Works That Work Issue 9

WO R K S T H AT WO R K A M AGA Z I N E O F U N E X P E C T E D C R E AT I V I T Y I S S U E 9, 2017

P

L

A

Y

The mediaeval city of Dubrovnik has been an important Mediter­ ranean sea power since the 13th century, and is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In its very centre, abutting the city fortifications, is an unusual sports court on the site of an ancient reservoir that fell into disuse after it was damaged by an earthquake in 1667. In the mid20th century, Dubrovnik socialist revolutionaries established a sports club and physical education facility, and in 2004 it was reconstructed, resulting in a uniquely shaped basketball court adapted to fit the available space.

w-t-w.co/w7v

This issue of Works That Work is about sports and games. I have friends who enjoy reading newspapers in their entirety except for the sports section, deeming it too common and undignified to merit the attention of those who seek ‘higher pursuits’. I was intrigued by the challenge of writing seriously about sports, going beyond the ephemera of competitions and results to explore an activity that brings people together, often even in spite of apparently insur­mountable differences. Sport crosses social, geo­ graphic and economic boundaries. It promotes social inclusion, giving people new opportunities and hope.

The late Nelson Mandela remarked that ‘[s]port has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope, where once there was only despair. It is more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers.’

In the issue we look at sports and games from various perspec­­ tives: how football can facilitate reconciliation between enemies, how the design of gender-specific sportswear allows female ath­ letes to fulfil their potential, how coaches use elements of design to conceive sport strategies and how athletes use their equipment to gain a competitive edge. We also look at the darker creativity involved in cheating and manipulating the system, as well as at more playful topics such as how political activists use games to educate people about corruption, or how astronauts play in space.

As usual, we hope that you learn things that you didn’t know you didn’t know, something about how seemingly trivial hobby activities help us not only to relax, but also to overcome challenging social issues.

— Peter Biľak

Works That Work, Issue 9, Summer 2017 A Magazine of Unexpected Creativity published twice a year by Typotheque issn: 2214-0158 Edited by: Peter Biľak Copy editing: Ted Whang Proofreading: Johanna Robinson Editorial board: Jonah Goodman, Anne Miltenburg, Ed van Hinte Design: Atelier Carvalho Bernau Lithography: Mrs. Bright Printing: Drukkerij Tielen Binding: Hexspoor Typeset in Lava (designed by the editor) and Neutral (designed by the designers of the magazine) Printed on certified, environ­ mentally friendly papers: Magno Gloss and Lessebo Design Contact: Typotheque Zwaardstraat 16 2584 TX Den Haag The Netherlands editor@worksthatwork.com worksthatwork.com @worksthatwork Subscriptions: Exclusively online at worksthatwork.com/subscribe Contributions: We are always looking for new themes and articles in various forms. Please send us your proposals and something about yourself. Try to be as specific as possible: explain what the subject is and why you want to cover it.

Contributors this issue: Edrick Bruel, photographer, Quezon City; Niko Čučković, photographer, Dubrovnik; Armelle Garcia, designer, Quezon City; Christian Gecolea, designer, Quezon City; Christof Gertsch, sport journalist, Zurich; Ramón Iriarte, photographer/ journalist, Bogotá/New York; Anne Miltenburg, designer, Nairobi; Gideon Nachman, jour­ nalist, New York; Leanne Prain, writer/designer, Vancouver; Anne Quito, writer, New York; William Ralston, writer, Berlin/ London; Naomi Russo, writer, Sydney; Tall Guy Pictures, photo­ grapher, London; Alan Záruba, designer, Prague; Justin Zhuang, writer, Singapore.

Special thanks to: Johanna Biľak Roger Dalton Nikola Djurek Tom Forsyth Antonín Panenka Ivan Viđen

Patronage: Help us make Works That Work.

Become a patron, and in return get copies of the magazine, your name listed in the magazine and on the website, and a personal thank you note. Your donation is tax deductible. Together we can make a great magazine. worksthatwork.com/patrons The following people helped to make Issue 9: Wayne Ajimine Jason Dilworth Simon Esterson Konrad Glogowski Geir Goosen Frith Kerr (Studio Frith) Benjamin Listwon Jay Rutherford Brian Scott/Boon Martin Tiefenthaler (tga) Clodagh Twomey Typefounding typeheaven Dana Wooley Made and printed in the Netherlands Copyright © Typotheque 2017 All rights reserved.

In this issue:

Artefacts

by Peter Biľak 4

Designing Strategy

10

by Gideon Nachman

When Football Transcends Factions

18

by Ramón Iriarte

If you’d like to share stories from this magazine with your friends, use the short web address next to the title of the article; it is designed for quick and easy online sharing of the full articles.

If you would like to reproduce or republish anything, please ask first.

Front cover: Basketball court in Dubrovnik, photographed by Niko Čučković.

For the full story please see the inside front cover.

Back cover: Lukáš Timulak has photo­ graphed the dancer Francesco Iacino inside the Teatro Alfonso Rendano in Cosenza. We invite our readers to take photos featuring WTW in unexpected environments. Every reader who submits a photo will receive a free copy of the magazine. w-t-w.co/q5l The information in this magazine is not intended as a substitute for a properly designed exercise and diet regimen.

The techniques, equipment and subs­tances described in this publication pose potential health risks; consult your physi­ cian before attempting any of the activities depicted herein.

But you already knew that, right?

Gaming the Game

by Christof Gertsch

28

Zero-gravity Games: How Astronauts Play in Space

Beyond the Baseline 56 36

by William Ralston

by Leanne Prain

The Wild World of Sports Trophies Propagandopoly: Monopoly as an Ideological Tool

42

by Naomi Russo

Doing the Panenka 48 an interview with soccer legend Antonín Panenka

by Alan Záruba

68

by Anne Quito

May the Worst Politician Win!

78

by Justin Zhuang

Kit that Fits: Developing Women’s Sportswear

by Anne Miltenburg

82

4

Artefacts Sport is a powerful tool for shaping the foundations of a community, for solving problems where politicians stalemate and for paving the way for social progress.

Collected by Peter Biľak

WTW #9

Football In late December 1914, after months of devastatingly violent trench warfare, the brutality of the Second World War was briefly suspended in a number of locations along the Western Front as exhausted soldiers from both sides tacitly arranged an unofficial Christmas truce. Taking advantage of the delicate ceasefire to recover and bury their dead, the entrenched enemies also engaged in Christmas carol singing, gift ex­changes and prisoner swaps. Small football matches also broke out between the Germans and British in the no man’s land between the trenches and became one of the most fabled memories of the event. ‘How marvellously wonderful, yet how strange it was,’ a German soldier recorded in his diary. The next day, the War was on again. Photo courtesy of Picture-Alliance/United Archives/WHA.

w-t-w.co/3df

5

Cricket Cricket, the quintessentially British game, was used as a tool of resistance against British imperialism in India where developments in the sporting world presaged and perhaps even paved the way for progress in politics and in society in general. In 1881, four years before the Indian National Congress was formed, Indian cricketers were bold enough to petition the governor of Bombay to protest discriminatory use of sports fields, apparently with some hope that they might be heard.

And although Gandhi pondered the continued existence of separate Muslim, Hindi and Parsi teams in 1940, in many ways the camaraderie and mutual respect of the sports field helped to diminish barriers between religions and castes. India’s more recent emergence as the world’s cricket superpower has also upended an old colonial-era hierarchy.

6

Ice Hockey After the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August of 1968, sport was one of the few public spaces where resistance against the occupation was possible. The World Ice Hockey Championships the following spring saw the Czechoslovak and Soviet teams in the same group, and the Czechoslovak players ‘spoke’ for their countrymen by covering the red stars on their jerseys with black tape and defeating the Soviets both times that they met them. The streets of Czechoslovakia erupted in celebration, and although the USSR eventually won the tournament, the political symbolism of the confrontation was so powerful that it was recalled nearly 30 years later when the Czechs defeated the Russians to take the gold medal at the Winter Olympics in Nagano. Photo courtesy of ČTK/Alamy Stock Photo.

WTW #9

Artefacts

7

Tennis

Boxing

In 1967, when Billie Jean King won three titles at Wimbledon she received a £45 gift voucher, and although it was £45 more than she’d received for her first two Wimbledon victories, she knew that the men were being paid much more. In 1970 she led a group of nine women players in a boycott of a tournament that offered them 1/12th of the prize money to be awarded to the men, and launched the first women-only tournament in protest. She later campaigned for Title IX, anti-discrimination legislation that has put women’s sports on a more equal footing with men’s sports in American schools, and went on to found the Women’s Tennis Association to give female players a voice. She was also one of the first openly gay athletes and has fought to make the sports world and the wider public more open, equal and accepting. Photo courtesy of dpa - Sportreport.

Boxer Joe Louis was widely regarded as a symbol of the emancipated black American when he fought a widely publicised match in 1936 against Max Schmeling, similarly seen as a champion of Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s Aryan Germany (despite the fact that Schmeling was neither a member nor a supporter of the Nazi Party). When Louis lost after 12 punishing rounds, the defeat was deeply felt across America, and when a rematch was arranged in 1938, Louis felt, as he later remarked in his biography, that ‘the whole damned country was depending on me’. Hitler’s propaganda declared that a black man could not defeat Schmeling and that the prize money would be used to build German tanks.

Louis won the rematch with a knock-out just 124 seconds into the first round. Louis and Schmeling would go on to serve their respective countries in the armed forces during the Second World War—and to become lifelong friends afterwards. Photo courtesy of Picture-Alliance/dpa.

8

Castells The tradition of building castells, acrobatic human towers, began centuries ago in northern Catalonia. While most human towers are four to five levels tall, the most skilled teams can build towers as high as eight or even ten levels.

The structure is considered complete when a child climbs to the top and raises one hand with four fingers erect in a gesture symbolising the stripes of the Catalan flag. Like the Catalan language and other symbols of Catalan identity, the castells were forbidden during Francisco Franco’s fascist regime. Today, the Catalans are using the castells to promote their struggle for independence again, as a recent campaign proclaimed: ‘Catalans want to vote. Human Towers for Democracy’. Photo: Eric Sala & Tània García

WTW #9

Table Tennis In the early 1970s, table tennis led to improved relationships between the United States and China. At a time when China was pursuing limited sports diplomacy, a chance encounter between American and Chinese players Glenn Cowan and Zhuang Zedong at a tournament in Japan started a series of events that saw the US Table Tennis team cross a bridge from Hong Kong to the Chinese mainland to play friendly matches in April 1971: the first American delegation to enter China in more than 20 years. Two months later, the US lifted its trade embargo against China. Table tennis became an apt metaphor for the relations between Washington and Beijing, spawning the term ‘ping-pong diplomacy’ and paving the way for President Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 visit to the PRC. Photo courtesy of the US National Archives and Records Administration.

Top: Wide receiver routes from head coach Vince Lombardi’s 1966 Green Bay Packers playbook. The 1966 Packers were the first team to win the Super Bowl, and Lombardi would have made all of his quarterbacks and receivers memorise these routes. Then, in the huddle, quarterback Bart Starr would

call the specific play from the pages and pages of information the team had memorised.

Right: Philadelphia Eagles head coach Doug Pederson (second from left) coordinates with the other coaches during an NFL game against the Detroit

Lions. Nowadays, NFL coaches often select plays by committee. Most teams employ several sideline coaches as well as analysts and coordinators who monitor real-time video data and relay suggestions to the coaching staff. Photo: Jorge Lemus, Picture-Alliance/NurPhoto

w-t-w.co/pym

11

Gideon Nachman is an American journalist who primarily covers US soccer for The Guardian. He is interested in the intersection of on-the-field play and off-the-field sporting cultures.

DESIGNING

STRATEGY The stereotype of the ‘dumb jock’, gifted more with muscle than with intelligence, overlooks the importance of strategy in sports, of creativity that can give brains an edge over brawn.

Even though coach Bill Belichick can communicate with quarterback Tom Brady through a helmet microphone, raucous opposition fan noise can

sometimes make in-person clarification necessary. Photo: John Angelillo, Picture-Alliance/Newscom

In the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, far from the dignified bronze busts of the inductees, far from the victors’ rings and gameworn jerseys, far, far away from the gleaming Vince Lombardi championship trophy, is a wristband once worn by halfback Tom Matte.

Matte himself is not an inductee, nor will he ever be, and he only wore the band for three games in 1965 when he stepped in as emergency quarterback for the Baltimore Colts to cover for injured teammates. Since there was no time for Matte to memorise all the plays that he would have to call, legendary coach Don Shula devised an unprecedented shortcut: a wristband with a simplified version of the Colts’ offence written

on it. The wristband itself is modest, an index card mounted on a strip of dull, brown vinyl, but it helped Matte lead the Colts to victory against the Los Angeles Rams, and it is a seminal artefact in NFL playbook design and implementation.

Today, 50 years later, nearly every NFL quarter­ back wears one.

Matte’s wristband illustrates one fundamen­ tal fact of sports, that muscle and brute force can be trumped by strategy and creativity. If the thrill of sports is in the beauty of human beings pushing themselves to their physical limits, then the purpose of intelligent play design is to minimise the role of the physical contest or, if possible, to remove it altogether. It creates

Designing Strategy

Two variations of the same passing play from Vince Tobin’s 1998 Arizona Cardinals playbook. Tobin would call this play through his headset, and the

13

quarterback, Jake Plummer, would choose which version to run at the line of scrimmage. The ’98 Cardinals would squeak into the playoffs, but Tobin only

a moment of optimal solitude, an O breaking free from the crowd of Xs on the whiteboard: the football player who goes untackled or the basketball player who is open. Strength allows athletes to overpower a defence; design allows them to ignore it. They must not only play faster, stronger, or harder, but also smarter.

This is true even at the ground level, where young players are drilled in the fundamentals of their game. Liam Flaherty and Nat Rubin, high school basketball coaches at Saint Ann’s School in New York City, know this well. Saint Ann’s is primarily an arts school, famous for turning out poets, actors, filmmakers and architects rather than high-quality athletes. Does any of the

lasted five seasons as a head coach in the NFL.

artistic training these kids get bleed over into the play design? Flaherty and Rubin are cheerfully blunt. ‘At this level, one kid is still better than all the rest. So on defence, we want to keep it simple because our players are sometimes scared to go man-to-man. We don’t use the “triangle”, the “West Coast offence”, the “spread”, or anything like that. At this level it’s about being big and teaching confidence.’ Their basic, utilitarian strategy (three Xs in front, two in back) lets their players avoid the physical mismatches they are so wary of, perhaps preserving the good looks of a future film star, but it is also flexible enough to allow for some adaptation (two Xs in back, three in front) during a game.

