I’m old enough to remember when the Carabao Cup was called the League Cup, and I’m (just) old enough to remember Newcastle United winning the Fairs Cup in 1969. I’m also old enough to remember countless cup final defeats, but I’m not old enough to remember the last time The Toon won a domestic trophy (the FA Cup in 1955), so today’s victory against Liverpool presents a unique opportunity to celebrate a Cup success. Even if it isn’t the most important piece of silverware, such an event is something I’d taken for granted I’d never be able to blog about!
Yesterday I watched the last round of matches in this years Six Nations rugby Championship so, as I did last year, I thought I would do a quick summary of the games and the competition as a whole.
In the first game yesterday, thanks largely to their own errors, Ireland struggled to beat a spirited Italian side in Rome 17-22. That put them briefly top of the table, but with fewer bonus points and a worse points difference than either England or France so needed both those teams to lose in order to win the Championship. Hope of that happening vanished quickly when England scored a try about 2 minutes into their game against Wales in Cardiff, quickly followed by another. England thereafter ran riot and won 68-14 taking them to the top. England did play well, but Wales were very poor. To be honest, I found the game a bit painful to watch. If it had been boxing the referee would have stopped the fight. Memories of the great Welsh teams of the past are very distant nowadays. It’s hard to see where they go from here, with their second successive Wooden Spoon.
Then it was time for the finale, France versus Scotland. I did think that France would win easily but Scotland gave it a good go, and were unlucky not to take a lead into half-time. They wilted in the second half, however, and France duly picked up a bonus point win and the Championship. They are worthy winners, and all credit to them.
(The atmosphere at the Stade de France last night was so raucous that I had difficulty hearing the commentators over the crowd noise. I find commentators rarely add much to the experience, so this isn’t a complaint. In fact, I think it would be good if TV broadcasts allowed the viewer to turn off the commentary but keep the sounds from the stadium.)
The only game France lost was against England on a rainy day at Twickenham on 8th February, a game I watched. France should really have won that game but made a ludicrous number of mistakes and lost by a single point at the death. But for that Les Bleus would have had a Grand Slam. Fair play to England for hanging on and showing great resilience. After an unconvincing start as the competition went on they got better and better, though they needed a slice of luck to beat Scotland 16-15 as Finn Russell missed a conversion that would have won the game.
Up until last week the only team able to do a Grand Slam was Ireland, but they were outplayed in Dublin by France who won 42-27. Sports journalists have a habit of seeing everything as either a triumph or a disaster, and the Irish media portrayed that as the latter. The way I see it is that Ireland’s rugby team reached a high-water mark with their Grand Slam two years ago since when a number of important players have retired. It’s been a time for reconstruction and rebuilding. This is the way of things. I remember Ireland beating France comfortably last season, but France came back strongly this year. At least Ireland collected another Triple Crown, beating England, Wales and Scotland.
After last night’s game I was reflecting on why I enjoy the Six Nations so much. I think it’s mainly because there are relatively few games so each one takes on a significance, either in the context of the Championship or because it represents a longstanding rivalry (e.g. the Calcutta Cup). The point is that there is real jeopardy attached to many of the games. Contrast this with the United Rugby Championship. The games featuring the Irish teams in this competition (Leinster, Munster, Connacht and Ulster) are broadcast free-to-air on television here and I watch quite a few of them. There are 16 teams in this competition, divided into four pools of four: each side plays the 15 others once, and an additional game against the other three in their pool, meaning 18 games per team. After 18 rounds, all that happens is that the bottom eight in the league table are eliminated and the top eight go into the knockout stage. Eighteen games is a long slog when all it does is eliminate half the teams, and it means that there’s much less at stake in individual matches. Still, now the Six Nations is over I’ll be watching the URC for the rest of the season, starting next weekend.
Yesterday (8th March 2025) was the 150th anniversary of the birth of Maurice Ravel and the National Symphony Orchestra celebrated it in fine fashion with all-Ravel programme for last night’s concert under the direction of guest conductor Speranza Scappucci (whose name aquired an extra p for the printed programme):
As you can see, it was basically a selection of Ravel’s greatest hits and there’s no surprise that the concert ended with a performance of Boléro, which is by no means the most interesting of Ravel’s compositions but is easily his most famous. Ravel himself said that `it has no music in it’, meaning that it doesn’t have any variation or thematic development or invention, but was written deliberately as an experiment to see how far he could get in writing a work that was entirely based on rhythm and repetition. The result was a smash hit and earned him a very great deal of money, but he grew to resent the fact that it was so much more popular than the other works he himself thought were much better. I know some people who hate this piece, but I think it’s great fun and always enjoy hearing it. Last night was no exception.
