#anyways woo fair game miss universe winner woo

[thewhizzyhead]

i mean like even though our miss ph didn't get into the top 16, the one who DID win the most recent miss universe aka the miss usa representative IS half-filipino and she is rather proud of it so like,,,technically,,,we still won right

[theuniversitychallengereview]

UC 52.3 - LSE vs Univ, Oxford

It is raining and it took me forty five minutes to get back from Tesco after work and I have no idea how I usually start these. I’m trying to think about the opening paragraph from any of the hundreds of such posts I’ve made over the past five years, but I genuinely don’t have a clue. I know I don’t usually start by talking about the weather, or the duration of my commute, though I may well have done that at some point. 

Surely it's really simple and I just talk about the teams, but I tried typing out ‘University College, Oxford are two-time winners of University Challenge’ and it felt far too formal for some reason. However, my mini-meltdown appears to have obfuscated that formality as far as I’m concerned, so I’ll press on from here and say that they were also beaten finalists on two occasions. 

All four of these appearances in the Grand Final came with Bamber Gascoigne as host, making them the most successful team of that era. A bunch of other teams also won two trophies, but no one else came so close to winning a further two on top of that. Even more impressively, these four finals came from only five appearances. 

The only blot on their record is that University College is an objectively silly name. No one is going around calling their higher education institution College University, so why are these jokers getting away with the opposite. And before you say, UCL is different. I don’t know why, it just is. 

And speaking of initialised institutions, University College are up against LSE tonight, with their London rivals reaching the final in 1996. A semi final followed two years later, before a barren spell which has seen them make the quarter finals only once in the past twenty four years. 

I was about to write a whole spiel about how this was remarkably poor form from one of the countries biggest Unis, but I thought I’d check exactly how big it was and found that it was in fact pretty tiny, ranking 89th on the list of largest enrollments. So its a good job I checked that, or I’d have made a right fool of myself. 

Just above them on the list in 85th is Roehampton University, which has never been on the show, although it did feature on the recent University Challenge documentary, with a former contestant training up a prospective team. And delightfully, when I just searched this on Twitter, I found a tweet from one of the members of their team, confirming that they made it onto the show this year! I really hope that wasn’t revealed on the doc, because this feels sort of like a scoop, and its very rare I get to make scoops with this blog. So look out for Roehampton when they’re on at the end of November!

Anyway, that’s quite enough award-winning investigative journalism for one night - here’s your first starter for ten. 

Off we go then, and the first thing to note is that LSE counterparts Ede and Balt are both wearing the same top, although Ede appears to have ripped the sleeves off of their one. Second thing to note is the presence of Wallop on the Univ team - we are well and truly off and running with both funky names and funky garb. An auspicious start.

Univ are the youngest team in the competition with an average age of 19, and their inexperience shows on the opening question as Hassan is able to snag ten points for LSE with Holmes and Watson. A bit before Univ’s time, that. Bless them. Two bonuses on tall structures followed for LSE, though they mixed up Lincoln and York cathedrals for the hat-trick.

Their lead doesn’t last for long though, and Wallop wallops Univ right into the game with a quick buzz. Bonuses on the use of ukuleles in movies follow, giving us a brilliant bit of phraseology from Paxman and the question setters - ‘woos a lady with his ukulele’. Both sides then miss a relatively easy starter on golf, before Cunanan hears the word orangutan and buzzes in instantly with Borneo. 

No one gets the first picture starter either, though Hassan gives the same answer I did. TO be fair to us both, it kinda did look like a picture of the Black Sea. Cunanan gives Anne of Cleves to get the picture bonuses, and despite being told that all of the answers are gulfs they somehow contrived to give the Adriatic Sea as a guess. We’ve all been there. 

The Oxonians have a thirty point lead at this stage, but Balt slices this up with Brighton Pavilion, pausing for exactly the same length of time as I did between the two words. We all associate the Green Party with Brighton, but it does just seem a bit silly for an entire constituency to be contained within a pavilion, doesn’t it? The bonuses have a question about a King Charles, but not the same one who has been in the news recently, and LSE are back within ten points.

