Playing with Fire Podcast

Joe Fox was one of the greatest men I ever knew. As a freshman on the cross-country team and later as a high jumper, Mr. Fox began the process of coaching a boy into a man. He was tough and reminded me of an old sea captain with his pipe firmly clenched between in his teeth while barking out his coaching pearls of wisdom. One day, exasperated by something that I probably should not have been doing he said, “Thierfelder, go home and tell your mother not to through out the baby with the bath water.” I stood perplexed not knowing what he was talking about so I just smiled and quickly moved on. Unfortunately, he often repeated this to me until I finally understood. He saw something good in me but he also knew there was a lot of “dirty” bath water that needed to be thrown out.

The Tour de France should follow Mr. Fox’s advice. It is one of the greatest sporting events in the world but has a serious problem that threatens its future. Cyclist looking for every edge cross the line by using various illicit means to gain an advantage. The race is awesome as it contains team and individual competitions, extreme challenges to body, mind and spirit, and the beauty and majesty of the route itself. Watching individuals compete under these circumstances is mesmerizing and inspiring. The problem with drug doping is that it destroys the incredible achievement of completing the tour and removes from our view models of heroic virtue. The distrust generated by so many examples of drug use takes away the enjoyment of watching one rider rise above another. We are not sure if it was virtue or chemistry that made the impossible possible. Once riveted on the three-week human drama of man versus man, self and the environment, we now can only see the I.V. and syringe.

The Tour is not unique in this regard; every sport is facing the same kind of problems. When love of self in the form of money, power and fame become the primary reasons and motivations for competing then sport will continue its downward spiral and be a means for developing vice. Individuals and society must value the human person above material things. The primary goal of athletes, coaches, parents, and businesses should be to provide a glimpse of God through the good, the true and the beautiful that can be found in sport.

Until then, the practical solution is weekly, mandatory, drug testing for every rider who wishes to compete in the Tour. A rider who misses one week is out. This is an expensive, invasive and unfortunate solution but it would restore our faith in each rider and bring back all that is good in the Tour de France.

Great news! A healthy, 9.4lbs., Matthew Thierfelder was born on July 24, 2007. Mother and child doing well. We thank you for all your prayers and support.

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Music: Stand Your Ground by Tony Tyrell available at http://www.tonytyrrell.com/

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Music - Back Home by SYD available at http://www.sydband.com/

I think that at least one of my sons may be destined to be a lawyer. One day while my seven year old was running through the house I said, “Remember there is no running in the house!” Without missing a beat, he shot back, “Dad, I wasn’t running, I was speed walking.”

You might think I have written enough about Adam “Pacman” Jones, the NFL defensive back who received a one-year suspension from the NFL due to his poor behavior, but he and his lawyer continue to provide such clear examples of what not to do that I couldn’t resist brining attention to it one more time.

ESPN reported, “Suspended NFL player Adam “Pacman” Jones received several driving citations in a traffic stop last month in Williamson County, Tenn., where he has a home.
Jones was pulled over June 10 at 8:30 a.m. in his orange Lamborghini sports car because the tags did not match the car, WKRN-TV in Nashville reported.
Sheriff’s deputies said he had switched the plate from another vehicle he owns. He was cited with a registration violation, as well as a residency violation for having a Georgia license and failure to show proof of insurance.”

The Baltimore Sun reported, “An attorney for suspended Tennessee Titans cornerback Adam ‘Pacman’ Jones accused a sheriff’s deputy in Franklin, Tenn., of targeting Jones in a June traffic stop, saying there was no reason to pull over Jones’ orange Lamborghini.

Attorney Worrick Robinson said he has been told the deputy had talked of his intention to pull over Jones when he had the chance. ’It was not because he was speeding. It was not because he was swerving or that he failed to obey any traffic signal or any other traffic laws,” Robinson said of the traffic stop. “He pulled him over. He had heard that Mr. Jones did not have a valid driver’s license.

News of the June 10 ticket issued in this Nashville suburb surfaced Tuesday. Robinson said he got a copy Wednesday of the ticket, which cited Jones for a 30-day residency violation with a Georgia driver’s license and no proof of insurance or registration. That citation included the notation that the deputy made the stop because another deputy told him the cornerback had no driver’s license.”