The composition of Boléro is so simple that even a non-musician like me can play it. It’s basically written in a slow 3/4 time signature on which is superimposed the following figure:
The second part is basically a repeat of the first, with the last two eighth notes replaced with triplet. The whole pattern consists of 24 notes. I once tried to count how many times it is repeated in a performance of Boléro, but gave up when I got to 100. I think it must be over 200 times. This figure is introduced first on a single snare drum, which carries on playing it for the duration, i.e. for about 15 minutes in total. As the piece develops the same pattern is picked up by various other instruments, either alone in combination. A second snare drum joins in too. The key to the piece is to keep this all very strictly in tempo, as the piece gradually gets louder.
As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, my Father was a (jazz) drummer. I remember once borrowing his snare drum and attempting to play along with a recording of Boléro. The pattern shown above is not that hard to play in itself, but it’s not as easy as you probably think to keep in tempo as you play it louder and louder. At the start it’s fine: you begin by tapping the sticks on the skin of the drum very close to the rim. To increase the volume you gradually move the point of impact closer to the centre of the drum, which naturally makes it louder. However, to get louder still you have to increase the distance the sticks move, and that makes it tougher to keep to tempo. Playing along at home is one thing, but playing the percussionist playing this in an orchestra must leave the drummer feeling very exposed. One mistake, any speeding up or slowing down, and the whole performance will be ruined. Percussionists very often have little to do for long passages in an orchestral work, but this takes it to the opposite extreme. It requires constant concentration, but no variation or embellishment is allowed. I suppose professional musicians just get into the zone and don’t think about the possibility of screwing up. Last night the task fell to Section Leader Rebecca Celebuski, who performed it flawlessly.
The bolero rhythm is just one element of the composition, of course. There is a melody, in two parts. The first simple and catchy, the second bluesier and a bit syncopated. Each part is played twice, passed around the instruments of the orchestra, first individually and then in combinations. Sometimes the melodic line is doubled, but there are no complicated harmonies and the piece stays in C major throughout, apart from a sudden change of key near the very end. The second part of the melody allows the musicians to release their inner jazz a bit, playing behind or across the beat to generate the feeling that the tune is trying to escape the confines of the incessant rhythm. As is the case in jazz, this sense of tension only works if the basic rhythm is kept strictly in tempo as the crescendo builds
The third element of the composition is the simplest of all, but I feel that it is very important in determining whether a performance of Boléro really rocks. That is a rhythmic pulse based on the three beats of the underlying 3/4. When they’re not playing the melody or shadowing the bolero pattern, the orchestra play this figure and it ends up being boomed out by the timpani in tremendous style but also as the piece progresses the stress shifts between the three beats as different instruments contribute.
I know it’s a familiar piece but I really enjoyed last night’s performance. I’ll also reiterate that as well as making a great sound, a full symphony orchestra playing during a piece like this is also a tremendous thing to watch.
Anyway, it wasn’t all about Boléro. In the first half we had the orchestral suite Ma mère l’Oye (My Mother the Goose), the song cycle Shéhérazade with vocals by excellent mezzo-soprano Julie Boulianne, and La Valse. The last of these is a masterpiece, originally conceived as a tribute to the Viennese waltz, but not composed until after TheFirst World War, and turned into a kind of tragic parody, starting out sombre and brooding, gradually building into a garish intensity and then into a brutal, almost chaotic, ending.
After the wine break we heard Alborado del Gracioso, a beautifully atmospheric with a strong Spanish influence and the orchestral version of Pavane pour une infante défunte, played well but a little too slowly for my tastes, and the only piece of the evening that I’d never heard before, Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, a miniature song cycle lasting just 7 minutes, comprised of settings of three poems by Paul Morand. Soloist was baritone Lionel Lhote who not only sang very well but had a very engaging stage presence.
And then it was Boléro, received with great applause and a standing ovation, and then by train back to Maynooth. There were a lot of French people in Dublin last night, presumably not for the Ravel, but for this afternoon’s rugby. They will be enjoying themselves in the city right now, as France convincingly beat Ireland 27-42 in the Six Nations, to end the home team’s hopes of a grand slam. Disappointment for the Boys in Green, but France were excellent and thoroughly deserved to win. Losing to a side as good as that is no disgrace.