However, this was the closest they would get for the rest of the game. Both sides missed a starter which mentioned tofu - Ede, who looks pretty vegan, buzzed in with a guess, but got the wrong salt - then Cunanan came in with his third starter of the night (and not to pat myself on the back too hard, but at this point in my notetaking I wrote ‘Cunanan is giving quiet Monkman vibes’. He would go on to take eight over the course of the match, so I think I can count myself as a pretty decent talent spotter. It's not quite a second scoop of the day, but it comes pretty close). 

There is talk of a board game called Wingspan which sounds absolutely fantastic, but no one gets the question it relates to. Another for Cunanan brings up the music round, which is on trombone solos. I’m always a bit disinterested by the classical music questions, because I usually only get them by guessing, but I played the trombone for many years and recognised the Rimsky-Korsakov bonus like an old pro. Finally it comes into its own. I can only bemoan the lack of Guilmant’s Morceau Symphonique (a real deep cut, that, for all you bone fans out there).

A rare slip up from Cunanan offered LSE the chance to get back into the match, but they couldn’t capitalise and the Univ skipper was able to make up for his mistake on the very next starter. He’s delighted by the second picture round, which is on dinosaur skeletons, and has a little fist bump to himself before the pictures come up, but sadly it's an incredibly easy set (diplodocus, allosaurus and stegosaurus) so he isn’t able to showcase what I presume is immense expertise on the subject. Quick sidebar on the topic - my gf and I won a tub of hot chocolate mix from a pub quiz last Wednesday for drawing a gang of velociraptors at a concert. We may not have won the quiz, but by golly did we draw some weird looking velociraptors. 

Some more points find their way to LSE courtesy of a rapid buzz from Ede on trigonometry, but like the ugly step-sisters trying to fit into Cinderella’s slipper after she’s already been discovered by the Prince, it's too little too late (I’m not sure if that actually happens at the end of Cinderella, but I’m too pleased with the simile to change it).

Final Score: LSE 110 - 175 University, Oxford

Had a lot more fun writing this one than the last two - I’ve even forgotten I was stuck in traffic for an age on the way home - so I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it. As ever, if you did, you can subscribe in a clicky-box somewhere on this website to ensure you’ll never miss an episode! If you’re reading this on Tumblr then the website I’m talking about is quizposting.com, and I’d be delighted to see you over there too. Thanks.

[theuniversitychallengereview]

UC 51.03 - London Business School vs Hertford, Oxford

Since it was introduced at the 1988 Olympics, every single Gold Medal in the Women’s Team event in the Archery has gone to South Korea. Including yesterday’s win that’s nine straight victories, and their period of unparalleled dominance continues. The men’s team have also won six of the nine they have contested, and a mixed team won the first staging of that event in Tokyo too. Adding their success in the individual events, South Korea have won 26 gold medals, and 42 in total, in the 43 archery events which have been thus far staged at the Olympic Games. 

As Twitter’s own @tarequelaskar pointed out in the brilliant article which alerted me to this story, this is a perfect example of specialisation, an economic concept whereby countries or companies focus intensely on one particular aspect of a given industry and come to serve that niche in such a specialised fashion that they become the ultimate experts and nigh-on irreplaceable. This is done in government and business by providing companies with incentives to specialise, and supporting those who succeed at it. 

With respect to Korean archery, similar forces are at play. There are a bunch of professional teams and leagues in the country, giving archers financial stability while they focus on their training, something not as common across the world. Said training involves such things as practicing in live baseball stadiums and replicas of the Olympic venues, to mimic first the atmosphere and then the conditions that will be present on the day of the actual tournament. 

This philosophy of marginal gains - the same system used by Team Sky and Chris Froome to win multiple Tour De Frances on the trot - puts their preparation miles ahead of the competition, which goes some way to explaining their dominance. It is not the only reason. Before the fine-tuning of the elite shooters comes the discovery of the promising young ones, and the inspiring nature of past success (along with a historic national love of the sport) helps to create a virtuous cycle which give Korea a far larger number of archers to choose from than any other country. This greater choice means that there is a greater chance of finding the next Gold medallists.

