Oliver Wright writes:

Humans have always been predisposed to gossip. French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville once said “If an American was condemned to confine his activity to his own affairs, he would be robbed of one half of his existence.” In this vein, celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher and Stephen Fry have done themselves no harm by revealing the minutiae of their day to day activities to the masses.

Celebrities, of course, usually have a slick PR machine on their side to ensure that potential pitfalls are avoided. The new wave of sports tweeters (twits, if you prefer), however, seem to lack this essential facility. Where the sporting media may have previously traded on snippets from a group of closely guarded sources, they can now rely upon a host of tweeters for a steady stream of bitesize stories.

These messages left on social networks and microblogging sites have the nasty habit of transforming tittle-tattle, hearsay, and rumour into cold, hard evidence – often supplied by the protagonist. Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen cyclist Lance Armstrong show his hot headed reactions to Alberto Contador’s comments on his teammates after the latter claimed the Tour de France’s yellow jersey. Also tweeting regularly (and with a little more restraint), was fellow cyclist Bradley Wiggins, who quashed media speculation regarding his team affiliations next year half way through the tour. After the tour’s epic climb up Mont Ventoux, he later paid tribute to Tom Simpson, a British rider who collapsed and died on the stage in 1967.

More recently, Australia’s Philip Hughes let slip that he had been dropped for the 3^rd Ashes test due to start that morning – inadvertently informing anyone studious enough to notice of Australia’s batting line up, which they didn’t have to divulge until much later. Darren Bent also fell foul to his emotions on twitter (and later apologised), perhaps leading us to be thankful that most footballers’ 140-character musings are usually confined to the pitch.

Of course, sportsmen and women aren’t the only ones adapting to new media. As politicians have taken to using Twitter, Whitehall has released a rather lengthy guide for ministers thinking of using the service, no doubt in a spirit of public dialogue. Thanks heavens that British caution is not shared abroad.

A guest post by Robert Stanier

The start of a new cricket season (at least in Britain) seems a good moment to mention one of my surprises of the close season – that Bob Woolmer’s huge book on the “Art and Science of Cricket” turned out not to be so much of a coaching manual (although it is), as a complete history of cricketing innovation.

Woolmer played cricket for Kent and England, and coached South Africa and Pakistan, and his book is a wonderful example of someone taking a subject they have deep knowledge of, and love, and completely re-thinking it. He draws on all sorts of fields of expertise, from psychology (visualisation techniques), to physics (reverse swing), to historical analysis (comparing Ian Botham’s tips on batting in 1980 with the Reverend James Pycroft’s in 1851), to statistics (there’s no advantage in winning the toss in a one day match, despite the conventional wisdom!), and fusing them together with his experience of being at the top of international sport.

Every ten pages or so, he comes up with something utterly new and original, even to a hardened fan such as myself. For example, he links Don Bradman’s career batting average (40 runs per innings more than anyone else in the history of the game) to the fact that Bradman never saw any cricket played until he was fifteen, and largely taught himself to bat by striking a ball against a fence in his back yard. No one ever got round to ‘correcting’ his technique – but it was all but impossible to copy.

More practically (for someone like me), he explains why for most batsmen the best guard to take is leg stump.

More importantly, even for a non-player:  it’s about taking a subject, completely rethinking it, and coming to utterly new conclusions. It’s a process that must be applicable in dozens of other fields. And this is a classic example.

This is probably the most important book on cricket in the last thirty years. Maybe longer.

Robert Stanier, now a vicar in London, is a former colleague. Thanks to Deewhy RSL Club in Sydney for the photograph.

Tom Ding writes:

At risk of sounding like a Christmas quiz, what do the pictures have in common? Answer: they all relate to the summer success of the British Olympic Cycling Team, marked so emphatically last Sunday when the cycling squad kept on winning, cleaning up all three main prizes at the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year Awards. (GB Cycling won team of the Year, Chris Hoy was voted Sports Personality of the Year, while Performance Director Dave Brailsford became Coach of the Year.)

As it happens, a couple of weeks earlier a few of us here at The Futures Company were fortunate enough to see Dave Brailsford speak. The evening was fascinating from start to finish, but four things stood out for me:

Only wanting half (Slim Pret)
When Brailsford first received lottery funding he was given a fixed budget to be split between forty athletes. He responded by saying that he would like all the money, but that he only had half that number of world-class (and potentially medal-winning) cyclists, and that he would split the cash between them instead. His belief that each of these athletes was a champion in the making allowed him to put them in charge of their own training regimes (marginalising some coaches in the process), and insist that internal targets would be emasured against controllable variables such as acceleration and time (the medals would take care of themselves). The single-mindedness of this approach seemed remarkable.

