TRAGEDY STRIKES TRACK TEAM

From the Daily Intelligence, by Allison Maguire

Spring workouts for the track team at AIT-Brooks were briefly interrupted today by the bizarre death of Unenhanced High Jump try-out hopeful Jason Fetid. While waiting to make his third attempt at 1.9 meters, Fetid was hit by a stray javelin. The unexpected missile entered Fetid's neck, plunging through his carotid artery and coming to a quivering stop between two vertebrae. Varsity javelin competitor Ross Roy was contrite. "I just got off a beauty, my best ever throw, and he wandered into the range, apparently thinking about his next jump. I'm really sorry it happened, but he should have paid more attention." When asked for a comment, Track Coach Euler said, "Of course, it's a terrible thing. Luckily, Jason wasn't really very well-liked-I'm hopeful we'll be able to put this incident behind us before the NC3As."

Men's Football Team in ECAT Final

Ignacio Aguirre’s 87th-minute thunderbolt, his second goal of the game, drove the AIT-Zaragosa men’s football team into the final game of the 2142 EuroClub Amateur Tournament. Their opponents, a dogged but overmatched side from Die Neue Universität Bielefeld, fought gamely but in the end had no answer for the skill and flair of AIT’s senior captain.

Things started out well for AIT, as Aguirre got on the end of a Sunday Mphalele corner kick and flicked a 22nd-minute header past Bielefeld goalkeeper Arturs Wenger. The goal seemed to energize the Bielefeld side, though, and in the 38th minute they equalized. Midfielder Klaus Eberhard, played neatly through the AIT defense by Mehmet Agca, slotted a low shot inside the right post. AIT keeper Oscar Zamorano, at full extension, could only brush the well-struck ball with his fingertips.

AIT regained control of the match after intermission. Mphalele’s steady influence controlled the midfield, and the slashing runs of Aguirre and Pieter Rijkaard kept the Bielefeld defense off balance. Bielefeld mustered little offensive possession until the 67th minute, when they were unlucky not to go ahead as Agca’s blazing right-footer from 25 meters rocketed off the crossbar. After that scare, AIT possessed the ball and re-established their dominance in midfield, and in the dying minutes AIT defender Edgar Clavijo nodded an Mphalele corner kick out to the top of the Bielefeld penalty area. Aguirre took the ball at full volley and sledgehammered it into the roof of the Bielefeld goal.

From there, it was a matter of killing the game, and the cool-headed possession of Mphalele was more than adequate to the task. Bielefeld can hardly feel that the result was unjustified, and their coach Halvard Schnorr said as much. “They were the better team today. We had no answer for Aguirre, and were a bit unlucky when Agca’s shot hit the bar.”

For his part, Aguirre refused to gloat. “There’s one more game yet,” he said. “We don’t even know yet who we’re going to meet in the final, so it’s a bit early to celebrate.”

Celebrate we will, though. AIT-Z appears not to have lost a step from its championship years in the mid-thirties.

Field Hockey
The next time our hockey heroes hoist hardware, they’d better nod in the direction of Dr. Xian Chang of AIT-Ulan Bator. A star field hockey player himself during his AIT-UB student days, Dr. Chang decided he wanted to give something back to the game that had given him so much. The product, after seventeen years of research, is the IntelliStick®. Featuring an intelligent striking face that actually changes its contour depending on the kind of backswing the player uses, the IntelliStick® makes every player better without changing the dynamic of a match. Whether you’re winding up for a big boomer on goal or flicking your wrists to slot a pass between two defenders, the IntelliStick® anticipates the amount of force you want to apply and adjusts its face accordingly.

Partisans and players alike should salute Dr. Chang’s dedication to the sport. The IntelliStick® will be available for intercollegiate play once it passes the Amateur Field Hockey Association’s inspection process. Look for it this fall in the hands of an AIT player near you.

Mara Finnerty: Spare me your IntelliSticks. I want athletes.
Okay, I’ve had enough. First it was the Überclub®, the morphable single golf club that replaced a whole bag of standard clubs and put a generation of caddies out of work. Before that, it was the GoBall® long-fly golf ball. Between them, the Überclub® and the GoBall® have turned the history of golf into a sad record of futility. Who cares about the first time someone broke sixty in a major? Anyone who can putt can do it now, since your average paraplegic Sherpa can use an Überclub® to hit a GoBall® four hundred meters.