14

WTW #9

College athletics are massive in the United States (across all sports, it is a roughly US$12.4 billion/€11.7 billion industry), and it is hardly surprising that the triangle offence sprang from one of these programmes, where coaches are allowed the freedom to experiment, rather than in the do-or-die environ­ ment of the professional leagues.

If high school basketball is the classroom where pupils learn to colour inside the lines, college basketball is the design studio where innovation is unleashed, one step above the relentless drilling of fundamental patterns of the game, one step below the cutthroat win-now-or-be-fired atmosphere that discourages professional league coaches from experimenting too much. The triangle offence of which Flaherty and Rubin spoke is a perfect case in point, a strategy that turns conventional basketball wisdom on its head.

Whereas Matte’s wristband contained a limited number of set strategies designed to penetrate a defence, the triangle offence employs a multiplex stack of ‘automatics’, meticulously rehearsed contingency plans that enable a team to react instantaneously to events as they play out on the court. Its flexibility relies on a virtual interchangeability of players, requiring intensive teamwork built on continuity over multiple seasons, and it has both its staunch adherents and vocal critics. Doug Eberhardt, a former player and coach currently working as a sports analyst for GlobalTV BC, is one of the former. He says, ‘I know it’s the oldest cliché that basketball is like free form jazz, but… they’re always moving and moving the ball. It’s

beautiful, it’s like organised chaos.’ Eberhardt is a basketball obsessive and confesses to watching games with slips of paper in front of him—‘just in case a coach runs something that I find visually appealing’—so he can jot down the movements and formations and add them to the inventory of plays he keeps sealed in a Rubbermaid container.

‘If you’re a fan of design, simple design, the triangle can be spectacular to watch,’ he says.

‘Because A happens here, then B happens here, and it’s all done in a very geometric way.’

The triangle is also so successful because it breaks the mould of what basketball players have been trained their whole lives to do. ‘Player and coaches have grown up running and designing plays that force the defence to react, not the other way around,’ Eberhardt writes. ‘In both its insistence on patience and the way it inverts the traditional relationship between offence and defence, the triangle is counterintuitive. This is a big part of why it works, when it works. It is also why making it work can be so difficult.’ In order to learn it, offences have to reprogramme themselves, not an easy task. Nor are basketball players alone in this. University of South Carolina quarterbacks coach Kurt Roper also knows the difficulties of getting professional athletes to acquire a new way of thinking:

Boston Celtics coach Doc Rivers instructs forward Mikki Moore during the NBA game against the Los Angeles Clippers. Photo courtesy of Picture-Alliance/Newscom.

Denver Broncos head coach Gary Kubiak practising a play-calling system during a pre-season game. In any football play, each of the team’s 11 players on offence has a specific, scripted task. Photo: Gary C. Caskey, Picture-Alliance/Newscom

Designing Strategy

17 Three possible locations of the tight end in the ‘I Formation’ in the 2000 St. Louis Rams playbook. After winning the 1999 Super Bowl with the Rams, head coach Dick Vermeil announced his retirement.

Martz, his successor, tried to run his 3-digit offence for a second year, but he was never quite as successful; the ’00 Rams crashed out in the playoffs.

‘Learning a new offence is like learning a new language. The players understand football… But it’s like they’re thinking in English, and we’re teaching them in a foreign language. Our job is to get them to think in our language.’

In either or perhaps any sport, however, the end goal of such change is the same: to conceive, develop and execute a strategy that will maximise the athletes’ physical assets by deploying them in innovative ways. Truly groundbreaking play design may even transcend individual athletes and personalities, just as the triangle offence emphasises team play over individual superstars. This is why an unheralded and unknown St. Louis Rams team was able to

win the 1999 Super Bowl by running the highoctane ‘3-digit system’ in an ascent so sudden and unexpected that when Sports Illustrated ran a cover story on their quarterback, Kurt Warner, they used the title ‘Who is this guy?’. Whether it’s maximising a spread system to allow a team of nobodies to win the Super Bowl or drawing up a zone so outmatched art students can defend properly against their larger and taller peers, the fundamental idea remains the same: use the playbook to transcend the physical. In the end, this is precisely why Tom Matte is not in the hall of fame, but his wristband is. Millions of aspiring players can throw a football, but not every object can change the game’s design. ☐

WHEN FOOTBALL TRANSCENDS FACTIONS

Ramón Iriarte is a journalist and documentary filmmaker based in New York City and Bogotá. He’s covered social and environmental conflicts extensively throughout Latin America, and especially the war in his home country of Colombia.

w-t-w.co/ukh

19

At its best, sport brings people together in friendly, respectful competition. It can be part of the healing process that makes age-old enemies into neighbours and maybe even friends.

The Serranía del Perija, in the northeast of Colombia, was home to the campsites of the Caribe Bloc of the FARC-EP for decades. Just a few years ago,

On Christmas Eve, 1914, in a spontaneous act of humanity, German and British troops fighting on the Western Front ceased hostilities, walked into the barbed-wired no man’s land separating the two sides and spent part of a day together. They found common ground in Christmas songs, ciga­ rettes and—most famously—football. Varying accounts describe everything from an enormous pick-up game in which several hundred soldiers took part and where military helmets were laid out as goalposts, to an organised match between the 133rd Royal Saxon Regiment and Scottish troops, for which a reverend acted as referee.

However it really played out, that football passed between the trenches became a strikingly

combat and bombardments were a daily occurrence in these mountains. All photos by Ramón Iriarte.

bright anecdote in one of the most violent periods of modern history. But that remarkable ‘Christmas Truce’ match was not the only time of conflict in which people turned to football and its near-universal appeal. The game has often taken on a political character, aiding efforts to reach detente between warring sides, or even flaring tensions in bitter rivalries.

For the past five decades Colombia has been immersed in a bloody civil war involving the government, the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revo­ lucionarias de Colombia, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia People’s Army) and crime syndicates, and while the nation’s social fabric has been ripped apart by the violence in

20

Yezid won third place in the chess tournament of the ‘Reintegration Olympics’ organised by the mayor’s

WTW #9

office of the town of Fonseca. Like many of the guerrillas, Yezid plays chess during his free time, honing his skills.

many ways, soccer has always been much more than the national sport. In fact, it’s one of the very few things over which all Colombians are willing to put aside their political, cultural, social, and economic differences and be on the same side, wearing the same yellow shirt, for 90 minutes.

Football is somehow fundamentally tied in with the Colombian identity, and just as it has often been a source of joy that spans generations, it has also been symbolically present throughout the country’s violent history. Andres Escobar, a young football star, was assassinated after scoring an own goal that led to the elimination of the national team from the 1994 World Cup, a

testament to the limitless cruelty of the drug cartel gangsters. Three years later, during one of the most gruesome episodes of the Colombian civil war, right-wing paramilitaries infamously terrorised a village on the Pacific coast by playing football with the severed head of Marino López, a peasant who had been accused of aiding the guerrillas. Some say that this practice was fairly common in the early 2000s.

In 2016, however, everything is different. At 4:30 AM, in complete darkness, in a remote mountainous region in the north of Colombia near the border with Venezuela, fighters from the Caribe Bloc of the FARC emerge from their jungle hideouts into a clearing and start

Albeiro, wearing Colombia’s national team jersey, grew up on his father’s ranch, herding sheep and cattle. One

day, government-sponsored paramili­ taries came to his home and murdered his uncle and three of his baby cousins

falling into formation facing one of the group’s commanders. Instructions for the day are given, and guard and kitchen duties assigned, as the first rays of daylight shine upon the steel receivers of the rebel rifles, US-made M16s and old Soviet AK-47s, for the most part. Then the formation breaks.

Wartime protocol is still followed by all rebel units across the country, but life changed rad­ ically for the guerrillas the moment Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC secretariat signed a definitive bilateral cease­fire agreement last June. Throughout an arduous four-year-long peace process held in Havana, Cuba, the number of combats and bombard-

after accusing them of collaborating with the guerrillas. Albeiro joined the rebels soon after that, when he was 18.

ments dropped dramatically, and the guerrillas began to prepare for their transition to civil life, away from the rigorous military code that shaped the world’s oldest revolutionary insurgency and many of the guerrillas’ lives for the past 50 years.

Later in the morning the sun shines bright over a rudimentary mountainside football field built by the rebels near the campsite (an unthinkable sight during times of war, only a few months ago). The goalposts are wooden, and the pitch is sharply slanted, but the bright-red clay soil has an elegant look, reminiscent of the tennis courts at Roland Garros. A group of guerrillas marches onto the pitch and a tattered bright-orange ball begins to roll.

Research has pointed to British engineers hired to build railways in Colombia at the dawn of the 20th century as the forerunners of Colombian

soccer. They are reported to have brought the first leather soccer balls in 1903 and taught locals how to play the game. More than a century later,

soccer remains one of the most popular activities in Colombia, and a cultural reference point for Colombians from all walks of life.

24

Maria was born in a small settlement in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, near Colombia’s Caribbean coast. In 2001, she and her sister joined the FARC’s 59th Front after government-sponsored

WTW #9

paramilitaries violently drove their family from their home.

‘My folks are old now, and after all these years of running and hiding, they’re still poor. A whole life in poverty,’

According to a young combatant whose nom de guerre is Jaime, since the peace agreement was ratified by Congress, all of the FARC’s units have begun regrouping in areas like this one around Colombia to begin the demobilisation process. These demobilisation zones were designated in conjunction with the government and the United Nations’ mission to Colombia, and they are gradually becoming neutral

says Maria when asked about the whereabouts of her family.

grounds, where it is hoped that long-held blood feuds will dissipate little by little.

Jaime joined the FARC when he was a law and philosophy student at a prestigious university in one of Colombia’s coastal capitals and has been living in campsites for seven years now.

He’s in charge of the rebels’ radio station and communications strategy in this area. ‘It’s good that they’re training,’ says Jaime, ‘so they don’t

When Football Transcends Factions

make us look bad in the big game. I scored four goals in yesterday’s match, but I messed up my ankle so I can’t play for now.’

He’s referring to the grand finale of an olympics organised by the mayor’s office of the municipality of Fonseca (the jurisdiction nearest to the campsite) to promote the peace process and provide spaces for reconciliation between the guerrillas, the armed forces, and the population. Volleyball, chess and athletics tournaments in which both guerrillas and civilians took part were held in the adjacent village of Conejo, but by far the most awaited event of the festivities, as always, is the closing football match in the town’s main

25

field. The tourney was branded El Partido de la Reconciliación (the Reconciliation Match), and even the mayor announced he would play.

As the football practice comes to an end, a group of UN Ceasefire Monitoring and Verification Mechanism delegates enters the campsite on a routine visit; Jaime mentions that the UN has also agreed to join the reconciliation match. I approach a charismatic delegate as he greets the guerrillas and receives a cup of coffee from a female fighter. His name is Julio, and he volunteered to leave his house in the Spanish Pyrenees and come to Colombia for six months to oversee the process. He thinks that providing spaces for interaction between rebels, civilians

26

Yezid, a member of FARC’s 59th Front, posing between police officers Benitez and Eriquez, an unthinkable sight only

WTW #9

a few months ago. The ‘Reconciliation Match’ was the first time that many guerrillas and members of the state

and the government is key: ‘even more symbolic than having United Nations members playing football with the guerrillas is seeing people from the government sharing the pitch with the rebels. That alone is a big deal.’

The day of the game arrives. People walk the dusty, unpaved streets of Conejo, and gather around the football field. Dozens of kids kick tattered balls around, and the players of the highly anticipated game begin to arrive.

A number of unarmed guerrillas in civilian clothes chat with the villagers and take pictures with their mobile phones. The mayor, Misael Velázquez, makes an entrance surrounded by his staff, and several police officers in uniform follow. Then the UN delegates arrive, wearing their distinctive sky-blue caps and vests.

Jerseys are distributed and the participant delegations merge before being divided into two teams, a white team called Mayor’s Office and an

forces saw each other outside the context of the conflict.

electric orange one called Integration for Peace.

The players march onto the pitch, and amidst the bright, tacky uniforms, with the exception of a few recognisable faces, it becomes very hard to tell who is who. From the stands, a local veteran commentator introduces the event through a rusty mic wired to a huge and very loud speaker while the referee tosses a coin up in the air.

Integration for Peace wins the kick-off.

The game starts without much action; only a handful of players have considerable skills, and the terrain is about as smooth and even as the surface of the moon. The crowd watches attentively, however, and there’s a collective amazement at this monumental moment: people who were, quite literally, trying to kill each other only a few months ago are now kicking passes, however lousy, to one another, laughing from the bench, and high-fiving over goals.

One of those spectators watching intently is

When Football Transcends Factions

police chief Fabián Pedraza, a seasoned officer who has undertaken many tasks in the force, including fighting in the counter-insurgency units of the Colombian police, directly targeting the guerrillas. He now commands the police in this region. Pedraza is not very jovial, but seems receptive. ‘This is a good thing,’ he says, referring to the football game. ‘It remains a special occasion because we’ve never seen anything like it before.’ His tone verges on the apathetic, but his presence here alone is significant. Given the long record of failed peace talks, repression, and political genocide in this country, the support of battle-scarred, mid-ranking members of the armed forces like Pedraza is crucial to the sustainability of the whole peace process.

The white team scores first, and people celebrate. Asked why he’s not playing, Pedraza argues that it would be hard to justify his presence on the pitch in the middle of the holiday season, the busiest time of the year for the police.

‘We can’t take time off for leisure right now, but I’d give this activity a good grade.’ His answer sounds convincing. He even gave an interview to the rebel radio station after the game.

Officer Elías Benitez, Pedraza’s bodyguard, listens in to our conversation as he watches the game with curiosity. Benitez, 22, has been with the police only three years, so he’s part of the first generation of officers in over five decades not to have to battle the FARC. ‘I grew up here, and my dad would tell me stories of the violent times, but I never had to combat the guerrillas.’ He speaks lightly, and I can tell he doesn’t hold any grudges.

‘It’s strange to see them walking around here, but it’s entertaining to chat with them. They also want to stop fighting… Living in the jungle for so many years must be tough.’

Next, on a 50-50 ball, Silfredo, a robust high-ranking FARC commander playing midfield is thrown to the ground by someone from the mayor’s delegation. The public cries, ‘Uhhhhh!’ in unison at the rough tackle, and the universe seems to stop completely for a strained second.

Silfredo gets up and shakes the dust off. A rough welcome to civilian life, but the game carries on.