This morning I published another paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics and in the process I noticed that took us to a total 111 articles this year. I got to thinking about the significance of that number in cricket, where it goes by the name of Nelson…
In cricket – at least in England – Nelson is supposed to be an unlucky number. The reason for this could well be that the number 111 looks like a set of stumps without the bails (see left). (For those of you not up with the lingo, the bails are two smaller bits of wood that sit on top of the stumps. ) The absence of the bails could mean that they have been dislodged, signifying that a batter is out. Also umpires remove the bails at close of play, so it could indicate that the match is over.
What’s less clear is the connection with Horatio, Lord Nelson (right). The version I was told at school was that Nelson had “one eye, one arm, and one Trafalgar”. Some also say “Destiny” instead of “Trafalgar”. Those are polite versions. Others say the third one refers to a part of the male anatomy. Bill Frindall used to say “one eye, one arm, and one et cetera“. Who knows which, if any, of these is right?
In any case this does give me the chance to point out that, contrary to popular myth, Nelson didn’t lose an eye anyway. In 1794, Nelson was in action at the Siege of Calvi during the Invasion of Corsica when a cannonball struck a nearby sandbag and sprayed him with sand and gravel. Nelson’s right eye was damaged by this, but he didn’t lose it although he had little effective vision through it thereafter.
Meanwhile, I just saw this notification on LinkedIn about yesterday’s post:
I don’t think I’ve ever written a blog post about the League of Ireland (soccer) before, but since it’s a holiday weekend and I’ve just watched Dundalk versus Shamrock Rovers on the telly, I thought I’d do a quickie.
I’ve been following this year’s League of Ireland Premier Division with some interest as it has been very close. You can see how competitive the league is just by looking at the table: 35 games played with three points for a win and the top team only has 60 points! Each team plays the others 4 times, incidentally, making a total of 36 games. The last round of matches happens next Friday, 1st November; the season runs from February to November.
Anyway, Shelbourne seemed to be battling it out with Derry City for the top spot, but then St Patrick’s Athletic and Shamrock Rovers starting gaining ground, as Both Derry and Shelbourne stumbled. Today’s result was important because Shamrock Rovers had to win to keep the competition alive. Favourites to win against the bottom club, they didn’t play very well but scraped home 1-0. The gap in quality between top and bottom of this league is really very small.
Now the situation is simple: if Shelbourne win on Friday – or if Shamrock Rovers don’t – then Shelbourne are champions. If Shelbourne lose or draw and Shamrock Rovers win then Shamrock Rovers are champions. On paper, Shelbourne have the tougher game, away at Derry City, while Shamrock Rovers at home to Waterford. It’s a toss-up who will win.
UPDATE: 1st November. They left it very late but Shelbourne beat Derry 1-0 to take the title. Shamrock Rovers also won, but to no avail…
P.S. As the crow flies, Shamrock Rovers (who play at Tallaght Stadium) is the nearest Premier Division club to Maynooth
Today saw the end of this year’s County Championship cricket season, which I take to be definition of the official end of summer. It seems to have come very late this year, and the weather not particularly clement for the last day.
I like county cricket, and hope to be able to see more when I retire and have the time, but I haven’t followed many games this year. I was away for much of the season and a bit busy to pay too much attention for the rest. I still keep an eye on how Glamorgan are doing, though, because of the time I spent living in Cardiff. In fact they won their last game against Gloucestershire yesterday to finish 6th in the 2nd Division. The match had been affected by rain but both captains decided to try to make a game of it by each forfeiting an innings after Glamorgan declared their first innings 381/4with the best part of two days to play. Gloucestershire never looked like reaching that total and were bowled out for 189. The other Championship game between these two teams, in June, ended in a remarkable tie as Glamorgan were bowled out for 592 needing 593 to win. Of course the great success of the year for Glamorgan was winning the One Day Trophy, beating Somerset in a final deferred by a day and truncated by rain.
Elsewhere in the County Championship, Surrey won the 1st Division while Lancashire and Kent were relegated. Sussex won the 2nd division title and they and Yorkshire were promoted to Division 1 for next season. With Lancs and Yorks in different divisions, there wasn’t be a Roses match this summer, and there won’t be one next season either!
