Monthly Archives: August 2024

By Michael F. Duggan

The Summer Olympics is over. It seemed shorter this year, which is fine with me. I have always been ambivalent about the summer games. I never watch it on my own, and yet if it is on a television in a restaurant or bar, I cannot look away. If there was one thing that Jefferson and Nietzsche agree upon, it is the admiration for human excellence in all of its forms, and I concur. It is also a distraction of healthy competition in a troubled time, with “controversies” of little consequences outside of sports.

On the other hand, as a generalist, I find the idea of young lives obsessively devoted to single activities that come down to a few zero-sum moments of triumph or tragedy to be grotesque, and not infrequently a waste. Such focus to the exclusion of so much else in life is likely to cause harm. The loss to a young life in terms of opportunity costs (and later in dollars spent on psychiatrists) may be significant. I will still watch boxing and some of the daredevil sports of winter, but overall I take little interest in sports that are determined by the scoring of judges. Regarding the competitive sport of “breaking,” I will maintain a Buddha-like silence.

Of course I will not deny the pleasure of watching hard-fought competition between physical geniuses, people who can do things that I cannot, and achieving difficult success through physical prowess and training against the best opponents in the world. The problem, I suppose, is that outside of endurance, durability, longevity, and certain precision activities (e.g. diving, pitching, gymnastics), the physical exceptionality of humans is pretty mediocre. We are among the physical scrubs of the animal kingdom, and demonstrations of our physical prowess, such as they are, are among the lest interesting things about us.

Take Simone Biles: this phenom of women’s gymnastics can supposedly jump 12 feet, vertically, something that few, of the world’s other 8.1 billion people can do. And yet if she had the proportional abilities of an ordinary house cat, she would be able to leap 25-30 feet vertically. If she was a flea, she could clear the Eiffel Tower with room to spare.

And then there is swimming. The fastest swimmers in the 50 meter freestyle can move an around 5.6 mph (Michael Phelps once clocked an amazing 8.8 mph with a mono fin). By contrast an Indo-Pacific sailfish can move at speeds up to 68 mph underwater. The fastest human being can sprint to around 27.5 mph, relative to a cheetah’s bursts of 70 mph (or 10 mph slower than the underwater speed of some dolphins). A harbor seal (an animal roughly on the scale of a human) can dive to around 1,500 feet (more than 500 feet deeper than the Eiffel Tower is high) and can stay underwater for 30 minutes with no ill effects. How does unaided human performance compare to that? Even flies and gnats can do something we can’t without technology: flight. Ayuh, we’re a pretty pathetic animal, athletically speaking.

But within our limited parameters, there is also something that I call “annoying perfection.” On the one hand, the precision of platform diving is impressive to the point of disbelief (some of the dives look like they had been engineered by AU, and I still can’t figure out why some were judged higher or lower than others). On the other hand, if I saw another perfect physique (male or female) on the high board, I think I would have thrown a saltshaker at the TV set over the restaurant’s bar. And please don’t get me started about basketball, and other amateur events.

There is value in knowing the physical limits of what people can do (which might explain my youthful interest in the Guinness Book of World Records). Still, I can’t help wondering if athletics might have been more interesting during a time when sports was about naturals without all the added science and obsession.

So much of this perfection and the hair-splitting differences of new world records and sports victories of recent years come as the result of scientific training, diets, and a big-money, institutional approach to training (and today’s athletes who cheat are marginally better after taking performance-enhancing drugs, than the greats of yesteryear, some of whom used performance-hindering drugs, like alcohol [See Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle]).