Chimp
I have heard of sportsmen relying on ‘mental boxes’ and ‘triggers’ to control emotion before, but not of a whole team adopting a common approach and language. Brailsford employed a psychiatrist to work with the squad and together they developed the notion of the ‘chimp’ – a codeword for any sort of emotional barrier or mental block. Each cyclist’s ‘chimp’ is personal and different, and the techniques they use to control it are their own, yet critically, it is also accepted that they all have one. In this way, trackside arguments and training failures could be put down to ‘the inner monkey’ and brushed aside.

Door Handles
The concept of ‘aggregating marginal gains’ in sport has also been seen before, but it has never been employed with such conviction: sure, British Cycling hired  Formula One engineers to model the aerodynamics of helmets and bikes, but Brailsford also had someone to continuously clean the door handles in the Olympic village lest germs should get into the camp.

Al Pacino
After hearing one of the very best coaches in the world reveal the extraordinary measures it takes to be the best, there was one piece of comfort for this less accomplished sportsman: it is good to know that even the most successful team in the country use this speech from Any Given Sunday to motivate themselves before the big day. At least my rugby team has been doing something right.

London Freewheel rolls down the Mall

Andrew Curry writes:

It was European Mobility Week last week, and London marked it with its second ‘Freewheel‘ event on Sunday. Quite a large area of the city centre (St James’ Park and the Embankment from Charing Cross to Tower Hill) was closed to motor vehicles; there were marshalled rides from feeder points around the city; and Sky Sports provided free hi-viz vests to anyone who wanted one. And during the course of the day around 50,000 cyclists turned out, helped by fine weather.

It brought to mind the idea that successful cities have to be both ‘magnets and glue’ (the phrase is Rosabeth Moss Kanter‘s). Magnets are the events and buildings which make a city prominent; glue is what makes people stay there. The first is high profile, the second more about locality and liveability (good parks, good schools). The first tends towards the spectacular, the second towards the participatory.

What’s interesting is the way in which London has used cycling to promote both. There have been the magnet events such as the stages of the Tour of Britain and the Grand Depart of the Tour de France. Freewheel, in contrast, is glue – a social day out. But it turns out that a lot of the skills which are needed overlap. The roads closed off last Sunday were almost the same as for the first stage of the Tour of Britain earlier this month. The marshalling skills are similar.

As well as wanting to stage events such as this, cities have to learn how to do it. London has scaled up over time (the first time it closed off city centre roads for cycling it shut down a small area around Whitehall). It’s part of a successful pro-cycling strategy which has seen cyclist commuter numbers double in the capital over the last five years.

Freewheel photos (c) Peter Curry 2008

Andrew Curry writes:

The combination of the FA Cup Final – the last for a while on the BBC – and the epically overhyped Champions’ League final on ITV sent me to some recent interesting data (above) from BMRB Sport. They measure both the total interested audience for sport on TV, and also a “passion index” which captures the quality of the audience, assessed by their level of interest in the sport. The passion index seems to me to be a reasonable proxy for ‘attention’ – that increasingly important, but often elusive, quality sought by traditional media owners.

Broadly, the passion index is higher for football, and doesn’t correlate strongly with overall audiences, which leads to the thought that commercial terrestrial broadcasters need both scale and passion to make their rights investment pay off, in terms of advertising and sponsorship revenues, whereas a public service broadcaster can justify its investment by the breadth of the audience. And with next season’s rights to Formula 1 moving to the BBC (ITV couldn’t afford both F1 and the FA Cup), the BBC’s sports properties, if you include the Premiership highlights on Match of the Day, now include five of the top seven sports by breadth of audience, but only one (those Premiership highlights again) by ‘quality’ or interest levels.

And there is some good news for the BBC here. According to BMRB, Formula 1 has climbed steadily in the popularity rankings over the last year, from seventh to fourth, on back of Lewis Hamilton’s successes.

I hope I’m not too late to note a fine article [not currently available on the Guardian's own site] by the Guardian’s Richard Williams on how England’s footballing Premiership has, in its plan for overseas league games, followed a global marketing blueprint first laid down by Formula One. Williams suggests the three steps to sporting franchise heaven go like this:

• Step One: Secure the commercial rights to the sport, including the right to sell broadcasting licences, income from which will dwarf the sale of tickets and perimeter advertising.
• Step Two: Use the television ratings to encourage the acquisition of teams by people more interested in global brands and markets than in the sport’s traditional audiences.
• Step Three: Clear out the traditional schedule to create new opportunities in new markets, if necessary by threatening to remove existing events completely.

Williams also suggests that there’s a fourth lesson that the Premiership’s Richard Scudamore has learnt as well:

“Saying the unsayable out loud is more than halfway to actually getting it done, as long as you have the money on your side and are prepared to take no prisoners.”

Given the money at stake, the current crowd of owners, and the track record of the Premiership over the last fifteen years, you wouldn’t bet against it pushing the plan through. But there are a couple of differences: formula one is still about individuals (we remember great drivers like Senna and Fangio), whereas football is about teams and their history. And football is far more rooted in place than motor racing ever was.