Hacker Cinema
The Boys in the Boat
2023 · Film · 123 min
Directed by George Clooney
The triumphant underdog story of the University of Washington men's rowing team, who stunned the world by competing at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
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Part of the reason he got into trouble was that the US Olympic committee started to pay for athletes' expenses to attend the Olympics in the 1980s (the underlying law itself, the Amateur Sports Act, passed in 1978)...so someone begging on the street would not have been doing so because they needed the money to go (in Eric's case, Barcelona 1992).
That being said, the USOC does not financially support most athletes outside of the Olympic window (meaning, from the time they depart for the host city until the time they return). This means that any activities outside of the Olympics are paid for by the athletes out-of-pocket (for most sports, this includes the Olympic Trials to qualify for the team!). Most athletes don't make money from their athletic endeavors as prize monies are usually quite small and sponsorship opportunities are usually very limited outside of the marquee sports. Generally, in the non-marquee sports (i.e., everything outside of swimming, track and field, and gymnastics), U.S. post-Olympic financial funding (i.e., salaried training) is limited to podium finishers, and many of the more niche sports further limit financial support to gold medal athletes.
[Somewhat related: The Boys in the Boat is a movie about the UW Rowing Team, which won gold at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. At the time, athletes and teams were generally expected to help pay for the costs of attending the Olympics by fundraising (but as with fundraising today, this meant they were on the hook for any shortfalls). In the movie, Cal writes the check for the final post-fundraising shortfall of $300 so the UW team could go; in real life Cal offered a donation but it wasn't needed.]
After much initial resistance, I've become a fan of pair programming. When things are clicking, ideas spark back and forth. Frames collide and interfere, bits of partial insight are exchanged, and you and your partner arrive at a solution that would have been impossible for either of you to get to working individually.
There is the famous psychological notion of flow. The thing is, this can happen among multiple people. Think of a lovely choir or orchestra. Or a basketball team where every team member just seems to be reading other team members' minds. The book (and presumably the upcoming movie) "The Boys in the Boat" really emphasizes this and crystallizes this.
As the linked article mentions, the author and his father butted heads for three hours because they were not listening to each other and pairing very effectively! Really good pairing does take work and practice. But when it starts to work there can be moments when it feels like magic. It is a great way to grapple with the myriad of unforeseen "details" that are actually life-or-death critical issues to project success.