Towards the end of the second half, Mayor Velázquez, young yet corpulent, is visibly exhausted, so he calls for a sub and heads for the bench. Velázquez is a member of a controversial political party named Opción Ciudadana (Citizen

27

Option), several members of which were ousted from Congress on charges of corruption and accusations of ties to right-wing paramilitary organisations. The mayor himself has had public brushes with the FARC, who have accused him of negligence and fraudulent conduct.

I take a seat next to him and ask him why he agreed to get on the field with his enemies.

‘You know,’ he says, ‘once you step on the pitch, everybody is the same. You leave your prejudices behind and focus on scoring a goal. Sports aren’t only about health or fun; entire countries unite around their best players, and football is a great medium for reconciliation.’ The usual political spiel, but beyond the electoral interests, the fact of the matter is that this type of activity does have an integrating effect on the opposing factions and on the civilian population long caught in their crossfire.

On the football field, the dynamics of war are skewed; when the ball rolls, any sworn enmity becomes inconsistent, even absurd.

Why football? Because ‘the beautiful game’, as Pelé dubbed it, has a special ability to demarcate a sacred space, one that renders all other concerns irrelevant. In this remote Colombian village everybody plays it and everybody loves it. Political barriers are transcended, the myths that feed antagonisms are undermined, and the other becomes humanised: a fraternising effect that doesn’t quite disappear once those magical 5,400 seconds have gone by.

Game time is up, and the referee’s whistle announces the end of the match. All the players then shoot a penalty kick, and everybody cheers for each other while cracking up at a handful of outrageously bad shots. Team colours and the official score count fade away with the last orange rays of sunlight, as a festive sentiment fills the air. It is almost like that historic Christmas Eve, a century ago in France.

In Colombia, most massacres were committed in the football fields of dusty towns like this one, and all the fear and tragedy that this red dirt has witnessed heighten the symbolic value of the event that has just ended. Even 90 minutes of reconciliation can mark a revival in the heart of a battered society that, decade after decade, has repeatedly lost hope. Now footballs, not heads, are rolling again on the pitch. The beautiful game has done it again. ☐

28

In the early years of the Tour de France, much of the race took place beyond the view of spectators and cameras, and cheating was widespread: riders getting

WTW #9

lifts in cars or jumping on trains, fans dumping nails on the road or attacking riders, and substances of all kinds being abused. Above, Noël Amenc pushing

his bike up to Col de Tourmalet in 1920.

Photo courtesy of Presse Sports.

Christof Gertsch is a two-time Sports Journalist of the Year in Switzerland. He has covered five Olympic Games and 11 Tours de France. He loves sports, but the subject that really interests him is cheating, where the spirit of sport and the hunger for victory collide.

w-t-w.co/lo3

29

Throughout the history of sport, athletes have strived to find methods of gaining a competitive edge over opponents. In the endless quest for victory, ethics sometimes fall by the wayside.

GAMING THE GAME It happened on a Sunday in the spring of 1994, during La Flèche Wallonne, one of Belgium’s many venerable cycling events. Despite the nasty weather, tens of thousands of spectators lined the streets, thousands of them standing alongside the last climb, only 1,300 m (4,300 ft) long, but with a punishingly steep grade. That year there were clear leaders: Moreno Argentin, Giorgio Furlan and Evgeni Berzin, all riders for the renowned team Gewiss-Ballan. Leaving all the other competitors lagging far behind, they looked like supermen, storming the climb as if they hadn’t already put hundreds of kilometres behind them, riding like machines. If they were

machines, then they were machines fuelled by erythropoietin (EPO), a hormone that boosts red blood cell production, increasing athletes’ oxygen intake and endurance. Team doctor Michele Ferrari had administered it in what are enormous doses by today’s standards, and it propelled them to an astounding victory. Of course, that 1994 Flèche Wallonne was neither the first nor the only incident in the history of sports doping, but it serves as a good illustration of how it works, of the ever more complex and creative game of cat and mouse between those who work to maintain fair play in the athletic world and those who seek to win at any cost.

30

WTW #9

Athletes have a huge variety of doping substances at their disposal. There are steroids (to boost muscle growth), narcotics (to suppress pain), beta blockers (to slow the heart rate), and stimulants (to increase energy).

For one thing, Gewiss-Ballan’s riders were using what was then a relatively new doping method. EPO had already been banned by the International Olympic Committee in 1985, but no test was developed and implemented until 15 years later. Part of the difficulty is that artificial EPO is difficult to distinguish from EPO produced naturally by the body, but another aspect is that EPO represents only one step in the endless search for a competitive edge, ethical or not, and the resulting effort to detect and eliminate unethical practices.

For as long as humans have competed, they have sought out ways to get and maintain advantages over their opponents. Historians record that Olympic athletes in Ancient Greece used mushrooms and herbal beverages to increase their strength and endurance. The word ‘doping’ itself can be traced back to 18th-century Africa, where Dutch colonists observed indigenous tribes using ‘dop’, an alcoholic beverage, as a stimulant in religious ceremonies

and sports competitions, and adopted the word as a term for stimulant beverages in general. In more recent years doping has become far more sophisticated as medical science has advanced.

The days of using drugs such as alcohol, ether, cocaine, heroin and strychnine are long past, and today’s more subtle techniques use substances like EPO, steroid precursors, human growth hormone and even transfusions of the athlete’s own previously stored red blood cells. The cutting edge, however, is gene doping, tweaking the athlete’s very genes to build muscle, increase speed and reduce recovery times. Whether or not gene doping is actually being used now is anyone’s guess, but the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has been studying it since 2002 in the hope of being able to detect and punish it.

Dopers, of course, are just as determined to find ways to evade testing or, better still, to test negative to ‘prove’ that they are clean, and the Gewiss-Ballan team probably passed doping tests (which had been introduced at the Tour

Gaming the Game

Ben Johnson winning the Men’s 100 Metres at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, sometimes called ‘the dirtiest race in history’. Two days later, Johnson

31

was stripped of his gold medal after testing positive for the use of steroids.

Six of the eight finalists were found guilty of using performance-enhancing

or other illegal drugs at some point in their careers. Photo: Legros Lecoq, Presse Sports

The winners’ podium of the Tour de France 2005 with Lance Armstrong (centre), Ivan Basso (left) and Jan Ullrich (right). Armstrong was disqualified in

2012 by USADA (the United States AntiDoping Agency), Ullrich was officially stripped of his finish by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and Basso was

de France, not without controversy, decades earlier in 1966). EPO was new enough that it went undetected. Riders using less sophisticated doping, either for lack of information or lack of finances, had to find other ways to pass the test, and were certainly aware of Michel Pollentier’s infamous attempt at the 1978 Tour de France.

He had attempted to pass a drug test by taping a condom filled with foreign urine under his arm and running a tube under his shirt and through his shorts, but was caught by a doctor. Today a more modern athlete might be tempted to try the Whizzinator, an easily obtainable prosthetic penis sold with synthetic urine and a heater pack to keep the urine at body temperature. Or to use a catheter to inject clean urine into his bladder before the test.

Or if the test cannot be avoided, then perhaps it can be fooled. In the case of blood tests for EPO, for example, saline injected into the bloodstream can dilute haemoglobin and haematocrit concentrations to below official

found guilty of doping several times, just like all but one of the top ten finishers of that year’s Tour. Photo courtesy of Presse Sports.

thresholds if administered as little as 20 minutes before a test. Urine tests have also been spoofed: common household soaps contain protease, an enzyme that breaks down EPO, and athletes have been known to rub it on their hands and urinate over their fingers, or if they suspect that they will be asked to wash their hands before providing the sample, to hide it under their foreskins.

For those who prefer not to tinker with their body chemistry, either because of the side effects of doping or the risk of being caught, there are other ways to cheat. Accusations of ‘mechanical doping’ go back to Fabian Cancellara’s victory in the 2010 Tour of Flanders, but Belgian cyclist Femke van den Driessche became the first rider in history to face sanctions because of a bicycle fitted with the Vivax Assist system, an electric motor concealed in the seat tube. Italian newspaper Gazetto dello Sport reported on a far more sophisticated electromagnetic boost system using wires embedded in a carbon-fibre wheel, allegedly in use at the highest levels of

Gaming the Game

Michele Ferrari, the team doctor for the Gewiss–Ballan road bicycle racing team, and the mastermind behind the doping methods of dozens of cycling

33

professionals, supervising their use of blood transfusions, EPO, testosterone and other banned substances. Photo: Biville, Presse Sports

the sport. Those who choose the medical route, however, have to master not only their training and competing, but the art of evading tests.

Cheating, as they say, is easy, but winning and not getting caught is hard.

One such master was Lance Armstrong, who used EPO up until 2001, knowing that it was undetectable. He used blood doping and HGH up until 2005, knowing that they were undetectable. He was very precise when it came to the timing of injections the night before the race, and he used a wide range of masking agents to cover his tracks. This level of information, however, goes far beyond what an athlete or trainer can obtain without consulting a medical professional, and just as Gewiss-Ballan had Michele Ferrari, nicknamed ‘Dottore EPO’, athletes and teams turn today to clinics like Victor Conte’s Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (most infamously associated with Barry Bonds, Tim Montgomery and Marion Jones) or Biogenesis (linked to Alex Rodriguez and

12 other Major League Baseball players). Like Conte, who returned to the sports-supplements industry after serving a total of four months’ prison time, Ferrari continued to have close relationships with cyclists after being fired by Gewiss-Ballan, among them Lance Armstrong, who based his doping system on Ferrari’s.

The doctors are among the most colourful characters in the doping world. Conte was a bass guitarist before he began to manufacture supplements, even playing with the legendary Tower of Power from 1976 to 1979. Ferrari once boasted in an interview with a local newspaper that his name appeared 450 times in the USADA’s report, while Armstrong’s name only appeared 200 times. Nor was Ferrari content merely to advise the cyclist on drugs, recovery times and test evasion; he also discussed raising the bike saddle by 2 mm (0.08 in) or adding another training session. He owned an apartment in the Swiss mountain village of St Moritz, where he received athletes from all over the

34

WTW #9

The Festina cycling team at the start of the Tour de France in 1998. All members of the Tour team were arrested and ejected from the race after its director admitted a systematic programme of administering performance-enhancing drugs to riders. Photo: Clement, Presse Sports

world—cyclists, football players, tennis players, boxers, cross-country skiers—who came not only to train at high altitudes, as they told everyone, but also to receive doping substances.

And when important cycling races were taking place, he sat at home in front of his television, pleased as any child in front of a Christmas tree when one of his riders won.

Even after his lifetime ban by USADA in 2012 and Armstrong’s fall from grace in 2013, Ferrari continues to move in elite sports circles, offering his services as a coach to anyone who wants to hire him. And this is perhaps the most troubling and complicated way in which the scene from

the 1994 Flèche Wallonne serves as a microcosm of sports doping: athletes and coaches hungry for victories and trophies, doctors hungry for fame and influence, sponsors eager for a return on their investment, and fans willing to wait in the rain for the thrill of watching a superhuman performance may all be willing to turn a blind eye to doping’s existence. In fact, some of the earliest cheating at the Tour de France was committed not by cyclists, but by spectators throwing rocks, nails or broken glass in front of riders they didn’t like. The cases of East Germany’s State Plan 14.25 and the Russian scandal at Sochi demonstrate that a willingness

Gaming the Game

to not only ignore but also to facilitate programmatic doping extends to the level of the state.

The end result of all of this is that everything we know about doping may be only the tip of the iceberg. A study by researchers at the University of Adelaide suggests that on average, the chance of successfully detecting doping is around 2.9% per test. French gene-therapy researcher Dr Philippe Moullier, who was able to boost EPO production in lab animals, has had to explain to countless athletes that his technique can have unpredictable, potentially fatal side effects.

‘They didn’t seem to care, it didn’t seem to be

35

a problem for them,’ he says. ‘The competition is so high, those guys are ready to do anything to make the difference.’ Even the widely touted ‘biological passport’, which seeks to demonstrate doping use indirectly by monitoring athletes’ biochemical profiles, has been successfully challenged in court as insufficiently sophisticated. The dopers are amongst us, and they always will be. From time to time we may catch a glimpse of one of them, but most of the time their ruthless and somehow subversive activity stays undetected. How many more like Ferrari and Conte are out there? ☐

36

WTW #9

ZERO-GRAVITY GAMES:

w-t-w.co/m5a

37

Leanne Prain is a writer and designer who lives and works in Vancouver, Canada.

She hopes one day she’ll see crokinole, her favourite game, played in space.

HOW ASTRONAUTS PLAY IN SPACE

The International Space Station (ISS) is a busy place where every day is divided into five-minute increments from 6am to 8pm for tasks such as running experiments and performing

maintenance. Astronauts also get about two hours a day for physical activities, and have access to a treadmill, resistance exercise machine and stationary bicycle. Above, Christa

‘What three things would I take with me to Mars? A deck of cards, my wedding ring, and my Looney Pyramids,’ states Dr Leila Zucker on her personal website. Zucker, an ER physician based in Washington DC, is an avid game player who is among the 100 remaining candidates currently being considered for the Mars One Mission. A private enterprise set up by Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp, Mars One aims to establish the first permanent human colony on the Red Planet by 2032 (see WTW Issue 4). During the seven-month trip to Mars, participants will have to amuse themselves. Fortunately, with a little creativity, play is as possible as it is critical in space.

The Looney Pyramids, a set of lightweight, stackable styrene pyramids, and a deck of cards would allow Zucker to play over 500 games varying from simple to complex, short to long.

‘Playing games in space, especially with pyra­ mids, literally opens up a whole new dimension,’

McAuliffe (top) and Barbara Morgan play leapfrog during zero-gravity chamber exercises. Photo: NASA

she says. ‘Imagine playing a game where your pieces were arranged not in 2‑D but in 3‑D.’ Such complexity and novelty will be sorely needed on the mission since candidates who make the final selection get a one-way ticket to Mars, leaving their home planet for good.

‘There’s nothing better than sitting around with your friends and playing a game. A good game is visually appealing. There is a visceral feeling to holding a piece in your hands,’ says Andrew Looney, Chief Creative Officer of Looney Labs, and inventor of the Looney Pyramids.

‘You should be able to play a game anytime, anywhere.’ A former NASA employee, he’s confident that his games would work on Mars, whose gravitational pull is only 38% of Earth’s.

Looney compares game design to coding for the Hubble Space Telescope. ‘In my previous life as an aerospace engineer, I wrote a lot of code.

