Re: Death porn, media, and socmedia

[Rich Kulawiec <rsk () gsp org>]

On Sat, Feb 13, 2010 at 03:25:56PM -0800, Rob, grandpa of Ryan, Trevor, Devon & Hannah wrote:
> The Olympics is increasingly involving "extreme" sports: exhilarating,
> not necessarily skilled, and dangerous.

As someone who participates in an "extreme" sport (whitewater kayak
racing) and who has been good enough to represent and medal for my
country in international competition, I think this is an oversimplification.

Equipment, technique, training and venues just keep getting better all
the time.  As a result, athletes are capable of doing incredible things
with reasonable safety margins -- things that would NOT have come with
those reasonable safety margins 10 or 20 years ago.

This is not to say that sometimes there aren't misteps: the wall
that was built overnight on that track should have been there before.
And this is not to say that there isn't a subtle underlying pressure
to make events more difficult: there is.  And there is of course the
ever-present crash-and-burn voyeurism among audiences: they want to
see the skier wipe-out, the ferocious middle linebacker hit, the whole
"agony of defeat" sequence.  And TV of course provides them with this.

But the biggest push for this comes from athletes themselves.  Having
competed against world champions, I can report first-hand that the gap
between them and the rest of us, even those of us who are pretty good
at what we do, is enormous.  They operate at levels that are so far
beyond anything we can reach that it's difficult to even grasp what
they're doing.  And they're constantly trying to push their own limits,
to do things that are near the edge of their abilities.

Sometimes they go too far.  Sometimes equipment fails.  Sometimes
venues have design or condition issues.  Sometimes it all goes wrong.
And when it does, the results can range from a spectacular-looking
but relatively innocuous crash (the ski-jumper in the "agony of defeat"
clip had a mild concussion) to career-ending injuries to death.

And in the aftermath, there are always questions and often recriminations.
Was the Whistler track too ambitious?  Should there have been more
training time for non-Canadian athletes?  Should the start have been
as high up as it was?  And so on.  I think that process is already
well underway and hopefully the athletes, coaches, trainers, organizers,
architects, etc. will arrive at a consensus understanding of what went
wrong, why it went wrong, and how to diminish the probability that
something similar will go wrong again.

---Rsk
_______________________________________________
Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts.
https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec
Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.