There is also the ridiculous, disproportional count of medals by nation, a kind of metallic arms race, and the inspirational stories of the athletes themselves (except for Sea Biscuit, there are few things more beaten-into-the-ground than the genre of the inspirational sports story, especially if it has a slo-mo footage and a guitar or piano soundtrack). If I saw another picture of some athlete biting a gold medal, or heard another against-the-odds story about overcoming obstacles in the pursuit of excellence that make Victorian melodrama look understated… where’s that saltshaker?). The real story is that large nations with well-endowed programs seem to have an exponential advantage over small, poorer countries. This is why I find myself cheering for smaller nations rather than the ones who throw big bucks into the sports perfection business, like the U.S. and China. Cheering for a large, vastly-favored nation, sometimes feels a little like cheering for the Roman Empire (or, given the relative resources of modern world powers, perhaps the absurdity of cheering for them is its own metaphor). For the men’s 10 meter platform dive, I ended up pulling for the Mexican diver, who came in fourth.

Well, it’s over until next time. Sorry for such a grouchy posting. I’m not really against sports. On to that other contest in November.

By Michael F. Duggan

During the summer of 1943, the Germans and Soviets fought the Battle of Kursk, the largest battle in history. Like so many battles on the Eastern Front, it was a contests of salients, counter-salients, and the reductions (and attempted reductions)of salients.  The Germans lost fewer men, but the battle was a strategic victory for the Soviets.  It was the last German offensive on the Eastern Front.  It was also the largest tank battle and the costliest aerial battle ever fought.  

Eighty years ago this December, the Germans launched an offensive on the western front, in the Ardennes.  The strategy, to strike hard where the enemy did not expect it, was initially successful. Although it took the Allies by surprise, and the Germans appeared to be making a beeline for Antwerp, it was stopped, and the salient was reduced. It was the last German offensive of the war.  A fraction of the size of Kursk, it was the costliest battle for the Allies in western Europe in the Second World War. 

In the summers of 1862 and 1863, Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia went on the strategic offensive and crossed the Potomac River, the border between North and South in the U.S. Civil War. The result of his taking the war into Union territory, were the battles of Antietam (September 17, 1862) and Gettysburg (July 1-3, 1863). Antietam was the bloodiest single day in U.S. military history, and Gettysburg was the largest land battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere.

In the spring of 1918, German forces smashed through the allied lines in what is called the Michael Offensive. It was a brilliant initial effort that outran its planning, supplies, and logistics and the Germans were pushed back and the lines, restored.

This week Ukraine launched cross-border operations into the Kursk oblast of western Russia.  Unlike the Ukrainian spring and summer offensive of 2023, this one was not advertised. Striking when and where it was not expected, the attack was brilliant in its operational planning, execution, and surprise, and caught the Russians completely off guard (how is it possible that a stretch of the Russian-Ukrainian frontier was so thinly protected; how is it possible that Russian intelligence did not see it coming?). Although nowhere near the scale of its WWII predecessor (this one appears to be a divisional-size operation) it is the largest Ukrainian incursion into Russia of the present war and has created an irregularly-shaped salient several miles deep. 

Unlike the Kursk offensive of 1943, the Ardennes offensive of 1944, and the Confederate offensives of the Civil War, the attack does not appear to have a specific military objective other than the hope of drawing Russian troops away from hot spots on the front (one wonders how Ukraine can afford such an operation given Russian advances in the Donetsk region, especially in the area east of the city of Pokrovsk). Otherwise the area involved seems to be of no military value, and the attack is unlikely to have any impact on the outcome of the war. Its purpose appears to be psychological and to send the simple message that Ukraine can still hit back. The war will not be won in the north by attacking Russia there, but such diversions contribute to defeat by thinning out manpower and sending resources to what now amounts to another costly front.

This attack is different from all previous attacks of the war. This is a ground assault on Russian soil. The attack might have caught the Kremlin off guard, but surprise does not by itself guarantee a collapse in morale (did the U.S. give up after the Fort Sumter or Pearl Harbor attacks? Did Israel give up after the October 7 attacks?). Given the symbolic importance of Kursk in Russian history, does anybody think that the they will fight with less intensity and determination now?

By Michael F. Duggan

It is good that the United States and other Western nations were able to get their people out of Russia. Still, it seems a little odd that the Russians exchanged were all spies and assassins where the Westerners were all wrongly-accused innocents.