GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – I don’t follow cricket and couldn’t explain more than the basics about bowling no-balls, but I’m feeling very sad for Pakistan and cricket-lovers everywhere today. One of them lives in my house, so perhaps I’m more aware of the story than the average non-fan. Three of the sport’s top players, including one of the  most promising stars of his young generation, now face prison in Britain for gambling cheating, after a court case watched closely around the world.

You’ll find a lot of media writing out there about the sentencing, but the best reading is the original source: the judge’s sentencing remarks, published on line by the court. Read it, for the larger reflections it offers us on life and sports and honesty.

Two hours of show-time before the first race shows up, and two minutes later, the pack

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Journalists don’t often have the news come to them, and when it happens on a long  holiday weekend, it’s a special treat! Sunday, late afternoon, the Tour de Suisse bike race went past my house in the mountains, but the party started long before, up and down the mountain road. The neighbours put out flags, invited family and friends and the wine flowed. Cyclists pumped up the hill all day: wannabe racers before the real ones came by.

Banners were hung out, parking on farmers’ fields was negotiated since the road would be closed shortly before the race, police and security guards streaked by at regular intervals.

And then the fun began, as Ferraris, part of the show, rumbled and roared up the hill. Soon after the sponsors came by, pausing just long enough to hand out freebies. Water bottles, flags, caps and bags were collected. The favourites included red gummy-bear style hearts handed out by the Swiss organ donor association and a terrific lemon sorbet on a stick from Frisco (Pacific). No one handed out mini-Ferraris, too bad, and the Clos, Domaines & Chateaux people, for whom this is a big event, weren’t handing out wine bottles, also too bad but probably wise.

Here’s a collection of images from the day (click on images to view larger). For photos of the race itself: GenevaLunch photo album “2011 Tour de Suisse bike race”

Usain Bolt at IMD business school in Lausanne; agent Norman Peart on the right

One of the things that I like best about being a journalist is going to meetings with people in the news and hearing what they really said, rather than what other journalists write up afterwards about what they said. It’s not that we journalists get it wrong (well, sometimes we do) , so much as that we pluck out one thread from several and turn that into a story. Sometimes the thread is pretty thin.

A good example came Tuesday evening, when Usain Bolt spoke to a couple hundred people at IMD business school in Lausanne about the principles of sustaining success. He was asked by a member of the audience about his plans, how long he plans to run. This came shortly after he and his agent, who was also part of the programme, had laughed about how often journalists get it wrong, and how Bolt was widely quoted at one point about his expectations for a particular race—words he never said, they both assured us.

So Bolt’s relexed answer, legs and orange-clad feet stretched out in front of him, was that he would like to do the next two Olympics, 2012 and 2016, and then see. He might decide to do something else after that, but it depends on how things go.

This was the closest thing to news in an evening of otherwise interesting but not hot news remarks about how he prepares for races and what it’s like in the room with all the other runners just before a race. Reuters was there, and as a news agency they have to come up with a news story, of course, so not surprisingly, it was Bolt’s casual remarks about the Olympics that the reporter used as a news peg.

Here’s the story which, by the way, is perfectly accurate, I think: “Bolt says 2016 Olympics may be his last”.

But here are some of the other bits of information that have come out of that meeting, most of them close to what he said, but not accurate according to my memory and that of the journalist who was with me: he’ll be switching to the long jump (this, from Track & Field is more accurate), he’ll be switching to other events after 2012, he says people are already saying he’s a legend (the quote I wrote down is that he’d like to be a legend).

Xinhuanet, like most news agencies, routinely carries lovely photo galleries from around the world. Today it’s a collection of shots from the University of Geneva, with a game of giant-pieces chess.

The new Nike summer World Cup ad that’s making a lot of noise is now viewable on YouTube. See what you think.

Great powder and off-piste skiing and snowboarding go together, and no one is going to ban them, but accidents in recent days in Switzerland have raised the issue of responsibility, moral and legal.

Recent avalanches raise the issue of responsibility

The past five days have seen eight people die from avalanches in Switzerland and more than a dozen others caught by them, with several people hospitalized. Two groups were ski- touring, and in two other cases off-piste skiers and snowboarders appear to have set off avalanches that ended on groomed slopes.

Swiss law

The quick answer is that skiing off-piste is not illegal, but you always carry the risk of setting off avalanches for which you might be held responsible. The tricky part is: who decides if you were responsible, how is it decided and what are the implications if it’s your fault. Police initially seek those who might be responsible for setting off an avalanche, and if they suspect someone is at fault, they file a report with a cantonal magistrate (judge) who is assigned to investigate the case. A judge always investigates in cases of injuries or deaths caused by avalanches, but there have been some cases of damages caused, or even no damages but behaviour judged irresponsible, where a skier or snowboarder was considered to be acting against the public interest.

The Swiss penal code calls for a fine or up to three years in prison if the person acted out of negligence or put a life in danger. In the case of putting several lives in danger the prison sentence can be up to 10 years.

