In Pursuit of a National Olympic Team: James G. Merrick and the 1920 Canadian Olympic Track and Field Trials
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Following the First World War, Canadian Olympic Committee President James G. Merrick organized an extensive recruitment scheme to assemble the Canadian track and field team for the 1920 Antwerp Games in hopes of reigniting sporting nationalism from coast to coast. Although not a total failure, I argue that Merrick mismanaged arrangements for the track and field team in two important ways. First, he failed to consider the regional implications of sending Coach Walter Knox on an education and recruiting tour of British Columbia and the Prairie Provinces, but not the Maritime Provinces. Secondly, by planning a large-scale system of provincial, regional and national trials in the midst of economic recession, and holding the national finals in Montreal, Merrick gave Central Canadian athletes – Quebec and Ontario – financial and temporal advantages not afforded to their counterparts in the Prairies, Maritimes or British Columbia, stoking the flames of regional discontent. When the national track and field team finally left for Antwerp, therefore, Merrick had made little progress towards a truly national sporting culture.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".