‘How does anyone do that?’’’

The book says he kept tanks of nitrous oxide in his garage. His longtime agent, Bud Holmes, and his executive assistant, Ginny Quirk, said they received suicide calls at all hours of the night in the mid-'90s.

At the 1993 Hall of Fame induction, Quirk said Payton brought both his wife, Connie, and his mistress.

"The introduction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame is supposed to be the greatest moment in his life," Quirk says. "And in truth, it was probably the worst. Four full days, and Lita and Connie were like two ships passing in the night. If Connie was scheduled to come late, I'd make sure Lita was there early. If Connie was there early, Lita would be there late. I can't describe the horror of that trip."

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Mike Ditka, Payton’s former coach, was upset by the revelations.

‘‘It’s pathetic, and I don’t want to talk about it,’’ he said.

 Payton died from a rare liver disease and bile duct cancer in 1999. The book goes on sale Oct. 4.

MORE:

With fast start, Lions finally join the club

Jets' Mark Sanchez not limited by broken nose

Plaschke-Simers video: Are the Chargers the best NFL team for L.A.?

 -- Melissa Rohlin

Photo: Walter Payton. Credit: Mike Eliason / Associated Press

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Carlos Tevez – a day in the life …

Man on fire: Carlos Tevez ain't gonna take it no more. Photo: AFP/Getty

(A day in the life of Manchester City's rebel without a clue, as mistranslated by an evil journalist)

I am wake early, and am having nice afternoon sitting in the kitchen designing a new range of snoods and talking to butler. I like butler; sometimes I think he is only one that understand me.

The wife comes in; she look angry. This could be trouble – I don’t want her to make me move countries again. She say to butler that someone is ringing at the front door bell for many minutes and why can butler not go answer the door like he is paid to do?

I look at butler. Butler look at me.

I know I have to take a stands. I put down my snood-designing crayon.

“No way,” I say. “It’s not your place to tell butler where to come and go. I like him here in kitchen with me. We are drawing picture of snood and deciding which watch to buy today.”

I show her design of latest snood: the Tévez Freedom Fighter snood. Is picture of me and Eva Peron fighting together against injustice (represented by Mancini dressed up as the forces of oppression in a dirty scarf).

She look at picture with sneer of disgust; like Sir Ferguson when I tell him I need more pay-rise to pay for fashionable clothes and fleet of cars befitting a man of my position.

My wife says this is ridiculous and that we pay butler so we can tell him to go and do things. She says it is bad enough that she cannot get a decent empanada for love nor money in Alderley Edge, and now she cannot tell the servants what to do?

I will prove her that I am the boss around here. To make my point, I start crying until she says butler can stay.

When I am stop crying, she say: “Okay Carlos. You go answer the door yourself then.”

No way. I am not warmed up properly for that. I go to sit over by breakfast bar and avoid her gazes. This is the time for me to say “No más”. Her request is totally unreasonable.

LATER Wife is still angry and she has been on phone to Mancini. I am been exiled to sit in garden with gardener. I do not like gardener; he has little interest in snoods. I expect we shall have to move to Italy.

N.F.L. Game Probabilities Are Back, With One Adjustment

Game predictions are back for 2011. As always, the probability model is based on passing, running, turnovers and penalty efficiency. But now, running is represented by Success Rate (SR) rather than Yards Per Carry (YPC). SR is the percentage of runs in which the a team’s point expectancy (based on down, distance and yard line) has improved.

SR correlates far better than YPC with winning games. YPC is too susceptible to a handful of relatively rare breakaway runs. I think of running as a jab and passing as a cross or uppercut. The jab is a low-risk punch that doesn’t expose your defenses, keeps your opponent off balance and guessing, and keeps him from purely defending against your cross. A good jab is a prerequisite, but the cross is what scores points and wins bouts.

Running can be more than that, of course. It’s essential in short yardage and inside the red zone. And when team has a lead, it burns clock and helps keep the ball out of an opponent’s hands in the fourth quarter. I believe the revised model captures this aspect of the running game and better reflects the true inner workings of the sport.

For new readers, here is refresher on how the model works. A logistic regression is fed net Yards Per Attempt (YPA), run SR, and interception rates on both offense and defense, plus offensive fumble rate. Team penalty rates (penalty yards per play) and home field advantage are also included. These particular statistics are selected because they are predictive of future outcomes, not because they explain past wins. This is a distinction overlooked by nearly all experts. Sometimes less really is more when it comes to predictions.

For example, turnover rates explain past outcomes very well, but a relatively small part of turnover rates carry forward and predict future outcomes. If a team has a very low interception rate of 1.2 percent, how likely are they to continue the season with so few interceptions? Chances are they will remain better than average, but not nearly as low as 1.2 percent. This concept is known as regression to the mean, and it’s essential for good predictions.

“Logistic regression” might sound like just mathy mumbo-jumbo, but don’t let it scare you off. The regression uses data from recent N.F.L. seasons to tell us how each facet of team performance is best weighted to predict which team will win a game. Each team variable is regressed again to account for how reliable each particular facet is throughout a season. In other words, the stats vary in terms of how consistent they are from game to game. For example, offensive passing efficiency is most consistent, and turnover rates are least consistent.

Lastly, the model adjusts for each team’s previous opponent strength. This is an especially important consideration early in the season, when some teams have only played weaker teams, and some have had to struggle against solid opponents. As the season wears on, strength of schedule will tend to even out, but never completely.

