Tokyo has unveiled its logos for the 2020 Olympics and Paralympics, and they’re awful.
From the awkward Clarendon-esque serif font – positioned too close to the image – that looks like something you’d see at the top of a stereo manual from the 1980s, to the simplistic, drab colour planes of the figure that look like something an unimaginative biotech company would leap on, it’s a hideous, retrograde mess.
The half-negative Paralympic figure is less bad, but they managed to screw the pooch by mixing the already-bad serif font with an gimcrack Gothic sans serif, the most overused, badly applied typeface style of the last ten years – and some commentators have suggested that it has been Frankensteined out of several other well known fonts. Mixing sans and serifs is always tricky – here it’s terrible, like two strangers forced to share a bed. It makes the much maligned London 2012 logo (which grew on me a lot) look like Swiss poetry in comparison.
It’s a shame, because it seems to want to reference the logo Tokyo developed for the 1964 Games; perhaps the single greatest piece of Olympic communication of all time.
The rising sun logo by Yusaku Kamekura, with its tightly condensed sans-serif brought modernist, minimalist design and typography to the world, marking a Games where Japan really came out of its post-war slump. He also designed several great posters which have influenced Games designers ever since.
Even the relatively unchallenging candidate city bid logo, with its cherry blossoms, ’64-aping red dot, and conservative DIN font, was better than the current final choice:
Still, perhaps it’s a grower. As mentioned, the engaging, divisive London 2012 logo grew on me a lot, although the typeface never did. It just seems like a missed opportunity to show the world a semblance of a new Japan, still reeling from nuclear disaster and long-term economic downturn.
But if the plans for the equally bad stadium design can be revised, maybe this can be too. Rant over.
UPDATE: September – The logos have been scrapped due to ongoing plagiarism row. Read more here.
Brady Ellison vented his frustration to ESPN about the set system that saw him lose the gold medal match to Luis Alvarez in Toronto at the Pan-American Games, despite Alvarez failing to get an arrow off in time in the fourth set. Full details here:
“I outshot the guy by 11 points,” he said. “We’re a score-based system where you can miss and win — and that’s what happened. I don’t agree with it and it’s probably one of the reasons I’ll be done with this sport unless it changes. It’s kind of B.S. in my opinion. You can’t make that big a mistake in the gold-medal match and win. He shot well the other sets. But you miss and win, I disagree with that.”
The former No. 1-ranked archer and two-time Olympian said he might leave recurve archery after the 2016 Olympics if the scoring system doesn’t change:
“I’ve been thinking about it since we went to sets in the team rounds. It’s taken away our world records, and fun toward shooting,” Ellison said. “A lot of my contracts are up in 2016 so unless something changes or I get some really big contract, I’ll probably go back to compound.”
The quote from Luis Alvarez is worth reading:
“A lot of people said that a running score is better. Because I just missed a shot and I still win. How can an archer that missed one arrow win?” he said. “It’s two sides of the same coin. But in the end, the set system requires more concentration. If my shot was to miss, the other archer has no pressure because I already will lose by shooting a miss. But the set system helps you make a bad shot and recover in the next one and that’s more competitive.”
“Some archers say it’s not OK, some archers say it’s good. But in the end, competition is like that. It was good.”
This also sparked a lively discussion on the Infinite Curve Facebook page. I don’t have time to search through all Brady’s H2H matches for the last few years, but I find it difficult to believe that he’s never won a high-level match while still scoring less than his opponents. But maybe that’s the case.
Brady also makes a tennis analogy. It turns out that around five percent of professional men’s tennis matches since 1990 have been won despite the winner scoring less total points than the loser, because of the set system (it’s even possible to win a match winning less total games than the loser, if you won something like 0-6, 7-5, 7-5). This anomaly is referred to as Simpson’s Paradox, and there’s a particularly interesting article about it here. Does anyone have the number crunching ability to track through IANSEO and see the proportion of H2H matches where this occurred? Would be very interesting to know.
The purpose of changing to a set system in H2H recurve matches was to improve archery as a spectator sport, of course – but that was a change that was agreed and tested with athletes. Brady Ellison is one of the biggest draws on the circuit, and has won three World Cup finals using the very same set system. I also know Brady rides the waves of his emotions, he’s the very opposite of a cool, machine-like shooter. That’s one of the things that make him a great sportsman and a great human being, and I suspect this outburst, no doubt shortly after the match, was born out of deep frustration at not quite achieving the incredibly high standards he sets himself.