Anyway, as I’ve done before, it seems apt to mark the end of the County Championship with one of the classic cricket poems, Close of Play by Thomas Moult.
How shall we live, now that the summer’s ended, And bat and ball (too soon!) are put aside, And all our cricket deeds and dreams have blended — The hit for six, the champion bowled for none, The match we planned to win and never won? … Only in Green-winged memory they abide.
How shall we live, who love our loveliest game With such bright ardour that when stumps are drawn We talk into the twilight, always the same Old talk with laughter round off each tale — Laughter of friends across a pint of ale In the blue shade of the pavilion.
For the last time a batsman is out, the day Like the drained glass and the dear sundown field is empty; what instead of Summer’s play Can occupy these darkling months ere spring Hails willows once again the crowned king? How shall we live so life may not be chilled?
Well, what’s a crimson hearth for, and the lamp Of winter nights, and these plump yellow books That cherish Wisden’s soul and bear his stamp — And bat and ball (too soon!) are put aside, Time’s ever changing, unalterable score-board, Thick-clustered with a thousand names adored: Half the game’s magic in their very looks!
And when we’ve learnt those almanacs by heart, And shared with Nyren … Cardus ….the distant thrill That cannot fade since they have had their part, We’ll trudge wet streets through fog and mire And praise our heroes by the club-room fire: O do not doubt the game will hold us still!
One of the many highlights of the 2024 Olympics was the amazing achievement of Armand Duplantis in winning the Gold Medal in Pole Vault and in the process breaking his own world record at a height of 6.25m. Here he is
He seemed to clear that height quite comfortably, actually, so I dare say he’ll break quite a few more records in his time. On the other hand, when I first wrote about this back in 2011 the world record for the pole vault was held by the legendary Ukrainian athlete Sergey Bubka at a height of 6.14m which he achieved in 1994. That record stood for almost 20 years but has since been broken several times since. The fact that the world record has only increased by 11 cm in 30 years tells you that the elite pole vaulters are working at the limits of what the human body can achieve. A little bit of first-year mechanics will convince you why, as I have pointed out in previous posts (e.g. here).
What a pole-vaulter does is rather complicated and requires a lot of strength, flexibility and skill, but as in many physics problems one can bypass the complications and just look at the beginning and the end and use an energy conservation argument. Basically, the pole is a device that converts the horizontal kinetic energy of the vaulter , as he/she runs in, to the gravitational potential energy acquired at the apex of his/her vertical motion, i.e. at the top of the vault.
Now assume that the approach is at the speed of a sprinter, i.e. about , and work out the height that the vaulter can gain if the kinetic energy is converted with 100% efficiency. Since the answer to that little sum turns out to be about 5 metres.
This suggests that 6.25 metres should not just be at, but beyond, the limit of a human vaulter, unless the pole were super-elastic. However, there are two things that help. The first is that the centre of mass of the combined vaulter-plus-pole does not start at ground level; it is at a height of a bit less than 1m for an an average-sized person. Note also that the centre of mass of pole (which weighs about 15 kg and is about 5 m long) only ends up about 2.5 m off the ground when it is vertical, so there’s a significant effect there. Note also that the centre of mass of the vaulter does not actually pass over the bar after letting go of the pole. That doesn’t happen in the high jump, either. Owing to the flexibility of the athlete’s back, the arc is such that the centre of mass remains under the bar while the different parts of the athlete’s body go over it.
Moreover, it’s not just the kinetic energy related to the horizontal motion of the vaulter that’s involved. A human can jump vertically from a standing position using elastic energy stored in muscles. In fact the world record for the standing high jump is an astonishing 1.9m. In the context of the pole vault it seems likely to me that this accounts for at least a few tens of centimetres.
Despite these complications, it is clear that pole vaulters are remarkably efficient athletes. And not a little brave either – as someone who is scared of heights I can tell you that I’d be absolutely terrified being shot up to 6.25 metres on the end of a bendy stick, even with something soft to land on!
I have seen many comments on social media to the effect that the 2024 Paris Olympics have gone “woke”. I agree. Many sports are now mere shadows of what they were a few decades ago let alone the original Greek ideals. Gymnastics for example, the name of which is derived from the Greek gymnós meaning “naked”, nowadays involves competitors with their naughty bits covered up. How woke is that? And the boxers even wear gloves! They’ve all gone soft!