But golf isn’t a sport anyway. More annoying than the Überclub® is the LunGills® system, like the Überclub® and the GoBall® developed by our very own AIT fatbrains. With the LunGills® nanites working through her system, your average competitor in, say, the 200 butterfly doesn’t have to breathe during the course of the race. Or take the Goodstick®, a carbo-nanite, selfregenerative dermal adhesive that has made slipping a thing of the past in competitive gymnastics. Another stroke of AIT genius, and — if you ask me — another nail in the coffin of sport.

Unlike golf, swimming and gymnastics are sports, but I don’t really love either of them, so neither the LunGills® nor Goodstick®, heinous as they are, bother me as much as potential developments in baseball.

Aha, you’re saying. My American-ness is showing. And you would be right. Soccer’s fine, basketball’s all right, hockey’s a blast, but baseball is the nearest and dearest sport to this reporter’s heart. That is why I am scandalized! outraged! apoplectic! irate! infuriated! at the petition recently mounted by our very own AIT Center for Technology in Sport.

For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, AIT is petitioning the World Collegiate Union to accept our new carbon-polymer bats (complete with interior gyroscope nanometrics to help keep every player’s swing as level as Rogers Hornsby’s) and weak-adhesive gloves. The WCU, in an entirely unexpected spasm of common sense, has resisted all previous attempts to fundamentally alter the character of baseball lest the National Pastime (I told you I was American) suffer the fate of golf. AIT is giving them the full-court press, though — if I may be permitted to import another sport’s metaphor — and I expect the WCU to fold soon.

Carbon-polymer bats, in testing with AIT baseball players, increased batting averages by — are you sitting down? — two hundred and sixty points, and increased the velocity of a batted ball by nearly thirty percent. This means that the average pitcher or infielder will have nearly twice as many balls coming at him (or her, since AIT wants these bats introduced in softball as well), and those balls will be traveling at the leisurely pace of two hundred-plus kilometers an hour.

No problem, AIT says. Dr. Raji Sarini of our Brooks campus has already developed (and patented — but this isn’t about money, is it, AIT?) Polyarmor® clothing, a smart-Kevlar that feels like poplin until it detects an impact of greater than a certain number of ergs. Then it hardens up and presto, the ball bounces away leaving only a bruise. So, says AIT and Dr. Sarini, there is no danger in these increased velocities. And maybe there isn’t. But my problem isn’t really with velocities or ergs or Kevlar or carbon-polymer. My problem is with the idea of The Game, and here The Game is whatever your favorite game is.

This is going to sound old-fashioned, Luddite even, but what I love about sports is watching the human body at work. Thinking about this column, I went back to the dawn of film and looked at the bodies of the TwenCen’s greatest athletes. I saw Jim Thorpe, Ted Williams, Jesse Owens, Pele, Sebastian Coe, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Mark Spitz, Wayne Gretzky, Barry Sanders, Martina Navratilova, Michael Jordan. They didn’t have Überclub® or GoBall® or LunGills® or Goodstick®. They swung wooden bats, kicked or bounced leather balls, wore metal spikes, ran on grass or clay or wood, hit rubber pucks or leather balls filled with cork. See what I’m saying? It was the body, and technology was a second thought (except in golf, which isn’t a sport anyway).

Now swimmers don’t breathe and gymnasts don’t slip, and hockey sticks know how hard to hit the puck or the ball, and soccer balls don’t get wet when it rains, and computers call penalties in American football games. And deep down in my Luddite-American baseball-loving soul, I think it’s all wrong. I’d rather watch kids play T-ball in the park than our vaunted AIT-Brooks and AIT-Sapporo baseball teams with their carbon-polymer-smartKevlar unsporting overtechnologized not-game.

Oh, for the days when all we had to worry about was steroids and blood doping.

Mara Finnetry studies Robot Kinetics at AIT-Barcelona.