In recent memory people have been fined CHF1,000, according to swissinfo. But they can also be held liable for related expenses, including injuries to other people and cleaning up if an avalanche hits a groomed piste, for example. If a search party, with avalanche dogs and helicopters plus scores of people, is called out to look for people after an avalanche, the cost can soar into the thousands. In the case of the seven people who died Sunday in canton Bern in two avalanches just minutes apart, eight helicopters were called in the first day, then helicopters, private rescue teams and the army were used Monday and Tuesday. A judge is investigating the accident and there is not, for now, any indication that humans caused the two avalanches.

But at what point is someone held responsible? Several factors are typically taken into account, such as whether or not warning signs were ignored, or skiers slipped under fences delimiting zones. A sense of responsibility is taken into consideration. Three off-piste skiers who appear to have set off an avalanche that hit a groomed slope in Anzères did the right thing by stopping to help look for people. They then left, say police and it took police a week to find them. It probably won’t be a point in their favour that they left the scene without giving their names to police, nor did they respond to a police press release asking them to turn themselves in.

Read further

Le Temps newspaper (Fre) and Swiss public broadcast system’s web site, swissinfo, both carry lengthy articles about this today. Le Temps in fact has several related articles, worth taking the time to read. They both interview legal experts and come to the same conclusion, that the Swiss most likely don’t want police on the slopes, monitoring, as they do in Italy.

The Independent has run a lengthy interview with Roger Federer. It makes for cheering reading after an evening spent in growing irritation at the amount of mis-reporting and confused writing on the Internet  about the just-published crtieria for determining which UBS bank accounts will be handed by Switzerland to the US tax authority, the IRS. Roger, I  hope you get a bit more sleep, but babies do eventually learn to sleep, one of life’s great pleasures!

Stories not making front page headlines but that are worth a moment’s reflection:

The US Justice Department says crimes by girls have been rising and by 2004 girls’ crimes were 30 percent of the total by juvenile delinquents. Little research has been done in this area, so no one seems to know why crimes by girls are increasing, although one part of the answer could be changes to the justice system in the US.

Meanwhile, in Copenhagen where the IOC (International Olympic Committee) just awarded the 2016 Games to Rio de Janeiro, the sports group also adopted a number of recommendations. One of these is the challenging Recommendation 66: “The Olympic Movement should strengthen its partnership with the computer game industry in order to explore opportunities to encourage physical activity, and the practice and understanding of sport among the diverse population of computer game users.” (good luck!) Olympic Congress Recommendations in full

And, in a peculiarly American news approach, both Bloomberg and Associated Press have now managed to put Roman Polanski (sex crime escapee) and tax cheats (IRS tax dodgers) into bed together with a lovely duvet-style Swiss feather cover over them (read that: Switzerland and Swiss neutrality = haven for all crimes committed by right-thinking Americans, which indicates editorial confusion).

After this dubious snuggle-down, what comes out is that a) Switzerland is “no longer” a haven, which implies that it has been, for all crimes, while forgetting completely about accurate reporting and b) that Switzerland, tut-tut, will have to live like the rest of the world, which is a sign that the writers, or more probably their editors, haven’t budged since 1980. Switzerland may not be a member of the European Union, but it has adopted much of the legislation, for a start and, frankly, the days when Switzerland was an island of oddity are over. Now Switzerland is as odd as any other country around. Back in 1980 all Swiss stories published in the US had to include gold under the streets of Zurich, cheese with holes, chocolate and cuckoo clocks, even though the Swiss have tried for years to point out that cuckoo clocks are Austrian, not Swiss. As for the other three, my editors at three major US news publications all told me this, at one point or another during the early 1980s. It made for some slightly skewered reporting at the time.

Looks like some things never change, but I’m not talking about the Swiss, who have.

I’m not a golfer: I belong to the league that figures if you want to take a long walk do it without chasing a ball. My worst date ever was with a pro who took me to a driving range for the night and didn’t notice I’d stopped swinging. So I’m usually immune to people waxing poetic about gorgeous and challenging golf courses, even though some of my best friends are avid golfers.

I just flew into Lisbon, reading on the plane about the new Amendoeira resort in Portugal’s Algarve; in fact we flew over it coming in, as the sun rose. The sun, I repeat. For while I left Geneva in a downpour that made driving to the airport at 5:30 truly miserable, the weather in southern Portugal is so good it almost makes me want to play golf today, with 18C and sunny skies, the kind of puffball clouds you get only when you’re next to the ocean.

And then I read CNN’s long article on Nick Faldo’s new golf course, which opened 19 October. Hand me a club, someone.

Truth in advertising: what does Michael Phelps really eat for breakfast? If I switch from muesli to Corn Flakes to Wheaties, will my swimming improve? Ad Age talks a lot about the money from food sponsors for Phelps and other top athletes, but they skip over the uncomfortable question of what the fellow really eats for breakfast, which at last report, according to the Guardian (whose brave journalist tried to eat as Michael does – check out the video) didn’t include pre-packaged flakes. Of course, the cereal boxes don’t say he actually eats the stuff.