Making the argument that professional footballers are at a higher level than other elite sportspeople, Michael Cox used this same argument in a recent article for The Athletic. To summarise, he stated that because there are a far higher number of people who wish to become professional footballers, that must mean that the ones who do make it are at a higher standard than those who make it in other sports. Initially, I was drawn in by the pure maths of this point, but having thought about it some more I’m no longer sure to what extent I agree. 

Now, the fact that hundreds of millions more people play football than rugby, or basketball, will certainly confer some level of “eliteness”, but only up to a certain point. Because football has been so popular for so long, the general standard of the play, relative to what it used to be, has had longer to improve. In the same way that if you transplanted a 100m runner from the Olympic final in the early 20th century to now they probably wouldn’t even qualify for the games, a footballer from the 80s would stand less of a chance of making it were they playing today. Many other sports don’t have that level of natural progression, afforded by decades of technical and tactical advancement - at least not globally. 

But the numbers argument only goes so far, as can be demonstrated by the Korean archers. Yes, there are more archers in Korea than anywhere else, relatively, giving them a higher chance of uncovering those with a natural aptitude, but the reason behind their bow and arrow dynasty is the specialisation. The hyper-detailed level of training and focus which allows them to be the best they can possible be. 

Now, archery is unique in that there is a theoretical maximum score (I understand that this is to some extent arbitrary, and related to the rules of the game as defined by some human being, semi-randomly, but it works in terms of this argument, because it gives a percentage score of how good the archers are based on the agreed-upon parameters of the sport), which, at the Olympics, is 720. The Olympic record is 700 (held by Korean Kim Woo-jin, giving an implied “eliteness level” of 97.2%. 

The best player in the history of football (don’t @ me) is Lionel Messi, and few would doubt that he operates at or above that level of perfection in his sport. But I also don’t think you could doubt that Novak Djokovic, or Serena Williams in her pomp, were similarly magnificent at tennis. Cyclists on the Tour De France put their bodies through more in three weeks than most people endure in a decade, and have every aspect of their training and diet strictly controlled so as to bring them as close to perfection as possible. There will certainly be a higher number of these elite performers in football, because there are a higher number of paying jobs for said elite performers, and because more people attempt to become elite performers, but I don’t think that it follows on from that that they are better at their sport than other elite athletes, all of whom have undergone years and years of specialised training to get them where they are.

Does any of this matter, in terms of how each sport should be enjoyed? Probably not, but its interesting to think about, and kind of awe-inspiring to try and appreciate just how good those at the top of their respective games are. And if there is some discrepancy in the level of eliteness between the different sports it doesn’t detract from the fact that they would handily dispatch any civilian challengers without breaking a sweat. The joy comes from watching people who are good at stuff doing that stuff - and, as evidenced by the crowds which gather for non-league football, it doesn’t matter whether or not they are at the absolute pinnacle of said stuff. They’re still going to be much better than the rest of us. 

Competitive quizzing is different from the activities previously mentioned in that any normal person can have a guess at pretty much any question, with a chance that they’ll get it right. What sets the contestants apart on shows like University Challenge is the speed of their recall under pressure - the quickness of their knowledge as well as the knowledge itself. But there are plenty of armchair quizzers who think they could wipe the floor on the show, so just how good are the actual contestants? (Compared to an elite footballer or archer on an imaginary scale that accounts for relative skill in all disciplines?). I don’t know (and in case you hadn’t noticed by now I’m just fascinated by people who are really good at anything, and wanted to share some of that fascination with you all), but I’ll try and have a go at answering it anyway. 

So, the World Quizzing Championships have been dominated by British and Irish quizzers since its inception in 2003, with 16 of the 18 winners coming from either Britain or the Republic of Ireland (who have four wins courtesy of The Egghead Pat Gibson). This, in my mind, makes this neck of the woods comparable to South Korean archery. It is a hotbed of talent, and the infrastructure is in place to encourage and aid talent maximalisation. Indeed, if you scroll down the list of highest ranking players at the WQC in any given year you can see a significant cohort of UC alums, so clearly there are a number of elite quizzers who have passed through the show. 