I find that writing software is a similar process to writing game rules. You try and get rid of all

Zero-gravity Games: How Astronauts Play in Space

39

The need for recreation and active relaxation is as real in space as it is on Earth. The creativity required to adapt games to the special demands of this environment is perhaps part of the fun.

NASA psychologists recognise that play is fundamental to astronauts’ mental health and encourage them to play games in their spare time. Because any loose object on the station can

potential errors.’ One discipline that helps him work out these details is to describe new games to his company in the form of a design memo.

‘Nothing forces you to think through an idea like writing it down,’ he says.

All games balance prescribed goals with an element of chance, an uncertainty that the goals will be reached. In this, they are remarkably like space travel, and the longer the mission, the greater the uncertainty. ‘Most of our current missions to the International Space Station are six months to a year, so we don’t have enough data about astronauts’ health on longer mis­ sions,’ says Dr Raffi Kuyumjian, Chief Medical Officer of the Canadian Space Agency’s opera­ tional space medicine programme, who moni­ tors the astronauts’ vital statistics to understand how they change in space, and to help them stay healthy before, during and after their missions.

But in addition to the physiological effects of long-term space travel, there are psychological

drift away and cause a hazard, every individual letter in this Scrabble set must be velcroed to the board. When pieces do get lost, they generally turn up in the airflow filter. Photo: NASA

ones, including the stress caused by isolation, by knowing that your every action is being recorded, and by separation from loved ones.

‘When space missions were shorter, astronauts were selected purely for their technical skills, but over the course of many missions, we’ve learned that the space station is a closed environment with many different cultures,’ says Kuyumjian.

Selecting a team of astronauts is not a matter of choosing people who are instantly compatible, but of choosing team players who can learn to work and grow together in a challenging environment.

On December 28, 1973 three American astro­ nauts at NASA’s Skylab, Jerry Carr, Ed Gibson, and William Pogue, felt so fatigued by their 16-hour workdays that they staged a one-day strike. Their protest, in which they cut off com­ munication with ground control and spent the day relaxing, set a precedent for future missions to recognise the importance of downtime. ‘We

Top: NASA astronaut and chess aficionado Gregory Chamitoff brought an ultra-lightweight chessboard with him on the space shuttle, introducing simultaneous Earth-vs-space chess matches against the control centres in Houston, Toulouse, Moscow, Tsukuba

and Oberpfaffenhofen. Magnetic pieces could interfere with the delicate on-board systems, so the hollow plastic pieces have Velcro bases. Photo: NASA Right: Canadian astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield playing space darts, a

game he designed for the low-gravity environment. Hadfield made darts out of camera batteries (for weight), Velcro, zip-ties, duct tape, and paper. The darts fly slowly and gracefully towards the target. Video stills: NASA

Zero-gravity Games: How Astronauts Play in Space

41

Looney was once sent an academic textbook called Rules of Play, in which he found himself categorised as a ‘full game system designer’, which means ‘I create a set of complements that the game can occur in, which involves thinking at a higher level than the game itself.’

learned from early research that [astronauts] needed the ability to call family and not be overworked. They have a regular work week, and aside from a few clean-up chores, they have weekends off,’ says Kuyumjian.

‘I believe that games such as chess or Scrabble act as an important means of maintaining mental well-being during a space mission. They allow for the ability to detach from the seriousness and monotony of being “trapped” in a potentially dangerous workplace environment,’ says Gary Bevan, Chief of Aerospace Psychiatry at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. ‘They allow crew members to engage with each other socially, free of making a mistake that could damage the space station or ruin a complex scientific experiment.’

Chess was part of life on the ISS in both 2008 and 2011, when astronauts Greg Chamitoff and Greg Johnson played an ‘interplanetary space game’ against earthlings who could suggest countermoves in a game facilitated by the United States Chess Federation. As for Scrabble, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield left Earth with a travel-sized set. Each tiny letter tile had a Velcro backing so it could be affixed to the board, which was hung in the mess area. In the zerogravity environment of the ISS, the pieces need

to be secured or they would float away, though lost pieces could usually be found relatively easily, not on a floor or under a couch as on Earth, but in the space station’s air filters.

Hadfield also developed space darts, adapting the popular bar game to a microgravity environment where sharp objects could not be thrown. His dart had a heavy camera battery for a nose, two zip-ties for a shaft, and notepaper for fletching. As ungainly as they may look, space darts drift gracefully from one end of the cabin to the other when thrown, quite unlike their planetside counterparts.

The games that astronauts choose to play appear personal, but Looney states that there are two types of game players: those driven by strategy who play to win, and those who are the ‘party game’ people. ‘They don’t play to win; for them it’s about the experience of playing.’

And when asked if astronauts tend to fall into one personality type or the other, Bevan puts game play into perspective: ‘I believe that most astronauts feel that their ultimate achievement was made when they reached orbit and began to experience life in zero gravity, realising their lives’ dreams. Given that, the gameplay during a space mission is most likely just for fun.’ ☐

42

WTW #9

PROPAGANDOPOLY: MONOPOLY AS AN IDEOLOGICAL TOOL

Known around the world as a symbol of both the fun and folly of capitalism, Monopoly has often been viewed as a vehicle for political indoctrination. Attempts to modify the game and the lessons it teaches have been many and various, and have met with different degrees of success.

Naomi Russo is an Australian writer who generally covers design, art and the environment.

Intrigued by designs that get away from their designers’ best intentions, Naomi couldn’t pass up the opportunity to write about Monopoly’s twisted path to popularity.

w-t-w.co/gma

The original Landlord’s Game invented by the proto-feminist Elizabeth ­Magie as a protest against capitalism some three

43

decades before Parker Brothers began to distribute Monopoly. Magie’s role in the history of the game has been largely

Monopoly is a game in which anyone from a child to a grandma can become a ruthless property mogul. Sold in over 114 countries, the game was first commercially marketed as a success story of the American dream, a game invented, its packaging claimed, by an unemployed man for whom it made millions during the Great Depression. As a potent worldwide symbol for capitalism it has become so well recognised that during the Occupy London protest in 2011, an oversized Monopoly board sat outside St Paul’s Cathedral, featuring a destitute Rich Uncle Pennybags and attributed by many to famous street artist Banksy. The message to everyone was clear.

The young woman who originally invented the game, however, had far different ideals.

Elizabeth Magie was inspired by her passion for the anti-monopolist economic theories of

overlooked, and she died in obscurity in 1948. Image courtesy of Thomas Forsyth.

politician Henry George, and her desire to teach them to others in a simple, compelling way led her to develop The Landlord’s Game. In the words of her 1903 patent application, the game was designed ‘not only to afford amusement to the players, but to illustrate to them how under the present or prevailing system of land tenure, the landlord has an advantage over other enterprises.’

The game had two sets of rules. One was similar to today’s Monopoly, while the other rewarded everyone and avoided monopolies.

The game was featured in The Review in 1902, where Magie was quoted as saying, ‘There are those who argue that it may be a dangerous thing to teach children how they may thus get the advantage of their fellows, but let me tell you there are no fairer-minded beings in the world than our own little American children. Watch

44

The Landlord’s Game, designed by Elizabeth Magie and patented in 1904, and Monopoly, patented by Charles Darrow in 1935. Parker Brothers bought the game from Darrow (eventually

WTW #9

paying him over a million dollars in royalties) and also bought Magie’s patent for $500. Parker Brothers was eventually acquired by General Mills, merged with Kenner and acquired by

them in their play and see how quick they are […] to cry, “No fair!”’

Nonetheless, Magie struggled to generate commercial interest in her game. Parker Brothers told her it was ‘too political’, most likely because of its length, complexity and anti-capitalist message. The game was fairly didactic, and its values were at odds with the American economic system, not to mention with Parker Brothers, a company that stood to benefit from the very practices that the game sought to censure.

Still, the game had popular appeal and quickly evolved beyond Magie’s control. Some changes were slight, such as adaptations of the street names to the players’ neighbourhoods, but others were radical. Perhaps the biggest change was the exact reversal of Magie’s original intent: as players created their own boards and rules,

Tonka, which was acquired by Hasbro.

To this day, Hasbro makes no official mention of Monopoly’s history prior to 1935.

they focused on the elements that were the most exciting for them, and for non-Georgists, those were accumulating capital, building a real-estate empire and dominating the market. This shift was so marked that the game came to be known colloquially as ‘Monopoly’.

‘Monopoly’ was also the name used by Charles Darrow, an unemployed salesman, when he took the game to Parker Brothers, pretending it was his original invention. His version, stripped of Georgist ideals, was already selling well, so Parker Brothers decided to take a chance on it, and Monopoly’s popularity spread quickly across American and European nations.

Communist countries were quick to ban the game as a bad influence that spread capitalist values. In Cuba not only was the game banned, but the existing boards were also destroyed after a direct 1959 ruling by the newly empowered

Propagandopoly: Monopoly as an Ideological Tool

45

A game works on two levels. One level is established by the author’s activity in creating the elements of the game, which, like all symbols, are open to interpretation. The second, more complicated, level is established by the players’ activity as they interact with the first level, creating structures and events which are likewise open to interpretation. Thus games, perhaps more than any other type of creation, are works whose meanings are determined collaboratively by the designer and players.

Fidel Castro. Some countries such as Hungary adopted the alternative route of providing a replacement. After banning the Hungarian version of the game, Kapitaly, they began to sell a low-budget board game known as Gazdálkodj Okosan!. Loosely translated as either ‘Economise Wisely’, or ‘Budget Shrewdly’, the game was far more politically correct, encouraging hard work and exercise with didactic Chance cards chastising bad behaviour.

‘You have dirtied the street! Pay 10 forints’, read one such not-so-subtle card.

But as Professor David Stark writes, a statesponsored game couldn’t usurp Monopoly as simply as that. He tells the story of a Hungarian friend, writing, ‘You did not need to be a nineyear-old dissident to see that Monopoly was the more exciting game’ and going on to explain that in his friend’s home Gazdálkodj Okosan!’s boards were turned over and used to form the basis of a home-made Kapitaly. The result was something of a hybrid born from remembered rules of Kapi­ taly, the cards of Gazdálkodj Okosan!, and the innovations of Hungarian children themselves.

The failure of Gazdálkodj Okosan! to impart its message has not discouraged others from creating their own politically motivated adaptations. In fact, the spin-offs by academics, artists and others seem endless, from a Hasidic version entitled Live Piously that reinforces Satmar community values, to Class Struggle, which aims to show the superiority of Marxism.

None of these versions have had anywhere near the success of Monopoly, however, their small sales suggesting that they mostly remain within their community rather than spreading their values more widely.

Still, variations on Monopoly have been found to be successful teaching tools in the academic world. Drs Catherine Coghlan and

Denise Huggins write that ‘when students from relatively privileged backgrounds “experience” a temporary bout of unfairness in a simulated game, it creates the opportunity to change their perspective’. An altered Monopoly simulation used by Thames Valley University researcher Suresh Gamlath found that ‘prolonged exposure to a game-based learning environment resulted in noticeable shifts in attitude and behaviour.’

If games can transmit values, however, why did Magie’s version fail while Darrow’s succeeded? As Keith Devlin, the ‘NPR Math Guy’, told KQED’s Mindshift, ‘Games are just simulators with an internal incentive structure’.

And The Landlord’s Game lacks real incentive.

As professors Dr Mary Flanagan and Dr Helen Nissenbaum discuss in their book, Values at Play in Digital Games, students at Virginia Tech who played both versions found that while The Landlord’s Game made its point, Monopoly was much more fun.

So are users learning to be ruthless capitalists when they play Monopoly? Research fellow Dr Marcus Carter says probably not, arguing that ‘despite the arguments and allegations of betrayal Monopoly is likely to cause in homes this Christmas, its morality is as unrealistic as that in Grand Theft Auto. Players are granted no moral choice whether or not to bankrupt their opponents and consequently, there is little moral involvement.’

On the other hand, social psychologist Paul Piff believes that Monopoly might be able to be used to expose moral codes or ethics. Piff uses rigged games, in which the rules are changed to make one player unbeatably wealthy, to reveal what he believes his earlier research has shown: that wealthier people tend to lack empathy.

His studies with rigged games showed that the person given all the advantages quickly became

46

The World Monopoly Championship brings together select players from all over the world, offering a grand prize of US$20,580, which is the amount of play money included in the current edition of

WTW #9

the game. The last world championship was held in Macau in 2015 and was won by Italian Nicolò Falcone, who drove the race car to victory, defeating Norwegian Bjørn Halvard Knappskog

(the thimble), American Brian Valentine (the battleship) and Japanese Tsutomu Doita (the top hat). Photo: Michael J. Maloney

Propagandopoly: Monopoly as an Ideological Tool

47

accustomed to them and played ruthlessly, feeling little to no regard for the other less fortunate player. His conclusions supported his continued work on the so-called ‘empathy gap’, but they also reveal two things about the game: firstly, that Monopoly can be set up to simulate moral decision processes, but secondly and more importantly, that those morals are affected by the rigged circumstances of the game. In other words, how people play isn’t necessarily how they act in the real world, but it is affected by the type of player the game sets them up to become.

There is no evidence that they continue to act in such a fashion after they stop playing that role.

Flanagan contends that ‘Monopoly successfully imparts the values of competition, individual wealth, and exclusivity’, but it’s worth noting that these values weren’t a critique of the society in which the game evolved, nor of our society today, but rather a reflection of it. This makes it hard to know whether Monopoly really encourages such values, or simply represents the values its players already have.

In fact, a different adaptation that rigged winners and losers to make a point was unpopular with players. The 1970s Blacks and Whites game, marketed by Psychology Today magazine, intended to highlight racial injustice.

The game was weighted in such a way that a player who chose to play as ‘black’ would never win the game. The problem was that the players found the game frustrating, not fun. Based on input from black activists, the game was later redesigned by David Popoff, to make it possible for black users to subvert and change the system.

As Flanagan explains, ‘if you would like to get a critique out to sell to a mass audience, the critique might have to be quite subtle to be effective. But if one is making a game for a particular community, or in an arts context where one can direct the dialogue to the art viewer and art viewers expect provocative work, the critique can stand easily.’

So can games like Monopoly work to transmit new values? The more-than 200 versions would seem to suggest that many believe so. But the lesson from the many adaptations that have failed to catch on, and from Magie’s original game, is clear: a game can be used to spread a message, but for it to reach beyond a limited target audience, first and foremost, it must be

fun.

