adidas Sport Sunglasses SP0103
About Arkalyk
This isolated city on the Kazakh steppe was founded in 1956 as a bauxite-mining settlement and later made the seat of Torgay Oblast. The oblast was abolished in 1997, mining declined, and Arkalyk was left at the end of a rail line with a much smaller administrative role.
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The adidas Sport SP0103 is a shield-style sport frame in the same family as the other SP models, distinguished by its lens tint and its lighter frame construction.
The single lens sweeps unbroken across both eyes, so there is no frame edge cutting the peripheral field — the reason shield frames are standard in cycling and increasingly common on court.
The frame is a light thermoplastic with an adjustable nose piece and grippy temple ends, and it is cut as a unisex fit.
The lens is mirrored with a lilac-pink flash and carries full UVA and UVB protection. A mirror coating reflects a portion of the light before it reaches the tint, which reduces glare from a hard court surface without requiring a very dark base lens.
Arkalyk is a former mining town on the Kazakh steppe, at around 350 metres, where the sky is open in every direction and there is little natural shade — the sort of place where glare comes off the ground as much as the sky.
Specifications
| Construction | Single-lens shield |
|---|---|
| Frame | Matte grey and white thermoplastic |
| Lens | Lilac mirrored, full UVA/UVB |
| Fit | Unisex |
| Adjustment | Nose piece and temple tips |
| Use | Tennis, running, cycling |
| Included | Case and cleaning cloth |
The SP0103 and the SP0063 look alike at a glance and are not the same frame — the numbers, not the silhouette, are what identify them.
LET adidas Sport Sunglasses SP0103 SHOW YOU Arkalyk
Sunglasses: Come in out of that sun, sweetheart. The Council of Ministers of the Kazakh SSR decided on this museum on 4 February 1972, the first exhibition opened 28 July 1973, and it has carried this name since 1998. Now look at the yard, because that is the very first bucket of Turgai bauxite they lifted out of the pits, up on a plinth like a christening photograph. The town only started in 1956, mind, geologists and builders sent out here for that bauxite, and it was not made a city until 1965. And that scorched bell of a capsule brought Dennis Tito, the first space tourist, home on 6 May 2001. There are Keiki batyr and A. Dzhalalov and A. Imanov in bronze too. Have you eaten anything today?
Sunglasses: Hat off here, love. Nicholas II decreed on 25 June 1916 that Central Asian men aged nineteen to forty-three be conscripted in support of the Brusilov Offensive, and the steppe rose against it; Amangeldy Imanov commanded the Kazakh forces on the Turgai front from July 1916 until Russian troops crushed the last resistance in early 1917. Arkalyk stands in that same old Turgai country where he fought, and was the administrative centre of Torgai Region from 1971 until the region was dissolved in 1997. This square before the akimat is still the town's own. Stand a minute with him.
Sunglasses: The line stops here, sweetheart — right there, just past the platform, no further, so nobody go falling asleep past their stop the way my sister's boy did. One branch comes in from Yesil by way of Derzhavinsk, and it exists for one reason: ore. By the 1980s the Turgai mine was raising up to a fifth of all the bauxite in the Soviet Union, but there has never been water enough here to process it, so the raw stuff has always been railed out to the aluminium plants at Pavlodar and elsewhere. That is Tolek Zhauke batyr on the square, keeping an eye on the trains.
Sunglasses: Mind the edge, love, I mean it, back from there. A Soviet resolution of 1956 ordered these mines built and commissioned, and the little camp of geologists and builders that grew beside the workings became Arkalyk, a city by 1965. At its height in the 1980s it was raising up to twenty per cent of all the bauxite ore in the USSR — that red is the good stuff — and the pits are worked now as part of the Kazakhstan Aluminium company. When it all contracted after 1991 the town fell from around 65,000 people to the mid-twenty-thousands. So many families gone. Here, take a biscuit.
Jackson Phillips here. Owner of TTT. We are working hard every day to bring you the most useful product reviews in the business. Our goal is putting the right product in every hand. If you have time, shoot me an email at jacksonphillips@thetennistactician.com and tell me exactly what you think of your purchase. The more feedback we get, the better we can serve. Thank you for your patronage. And Burn, Laugh, and Learn.