The predictions sometimes challenge our preconceived intuitions about games. If you knew nothing else about N.F.L. teams except for how well they’ve played so far this season, this is how you would want to handicap the games. Of course, we do know more than what we’ve seen the past three weeks. Sometimes that’s helpful, but at least as often it clouds our minds with bias.

For instance, this week it says Oakland should be favored to beat New England. Do I personally believe the perennial laughing stock Raiders are really better than the perennial A.F.C. East champion Patriots? Maybe not. But the model is telling us something to pay attention to. It’s saying: “Look deeper at the numbers that really matter. The Raiders might just be for real. The Patriots’ defense is just as vulnerable as they say.” So if you’re in an office pick ’em league and have to pick an upset, maybe this is the week to put your chips on Oakland.

An explanation of the principles behind the model and a detailed example of how it is calculated can be found here.

And now here are the game probabilities for Week 4:

Brian Burke, a former Navy pilot who has taken up the less dangerous hobby of N.F.L. statistical analysis, operates Advanced NFL Stats, a blog about football, math and human behavior.

Court case means doping history may not be airbrushed from London 2012

The Evening Standard’s Matthew Beard provides a timely reminder today that doping remain the most difficult issue for the Olympic movement. He reports that an imminent coffee-table book celebrating Britain’s greatest Olympians will not include Linford Christie, the 1992 100m champion.

The debate around Christie’s place in the Olympic pantheon has been well-rehearsed. Despite the fact that he failed a doping test long after his golden night in Barcelona, the British Olympic community is very slow to forgive. But it may not be able to airbrush more recent doping offenders from next summer’s Games if a crucial court ruling goes against them next week.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport is considering an appeal by reigning 400m champion LaShawn Merritt against the International Olympic Committee’s rule 45, which bans any athlete censured for more than six months from entering the next Olympic Games.

It announced this week that it will hand down its judgment next Thursday, October 6.

Merritt was banned for 21 months after failing a drugs test, an adverse finding that he blamed on his use of an off-the-shelf male-enhancement product, but is now competing again and won silver at the recent World Championships.

With the backing of the US Olympic Committee he is attempting to overturn the IOC rule so that he can run in London.

His argument is that the IOC rule is effectively a four-year ban, twice the two-years initially handed down in line with the WADA code, and it therefore constitutes double jeopardy.

All the soundings from the IOC in Lausanne and the athletics community are that CAS will find in Merritt’s favour.

So why does this matter to the British Olympic Association?

The BOA goes even further than the IOC, imposing a life ban from selection for Team GB on any banned athletes. This currently means that Dwayne Chambers, David Millar, a member of the outstanding British cycling team that propelled Mark Cavendish to the World Championships on Sunday and a member of the WADA athletes commission, are out of the running for London despite having served bans and being free to compete in non-Olympic events.

If CAS finds for Merritt the BOA’s byelaw, which has been successfully challenged by athletes including Christine Ohuruogu, will look more vulnerable than ever.

The question will then be whether any of these athletes has the will or the resources to challenge it. As well as legal obstacles they will face the court of public opinion, where we will discover whether the cherished 'Olympic values' stretch to accommodate human frailty, forgiveness and redemption. A personal view is that they should.

For Jets, Clamors of Doubt Are Familiar

After the Jets’ 45-3 loss to the Patriots last December, I wrote that no matter how successful the Jets were, the team’s doubters would never be far behind.

Welcome to the first such chapter of the 2011 season.

No one is questioning that the Jets’ 34-24 defeat at Oakland on Sunday qualifies as a bad loss. When you allow 234 rushing yards, no matter how the yards were accumulated, nothing positive can be drawn from it. The reasons behind how the big plays happened need to be addressed.

But the notion that the Jets are going to look at the schedule on the wall as if it were a bogeyman in the room? I wouldn’t count on that.

Worried about the Baltimore-New England 1-2 punch on the schedule in the next two weeks? Well, the Jets have been there and done that.

They opened the 2010 season with the same schedule under far more ominous circumstances. A bad loss by the Jets to Washington in the third preseason game in 2010 — the starters’ final preparation for the regular season — had many doubters saying that the Jets were not going to be ready for their tough early schedule. And Darrelle Revis was still a question mark because of his contract dispute. The Jets’ victory over the Patriots in Week 2 righted the ship and pushed the doubters aside until later in the season.

For the Jets, sometimes going back to the drawing board is as simple as going back to basics. For a reminder of what that means, here is another look at what Rex Ryan laid out as his plan when he was introduced as the coach in January 2009.

So what are the Jets’ concerns? Here is a short list:

1) Sunday’s loss to Oakland was the Jets’ second straight defeat to a team whose stated goal was to out-physical them. The other was to Pittsburgh in last season’s A.F.C. championship game. For the Jets to get back on track, that cannot stand.

2) Avoid the mistakes on the road that serve to energize the home crowd and the home team. Against the Raiders, two such instances stood out. The first was Mark Sanchez’s ill-advised throw into the end zone at a well-covered Derrick Mason. The throw was intercepted, and it came one play after Jeremy Kerley’s electric 53-yard punt return. The other was the decision to go for the first down on 4th-and-2 at the Oakland 37 late in the third quarter. The Raiders had been playing on a long field the entire game — 7 of their 9 possessions had started from their 20-yard line or worse — and their fourth-down stop charged up the stadium. The Raiders followed with a four-play, 63-yard drive that gave them the lead for good.

Are the Jets overrated? Will their doubters have the final say? The Jets have been down this road before and lived to tell about it. Fifth Down readers can join the discussion on this and other topics with George Bretherton and Bret Leuthner tonight from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. Listen in or call in at  609-910-0687.