DOING THE PANENKA

Alan Záruba is a Czech graphic designer and art director. He grew up near the Bohemians Prague football stadium where Antonín Panenka played most of his career.

w-t-w.co/t2x

49

Antonín Panenka achieved international football stardom with a ruse that scored a critical goal for the Czechoslovak national team in 1976. He talks about the childhood that formed him as a sportsman and how he invented the penalty kick that bears his name.

The final match of the 1976 UEFA European Football Championship in Belgrade was a historic match. The powerhouse West Germans and underdog Czechoslovaks fought to a 2:2 tie unbroken after 30 minutes of extra time, making it the first time that a major international title would be decided by a penalty shootout. Against the world’s best goalkeeper, Sepp Maier, in the biggest game of his career, with the whole tournament riding on his final kick, Antonín Panenka took a long running start and charged the ball ferociously. Only at the last minute, as Maier started to dive for the expected cannon-ball blast, did Panenka chip the ball delicately to the centre of the goal to win Czechoslovakia its first and only Euro trophy. Countless other players after him have tried to execute this kick, and many have failed, but the whole world knows it as the ‘Panenka penalty’, and the 1976 original is still regarded as one of the greatest penalty kicks in football history. We spoke with Panenka about sports, creativity and his legendary move.

Did you start playing sports as a kid?

I learned all kinds of sports on my own: swimming, skating, riding a bike… I played football with older boys regularly. I guess I have a God-given talent for sports and a kind of creativity, sports ideas. I guess maybe I was born with quite a bit of that. And it’s true that even as a little boy I was always playing matches like kids do, one street against another, one

neighbourhood against another, and pretty often on a weaker team that I helped to win. When we got together in the park I would choose the weakest boy and play with him, maybe just the two of us against five. So then everybody wanted me to play with them. For example, I remember once at one of those street games, the team my friend was playing for was losing 0:2, and after I joined in, it turned out exactly the opposite, and we won with flying colours, 13:2. I guess it was because I was just crazier, stubborner, maybe more skilful than the others.

Did you try any other sports besides football?

Of course in the summer there was football, and in the winter there was hockey. As a youth I started with football for Bohemians Prague [editor’s note: known today for legal reasons as Bohemians Prague 1905], and I played hockey for Dukla Prague. In fact we got as far as the youth leagues where there were guys who played hockey as their main sport. I remember that we didn’t have any equipment. We would borrow hockey sticks on the bench, and I played in plain trousers, no shin guards. When somebody took a shot I used to flatten myself against the boards so that nobody would hit me in the shins with the puck. Looking back on it now, I think that it was a huge learning experience, and my sports personality, so to speak, was formed there. As a footballer I had to fight for myself, get the ball, zig-zag down the pitch, finish off plays, because I had only myself to depend on. I basically spent five, six, seven hours on the field daily. I think that’s missing nowadays. Young players spend

50

only four or five hours on the field a week, so they don’t have that extra skill, that zeal for the game.

They’re missing those hours that I spent on the pitch.

You were fairly young when you started to play on the men’s team.

What I always liked was ball-handling, practices, matches… What I never liked, on the other hand, was strength training and athletics. That was stifling for me. I was never much the combative type, I wasn’t a power player. I didn’t have the drive, and I never ran too much, I just had the physique for my style of play and for working with teammates, more than a physical approach to football. Ball skills were my forte, and I told myself that I had to perfect the things that I knew how do to advance myself on the field.

At Bohemians there was a youth league coach who opened my eyes with one interesting thing. We were playing a match and I messed

WTW #9

up one pass—it wasn’t even a tricky one—and at halftime he cussed me out. And I felt like that wasn’t quite right, so I went and asked him: ‘The other guys messed up a lot more passes, and I messed up one, and you yelled at me. Isn’t that unfair?’ And he answered me: ‘Yes, you’re right, but you have to realise that your technique is so good, and you so surpass the others with your kicking technique that you can’t allow yourself to mess up. They can; they don’t know any better.’

Well then, after that I tried to live by that advice for my whole career.

At winter training they always did physical strength and fitness tests, and usually it turned out that [Slovak fullback Karol] Dobiáš and Panenka were in last and second-to-last place.

But it was interesting that when the season ended and the coach was evaluating who the best players were on the field, then that list turned around 180 degrees. I think that physically, for my level I was pretty well prepared for playing first-league football. Not as well prepared as

Doing the Panenka

51

‘ After every training session, I’d stay behind with our keeper, and we’d have a spot-kick competition.

To make it more fun, we’d gamble: chocolate, beer or cash. It was costing me money, because I kept losing. I’d lie in bed at night and worry about it.

Then it came to me. He was a keeper who often waited until the last second and then guess either left or right. So it made sense to put it down the middle. Except if you do that with a normal shot, the keeper can reflexively lift a leg and save it.

But if you float it gently, he can’t.’ The only negative, Panenka says, is that he ‘got really fat from the chocolate and the beer.’

the others, but on the other hand I scored a lot of goals and had a lot of assists, so everyone was satisfied.

take the title instead. Everyone needs money, of course, but money certainly isn’t everything.

There has to be a little something more and your attitude has to be a little different.

In your era football was mainly about the joy of the game, and maybe today spectators don’t get so much of that, don’t you think?

Did you know that there is a magazine in Spain called Panenka?

Well, maybe, but football is a completely different thing today. It’s such a strong commercial commodity that for young players professional football is really hard work, physically and especially mentally. We played football because we loved it, and the advantage was that we could make a living at it, get some benefits from it, and most of all, we didn’t have to go to work. Of course the best players today have conditions that we never even dreamed of back then. But when I look at it from a different angle, for example how we won the European Championship in Belgrade, if you offered any player a hundred million crowns for that, he’d

Of course. It’s a big honour for me. Some young journalists from Spain called me because they wanted to do a new style of football magazine, and they chose my name for it. I was really surprised because I said to myself, it’s been so long since I played, and what’s more, these guys are from Spain where they have maybe the best players in the world, and they’re choosing someone from the Czech Republic? So I asked them about it, and they told me that for them, my penalty kick in Belgrade and my whole career, about which they knew absolutely everything, were so inspiring that my name was the only choice for their innovative project. That made

52

Many great football players have tried the iconic penalty kick, which requires steady nerves as well as top-notch acting skills. Above, Gianluigi Buffon, the

WTW #9

best goalkeeper of his time, watching Zinédine Zidane outwit him at the 2006 FIFA World Cup Final. Photo courtesy of Presse Sports.

me really happy, and I agreed, but that’s not all that happened. In fact in Holland there’s another football magazine named Panenka, and a restaurant named Panenka in Madrid, and even a sports bar in Rotterdam that also bears my name.

So I guess in Holland and Spain they like me.

And that brings us to that famous penalty at the 1976 UEFA European Football Champion­­ ship in Belgrade.

Never in my life did I imagine that one penalty could have such an impact. Say what you like, that event became part of football history.

I noticed that the first one to try it out at a championship game was your teammate Štefan ‘Pišta’ Ivančík playing against Lokomotiva Košice in 1975. You couldn’t play that day because of an injury, and he used your trick. What was the reaction, and weren’t you angry that someone else was the first to use your invention?

Not at all. We were always practising those kinds of things between matches, and I don’t even remember who was the first to use it in a game.

It’s true that I often stayed on the field after practices with our goalkeeper Zdeněk Hruška, and we came up with a kind of penalty-kicking game. To liven it up a bit we played for beer, or chocolate or money. And because I was always losing these games I spent evenings thinking about what to do so I could win some too. And out of that ferment was born the idea of trying that trick. Because the goalie never stood still, it occurred to me to just lightly chip the ball; he’d jump to one side, and the ball would sail gently into the middle of the goal. Once he jumps, he can’t turn back in mid-air, it’s impossible.

And was there some method to it that you perfected?

Of course, the kicker has to get a fast running start to spook the goalie, who anticipates a hard blow and throws himself towards the post.

Doing the Panenka

When a Panenka is executed correctly, it is a thing of beauty. But there are few things more embarrassing than a failed attempt at a Panenka, when

53

the goalkeeper stands waiting for the ball to land gently in his arms, as many professional footballers have found out.

Photo courtesy of Presse Sports.

Except instead of the expected bang, you just give the ball a gentle undercut and then sit back and enjoy watching it fly into the goal. But it’s not as easy as it appears at first glance. Basically, I practised it diligently every day for two years.

As the kicker you have to convince the goalie that the shot is going to one side. In other words, I have to use everything to deceive him: my behaviour, my eyes, my movement, my running start. I have to commit to the situation. And then at the very last moment, that’s the easy part when you just slow your leg down a bit and send the ball lightly to the centre. Back then there were rules in my favour that don’t apply any more. The goalkeeper had to stand in one place on the goal line, wasn’t allowed to run forward and wasn’t even allowed to move to the side. He had to just stand there, and couldn’t move until the moment when the ball took off. And that was usually too late because when I kicked the ball from the penalty mark the goalie had no chance to catch it unless he stood there stock-still.

When did you first try the Panenka in a championship match?

The first time was at Bohemians against Dukla, and it was three weeks before the European Championship. Ivo Viktor was their goalie at the time, and he knew that I would try it and how I would kick it, but he still couldn’t prevent the goal.

When you went to kick that last, crucial shot against West Germany’s Sepp Maier at the European Football Championship in Belgrade, had you already decided beforehand that you would try it again?

I already knew two months in advance. That might sound like bragging, and of course I didn’t know that it would be in the final match, that we would tie with the Germans, and that it would all turn out the way it did. But I knew that if it came down to a penalty shootout, which I figured would be more likely against Holland, because

54

Panenka played for Bohemians Prague for most of his career, joining the club in 1967, and today he is the president of the club. Photo: Jiří Koliš

WTW #9

Doing the Panenka

in my opinion they were the best team of all in Europe, I told myself that if we were lucky and tied with them and it came down to a shootout, that I would use it against them. But everything turned out differently. Of course, I’m glad that I could wrap up the championship with such a nice finish.

Such a nice finish for you, but not for everyone.

I read somewhere that Maier was so upset afterwards that he had to go and get drunk, and later he put up your photo in his garage and threw darts at it to calm himself down. Is that true?

It’s true that the Germans went to a bar after the match; I guess they were so disappointed, but everything went more or less like always.

What was worse was that the next day all the newspapers were saying that I’d made fun of him, and I think that was unfair because it wasn’t true. I had a chance to meet him a number of times afterwards and to see a number of his appearances on television where he always acted like a great companion, a funny guy, a clown, up until the moment when the subject of Panenka and his penalty came up, and then all of a sudden he got mad. So he didn’t speak to me for 35 years, and after all those years we met up once and everything was okay. But I think that it was okay because he was so old he’d already forgotten everything.

Was that penalty the highlight of your career?

55

I have one more thing in my career that I value really highly, and that’s that I had the chance to play in various all-star teams with the best players of all time from Europe and around the world. When the coach announced the starting line-up in the locker room and said that [Lev] Yashin would be the goalkeeper, the defence would be Carlos Alberto [Torres] from Brazil, [Franz] Beckenbauer, [Alberto] Tarantini from Argentina, the midfielder would be Panenka, in the middle Bobby Charlton, and on the left Eusébio [da Silva Ferreira], well, what can I say, it makes your head spin. [Kevin] Keegan and Johan Cruyff in front. You sit with them in the dressing room, and I was so impressed by the fact that even such superstars of world football treat you like their equal. Me, Tony Panenka, who was famous maybe from Vinohrady to Vršovice in Prague, sitting in silent wonder in the same locker room next to Bobby Charlton, who was famous the whole world over. And what all these players have in common, one thing, is that they are all incredibly modest. They are willing to give an interview to anyone, they’re gentlemanly, friendly. For me those were unbelievable moments.

Do you still watch football?

I don’t watch football so much any more. I see dedication and a fighting spirit there, but not much of the beauty of the game. Maybe it’s because of the way the sport has gotten so fast, so there isn’t time for any approach to the situation other than the straightforward, effective one.

Nowadays there just isn’t time for beauty. ☐

On Sunday, November 20, 2016, Andy Murray beat Novak Djokovic at London’s ATP World Tour Finals to finish the year at the top of the rankings and cement his place at the very pinnacle of his sport. While nutrition, training, and his choice of coaches have all contributed to his successes, he really boosted his game by switching his main strings from Luxilon Alu Power Rough to Luxilon Alu Power in the summer of 2012. Photo: Volkan Furuncu, Picture-Alliance

William Ralston is a freelance writer based between Berlin and London. Having spent several years playing the professional tennis circuits, he wrote a book exploring the evolution of the game, an important part of which was a discussion of how technological advancements have impacted how the game is played.

BEYOND THE

BASELINE

58

w-t-w.co/2r5

While all eyes are on players’ speed, strength, strategy and showmanship, nearly invisible changes to their rackets can help them achieve a competitive edge over their opponents.

String type and string tension have huge implications on how the ball responds when it contacts the racket face. Traditional tennis strings (left) are smooth and circular, but recent years have seen a great rise in the number of shaped or textured strings (right) on the market. These strings are designed to maximise the amount of rotation on the outgoing ball by increasing the friction when the player swings across its trajectory. Photo: Tall Guy Pictures

On November 5, 2016, Andy Murray confirmed himself as the world’s number one tennis player.

It is a remarkable achievement by almost any standard: not only did he become the first British player to reach the position since computerised rankings began back in 1973, but he also did it in an era considered to be one of the strongest in the sport’s history, fighting from the peripheries of the elite echelons, past the likes of Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, to name just a few. In 2011 he was still the talented if volatile outsider who entered but never conquered the major tournaments, but in August 2012 he became the first British man to win the Olympic singles gold medal, beating Federer in an emotional final on home turf. The following September, he secured the biggest victory of

his career, overcoming Djokovic in New York to become the first British man to win a Grand Slam final since Fred Perry in 1936.

Of the changes that account for this impressive transformation, one was visible and widely publicised: on December 31, 2011, Murray invited Ivan Lendl onto his coaching team—a valuable addition that had a substantial and visible impact on the player’s mindset and playing style. Another change was so subtle as to slip by unnoticed, even by those who know the game well. Like many players, Murray has long preferred a hybrid set-up where two different types of string are combined in one string bed: one for the mains (verticals) and another for the crosses (horizontals). While he continues to use natural gut in the crosses, in the summer of

Almost all competitive players take several rackets onto the court for a match. While the rackets are likely to be identical in terms of almost all specifica­ tions (weight, balance point etc.), they

are often strung at different tensions, which allows the player to adapt to the continually changing circumstances in a match, including temperature, tactics, and ball conditions. For example, when

2012 he switched the main strings from Luxilon Alu Power Rough to Luxilon Alu Power. A small change, perhaps, but its importance should not be underestimated. Alu Power is reported to offer more power on ball striking than Alu Rough, and although it must be noted that Luxilon does not mention any power difference in its advertising literature, the results are there for all to see.

