Sink Faze: The Life Chaotic
Posted By Paul Kotik on 16 April 2006
In Association with PFI
The most successful World Record event is one which ends in failure.
It’s a variant of the Peter Principle, and makes perfect sense if one imagines an event with no scheduled Last Day: you just drop the plate a meter or three each day until your divers simply can’t do it anymore. The event is over when everybody’s blacking out, and it’s successful if yesterday’s dives made new records. With this paradigm clearly in mind, it’s easy to see that stirring a predetermined endpoint into the mix adds a strategic constraint to the game, felt as temptation by coaches, urgency by the divers and manifested in early-game failed dives.
Failed record attempts are perfectly okay when they happen as the last note in the tune when the song has already been played, records set, the audience is on its feet and the athlete is going for gravy. It’s the expected result of pushing beyond the new definition of human limits. That’s how come they’re World Records, after all.
The trouble starts when a sour note is played in the middle of the concert or worse, at the beginning. That’s when things can start to unravel. One the one hand there’s the Golden Way- nothing succeeds like success- but the flip side of that particular coin is a devil’s cloven hoof.
Mandy-Rae and the Devil
Photo (c) 2006, Grant W. Graves
So the devil stepped on Mandy-Rae Cruickshank, and she didn't reclaim the women’s World Record for the Constant Ballast discipline. Everything seemed to be in place to make it happen. She's arguably in the best physical shape of her life and the living conditions for the athletes were, thanks to ICU Medical’s sponsorhip, the best ever. Which is to say the least burdensome on the competitors, although of the three Team athletes Mandy was the only one with a considerable administrative and logistical obligation to meet during the event.
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