Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

More Than Simply Sport

The 2010 Winter Olympics are approaching fast, and news stories about it are beginning to appear more frequently. Trolling for Olympics-related news recently I noted several that deal with politics, community, and the social and business impacts of the games: petrochemical companies sponsoring the games hope to get "green" points with the public, even as they continue to support environmentally destructive tar sands mining in Alberta; NBC, which has an exclusive contract to broadcast the games on US television, expects to lose money on the deal, while the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is merely expecting to break even; renters have been evicted to make way for tourists; critics complain that the B.C. government is not using available resources to estimate the economic impact of the games; and Olympic tourists may be lucky enough to encounter Captain Condom, a superhero who will be on hand to encourage people to practice safer sex. Clearly there's a lot more going on here than sport. And it's nothing new for the Olympic Games to have a huge social impact.

The most famously controversial modern Olympics is probably the Berlin Games in 1936. Adolph Hitler's government placed great importance on the Games's ability to showcase the success of Nazi ideology and fortify Germany's place in the world scene – and German officials and amateur sports promoters went to great lengths to manipulate the International Olympic Committee to arrange the games to suit their purposes.  The United States and other countries considered boycotting the Berlin Games because of Nazi policies on racial purity, but Jewish athletes who had been prohibited from competition by the Nazis were compelled to compete for their country to prove Germany was playing fair, and the U.S. backed down. Spain, which had recently elected a left-wing government, did boycott the games, and they set up their own People's Olympiad, to be held in Barcelona. Guy Walters details the fascinating history of this unusual and complex chapter in modern Olympic history in his readable but detailed book Berlin Games: How the Nazis Stole the Olympic Dream. What I found most intriguing about Berlin Games, really, was how much the controversies of 1936 have been echoed by conflict and turmoil around more recent Olympiads.

David Maraniss argues that the 1960 games in Rome were a watershed Olympics, and the evidence he presents in his book Rome 1960 are pretty convincing. The 1960 Rome games ushered in the first Olympic doping scandal, the first commercially televised Summer Games, and the first apparel sponsorship contract for an Olympic athlete. Rome in the summer of 1960 was also a hotbed of international intrigue, with rumors of defections circulating everywhere and the intensity of cold war conflict rising sharply all the time. Maraniss's history offers a personal look into these questions (and many others more directly related to the actual sporting competitions) with information gleaned from dozens of interviews with athletes, coaches, journalists, and many other people whose work made the games happen – and on the whole it is quite a compelling story.

If you're wondering how the modern games compare to their ancient predecessors, check out The Naked Olympics. Tony Perrettet takes readers through the games chronologically, beginning with athletes' pre-games training, administrative and religious preparations before the games began, and spectators' journey to Olympia, and moving on to cover each stage of the festival and its aftermath. It's a lively, entertaining history, and Perrettet's focus on details (and the book's many illustrations) allow readers to get a sense for what it might have been like to actually have been present – at the sporting events, the religious ceremonies, and of course, at the parties and the political fights.

I can't leave you without recommending my favorite fictional Olympics story: Asterix at the Olympic Games, by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo. In this episode of the long-running comics series, Asterix and his companion Obelisk travel to Greece to compete for the Gauls in the Olympic Games – with the help of the magic potion created by their village Druid, Getafix, which makes them incredibly, ridiculously strong. Naturally this leads to a doping scandal (though our heroes comport themselves most honorably), and many pages are taken up with jokes and situation comedy at the expense of the self-righteous and irritating Romans. If you find this comic suits your reading tastes, there are many other Asterix and Obelisk books for you to enjoy!

Caster Semenya and the "Rules" of Gender

South African, middle-distance runner Caster Semenya has been embroiled in controversy these last few months. Last week Semenya withdrew from competition amid reports in the Australian media regarding leaked findings of a sex-determination test that implied Semenya, who had dominated the field running against women, has Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. Indicators of AIS include elevated testosterone and the presence of undescended testes. Semenya's success as a runner brings to light surprising limitations in our culture's conception of gender but this is not the first time that an athlete has faced such scrutiny. Indian runner Santhi Soundararajan tested positive for possessing a Y chromosome and was stripped of her silver medal from the 2006 Doha Asian Games. Soundararajan attempted suicide the following year. The International Olympic Committee banned genetic testing in 1999 but during the 1996 games in Atlanta eight women athletes tested positive for having a Y chromosome. Of those eight, seven had AIS and all were allowed to compete.

Gender is, of course, a complicated issue and as a construct it is difficult to contextualize. Matt Ridley's The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature succeeds mightily in comparing/contrasting human expressions of gender and sexuality to those found elsewhere in the animal kingdom. The book's title refers to the Red Queen's race in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass during which the Queen remarks, "it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." Ridley uses this analogy in explaining the advantage of sexual reproduction for individuals within a species as well as the constant evolutionary arms race that exists between species competing for resources in their shared environment. By using frequent examples from throughout the animal kingdom Ridley illustrates that our cultural concepts of gender and sexual reproduction are frequently much narrower than those recognized by science and expands these insights into valuable reflections on the nature of our behavior as a species.

Then again, if professor of genetics at the Institute of Molecular Medicine at Oxford University Bryan Sykes is correct, humans may not have to worry about gender issues in the future. In Adam's Curse: a Future Without Men he posits that within 125,000 years (not really that long by evolutionary standards) Homo sapiens may lose the Y chromosome entirely. Sykes describes the deterioration of the Y chromosome in dramatic terms and proposes that its diminishing stability may be responsible for increasing rates of infertility among men. Though the author has impressive academic credentials, this story of conflict and cooperation between mitochondrial DNA (which we all inherent from our mothers) and the Y chromosome (which males inherent from their fathers) is written in concise and entertaining prose. The central thesis of Adam's Curse may not come to fruition until well beyond our days but the science that Sykes describes in exploring this intriguing possibility has many applications in the present.

As much as the parent's genes may battle for expression in their child's body, sexual reproduction is still an altruistic (and very successful) process. How Sex Works: Why We Look, Smell, Taste, Feel, and Act the Way We Do by Dr. Sharon Moalem explores human sex from a practical, scientific vantage point and the results are a fascinating and revealing look at what makes us human using our sexuality as a lens. Moalem presents up to date research about human sexuality in a compelling and informative way and doesn't shy away from difficult issues (can twins have different fathers?) Competing theories are included in an effort to be as informative and honest as possible about the complexities of the issues at hand. Although How Sex Works enthralls with its detailing of the unseen machinations of our bodies, such as the development of the secondary sexual characteristics that we commonly use to distinguish the sexes, its greater import is to suggest how flexible our society may need to be if we are to acknowledge the gap between our cultural constructs of gender/sexuality and science's interpretation how and why we behave the way we do.

Altruism, Basketball and Competition

Jeremy Tyler, a talented basketball prospect from San Diego, CA has decided to forego his senior year of high school in order to play professional basketball in Europe. This is the latest development in a series of youth athlete's decisions that sidestep the NBA draft's age restrictions which call for players to be at least 19 and one year removed from high school at the time they are drafted. Some might see this as the latest assault on the innocence of youth by professional sport. Others might comment that Tyler's choice to play overseas is enabled by the economic power of his rare abilities and that if his dream is to play basketball professionally in the NBA, playing in the Euro-Leagues might be a better apprenticeship than playing college ball. Either way his choice says something about changes in our world as seen through the prism of sports.

Tyler's decision to play in Europe was guided by Sonny Vaccoro, the man who signed Michael Jordon to his first shoe contract with Nike, founded the Adidias ABDC basketball camp and a man who casts a long shadow over the Summer AAU basketball circuit that some blame for hastening the aforementioned loss of innocence in amateur basketball. Vaccoro's career provides the thread that Dan Wetzel and Don Yaeger follow in an effort to identify the major players in the growing corporate presence in amateur basketball in their book Sole Influence: Basketball, Corporate Greed, and the Corruption of America's Youth. Whether or not you agree with the premise of Influence, that the corporate race to find the next Michael Jordan has ruined youth basketball, Wetzel and Yaeger's book does a great job of illustrating the vicious competitive drive that has fueled profound changes in the world of amateur hoops.

Perhaps these ultra-competitive shoe company executives and AAU team coaches could perfect their craft with lessons learned from Richard Conniff's The Ape in the Corner Office: Understanding the Workplace Beast in All of Us. Conniff applies the questionable study of Evolutionary Psychology to the work place, a setting where many are looking for any edge that will help them get ahead. While animal driven metaphors are common place in the business environment (after all, it's better to be head of the pack than to be thrown to the dogs when they thin the herd) Conniff's witty and engaging style might make you reassess what you can do differently and/or better to get ahead or just not fall behind in these troubled economic times. Ape in the Corner is also set apart from other related books in that Conniff acknowledges the value of altruism, that is, the idea that helping others can be a way of helping yourself. This idea can be applied on any level of an organization, from individuals cooperating on a project to entire departments sharing resources. Come to think of it, this sort of cooperative competition might even be used to build better basketball teams!

Robert Wright takes the idea of examining and emphasizing the altruistic aspects of human nature to the extreme in his book Nonzero: the Logic of Human Destiny. The view he presents is that our increasingly interdependent global society is not just a positive expression of the benefits of an altruistic approach but is a more or less predictable result of the competitive advantages that altruism allows for participating parties. Further, Wright imagines that we may be soon arrive at a time when the complexities that intertwine our societies create an unprecedented moral stability. He proposes an unintentional but undeniable system of checks and balances that results in our collective experience of an unprecedented spiritual ballast. Nonzero's title is a reference to the game theory concept that not all exchanges can be characterized as one party losing while the other wins. For example, clearly Jeremy Tyler leaving the US to play professionally in Europe is a loss for college basketball here but if he has an enriching experience in Europe, represents his community well there and returns a better player and happier person then, in a sense, we all win.