Another example is the fencing. I’m not an expert on this but I did watch quite a lot when I was younger – admittedly not on live TV, but in the form of film recordings. The modern Olympic version of fencing is boring compared with how it used to be. Here are two photographs that illustrate how fencing has gone woke.
WOKENOT WOKE
For a start, just look at all the protective gear worn by the namby-pamby competitors on the left! And they don’t even use proper swords! It’s health and safety gone mad!
Also, where are the fancy costumes, the stone staircases to run up and down, the chandeliers to swing from, the elaborate hanging tapestries to climb, or the long banqueting tables covered in expensive items there to be trashed? Pathetic!
(P.S. Basil Rathbone (in the still on the right) was actually a seriously good fencer, twice British Army champion in fact, unlike his opponent in the picture Errol Flynn who was so useless that he was a danger to other members of the cast, including Rathbone.)
As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, one of my English teachers at school would occasionally give us exercises in creative writing inspired by `Only Connect’ – the epigraph of the novel Howard’s End by E.M. Forster. We were given two apparently disconnected things (usually news items), asked to think of a possible connection between them and write an story joining them together. From time to time when trying to think of something to write about I’ve resorted to playing the same game and am going to do it today.
Tsung-Dao Lee’s most famous work – for which he won the 1957 Nobel Prize with was on parity violation, which was detected experimentally by Chien-Shiung Wu in 1956. Parity is a conserved quantity in classical physics (e.g. in electromagnetism and gravity) and it was believed until the mid-20th century that it would be conserved in the quantum theory of nuclear interactions too. Wolfgang Pauli, for example, criticized Hermann Weyl’s suggestion of a two-component weakly interacting massless particle because it implied parity violation.
The experimental proof of parity violation in some weak interactions led to a much deeper understanding of fundamental physics, including the the idea of chiral gauge interactions, and the development of the standard model of particle physics. Parity is violated in some strong interactions too. Our simple-minded view of how things are changed as a result of an exception to a widely-held assumption. That’s how progress happens.
You might think now that I’m going to write about the fact that double-helix structure of DNA is right-handed, i.e. that it exhibits a form of parity violation, but that’s not it. Or only a little bit. You see, not all DNA is right-handed…
What does this have to do with Olympic boxing? Well, much of the furore about about Imane Khelif is about the (unproven) assertion that she has XY chromosome and is therefore male and should not be allowed to box in the women’s competition. A ‘biological’ female would have XX chromosomes.
It is true in the vast majority of cases that men have XY chromosomes and women have XX chromosomes, but if you read any reasonably modern book on human biology, the statement that ‘females have XX chromosomes’ is preceded by a “usually” or “in most cases”. But there exceptions: some women have XY chromosomes and some men have XX chromosomes; there are also individuals who have an extra chromosome and are XXY.
How can a person be said to be female if they have XY chromosomes? Well, that is because there is a very long journey between the information encoded in genetic material and the expression of that information in form and function. That entire process determines whether an athlete may nor not have an advantage over another. In a rare, sensible article about the Imane Khelif case I found this
Alun Williams, professor of sports and exercise genomics at Manchester Metropolitan University, said that when considering if a person had an unfair advantage it was necessary to look at chromosomes, levels of testosterone and other hormones, as well as the body’s response to testosterone.
“That then is a clinical assessment, which is really very invasive,” Williams said. “Simply looking at someone’s sex chromosomes … is incomplete.”
In most cases individuals with XY chromosomes develop “male” characteristics and those with XX chromosomes develop “female” but there are exceptions. For example, there are women – with ovaries, a uterus and no male sex organs – who have XY chromosomes. These are biologically female, even if their karyotype indicates otherwise. There is much more to biology than genetics, just as there is much more to physics than electromagnetism and gravity.
I don’t know whether Imane Khelif has XY chromosomes or not, and frankly I don’t care. The fact is that she was assigned female gender at birth, has been raised as female, and her gender is female as on her passport. She is a woman. I won’t use the phrase biological woman, because it is silly: every human being is biological. Caster Semenya is female too.
You might not care about this case and prefer top stick to the rigid definition that XX=male and XY=female. I don’t think that’s appropriate in sports: chromosomes don’t compete in sports, people do. I’ve also been accused of being ‘unscientific’ for accepting that the exceptions to a rule. On the contrary, I think such exceptions are how our understanding improves, not only in scientific terms but also in our respect for our fellow human beings.
