2012 London Olympics: Don’t blink or you’ll miss the speeding objects

At the London Games, a radar gun might be more valuable than a program in enjoying how fast things are traveling.

3. Soccer shot on goal

Jon Super/AP
Brazil's Alexandre Pato, center right, scores past Belarus' goalkeeper Aleksandr Gutor during their group C men's soccer match at the London 2012 Summer Olympics, Sunday, July 29, at Old Trafford Stadium in Manchester, England.

90 m.p.h.

While the fastest shot ever recorded in the men’s English Premier League is 114 m.p.h., by David Hirst, at the Olympics the top speeds probably will be in the 90 m.p.h. to 100 m.p.h. range for the men. That’s still screaming fast, especially for a goalie assigned to try to stop close-range penalty kicks. 

3 of 11

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.