Adidas’ Telstar 18 taking its orbits on the field
MOSCOW – Two World Cup balls burst during game action Thursday, prompting FIFA to launch a swift defense of the Telstar 18, made by Adidas.
Yet if the worst fate that befalls the ball during the tournament is that an unfortunate few meet a premature implosion, soccer’s governing body will be happy. As the 2010 tournament and the catastrophic (and sometimes uncontrollable) Jabulani showed, the less discussion there is about the object being kicked and the more about the players doing the kicking, the better it is for the World Cup.
Furthermore, perhaps it is a good thing that the Telstar 18 has been absent from headlines, as its unusual name and history mean that it could be a source of embarrassment to Russian President Vladimir Putin, a man who doesn’t take too kindly to such things.
The origins of the Telstar’s title date to the Cold War and stem from a major American technological triumph.
The first Telstar had nothing to do with soccer. It was a satellite, launched by NASA (and largely funded by AT&T), on July 10, 1962. It was blasted into space amid great fanfare, with the public scarcely able to comprehend that a spherical construction the size of, well, an ultra-large soccer ball, could beam images around the world in real time.
That’s exactly what Telstar did two days after its launch.
“(It was) a proud moment for both NASA and the commercial companies,” David Israel, Space Communications architect at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, told USA TODAY. “Live television broadcasts, like the World Cup, are a normal part of life in the 21st century. Telstar started the world’s ‘live via satellite’ capability that lets audiences view broadcasts of events as they happen on other continents.”
It also came at a time when any American triumph was seen as a win in the ideological war against the USSR.
“Telstar was … a technical, political and cultural happening,” Martin Collins of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum wrote in conjunction with Telstar’s 50th anniversary. “(It) stood for the defining place of private enterprise in American life and as an alternative to Soviet-style communism.”
What was seen as culturally significant then faded from the public consciousness and Americans became accustomed to live images being beamed into their living rooms, without giving too much thought to how they got there.
Telstar was still well known enough by 1974, when the World Cup was in West Germany, for the name to be given in honor to the official tournament ball, the second time Adidas had been given the rights to provide it. It was a popular choice in a tournament of outstandingly high quality, with its clean look endearing it to soccer fans worldwide.
After the Jabulani disaster and the strong performance of the Brazuca in Brazil in 2014, Adidas decided to re-create the Telstar. “It is easy to see the resemblance,” Israel said. “The black and white pattern of the Telstar soccer ball mirrors the pattern created by the layout of the satellites’ solar panels. They are definitely different in size, though.”
The first Telstar satellites were about 3 feet in diameter and of a weight that made them better suited to broadcasting soccer kicks than being on the receiving end of them.