The modification that Murray made is merely one piece of a far larger puzzle, just one of a plethora of options available to players looking to tweak their rackets in order to improve their games. ‘Touring professionals have their rackets customised to their specific needs,’ says Colin Triplow, a UK-based professional racket stringer. ‘It’s a highly important part of

new, more lively balls are introduced, players will often switch to a racket with a higher tension in order to maintain control. Photo: Volkan Furuncu, Picture-Alliance

performance maximisation.’ Consequently, the specific rackets used by the world’s elite are not actually readily available to the public; rather, each racket is individually tailored to suit the player who uses it.

Take Mike and Bob Bryan, for example, arguably the finest doubles pair in the game’s history: ‘We’re very particular with our racket specifications,’ they say. ‘All our rackets are sent from our manufacturer to Tampa, Florida, where our frames go through a lengthy and thorough customisation process with the experts at Priority One, a customisation specialist,’ they add. ‘We have tinkered with everything from our grip size, racket length, swing weight and string density to even different kinds of cosmetic paint.’ The rackets they use now are heavier than

60

WTW #9

For Andy Murray the road to the top of the men’s tennis world was marked by relentless dedication to honing his strength, speed, endurance, technique and tactics, but also to developing a racket set-up that enabled him to maximise his physical and mental performance. Nearly invisible modifications to his stringing were a critical part of his transformation into the number one men’s player in 2012.

the average model and also have a denser string pattern (i.e. more crosses and mains). ‘We feel we get more power and stability from the added weight and that we have more control with the added strings.’

The primary reason for these modifications is simple: as the line between winning and losing becomes thinner and thinner, even these slight changes become more and more important. As a result, players and their teams are becoming increasingly creative with the modifications to their racket set-ups as they look to maximise any competitive advantage over their rivals.

It hasn’t always been this way. Only in the late 1960s and early 1970s did string customisation begin ‘taking off’, Triplow says. ‘Before then, a racket was a racket and a string was a string.’ The only known earlier examples of racket modifica­ tions came in the thirties when players began using piano wire instead of natural gut in search of more durability, but this was an exception.

Then in 1976 Werner Fischer started playing with the spaghetti-strung racket following four years of development. It was, Triplow explains, an ‘extreme’ way to string, executed by reducing the number of cross strings from the standard 18 or ten to five or six thicker strings, and doubling the number of main strings by passing two thinner strings through each hole.

He then inserted short sections of plastic tubing onto the main strings where they intersect the cross strings, creating a string bed that generated so much topspin that it was quickly

banned by the International Tennis Federation (ITF). It wasn’t long before some of the leading names of the generation picked up on this breakthrough technique, including Ilie Năstase, who subsequently forced Guillermo Vilas to walk off court during an Aix-en-Provence tournament because the Argentinian could not deal with the spin on the ball. Fast forward a decade or two, and racket modification has now become a regularity, in many ways an aspect of the game that is equally important as nutrition or physical, technical and tactical training.

Modifications can be divided into two categories: those to the string bed and those to the racket frame. The former is far more com­ mon than the latter: the choice of the strings and the tension with which they are installed is customisation on the most basic of levels—and one upon which almost all players, like Murray, must decide. Many rackets today actually come without any strings on the assumption that the purchaser will wish to format the string bed according to personal preference.

In 1874 tennis rackets were all strung with natural gut made from the outer layer of sheep intestines. Natural gut is actually well suited for tennis because ‘it is extremely powerful and offers great feel,’ says Roger Dalton, former Head Stringer at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships. Due to a shortage of sheep gut, cow gut has become the most prominent natural gut string on our shelves today, and ‘up until the early nineties, no professional would have been

Of all synthetic strings, co-polyester are the most prevalent. Co-polys, as they’re called, were born when Luxilon combined polyester strings with powerful element additives and created a string that supports performance by maximising the generation of spin. Nylon strings, in comparison, are reasonably receptive, but Kevlar strings are considered too stiff for competitive play. Photo: Tall Guy Pictures

62

The thickness—or gauge—of a string is an important consideration for competitive players. Selecting a gauge is always a case of compromise: a thicker string will offer increased

WTW #9

durability but reduced ‘playability’, while a thinner string will snap more easily but is supposed to offer enhanced ball ‘feeling’ and control on ball striking, although some players prefer the feel of

seen dead without natural gut strings,’ Triplow says. This all changed, however, with the devel­ opment of synthetic strings that are cheaper, more durable high-performance alternatives to natural gut. They are made from three materials: nylon (relatively durable and affordable), Kevlar (too stiff to be used alone) or co-polyester (poly­ ester combined with additives that enhance its performance). Still, many touring professionals continue to use natural gut, especially in a hybrid set-up with a combination of other strings.

Of the synthetics, co-polyester is by far the most prevalent, a perfect fit for an era where players battle it out from the back of the court rather than coming to the net: studies indicate that the average outgoing spin from a co-polyester string is 25% greater than from

a thick string. Players can find a middle ground by adopting a hybrid set-up, i.e. using different tensions in the mains and the crosses. Photo: Tall Guy Pictures

natural gut or other synthetics. In a sense, Luxilon ‘revolutionised the game,’ Triplow says.

‘As one or two players began to experiment, then the others began to follow suit. It wasn’t long until the majority of touring professionals were experimenting with these “co-polys”.’

Recent years have also seen a rise in the number of players using shaped or textured strings instead of the smooth, circular strings that were used for many decades. Textured strings are constructed with the addition of an outer wrap which increases the grip of the string surface, while shaped strings have a hexagonal, square, octagonal, or triangular profile. Both are designed to maximise the amount of rotation on the outgoing ball by increasing the friction when the player swings across its trajectory.

Before the introduction of synthetic strings, almost all tennis rackets were strung with natural gut, made from the outer layer of sheep intestine. Natural

gut continues to be used by many of the world’s leading players because it is extremely powerful and offers great feel on the ball, but it can be too powerful

The effectiveness of textured strings is yet to be proven, but shaped strings are regarded by many as some of the best on the market and are highly popular with players like Nadal who are looking to maximise spin.

Another important consideration for string selection is gauge or string thickness since it has an impact on both ‘playability’ and durability, how the string feels when the player strikes the ball and how long it lasts before it breaks. The general rule is simple: a thicker string will give increased durability but reduced playability while a thinner string will snap more easily but is supposed to enhance the feeling of the ball on the strings. Nadal has been known to use a thick 1.35 mm (0.053 in) string on the basis that his heavy ball striking would cause any thinner

and also expensive in comparison to synthetic alternatives, so some players will opt for natural gut as part of a hybrid set-up. Photo: Tall Guy Pictures

gauges to break too quickly; in contrast, top50 doubles player Dominic Inglot uses a thin 1.25 mm (0.049 in) gauge because he prioritises responsiveness over durability. Sampras even tested thinner squash strings in an attempt to increase the feel of his racket.

Finding a compromise is why many players use a hybrid set-up. Using one type of string or gauge in the mains and a different one in the crosses allows players to fine tune the playability, durability, responsiveness, and control of their string bed by combining the best qualities of a string while minimising its limitations. To give an example: in a uniformly strung racket, it is almost always the main strings that break because they move a lot more than the cross strings, so to counter this—to increase durability

64

Many players install lead tape at various points on their racket frame in order to enhance their feel on the ball striking.

The effect of the weight depends on where it is added. Looking at the racket face as a clock, players will add weights at three and nine o’clock to minimise

WTW #9

frame-twisting on off-centre hits by pulling the sweet spot, the ideal place to strike the ball, out to the sides. On the other hand, weights at ten and two o’clock will raise the sweet spot and make shots hit high in the string bed feel more solid. Other players add weights

without compromising performance—many mid-tier players will combine a durable, thicker co-polyester main string with a softer natural gut or premium synthetic (i.e. nylon or polyester) cross string. This will increase the longevity of the string bed and reduce the stiffness of the mains. Top players will reverse this combination for a high-performance hybrid combination with reduced durability.

String tension is also important. Tight strings give control because they deform the ball more on impact, while loose strings give the effect of being more powerful because the ball dwells on the strings for longer and is released later in the swing motion. Tension, however, is rarely fixed; rather players will have a tension with which they feel most comfortable but will continually

at 12 o’clock to draw the sweet spot up the string bed without any substantial increase in the overall weight of the frame, while others add weights at six o’clock to increase the racket weight without reducing manoeuvrability.

Photo: Tall Guy Pictures

tweak it depending on various factors including the court surface, altitude, temperature, game styles, and the condition of the balls. ‘My string tension is never constant,’ says Filip Peliwo, the 2012 Wimbledon, French Open and US Open Junior Champion. ‘I normally change it by a few pounds depending on the surface, temperature, stringer and machine. I also change it depending on how I am feeling at the time.’

As the Bryan brothers mentioned, however, many players go beyond these basic adjustments and make changes to the racket frame itself.

Much of Sampras’ serving power was attributed to the addition of four to five lead weights taped onto his racket, and today many professionals have the weight adjusted during the manufactur­ ing process. James Allemby, a Barcelona-based

Beyond the

65

At the professional level where elite players go head-to-head, tournaments can be won and lost on minute details, so every player must have not only a racket that perfectly complements his or her playing style and strategy, but also an array of rackets fine-tuned to compensate for changes in temperature, temperament and ball condition.

touring professional, adds 18 g (0.6 oz) because it allows for ‘easier access to power,’ he explains.

‘It allows me to play looser knowing that the racket is helping me to generate pop on the ball.’

In comparison, with light rackets he finds that ‘a lot of the acceleration goes nowhere’. Much of his reasoning comes down to his style of play: instead of coming to the net, James constructs the majority of his points from the baseline, and the added weight allows him to hit heavily from the back of the court without jeopardising his control and accuracy.

Other changes to the frame involve the handle. The Bryans switched from Wilson to Prince but preferred the handle shape of the former. To get the best of both worlds they had Wilson-shaped handles moulded onto their

Prince rackets. ‘This mould is applied to every frame we use so we always have a consistent feel,’ they say. Gonçalo Oliveira, now ranked number 426 in the world, replaces the original grips of his rackets with thinner over-grips because he finds them more comfortable. Players can also install vibration dampeners to reduce the vibration transferred up through the arm, and most players will also note a change in the ‘feel’ of the racket on contact. Even the butt cap, the thick part at the bottom of the handle, is more than mere decoration. Many players feel that a smaller butt cap increases a racket’s manoeuvrability; this is especially true amongst those who play with a single-handed backhand.

By contrast, French player Richard Gasquet, who possesses one of the finest single-handed

66

WTW #9

While there are hundreds of types of tennis rackets on the market, pro players rarely play with off-the-rack models. Weight and balance, string types and tension, grip size and shape— all must come together to create a racket that is an extension of the individual who wields it.

backhands in the game, builds up the size of his butt cap because he prefers the solidity it offers when changing from forehand to backhand and vice versa.

The final consideration for players when it comes to customisation is racket matching. It’s not uncommon for two theoretically identical rackets to feel different because manufacturers allow up to a 5% difference in various specifica­ tions. Though a fine margin, it is one that elite players cannot afford and so many of them will work with a specialist technician who will ensure that each and every racket is the same, and many of the game’s elite will even travel with a per­ sonal stringer in order to rule out any inevitable disparities that stem from minor differences in technique. Sampras, for example, employed

professional stringer Nate Ferguson to travel with him to tournaments around the world.

Racket customisation and modification is a fascinating and continually evolving world, and players keep their set-ups strictly confidential while always experimenting on the practice court in search of any small modification that will improve their play. Consequently, the technology and information available today have pushed the standards of the game to greater levels that few could have anticipated in the days of natural gut strings and heavy, wooden frames, and it’s exciting to see what further developments there will be in the future.

Nonetheless, as profoundly creative and critical as this aspect of the game is, for those who watch from the outside it is easy to miss. ☐

It’s not uncommon for players to add weights to the handle of the racket with a view to increasing the manoeuvrability of the racket head. In addition to this, many players will change the size of the grip and the butt cap either by

building it up with extra over-grip or filing it down. Some feel a smaller grip increases manoeuvrability and feeling on ball striking, while others enjoy the solidity of a large grip. Photo: Tall Guy Pictures

NYC-based journalist Anne Quito grew up surrounded by sports trophies from her father’s exploits in Asian tennis and golf circuits. She has contributed several stories to WTW including an investigation on the nation branding of South Sudan and a story about buying a Pulitzer Prize in the world’s forgery capital. She covers design and architecture news for Quartz.

Brazilian footballer Pelé in front of the trophy cabinet at Santos FC, one of Brazil’s most successful football clubs.

Photo: Popperfoto/Getty Images

w-t-w.co/ter

69

THE WILD WORLD OF SPORTS TROPHIES Some coveted sports trophies are bold, majestic and dignified. Some are not.

For athletes, there’s no such thing as an ugly trophy. At the 2013 US Open Tennis Championship winners’ ceremony, Rafael Nadal became unusually emotional upon receiving the tournament’s silver cup. ‘It means a lot for me to have this trophy with me today. It’s just amazing. I’m very, very happy,’ he said, hugging and kissing the Tiffany-made vessel that, on a buffet table, could have served as a fancy coffee dispenser. Posing for the cameras, the Spanish champion caught a nib of its handle in his mouth, giving it his signature trophy bite.

For Nadal, as for all athletes, the cup was not just a memento of the tournament’s winning point, but it was also a validation of all the pain and sacrifice that went into reaching the pinnacle of his sport. Never mind the US Opens’ US$3.5 million (€3.2 million) prize; at least at the victor’s ceremony all eyes are on the trophy.

