The 2014 Balls of Stone Award

The 2014 Balls of Stone Award absolutely has to go to Dr Robert Alan Eustace, the Google Senior Vice-President of Knowledge, who broke Felix Baumgartner's parachute high jump and freefall records from the edge of space. This attempt was done quietly, without fanfare, and stunned everyone, including Baumgartner I am sure. Eustace is a 58 year old computer scientist, not a professional athlete, and his feat in my opinion astonishing. Here are the salient facts: On October 24, 2014, Eustace made a jump from the stratosphere. The launch-point for his jump was from an abandoned runway in Roswell, New Mexico, where he began his balloon-powered ascent early that morning. He reached a reported maximum altitude of 135,908 feet—25.740 miles (41.425 km)—but the final number submitted to the World Air Sports Federation was 135,889.108 ft—25.736573 miles (41.419000 km). The balloon used for the feat was manufactured by the Balloon Facility of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Hyderabad, India.His descent to Earth lasted 15 minutes and stretched nearly 26 miles (42 km) with peak speeds exceeding 821.45 miles (1,322.00 km) per hour; setting new world records for the highest free fall jump, and total free fall distance.

Why Nobody Wants to Host the 2022 Winter Olympics

Hosting the games is too expensive!

On October 1, Oslo withdrew its bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics, making it the fourth city—after Stockholm, Lviv, and Krakow—to have second thoughts about hosting the games. With only Beijing and the Kazakhstan city of Almaty left in the running, the International Olympic Committee now faces the difficult task of choosing between two undemocratic nations with less-than-stellar human rights’ records. But Norway’s decision suggests that if the IOC hopes to stem the tide of unwilling hosts, it faces an even more difficult task: reforming itself.

Why doesn’t anyone want the Olympics? Price is a good place to start. The $448,000 cost of the first modern games, held in Athens in 1896, wouldn’t cover a single Danny Boyle-choreographed opening ceremony these days. The total bill for Vancouver’s 2010 winter games came to $6.4 billion, while London’s summertime turn in 2012 cost over $14 billion. Sochi, whose venues and infrastructure had to be built pretty much from scratch, rang in at an anomalous but no less heart-stopping $51 billion.

Those kinds of numbers help explain why even a wealthy nation like Norway would reconsider its candidacy. Although Oslo budgeted a comparatively sober $5.4 billion, and even though the ruling Conservative party initially backed Oslo’s bid, concerns over ballooning costs grew strong enough to chip away at government’s support. Speaking to the press on Wednesday, Prime Minister Erna Solberg confirmed that her government would not continue to pursue the games.

“We’ve received clear advice and there is no reason not to follow the advice,” Solberg told the press. “A big project like this, which is so expensive, requires broad popular support and there isn’t enough support for it.”

Those same concerns were echoed in Sweden earlier this year. “The city of Stockholm needed time to investigate whether the estimated costs were realistic,” says Markus Jonsson, press officer for the Moderate party in Stockholm’s city hall. “But there wasn’t enough time.

Lviv dropped out because of the unstable conditions in Ukraine. But for the other wavering contenders, including St. Moritz and Munich, which as late as November 2013 was still weighing a 2022 bid, a growing awareness of the true costs of hosting the games played an important role in their decisions not to compete. And on top of concerns over cost, there were fears over benefits, too.

To read the rest of this intriguing article, click on the title... "Why Nobody Wants to Host the 2022 Winter Olympics" — by Lisa Abend — Time Magazine.