Last week’s news from the 2024 Olympics was dominated by the story of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif who defeated her Italian opponent Angela Carini in the Women’s 66kg (Welterweight) division. Carini quit after 46 seconds saying that she was hit so hard that it hurt. It is surprising that she would even enter the Hitting Each Other In The Face event if she were going to complain that her opponent hit her in the face, Anyway, Khelife subsequently won her next bout against Hungarian Luca Hamori to proceed to the semi-finals and is thereby guaranteed a medal. I hope she wins the Gold for all she’s had to put up, not only for the past few days. She seems to have had a tough life generally.
Khelif’s deserved success has ignited what has been called a “gender row”, based on the fact that she and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting (who is also competing in the 2024 Olympics, in the 57kg category) were disqualified from the IBA World Championships allegedly for failing “gender eligibility tests”. This decision was made suddenly by the Secretary General of the IBA without any due process and the only documentation available is a message on the dodgy social media platform Telegram. The IOC has commented on these so-called “tests”, see here. Here’s an excerpt:
Those tests are not legitimate tests. The tests themselves, the process of the tests, the ad hoc nature of the tests are not legitimate…
You can draw your own inferences about the motivation for the deliberate manufacture of a scandal by the International Boxing Association, but my own view is that it reeks of sour grapes: the IBA, which has been mired in corruption scandals for decades, is no longer recognized by the International Olympic Committee. I think this whole row was deliberately manufactured.
Such are the levels of ignorance and prejudice about anything to do with gender these days that the usual bigots lined up to condemn Khelif and the IOC on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. Widely circulated claims that Khelif has XY chromosomes and/or high levels of testosterone are neither documented nor verified, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the haters.
I’ve seen posts and comments all over the place asserting that women don’t produce testosterone at all. They do. Men produce oestrogen, too. In both cases it’s a question of quantity. Some women have higher testosterone levels than others. So what? If that makes them better at boxing then so be it.
(I even saw a photograph on social media showing that Khelif wears a groin guard under her boxing shorts. Indeed she does: that’s actually mandatory in both men’s and women’s boxing. The person who posted the image however said that wearing a groin guard is something only men do. Clearly he is unaware that a women’s private parts are also sensitive. I guess he’s never had the opportunity to find out.)
It has been argued that “biological factors” have given Imane Khelif an unfair intrinsic biological advantage over competitors. If that were the case then you would expect her to have been an outstanding boxer from the outset. She wasn’t. In fact she had a poor start to her boxing career, losing her first two competitive bouts; she has lost to other women 9 times altogether. Hardly the performance of some kind of superhuman monster as she is being portrayed. She has improved because she has worked hard on her fitness and technique. She is quite tall for her weight division – 1.78 m (5 ft 10 in) – and has learnt to make use of her long reach, but how is that unfair? I think she might well struggle against an opponent who can get inside and fight at close range. Tall and rangy versus short and powerful is a contrast you often find in these mid-range weight divisions, which is one of the things that make such contests so interesting.
In any case, don’t all athletes have some sort of intrinsic advantage over the rest of us? Michael Phelps certainly did. People who excel at sports often have extreme physical characteristics, whether physical size, muscular strength, cardio-vascular endurance or whatever. Usain Bolt certainly had the advantage of being born Usain Bolt rather than someone else. Which is not to say that he didn’t have to work on making the most of his physique.
There being no documentary evidence to support their claims that Khelif is a man, others have resorted to crude stereotypes based on her looks. I’ve seen the same sort of comments about black female athletes who are accused of looking like men because they don’t conform to white ideals of femininity. A summary of this type of argument is “women should be banned from boxing if they display masculine characteristics, such as being good at boxing”.
None of this alters the fact that Imane Khelif is a woman and indeed a woman who deserves to be celebrated not only her success in her chosen sport, but also for the dignified way she has braved the abuse she has received. I hope she wins Gold and sends the haters into a state of apoplexy.
UPDATE: Imane Khelif did indeed win Olympic Gold by a unanimous decision. Congratulations to her!
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, as he/she runs in, to the gravitational potential energy 
acquired at the apex of his/her vertical motion, i.e. at the top of the vault.
, and work out the height 
that the vaulter can gain if the kinetic energy is converted with 100% efficiency. Since 
the answer to that little sum turns out to be about 5 metres.
In the Dark 