The US Open’s silver cup is not the oddest thing the 30-year-old tennis player has ever sunk his teeth into. Nadal’s collection of oddball trophies includes a falcon from the Qatar Open, a gourd from the Mexico Open, a ceramic jug from the Cincinnati Masters, a ‘Ladder of God’ made of stacked miniature tennis rackets from the Madrid Open, an unwieldy wire sculpture from the Rio Open, and from the Abu Dhabi Open, a bouquet of glass shards that looks like it was gathered from Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. When Spain won the World Cup in 2010, Nadal also bit into FIFA’s 18-karat gold

Hungry for success Rafael Nadal, the greatest clay-court tennis player in history, has won 69

tennis titles, celebrating each with his signature trophy bite. While it is common for sportsmen to bite their medals as they mug for the press,

ever-larger trophies are presenting more of a challenge. Nadal has been munching trophies since 2005. Top: the 2013 Mexico Open, 2013 US Open

and 2014 Rio Open. Bottom: the 2013 Cincinnati Masters, 2014 Madrid Open and 2016 Abu Dhabi Open. Photos: Yuri Cortez/AFP, Luttiau/Presse Sports,

Buda Mendes/Getty Images, Matthew Stockman/Getty Images, PictureAlliance/Actionplus, Nezar Balout/AFP

72

The Duchess of Cambridge takes a closer look at the America’s Cup, a trophy awarded to the winner of the yacht race of the same name. On her

WTW #9

left is Eric Deardorff, CEO of Garrard & Co, manufacturers of the America’s Cup, and many other highly ornate trophies.

Photo: Sang Tan, Associated Press

trophy, once described by an NPR commentator as the H. R. Giger ‘Alien of trophy design’.

Long before the mid-1800s, when trophies became part of every sporting event, the sports world had already seen some unusual tokens of triumph. The Carlisle Bells, awarded to winners of a historic horse race in England, are said to be the world’s oldest sports trophies, dating back to 1559 and 1599. At the 343-year-old Scorton Arrow archery competition held in Yorkshire, England, competitors vie for several ceremonial tokens. The sharpest shooter gets a silver arrow with a pouch of coins and a silver brooch, and the first to pierce the red area of the target gets a silver bugle. The worst player is distinguished with a spoon inscribed with the words ‘Risum

Teneatis, Amici’ or ‘Hold your laughter, friends’.

Sailing and regatta competitions also have a legacy of unique trophies. The America’s Cup or ‘Auld Mug’ is the oldest trophy for an international competition, dating back to 1851.

The 69 cm (27 in) Victorian-style ewer made of 3.8 kg (134 oz) of silver was designed by the Queen’s jeweller, Garrard & Company Ltd. The coveted prize for the Intercolonial Sailing Carnival of 1898–99 was a cigar stand in the shape of a ram’s head, now preserved in the Australian National Maritime Museum.

With advancements in 3D printing and other fabrication technologies today, tournament organisers are becoming more creative, says Bob Bennett, proprietor of Bennett Awards, a custom

The Wild World of Sports Trophies

British cyclist Mark Cavendish received this highly nutritious prize for winning the first stage of the 2015 Presidential Cycling Tour of Turkey. The route took

73

him through Alanya, a district famous for its fruit farms. Photo: Mustafa Kurt, Anadolu Agency

trophy design shop in California. Departing from standard cups, bowls or three-pillar, offthe-shelf trophies, Bennett’s clients are asking for original, ‘design-centric’ ideas that fit the tournament’s brand identity. ‘Organisations are much more cognisant that awards are part of their marketing mix. If they’re smart marketers, they’ll do something that’s integrated with their overall branding,’ explains Bennett, whose business developed out of his father’s sculpture and fine arts studio.

Some tournaments also rely on outlandish trophy designs to provide a defining element.

The winner of the Swiss Open Gstaad tournament, for instance, gets a towering rock shard for a trophy. In 2013, Swiss Open

organisers gave home-town hero Roger Federer a special award in the form of an 800 kg (1,760 lb) cow named Desiree. Winners of the Italian Open Golf tournament receive their weight in Parmesan cheese, and the cyclist who won the first leg of the 2015 Presidential Cycling Tour of Turkey got a bounty of bananas.

For clients with a healthy budget the options are virtually limitless, although a trophy designer has multiple audiences to satisfy: the sponsor, the winner and the media. One important criterion for an effective trophy is that it must register well on camera, working well in close-ups and still recognisable from a distance.

‘We modify design based on the showcasing, the travelling and the holding,’ says Bennett.

The Paris–Roubaix is a one-day professional bicycle road race that is famous for its cobblestone route, and its winner receives a mounted cobblestone.

Fabian Cancellara celebrated his third victory on this demanding course in 2013. Photo courtesy of Presse Sports.

The Indian Wells Masters tennis tournament has one of the sport’s heaviest trophies, a crystal sculpture resembling the logo of sponsor BNP

Paribas. The same trophy is given to men and women, but most champions would struggle to raise it since it is not only weighty but also sharp. For safety

reasons the trophy sits on a tall stand, which photographers usually crop out of their images. Photo: Frederic J. Brown/ AFP Photo

An awards ceremony is a momentous, emotional event in which the trophy plays a critical role. Well-designed trophies look good in close-ups but

are still recognisable to the farthest spectators and also to TV viewers. Of course, they must satisfy sponsors, and ideally they are sufficiently manageable

The craftsmanship of the award should also carefully be considered, explains Vinne Mazza, spokesperson for the House of Waterford, a company that makes crystal trophies for several prestigious tournaments in sports ranging from golf and rugby to snooker. He explains that the master artisans at the Waterford factory in Ireland aim for brilliance, cutting the crystal to get maximum light refraction in their bespoke trophies.

One of the most challenging trophies they have ever had to produce was a full-size crystal version of a New York firefighter’s helmet commissioned by the Yankees to commemorate relief pitcher Mariano Rivera’s record-breaking 609th save.

that winners can lift them triumphantly overhead. Here, Novak Djokovic receives his first French Open title in 2016. Photo: Pierre Lahalle, Presse Sports

Size matters a lot too, adds Mazza. ‘The piece itself must be sized appropriately so that it can be lifted by the winner. A trophy that is too large to hold is one that will be remembered for all the wrong reasons.’ Indeed, weighty trophies have embarrassed weary athletes and presenters.

An aide had to help Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as he awkwardly struggled to present a gigantic cup to Mongolian sumo wrestler Harumafuji Kōhei in 2013. Winners of NASCAR Sprint Cup don’t even attempt to lift the 2 m (7 ft) grandfather clock they win. Ironically enough, excessively heavy trophies could even injure the victor. Romanian tennis player Simona Halep wisely gave up trying to hoist the solid glass trophy she won at the BNP Paribas Open, joking

The Wild World of Sports Trophies

The sleek 24-karat gold, bronze and steel trophy created by the design consultancy Pentagram for the US College Football Playoff, one of the most

77

watched American sports events. The simplified shapes of the trophy lend it a certain timelessness. Photo courtesy of Picture-Alliance/Newscom.

that she didn’t want to risk hurting herself.

Nadal got a cramp after hoisting the French Open’s 14 kg (30 lb) Coupe des Mousquetaires in 2014.

Curiously, there are no awards for the best trophy makers. For better or worse, a trophy design’s merit is usually determined by the client’s taste, but trophy designers like Bennett Awards’ Ryan Rivas are critical of some iconic sports awards. He says he’s itching to redesign the World Series trophy, a Tiffany & Co. design comprising a circle of 30 flags representing each team in US Major League Baseball. ‘That thing is so poorly designed… At the end of the game, the whole team is holding the thing up. I don’t know how it hasn’t broken 15 times over.’

But Bennett and Rivas agree that the most disappointing design is the very plain US College Football Playoff National Championship trophy.

‘It was riding the wave of the whole flat branding era,’ explains Rivas to describe the 60 cm (2 ft) oblong produced by graphic designer Michael Gericke and his team at Pentagram in 2014.

‘They basically just took the logo and made an extrusion from it. It’s lifeless.’

Between a weird trophy and a tastefully safe option, Bennet says he would always prefer the outlandish. ‘I’d rather see people take a risk, even if they miss the mark a little bit. You want something with personality.’ A bland and generic design, after all, is no cause for celebration. ☐

78

WTW #9

MAY THE WORST POLITICIAN WIN! The dirty politics of the Philippines inspired this satirical card game that hopes to educate Filipinos about the tricks their politicians play.

w-t-w.co/vfl

79

Justin Zhuang is a Singapore-based writer interested in design and culture.

He was amazed at how everyday Filipinos use creativity to take on their politics.

Photos: Edrick Bruel

80

When he first moved to the Philippines for work two years ago, P. J. Lim encountered political campaigning in the unlikeliest of places—at funerals.

‘Some people are so poor that they can’t afford funerals, so politicians fund them, and you see their faces all over the condolence messages,’ says Lim, who hails from neighbouring Singa­ pore. ‘It is ridiculous and it is real.’

That encounter sparked a conversation with his Filipino friend, R. B. Ting, about the crazy things that happen in that country’s politics. As the duo drew up a list that ran the gamut from marrying a celebrity to sex scandals, and even kidnapping opponents, they decided to create a game out of these examples in time for the Southeast Asian nation’s presidential elections in May 2016.

Politricks is a card game where players do whatever it takes to win the most votes in an election. Living up to its tagline of ‘Guns · Goons · Gold’, the deck of 104 cards offers players the tricks, trapos (Filipino slang for archetypal politicians) and money they need in order to

WTW #9

ambush, rig and bribe their way into power.

From winning votes by offering the public free lechon (a popular pork dish in the Philippines), disrupting rivals by hiring protestors, or gaining an unfair advantage as ‘The Military Man’, every aspect of this satirical game is based on real-life events in the Philippines and the country’s political culture.

The ‘Pork Barrel Scam’ card, for instance, refers to a 2013 scandal where several members of the Philippines congress allegedly siphoned off funds designated for development projects.

Another ‘Accuse of Foreign Blood’ card was inspired by the recent controversy surrounding presidential candidate Grace Poe. Rivals questioned her eligibility as Poe had renounced her citizenship when she emigrated to the USA, although the Filipino-born had reacquired it when she returned years before running for office. Besides cards based on historical events, there are also money cards denominated in the various bribes popular amongst Filipino politi­ cians, including pang-yosi (cigarette allowance) and pang-load (mobile phone allowance).

May the Worst Politician Win!

81 Politricks’ cards are inspired by the various ‘tricks’ Filipino politicians have used to win elections. The ‘Free Lechon Day’ card references the practice of distributing roast suckling pig (a popular but expensive dish in the Philippines) to sway voters. The ‘Bribe the Media’ card is inspired by cases of politicians offering money to journalists to cover their events or smear their opponents.

The ‘Marry a Celebrity’ card points to the fact that many politicians are married to celebrity wives—what many feel is a strategic ploy to boost popularity.

‘Everything you see in the deck looks ridiculous, but it all happened,’ explains Lim. ‘Some of it happens all the time.’

The duo felt a game similar to Monopoly and Cards Against Humanity, which they often play when not working their corporate jobs, was the best way to spark a conversation about this state of affairs. Such a fun format also ensured they would not sound preachy. As Ting explained at the game’s official launch, ‘People don’t want to be lectured, especially our generation, the millennials. We are showing what it is, and people make their own judgements when they play the game.’

Besides entertaining gameplay, the cards also offer amusing designs by Filipino illustrators Christian ‘Ice’ Gecolea and Armelle Garcia. They centre on the character Sir Pol, who is depicted carrying out the various tricks in comical situations such as posing as a lechon and being caught with his pants down in an affair. With his bloated form, pompadour hairstyle, and wearing the barong, a traditional formal garment of the Philippines, Gecolea says Pol is the epitome of

the ‘generic politician physique’ in his country.

The character also bears an uncanny resem­ blance to Joseph Estrada, a former president of the Philippines, and now mayor of Manila.

Similarly, the trapos cards look like caricatures of well-known Filipino politicians, including the previous vice-president Jejomar Binay as ‘The President’s Lapdog’ and Imelda Marcos, the widow of the late Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos, as ‘The Mayor’s Wife’.

‘It’s kind of unfortunate, yet at the same time funny, that a number of politicians here in the Philippines are easy to depict since most of them gained their votes by doing the most outrageous things,’ explains Gecolea.

The creators would not confirm that these figures inspired the images (the game even comes with a disclaimer that ‘All characters & events appearing in this work are fictitious’) and according to Lim, the game was never about singling out individuals. In researching for this game, Lim and Ting spoke with representatives of both politics and the media to ensure their game was based on a list of tricks from all sides.

Philippine Daily Inquirer

Corruption plagues Philippine politics to gain illegal wealth, about a senator to this day. On 18 February, 2017 the accused of peddling illegal drugs, and front page of the Philippine Daily Inquirer about officials sacked over the ‘pork featured stories about the current barrel funds’ scandal. https://www.pressreader.com/philippines/philippine-daily-inquirer/20170218 president, accused of using his office

25/03/2017, 22*02

Page 1 of 2

May the Worst Politician Win!

83

‘ Whatever difficulty is thrown at them, the Filipinos remain optimistic and upbeat about life. But the country is not giving them the right opportunities.’

Advice from journalists—and, as Lim notes, many Philippine journalists have been killed over the years—led them to use humour to take the sting out of their observations. ‘We actually toned down a lot of the things in our game,’ he says. ‘As outrageous as it is, the direction is more about poking fun and not pointing fingers to say someone is corrupt.’

Since Politricks’ launch in March 2016, thou­ sands of copies have been sold for 600 Philippine pesos (US$12.10/€11.20) a deck. During the run-up to the presidential elections, retail stores such as the Fire Sword Board Game Café in Metro Manila could hardly keep stock long enough to display it. J. C. Pulido, a partner in the café, calls the game a ‘fairly accurate’ portrayal of the state of politics. ‘While Filipinos won’t admit it out loud, almost all, if not all, of the dirty activities depicted in the game do happen behind the scenes during our national elections,’ he says.

Although this entirely Made in Philippines game is about a less-than-savoury aspect of the country, Lim says they also tried to highlight the beauty which surprised him when he was

based there for a year and a half. Politricks’ 19 vote cards depict the different regions of the Philippines, and illustrate their unique and colourful attractions from the mountainous ranges of the Cordilleras to the colourful Dinagyang Festival in Iloilo. ‘Whatever difficulty is thrown at them, the Filipinos remain optimistic and upbeat about life. But the country is not giving them the right opportunities,’ says Lim. He adds that dirty politics is not unique to the Philippines and the game could very well describe elections elsewhere too. Pointing to how Donald Trump got elected in the 2016 United States elections, he says, ‘It’s all about playing tricks. It’s all about stirring up the emotions of the silent majority.’ But rather than seeing Politricks as a cynical response to politics, Lim says this game lays all the cards on the table to offer a ‘realistic’ view of any election. ‘If your end is to create a better life for the people and in doing so you need to have blood on your hands, it boils down to a personal choice,’ he says. ‘There is no right or wrong.’ ☐

Danish sportswear company Hummel developed the new Afghan national women’s football jersey with a hijab integrated into a base-layer shirt that enables the country’s female footballers to play while meeting cultural standards of modesty. Photo: AP Photos/Jan M. Olsen

By Jonah Goodman

WOMEN SPORT UNIFORMS

Anne Miltenburg is a designer based in Nairobi. An inveterate traveller, she has lived and worked across Europe, and in Mali, South Korea, Australia and the US.

w-t-w.co/t9o

85

Even at top levels, women’s sports uniforms lag far behind men’s. What will it take for women to win equality on the field and in the cabin?

