Sci-fi sport at the Enhanced Games, this week’s World Indoor Athletics Championships, innovative funding for grassroots clubs exercise our sport business columnist this week.
“Patient is able to move a mouse around the screen by just thinking.” Elon Musk last week hailed the successful planting of a computer chip into a brain by his Neuralink scientists. One step closer to a whole new dimension in augmented sporting reality.
In years to come, would you pay to watch sportspeople with implanted chips compete against others who have not undergone augmentation?
Conceptually, the advantages such technology could bestow are wide-ranging. Not just in mind sports such as chess or bridge, but physical activities requiring constant, real-time analysis of on-field odds and opportunities. We laud apparently instinctive team players, but what if instinct could be implanted?
It’s easy to say now that you or I might be repulsed at the prospect, but as technology develops and in time enters the medical mainstream, so any innate aversion we might have to its use in sport would likely wane.
The lines between a super-shoe in athletics, the latest swimsuit developments, cycling technology or managers’ touchline data analysis and tomorrow’s version of the Six Million Dollar Man are very blurry.
Would you pay to watch a heavily doped athlete try to break Usain Bolt’s 100m world record? Maybe you have already, without knowing it, given the continued challenge athletics faces in rooting out cheats. But an ‘in the open’ attempt?
That opportunity is fast approaching, with plans for the Enhanced Games gathering publicity, if not widespread public endorsement as yet from athletes themselves.
Organisers of the Enhanced Games claim to be backed by “the world’s top venture capitalists.” I’d like to see more of these VCs named.
It wouldn’t be entirely surprising, though, to find that there are investors prepared to test the boundaries of sporting science, congratulating themselves in a warped way on being libertarian medical explorers.
You can read the propaganda here. Right now, I like to think I won’t be tempted to tune in.
Vaulting ambition
Athletics has long had its short-form format. It’s just never worked out how to effectively capitalise on it.
This weekend’s World Indoors in Glasgow sold out in an instant, but media coverage ahead of the event has been sparse and some nations – including Great Britain on the men’s side – are sending pretty small teams. The USA is an honourable exception, supplying almost 10 per cent of the 750 competing athletes.
No matter. There will be great sport. I’m particularly looking forward to seeing British pole vaulter Molly Caudery in action.
Caudery has cleared a world leading 4.86m this year. Her’s is a notoriously difficult event, and especially hard to predict, but she could have a massive year ahead of her.
Her 4.86m would have won a medal at every Olympics since the women’s event was added in 2000. Three times it would have been gold.
As to the future of indoor track and field itself, World Athletics simply has to crank up the prize money on offer. Just $2.5m to reward all 26 events really doesn’t cut it in today’s elite sporting age.
Lure the world’s best with far bigger prizes and you’ll sell out larger venues and attract more eyeballs. A virtuous circle no less.
Molly Caudery is in action at the World Indoors this week
It begins near home
The National Lottery has a new operator, but Allwyn is not expected to shake up its format until 2025. British sport, heavily dependent on Lottery funding, will be hoping for a sharp upturn when it does after years of flat sales and given the ravages of inflation.
Local sport understandably struggles to dip directly into the Lottery pot, relying instead on member fees, fundraisers and small business sponsors. Economic conditions are no less challenging at grassroots, though.
Enter My Club Wins, a lottery designed for sports clubs. A monthly draw pays individual prizes that bob over £100 rather than into the millions, but returns a whopping 50 per cent of stakes from participating clubs’ members back to that same organisation.
Get a few dozen members and friends taking part and suddenly those new sight screens or goal posts are in reach. So far participating clubs number in the teens and organisers cite some with annual targets of raising £3,000. Transformative.
My Club Wins has no meaningful budget for advertising – after all, that 50 per cent return to clubs necessitates tight purse strings – but sometimes all a great idea needs is the oxygen of some publicity. Happy to oblige. You can find out all you need to know here.
Bookwormery
Readers stepped up after my request last week for sports novels that warrant adding to my, at that stage, very short list of favourites. How about this for a pick ‘n’ mix bookshelf?
Don DeLillo’s Underworld, revolving around a search for a game-winning baseball, or Bernard Malumud’s The Natural, billed to me as “ostensibly about baseball… a mystical work concerned with redemption via Arthurian mythology.”
The same sport is at the heart of Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel, described as “a messy attempt at magical realism but with a few good jokes.” More straightforward, if no less bonkers, is Paul Gallico’s Matilda, about a kangaroo who becomes a boxing world champ.
John Grisham tackles American football in Playing for Pizza, the tale of a washed-up quarterback who finds himself competing in Italy. Nathan Leamon, whose book explaining cricket tactics was featured in a previous colulmn, is the author of The Test: A Novel.
Jane Smiley’s Horse Heaven, is flagged by one follower of the turf; another plumps for some retro horse-racing fiction with Dick Francis’ canon (co-written with his wife Mary).
One reader, coming all over nostalgic, waxes lyrical about Martin Waddell’s Napper Goes for Goal that he read in his youth. Published by Puffin in 1981, you can find pre-loved copies for a few quid online.
Older still is Peter Lovesey’s 1970 Wobble to Death, whose plot features murder at a Victorian race-walking competition, and is still in print.
Final word goes to the reader who cites David Peace’s Red or Dead, a fictionalised account of Bill Shankly’s reign at Liverpool (Peace had a mention last week for his Brian Clough-inspired The Damned United). He signs off: “Mind you, hard to beat Roy of the Rovers.”
(Run), bike, swim
The only leg of a triathlon I could face is the run. But if cycling or swimming is your thing, I can strongly recommend two charity events, each run by friends of mine.
The Bagpuss Birthday Bikeathon is at the iconic Lydden Hill motor sport circuit in Kent on 19 May. Celebrating Bagpuss’s 50th birthday, the challenge is to complete up to 50 laps of the one mile track and raise funds for children’s hospice care in the process. You can find details and sign up here.
Swimathon takes place at over 400 pools on 26-28 April, with a variety of distances to challenge you, from 400m to a triple 5k, plus team events or the option to do your own thing at your local baths. Money raised goes to Cancer Research and Marie Curie as well as supporting the participating pools.
All info you need is here. Go on, you know you want to…
Ed Warner is chair of GB Wheelchair Rugby and writes his sport column at sportinc.substack.com