BDDW CAHB appears to be a child of the BDDW furniture company based in New York, founded by a renaissance man called Tyler Hays, a woodworker, ceramicist and beekeeper, who also branches out into high-end hifi. The resonant imagery of arrows and targets, the deep satisfaction of bowyery and the sheer joy of being part of an archery club are just some of his interests. An interview with the WSJ last year yielded this:
“Every other Tuesday, BDDW hosts an evening of archery in the showroom. It’s a sort of hipster riff on the corporate softball league: Nearly 20 teams show up for each match, from institutions as varied as HBO, Helmut Lang, Thom Filicia and the Moth. The bows are hand-carved, of course, and the smoked meats are driven in from Bucks County, Pennsylvania. “It often ends with us singing karaoke until the small hours,” says the fashion designer and sometime-archer Phillip Lim. Once in a while, an arrow lands in the neck of a tripod lamp, and within a week someone will have asked to buy it that way. At the end of the year, the top 30 teams get seeded for a final tournament, accompanied by a huge, semiformal outdoor weenie roast upstate for hundreds of competitors, friends and family. “It’s like Burning Man meets The Great Gatsby,” Hays says.”
Source: camronpr
There’s some photos of one of these tournaments online, but that’s about it, and most of BDDW CAHB’s great looking website is locked off. Even more intrigued, I emailed them and asked for an interview. They were very polite, but said “sorry, no press”. I don’t really count as press, but hey. I can understand why. It would spoil the magic.
It’s been rumoured this was going to happen for a while, but Khatuna Lorig, of the USA recurve team has stripped off completely, in spectacular shape, for the 2015 edition of ESPN’s ‘Body’ issue. It’s accompanied by a pretty interesting interview transcription.
(I’d say the accompanying video is safe for work, but… it depends on where you work, I guess).
GWANGJU, KOREA: As with last year’s Asian Games, the prospect of a near-guaranteed medal avalanche on home turf meant that the organisers and the KAA threw every resource at this competition, building a brand new oversize stadium. The home squad didn’t disappoint in the ranking and knockout rounds, and made almost every final in both recurve and compound.
But after Ki Bo Bae’s spectacular smashing of the 70m round world record on Saturday – breaking Park Sung-Hyun‘s record by four points, giving great quotes and sending the Korean media into overdrive – the rest of the shoot at the biannual University Games almost had an air of anticlimax. The home nation sending out an almost full-strength national recurve side did seem slightly bullish towards the spirit of the event, although they are all apparently studying somewhere and well within the age criteria, and the competition featured other grizzled pros like Natalia Avdeeva.
On compound finals day, Korea delivered in spades, taking four of the six golds on offer. Kim Jongho became Korea’s first Universiade triple gold medallist. In the women’s individual gold match, Toja Cerne nearly denied Song Yun Soo in a tight shootoff, but came up a few millimetres short. Russia denied the USA women top honours in a minor upset.
On a sold-out recurve day, the ever-lurking threat of Chinese Taipei was the only major challenge to the great white sharks. The men’s team unfortunately threw down too many eights to do any serious damage to the Koreans, with Lee Seungyun shooting completely clean with six tens – afterwards, he laconically stated: “I think being the last shooter brought out the best in me.” Lee followed up by burying teammate Ku Bonchan 6-0 in the men’s individual final to cap a spectacular 2015 return to form.
However, Chinese Taipei took unexpected revenge in the women’s team final, with a strong squad anchored by Tan Ya-Ting, a multiple World Cup medallist who finished above the Korean women at the top of the ranking round in Antalya this year. The women in blue took the opening set after Kang “The Destroyer” Chae-Young and Choi Misun both sent down eights. Choi leaked a seven in the third set to make it 4-2. Despite Ki Bo Bae finding a fourth ten, they split the points in the last to give Chinese Taipei the victory.
In the individual matches, Maja Jager squeaked past Mei Chen-Hsiung in a shootoff for the women’s bronze. Her second podium finish in two major events (she took silver at Baku 2015) bodes well for a serious defence of her title at the upcoming world championships. For the gold, Ki Bo Bae and Choi Misun contested their third major podium match of the year in a high-quality final that saw every arrow in five sets hit the yellow, with a perfect end from each archer. Despite Choi drilling a staggering seven tens in a row, it went down to a shootoff. Ki Bo Bae edged it out, taking a 6-5 victory to a roaring crowd and doing her bit to leave the home nation sitting proudly at the top of the medal table.
Interesting piece from a couple of years ago about the rise of Win & Win and the archery business in general, featuring some of Team LH in action and being interviewed. Enjoy.
You all know that Win & Win make high end carbon bikes as well as bows, right? This is how:
