Category: uk

Wednesday ephemera

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Loads of things to write about but none of them deserving a full post of their own (although some other bloggers may disagree)?
It’s time for Wednesday ephemera!

Please feel free to while away your day with these links:

In a week that gave everywhere except Cape Town some snow, Windguru is predicting 10.2m seas and wind gusts of 91kph for the Mother City on Saturday | Nice wine | xkcd finally comes up with a way of stopping Michael Phelps | The 1% differences that gave TeamGB’s cyclists the edge at the Olympics | Great photos from Brian Micklethwait’s view from the train | And via that, the “battery-shaped” tower that uses less electricity | Batman doesn’t need to hear about Gauteng’s weather again | Data analysis of Star Trek deaths illustrates danger of wearing a red shirt | Baby octopuseseseses | How to make tiny rockets from matches | How big is the moon, really? | Hyperdecant your red wine (really?) | What your suitcase sees post check-in | Following the reindeer by Evgenia Arbugaeva

Please email me with any suggestions for the next ephemera post.

Big Boys

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I was reading this article (which I linked to from here) when I spotted this article and I thought it was worth a look.

Ricardo Blas Jr: Competing in the +100kg judo, Blas Jr. is a whopping 34st5lbs – more than 10st heavier than any other athlete in the whole Olympics and 6st10lbs heavier than the entire Japanese women’s gymnastics team put together.

They make them big in Guam.

Popping that into metric for you, Blas Jr’s page on the official London 2012 Android app states that he is 185cm in height and… er… 218kg. That’s 63kg heavier than the 203cm tall Rafael Silva of Brazil (also a judo competitor), who is just a puny 155kg. Pfft.

And talking of that Japanese women’s gymnastics team, step forward Asuka Teramoto in that Japanese team: 21 years old, 136cm tall and 30kg. So less than one seventh the weight of Blas Jr and about 4kg heavier than my 6 year old son.

Now that their respective events have been completed, I would pay big bucks to see Blas Jr and Teramoto swap sports for an entertaining demonstration session.
Please could someone make this happen and have the necessary medical personnel on standby?

Thanks in advance.

Also – read about the oldest 2012 Olympian here.

This is incredible…

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Mrs 6000 keeps chucking random Olympics questions at me, pub quiz style.

Many of these I can answer straight off:

“Gold medals are only 1.34% gold”
“Because he swam faster than the other bloke”
“Red at the top”, and
“That’s the Queen” etc etc.

Then last night, she popped the old “Who’s the oldest competitor at the 2012 Olympics?” one at me.

Fortunately, I was able to consult Dave Google and quickly come up with the answer:

Hiroshi Hoketsu, who will represent Japan in the equestrian discipline of dressage at the age of 71 is the oldest competitor in the London 2012 Olympics.

He’s 71. Seventy one. Imagine what the 71 year olds you know are doing during the Olympics. Knitting? Visiting the doctor? Hell, if they can walk unaided to the shops, they’re doing ok.

And his story is amazing. He hasn’t seen Motoko, his wife, for over a year, because he lives and trains in Germany and she lives back in Japan.

It is difficult to be away from home for this long as an old man and I owe everything to her patience and understanding.

But this isn’t his first Olympics – it’s his third. His first, incredibly, was in Tokyo back in 1964 – a full 48 years ago. That, in case you are numerically challenged, is the same as SA swimmer Chad le Clos still competing in the 2060 Olympics. Wor Chad would be 68 by then, so still not quite matching Hoketsu’s age.

This will probably be Hoketsu’s last Olympics:

My wife would like for this to be my last year of competition and that will probably be the case. But I still feel my riding is improving, little by little. That is my motivation. I am a better rider at 70 than I was at 40. Most people can’t tell but my body is getting a little weaker. My horse knows it and she helps me.

But if he did make it to Rio in 2016, he would beat the record of Swedish shooter Oscar Swahn, who won bronze at the age of 72 at the 1920 Antwerp Games.

I know that a 75 year old competing in the Olympics seems a little far-fetched, but if you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have said the same about a 71 year old.

I needed that…

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Back to Cape Town and back home after a couple of days at the cottage and I have realised that I needed a break there to remind me that this is a good country to live in.

Don’t get me wrong. SA is my home. My house is here, my wife and kids were born here and I have settled in like a duck settling into water (big splash, few ruffled feathers, some soggy bread). And I love it here. But coming back from our recent visit to the UK, I was again reminded about the thing I don’t enjoy in SA: the lack of personal freedom. (and the fast internet – Ed.)

Even living (as we do) in a leafy, decent suburb, people are uneasy about going out at night. While we were in the UK, wandering up the road to the pub each evening was great. Here, the roads are poorly lit, the standard of driving is poor, especially in the evenings and the chances of being mugged are unnecessarily high. We all live and exist behind great big, high walls and I miss the freedom that living in the UK gives you.

But that’s in the city. Down in Agulhas, things are so much more open. No walls, no electric fences. (I hope I’m not giving the burglars helpful information here.) I needed to be reminded that this can happen here. And we made the most of it. Beach, braai, beer. Brilliant.

It reset my system and I am at peace again.