All of the traffic citations appear to be true but his lawyer, doing him no great favor, points out all the things he was not doing such as speeding or swerving. He wants to focus on the fact that a deputy acted on information about a possible violation of the law. How can you miss an orange Lamborghini? What’s the point?!? Once again, Adam is doing something he should not be and once again, he has a team of lawyers trying to divert our attention from the facts by telling us all that Adam did not do. How about just telling the truth?

I hope that it is not too late for Adam who recently wrote a public letter of apology with the promise of reforming his way of life for the better. As a father, responsible for my children’s formation, I still have time to work on the “speed walker” in our family but I know it will not be easy because dying-to-self is a challenge for all us

“…Initially, the only riders who showed aggression were Nicolas Vogondy (Agritubel) and Matthieu Ladagnous (Francaise des Jeux). The Frenchmen attacked at six km and were joined at 52 km by Stephane Auge (Cofidis) and Frederik Willems (Liquigas). Vogondy and Ladagnous led by 13:50 at 44 km. Only then did CSC up the tempo.

At 104 km, the escapees led the bunch by 7:50. The chase was not hard, however. The peloton was together, and no riders had trouble following the pace.

With 61 km left and the fugitives’ lead down to 4:00, Auge attacked his companions and Willems followed. Two km later, the pair waited for Vogondy and Ladagnous. Behind, CSC and Credit Agricole stepped on the gas. The escapees led by 3:00 at 52 km.

With 21 km remaining, the break led the bunch by 2:36. Predictor, Quick Step, and Credit Agricole upped the tempo. Within five km, the lead had dropped half a minute, and with 10 km left, the bunch was 1:30 behind the break. A capture, however, was not certain, and Willems kept attacking his companions to keep the break’s pace high.

With one km left, the breakaway looked like it could be a winner. (Gerald Churchill, www.RoadCyclying.com)”

Breakaways often lack one essential ingredient to be successful, trust. Selfishness infects one or more of the breakaway riders and leads to distrust. Instead of working together until the end of the race, most cyclists in the breakaway begin taking advantage of the other riders who have been helping to keep the group ahead of the peloton. As they get closer to the finish line each cyclist isolates himself from the others, making any one of them incapable of maintaining the pace necessary to stay ahead of the main body. Stage three of this year’s Tour de France provided an excellent example of how the lack of this virtue led to failure and unhappiness.

“…Cancellara attacked from the peloton. With 700 m remaining, he overtook the escapees. The peloton charged after him, but the world time trial champion held on for the win. (Gerald Churchill)”. The breakaway group, the “escapees,” should have taken the first four places. If they had agreed to work together until 200 meters from the finish, trusted each other, Gerald Churchill would have written a very different ending. It might have been better to have trusted and lost, than never to have trusted!

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Music - “The Bad Times Aren’t So Bad” by: J. D. HaringJ.D. Haring’s Music is available on most internet music download site. (InTheHouse Records Catalog #ITHCD0030), whichis advanced release. The full album will be released late in the summer of 2007.

No, the title is not about an update from Wimbledon. Would you believe it is about a young man, Oscar Pistorious, running world-class 200 and 400 meter times with two lower leg prosthetics?

Josh McHugh wrote, “Pistorius was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1986, with five digits on each hand and two toes on each tiny foot. Each leg was missing its fibula, the long, thin bone that anchors the calf muscle and forms the outside of the ankle. His parents had a choice: consign their child to a wheelchair or amputate his lower legs and let him learn to walk with prosthetics.

His father, Henke, head of the family’s zinc-mining company, asked a dozen orthopedic surgeons which three doctors in the world they would choose to perform a lower-leg amputation on their own child. Of the top three they named, two were in the US and one was in South Africa. A month before Oscar’s first birthday, Gerry Versveld removed the baby boy’s legs halfway between his knees and ankles. Six months later, Oscar took his first steps, on a pair of fiberglass pegs. Fast forward to today.

