“Yes, we’re here, because 365 days to go, the London Olympics starts 12 months today…” – the generally on the ball Garry Richardson reporting from the Olympic Park for the Today programme, BBC Radio 4, 27 July 2011.
“The head coach [Charles van Commenee] of UK Athletics believes they need every one of the 365 days remaining before the opening ceremony to make the necessary improvements if Great Britain are to reach the target of eight medals, including at least one gold.” – Sky Sports, 27 July.
“British Embassy marks 365 days until London 2012 – The British and Canadian embassies will host a ceremonial Olympic torch relay to kick off the London 2012 countdown…” – British Embassy, Tokyo (subsequently corrected).
Even leaving aside the fact that there will be eight Olympic football matches (two each in Cardiff, Glasgow and Coventry, one each in Newcastle and Manchester) played on the two days before the official opening ceremony in London, there is a disheartening innumeracy in the three reports – and others like them – given above.
Maybe it’s just me, maybe I should get out more – at least to the Asperger’s Clinic – but for all that today does indeed mark one year until the flame-in-a-bucket is lit and Lord Coe gets turned on, it isn’t 365 days – because 2012 is a leap year, so there are actually 366 days still to go.
Regular readers will know that these things annoy me, be it people assuming that the day with the longest daylight also has the latest sunset (a BBC Met Office forecaster made this mistake last year, and should surely have known better), or well-intentioned charity cyclists claiming to have pedalled uphill the equivalent of Everest when such a thing appears distinctly unlikely.
Another common mistake – and one related to leap-year adjustment – is to refer not to the 600th (or the 750th or 1,000th or whatever) anniversary of some historical event – which would be fine – but to say it is “600 years to the day" since it happened. This forgets the Julian/Gregorian calendar-change which saw ten days being skipped in October 1582. (There has since been four days’ worth of further slippage to further complicate matters.)
There are even more obscure versions of this kind of innumeracy – for instance in cricket, where it is commonplace for a commentator to say that a bowler with figures of, say, 17.5–3–46–2 (in other words 17 overs and five balls, three maidens, two wickets for 46 runs) has bowled “17.5 overs”. Strictly speaking that’s OK so long as the listener knows that the commentator is invoking base 6, as that is how six-ball overs are calculated. But in normal usage it just makes it sound as if the bowler has sent down 17½ overs - 17 overs and three balls, in other words. (This is without getting into the further complexities of no-balls and Australian eight-ball overs of yore – but not wides, which don’t count as balls bowled…)
Back to the Olympic 365-but-actually-366 countdown, it could well be argued that such things don’t really matter. But the whole event is built on precision, and what if the running track in the stadium had a similar error of 1/366, or 0.0027322404371584699453551912568306? By my reckoning, that would make the 400-metre track just over 109-and-a-quarter centimetres short. If one of the events saw a world record broken by a tiny margin, say one-hundredth of a second, would that be valid?
Actually, this in itself raises a rarely discussed issue: there is an argument to be made that the ultra-precise timings now available for athletic events, down to one-hundredth or even one-thousandth of a second, are not always matched (and perhaps cannot be matched) by the measurement of the track distance. In other words, while timing has become very accurate and – so it seems – reliable, not all tracks are the same distance, and so the world of narrow-margin records is not necessarily a level (or, rather, same-length) playing-field.
Or what of the construction of the various Olympic stadia? (Not stadiums, grrrr…) An engineer reading this might be able to chip in with the permissible margins for error for large public structures, but there is surely a fair chance that if the various girder-boltings and suchlike were as much as 1/366th out, then the roof would fall down.
Not that everyone has got it wrong, however. Interestingly, the main Foreign and Commonwealth Office information about the one-year-to-go landmark makes no mention of either 365 or 366 days. Those diplomats, they certainly know how to steer a risk-free course. This also suggests that someone in the Tokyo office indulged in a bit of subeditorial embroidery and introduced the 365 figure at that end before being tipped off – and ticked off – by someone at FCO HQ.
Then there is – hooray – the Daily Telegraph. “There are 366 days to go until the London Olympics in 2012,” the paper comments today, “and this is going to be one of the busiest. We’ll keep you up to date with all that’s going on.”
Step forward Alan Tyers and Jonathan Liew, who wrote the piece – and who even allow themselves a little nitpicking of their own: “First clanger of the day award goes to Ladbrokes for their press release offering odds of 365/1 (geddit?) on various much more unlikely than that outcomes, including Becks scoring the winning pen in the Olympic football final… nice idea, although sadly there are 366 days to go.”
So thank goodness for the Torygraph, newspaper of record and bastion of all things solid and reliable. It’s reassuring to know that at least some people out there do actually know how the calendar works and how the celestial bodies move. It appears that all – to within a reasonable margin of error – is well with the world.
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