KIT THAT FITS: DEVELOPING WOMEN’S SPORTSWEAR Over the past 100 years, the design of sports uniforms has been evolving at top speed. There was a day when football players wore rugged cotton crewnecks, woollen socks and heavy cleats that weighed them down, and their shirts were devoid of sponsor logos. Today they wear kit that is lighter and more breathable than ever, and sponsors pay big bucks to be seen on a team jersey. Uniforms are designed down to the very structure of the fibres for maximum range of motion, minimum skin friction and optimal body temperature. Boots have specially designed studs specifically configured for firm ground, soft ground or artificial turf, ensuring faster turns, better kicks and fewer injuries. Nor is there any end in sight to the improvements that are yet to be made. Sports brands are in a race to design ever better gear to help athletes run faster, jump higher, swing harder and look better while doing so.

When it comes to the design of team sports uniforms for female athletes, however, it is often quite a different story. Karin Legemate, a retired Dutch professional football player, recalls her experiences with sports uniforms with a mixture

of disappointment and wonder. Professional athletes playing for a sponsored team are contractually obligated to wear the sponsor’s uniforms and gear. ‘At AZ, a first division club, our sponsor was Quick, a sports brand that does not have a line for women. As a result, we had to play in the smallest men’s size and in kids’ shoes.’

Because competitions are waged mentally as well as physically, Legemate experienced it as a huge impediment. ‘You stand on the field in a bag. It just looks wrong. It feels wrong. You are an athlete, you want to look like one. So mentally, you are already at 0:1. When you get a free throw, your shirt slides up and exposes your belly. It’s awkward.’ Your standard of play goes down too. ‘The children’s shoes don’t have aluminium studs. When you are playing on grass, you can’t turn as well, you slip, you get injuries quicker, you have to hold yourself back.’ It was not until she became a member of the Dutch national football team that she first experienced a great kit designed for women by the official sponsor, Nike.

According to Legemate, with the right gear you have more confidence and it shows on the

86

WTW #9

Most sports brands originate in the West, and within the industry there are tremendous hesitations, misgivings and dilemmas around designing sports clothing for Muslim women.

Is designing sportswear with head coverings a way to enable these women to play sports, or does it play into the hands of those who suppress women’s rights?

field. Without good gear the game becomes less fun for the players, and for the audience as well.

‘When women’s football has a small viewership, sponsors are less interested. Without sponsors, women athletes have to cover all their own costs.

It’s already impossible to support yourself as a professional female football player. All of us have to combine it with normal jobs. If you have to pay for your own gear it is just another setback.’

Princess Reema Bint Bandar Al Saud, Vice President of Women’s Affairs at the General Sports Authority, Saudi Arabia, had to make some quick decisions for the team of female athletes participating in the Rio Olympics in the summer of 2016. Because the decision to enter a women’s team—a first in the country’s history—was made quite late, the athletes were offered small sizes of the men’s uniforms that the national team sponsor had created, but even if they had received uniforms designed for women, Princess Reema doubts that they would have been suitable for her team. ‘The sponsoring brand does not yet design for women who cover their hair. In our culture, women cover themselves in public. Covered is also how we dress for formal occasions. The Olympics are a formal occasion.’ Princess Reema wanted to both show the world that Saudi women could compete with the best, and show her country that sending women to the Olympics was a great idea, but in order to do so, she had to find a solution that would allow the women to perform at world-class levels while also being covered according to societal norms.

She turned to a high-street brand for offthe-rack burkinis and hijabs. ‘We have athletes competing in the marathon. They need to have a uniform that is as aerodynamic as possible and allows them to regulate their body temperature, but our athletes cannot wear a skin-tight body suit even if it covers the entire body and our hair. We need something that is modest and yet enables us to compete with others without being at a disadvantage.’ It is a challenge waiting for the right sports brand or the right designer to take on.

Khalida Popal, former captain of the Afghan women’s national football team, makes a passionate plea for sports brands to create solutions which allow Muslim women to participate in sports. She recently collaborated with Danish sports brand Hummel to create the official Afghan sports uniform, which includes a line for women, with or without hijab. She is quick to point out that the debate should not be about whether or not the sports hijab represents a restriction of women’s rights. The debate should be about allowing all women to participate, regardless of their religion or background. ‘Before we had the Hummel uniform it was very difficult for me, as a leader of the team, to find comfortable clothing that did not irritate or disturb the players. And it was so hot! With the built-in hijab we look professional, and it helps parents to give their consent for their daughters to play sports.’

Parents do not necessarily ask their daughters to wear a hijab because of their own religious beliefs. In places like Afghanistan there are those

At the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Saudi Arabia entered their women’s team for the first time in their country’s history. The national team sponsor was not able to offer suitable sport uniforms covering the athletes’ hair. Instead, the team turned to highstreet brands for prêt-à-porter burkinis and hijabs, modest, yet functional sportswear. In this photo Kariman Abuljadayel competes in the Women’s 100m. Photo: Jewel Samad/AFP Photo

Top: The 2008 Australian women’s Olympic basketball team protested against their uniform, citing its excessive ‘perv factor’.

The team successfully appealed the uniforms and got a two-piece uniform with loose-fitting shorts and a snug, sleeveless shirt. Photos: Jesse

D. Garrabrant, Buda Mendes Below: American soccer star Brandi Chastain made history for women athletes when a shot of her celebrating her winning goal in the world championship made the cover of Sports Illustrated, a magazine that formerly

only showed women on the cover if they were swimsuit models. The cover made Chastain a household name and the exposure of her sports bra caused sports brands to see the marketability of women’s athletic gear. Courtesy of Sports Illustrated.

Kit that Fits: Developing Women’s Sportswear

on the hunt for any woman who crosses the line of strict behavioural and clothing codes, and they inflict gruesome punishments on trespassers.

Requiring girls to play in hijabs is often as much a sign of love and concern for their safety as it is a cultural or religious habit. In Popal’s words, ‘The uniform with the built-in hijab breaks barriers.

It is a way to say: look, sport is not against religion. Sports and religion are not adversaries.

We’ve received a very positive response from within Afghanistan.’ Interestingly, most of the negative responses have come from people in the West who believe that the hijab curbs women’s rights, but Popal firmly disagrees. ‘You have to understand: it gives us opportunity. Now we can play. Without it we could not.’

Given the increasingly hard lines drawn around Islam and the ongoing conflicts and acts of terrorism across the world, taking on the project of designing the Afghan women’s national team football kit was not one that any sports company would have easily embraced.

Hummel’s global marketing director Anne Skovrider thinks that it is key that Hummel is an independent company with an owner who is not averse to risk. ‘When the idea of the national team kit for Afghanistan arose, Christian Stadil, the owner, went to Kabul himself and saw how hard it is to play without the right gear.’ Still, the work was not a political statement for Hummel.

‘Players in the Afghan women’s national team come from different backgrounds. Some of them are daughters of Afghani parents, who were born in Germany or the Netherlands. They may not want to wear the hijab during a match in the USA, so we have made it optional. The women decide. We do not take a stand on politics or religion. We want to meet the Afghani people where they are, and right now that is enabling women to play football.’

Despite the fact that the national team now has its own uniform, for the aspiring amateur football player in the country, there are still no options. According to Popal, ‘No other companies have jumped in to create a uniform with hijab for the general market, unfortunately.’

While one side of the world is engaged in a discussion of how to cover up, the other is in a battle over whether or not to strip down.

Some people consider the sex factor in women’s uniforms as key to improving the viewership of

89

women’s sports. During an interview in 2004 Sep Blatter, then the head of FIFA, said: ‘Let the women play in more feminine clothes like they do with volleyball. They could, for example, have tighter shorts. Female players are pretty, if you’ll excuse me for saying so, and they already have some different rules to men, such as playing with a lighter ball. That decision was taken to create a more female aesthetic, so why not do it with fashion?’

Sep Blatter is not alone, and women’s teams across the world have to live with the consequences. In 2008, the Australian women’s Olympic basketball team successfully protested the skin-tight uniforms they were provided with by their management and sponsors. They demanded looser fitting uniforms to reduce the ‘perv factor’, as one player called it.

‘If sports was only about long legs, then women’s beach volleyball would be the biggest sport in the world,’ remarks Shammy Jacob, former Director of Sustainable Ventures at Nike.

‘Of course performance should come first. Only then is it about looking great as an athlete. But looking great does not equal looking sexy.’ Jacob offers an historic example. In the 1990s, Nike had been working with the American women’s national football team to design their outfits for the upcoming world championships. One of the things the women asked for was a better bra, one designed for sports. ‘To all of our amazement, Brandi Chastain scores the winning goal of the tournament, and celebrates by sliding onto her knees and taking her shirt off, revealing her sports bra.’ The moment was captured in a photo that made the cover of Sports Illustrated and became a landmark image in the history of women’s sports. Jacob rejects the idea that the image was iconic because it was revealing. ‘What the shot showed was an athlete at the top of her game. To have everyone see a woman so fit, so strong, so victorious, and to receive so much attention, that made a world of difference for women’s sports at that time. Nike focused on performance but made sure the styling was also relevant and tasteful.’

Despite the fact that more women are playing and watching sports, and that general viewership for women’s sports is increasing, women’s sports uniforms in most parts of the world remain stuck in a vicious circle. Without

Jill Roord (centre) during the Women’s Champions League match between FC Barcelona and FC Twente. FC Twente uses Liona uniforms that have built-in tights for protection when the athlete slides. Waistbands are wider, and shirts are longer and wider at the hips. Photo courtesy of Urbanandsport.

Kit that Fits: Developing Women’s Sportswear

91

Liona’s tagline? ‘Ladies, let’s go kick some balls.’

evidence of demand, sports brands won’t invest in creating professional gear for women.

Without high-quality gear, fewer women play and fewer still play at their best, making games less exciting for spectators and less interesting for sponsors and sports brands, closing the circle of low demand.

One brand that is looking to break the circle is Liona, a new sports brand from the Netherlands, founded by former professional footballer Leonne Stentler. Seeing that no brand was tak­ ing up the challenge of providing high-quality gear for women, Stentler decided to jump into the gaping hole in the market. Launched in 2015, Liona is already supplying professional league teams across the country with uniforms.

Growing up as a child playing and during her entire professional career, Stentler took the absence of women’s kit as a given. ‘There is no women’s clothing available all the way to the top of the league. It is a huge investment for brands to produce a “second line” for women. And when amateur clubs have to decide where to produce their uniforms, no company will design and manufacture a run of just 100 units. And there are no women on the board who will protest that decision. It is a men’s game; we are not a priority.’

Together with a fashion designer, Stentler started to redesign women’s uniforms. Most innovations came naturally to Stentler, who had seen first-hand what was needed. ‘All girls wear tights underneath their shorts for when they make slides. So our Liona shorts have

built-in tights. Their waistbands are wider for more comfort. Shirts are longer than those for men and wider at the hips. We created socks in smaller sizes. Also, we created a presentation suit and a training suit, so you look professional off the field as well.’ The response to Liona has been overwhelmingly positive. Luckily, it is not just praise that is rolling in, but orders as well. Liona has just supplied FC Twente with its women’s team uniform and the team is raving.

‘This is what is needed in the long run to create more confidence, to attract sponsors, and to lift the sport to a higher level.’

Stentler is not alone in seeing massive oppor­ tunities for women’s sports uniforms. With the availability of great sports gear, the vicious circle female athletes have found themselves in can become an upward spiral: the better the professional gear, the better the player. The better the player, the bigger the audience. With bigger audiences comes more sponsorship, allowing more women to have a career in sports.

Princess Reema Bint Bandar Al Saud is looking forward to lobbying sports brands to meet the needs of Muslim women. ‘The market is not just girls in the Middle East. There is a pan-Islamic diaspora. Imagine a young girl in Birmingham who wants to compete. Why would you exclude her from the game?’

Anne Skovrider of Hummel agrees. At the end of the day, access to the sport is what it should be all about: ‘Let these girls go out, play, get fit, learn teamwork, get confidence, feel good about themselves. That is what we want to support.’ ☐

We want to show you our new typefaces, such as ff Marselis Serif by Jan Maack.

The truth is—we can’t do it here, but if you head to

Handmade cycling apparel for Discerning riders

IsadoreApparel.com

FontShop.com you can discover, explore and play with them.

TYPOGRAPHICS A conference for people who use type

Bern University of the Arts MA Communication Design

Can Design be Social without being Social Design?

Study Design Entrepreneurship or Design Research with Social Impact.

June 16–17, 2017 NEW YORK CITY

www.typographics.com

VJ Software Footage Community

KERNING CONFERENCE DIVINA PROPORTIONE

Resolume.com

International conference on typography 7TH-9TH JUNE 2017

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

☞ 2017.kerning.it ☜

Custom typefaces for sports ☞ sportsfonts.com

Manufacturing handmade tiles and cement pieces since 1933.

Collections by Herzog & de Meuron, Sybilla, Lievore, Carme Pinós, Barozzi Veiga, J.A. Martínez Lapeña & Elías Torres, Lluís Clotet, Häberli.

huguetmallorca.com

Social Distribution Bring It Places If you are planning a trip, take WTW with you. We work with volunteers who have free space in their luggage and can bring the magazines to new places.

Our website features a travel database where you can sign up to help deliver WTW. Just log in and enter your destination and travel dates.

50% Off You can get WTW at half price when you order seven or more copies. This is a great way to keep the price low and share the magazine with your friends, classmates and colleagues. We work in particular with schools and colleges, making the magazine affordable for everyone and creating an intimate connection between the publisher and readers.

Start by dropping us a line. ↗ distribute@worksthatwork.com

Check out the first Works That Work documentary film worksthatwork.com/bhutan

BIG IDEAS

BHUTAN, A TINY COUNTRY WITH

A documentary film how Bhutan became an inspiration for both developing and developed countries.

WO R K S T H AT WO R K A M AGA Z I N E O F U N E X P E C T E D C R E AT I V I T Y I S S U E 9, 2017

P

L

A

Back issues of Works That Work are available in print and digital editions. ↗ worksthatwork.comw/issues

Y

Join the WTW Social Distribution network and meet creative readers from all over the world.