This specialisation can be seen in microcosm with the preponderance of top-level quizzers produced by Oxford and Cambridge, who both have a long-standing culture of competitive quizzing far beyond other Universities. The debate is there to be had on the fairness of each institution having so many teams, but clearly they produce enough elite players to compete with far bigger Unis when entering as (sometimes tiny) colleges. 

In conclusion, I think it is pretty obvious that UC is a breeding ground for world-class quizzers, and though no one has won a World title straight off the bat after appearing on the show, there are top-50 and top 100 finishes abound, which is still greatly impressive, and helps to give an idea of just how good these students really are. 

Hoping to justify the 1000 words I’ve just written about their exceptional talents are two teams from the London Business School and Hertford College, Oxford. The Oxford side have never made it beyond the second round, but LBS reached the semi-finals in 2006, their only previous appearance on the show. Anyway, there is quite literally no time for me to recite the rules; here’s your first starter for ten... 

Paxman mentions that LBS were in the show in 2006, but doesn’t mention that they reached the semi final, which is lazy imo. A bunch of them are studying for MBAs, which makes sense. He doesn’t mention Hertford’s previous appearances either, but that’s more understandable.

Hertford’s Hitchens takes the first starter with Kennedy, and the Oxonians added a full set of bonuses on words made up by authors - including a couple of educated guesses. LBS hit back with the next question, but can only manage one bonus on famous scientists. One of the two they miss is Rosalind Franklin, and Paxman teases them for not spotting an apparently obvious clue within the question.

The first picture round is on national emblems, and LBS are first to recognise that of Vietnam for the starter. They don’t know Laos or Belarus, but do know that Mozambique has a machine gun on its one. Butterworth then jumps the gun with argon on the next starter, giving his answer just as Paxman says it in the question. Butterworth makes up for it with the music starter, recognising Fat Boy Slim before anyone else, and LBS know Primal Scream and Wu Tang Clan too. They’re still fifty points behind though, and will need a big second half to turn things around.

This task gets more difficult for them, as Hitchens takes another starter. Lloyd adds a second in a row for Oxford and they are nearly one hundred points clear. LBS really need to get some points on the board, and Ruess duly obliges, knowing that there is a massive sculpture of a spider called Maman, which sounds needlessly scary, to the extent that I’m not even going to google it.

The comeback is ended before its even begun as Oswald takes a starter for Hertford, which gives them the picture bonuses - the starter having been dropped by both teams. Lloyd produces another excellent guess of Reuben, demonstrating how useful it is to have vague knowledge as well as specific knowledge. This is one of probably five questions he has answered in a throwaway manner, but which turned out to be correct. 

By this point LBS seem to have accepted defeat. Ruess takes another starter, but there is little to no urgency on the bonus questions. They’re right, granted, to have none, they have no chance of winning, but if they gave it a go they might scrape a high scoring loser spot. Ruess is the only one who seems bothered, and bags himself ten more points. They have an amusing discussion about methods of poisoning in Agatha Christie novels (’it was used as a curry ingredient?’, Ruess wondered aloud, trying to figure out which spices could be poisonous, before Butterworth pointed out that it wasn’t something commonly used as a curry ingredient, prompting respectful mirth from the audience) on the bonuses, but still languish miles behind. 

Lloyd grabs the last starter of the night for Hertford, who win by eighty at the gong.

Final Score: London Business School 100 - 180 Hertford, Oxford

At the end, Paxman mentions Hertford’s stellar guesswork, which means I wasn’t chatting nonsense (at least on that front, the jury is out on the rest of it), and says that they’ve done a really good job. Incredibly effusive praise for a score of 180. He really is going soft in his old age.

Phew, that was a long one. If you made it through the intro you deserve a prize. And that prize is that you get to come back next week for the next episode of this blog!! Woop woop! 

And if this wasn’t quite enough UC content for you then you can subscribe for extra blogs on my Patreon, which features Retro Reviews from the 2015/16 series of the show. Ta x