A company called Flex-Foot debuted the Cheetah in 1996, but the prosthetic blades remained a bit crude until Flex-Foot was acquired by the Icelandic firm Ossur in 2000. If you are missing a leg, owning an Ossur is like driving a BMW M-series. The current Cheetahs look a little like the rear leg of a horse or cat, extending straight down from the socket, cantilevering backward, and then angling forward sharply. But last September, Pistorius and Brauckmann went to Reykjavik to test prototypes designed for double amputees. The new ones, which Pistorius hasn’t debuted at a major race yet, make just one smooth curve, an arc of pure engineering.

Perhaps more important, the limits of the human body — any human body — are a matter of math. It takes 3,556 joules to move 80.5 kilograms, Pistorius’ weight, at 9.4 meters per second. That’s his average speed on his fastest 200-meter run (21.58 seconds). Those joules have to come from somewhere. Running is basically a matter of forcing that power into the legs and using them, springlike, to bounce the body forward. The lower legs of able-bodied sprinters return all the energy pumped into them by the muscles at the hips and knees — and they give back more, thanks to power from the calves and ankles. Pistorius doesn’t have feet, ankles, or calves, of course, so he compensates: His strength trainer estimates that 85 percent of his power comes from his hips and the rest comes from the knees. That hip- generated stride, combined with the odd shape of the Cheetah itself, means that Pistorius has to waddle slightly, his feet flailing out to the side a bit on each rearward kick. The blades make that scissoring noise as they grip the track, compress, and return to their original shape.

Pistorius’ street legs are modeled and painted to look as much like natural legs as possible, color-matched to his thighs. But covered by the flesh-tone paint is a doodled-on depiction of calf muscle a friend inked in red and black permanent marker before the Athens Paralympics. It’s an interesting tattoo, a reminder that no matter how good Cheetahs are, Pistorius is still missing a natural calf.

So, sure, artificial legs are lighter than natural ones. Pistorius will never blow out his ankles or break a toe, though presumably his knees are as vulnerable as anyone’s to old age and trauma. But does any of that constitute an unfair advantage? Does being able to modify and tune a prosthetic limb belong to the same category as blood doping (banned) or altitude training (A-OK)? If there’s an issue of fairness here at all, it’s not that Pistorius is using technology superior to what evolution has built for human beings. As Robert Gailey, who studies the biomechanics of prosthetics at the University of Miami, puts it, running on stilts isn’t exactly a plus. The real asymmetry is that Frasure and Shirley each still have one natural leg, and it’s holding them back.

It’s also true that the Cheetahs Pistorius hopes to run on in Beijing, with their pure-engineering swoop, are in quantifiable ways better — faster — than the ones he ran on in Athens. Does that bother you? Pistorius’ handlers have a saying: If you think having carbon-fiber legs will make you a faster sprinter, have the operation and we’ll see you at the track. In their eyes, Cheetahs — for all their sophistication — are a disadvantage that Pistorius has transcended.
The International Association of Athletics Federations is supposed to decide if Pistorius is eligible for the Olympics this spring. The possibilities: If Pistorius is a black swan, a statistical freak who would have been a world-class sprinter on natural legs, too, then no problem — let him run. And, if being an amputee is what gave Pistorius something to prove and turned him into a world-class sprinter, then no problem — let him run. But if he is the vanguard of a legion of plastic track-and-field terminators whose upper speed is a function of materials science and software instead of determination and training? The International Olympics Commission better start hiring some engineers.”

Many critics are advocating the best way to approach the question of Oscar’s eligibility to compete in the Olympic Games is “guilty until proven innocent.” I think we should give someone who can run 400 meters on two prosthetics, in 46.56 seconds, the benefit of the doubt until it is proven the prosthetics provide an unfair advantage. Even then, I will still be in awe of a bilateral lower leg amputee who has the talent to balance and generate enough power to compete with the best able-bodied track athletes in the world. His courage, perseverance, and joy in pursuing an Olympic dream is inspiring and challenges all of us to reach higher. What feeble excuse can we possibly give for not pursuing our dreams?

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Music - Mellow Guss available at the Podsafe Music Network