- 10:22 PM
- 11/20/09
Egypt scored in the sixth minute of injury time to beat Algeria 2-0; winning 1-0 would have eliminated them from World Cup qualification, but the second goal means that they have a one-off playoff against Sudan on Wednesday. It probably deserves a post of its own, given the acrimony between the two sides.
posted by etagloh at 02:49 PM on November 14
The Haye-Valuev fight was described by one of the Guardian's commenters as "an advert for MMA", with good reason, but Haye's victory probably revitalises the heavyweight division, especially if the matchup with Ruiz happens.
posted by etagloh at 01:31 AM on November 09
I remain wedded to Matt Taibbi's argument that if sporting and political hacks swapped jobs for a week, America would be much better off.
"Being from New York, I have always considered myself to be a winner," King told The Hill.
He was so much more amusing when he was supporting the IRA. Oh, no, that's not true at all.
posted by etagloh at 01:29 AM on November 08
Is anyone else surprised by how ESPN is covering this?
No, given that SportsCenter's coverage continues to make the ESPN Deportes team cringe.
Where's the ref? If you're going to play the hard-case centre-back, then you're either sneaky and get away with it, or blatant and go into the book. Blatant and getting away with it means the ref is AWOL.
posted by etagloh at 05:13 PM on November 06
There's clearly a few shades of grey here. There are competitors who take the money and passports offered by countries that want a fast track to gold medals. There are ones who get slightly advantageous treatment in order to compete under a nation's flag, such as Tanith Belbin, the beneficiary of a bill that removed (frankly stupid) bureaucratic impediments to her naturalization in advance of the 2006 Winter Olympics. Then you have Bernard Lagat, who, like many Kenyan long-distance runners, went to college in the US, but unlike them, chose to take US citizenship when eligible. And then you have those like Keflezighi and Freddie Adu who emigrated to the US as children.
International eligibility regulations for sport have always been somewhat askew from citizenship laws, as seen in Jack Charlton's Republic of Ireland side, or in the flag-swapping of rugby players and cricketers. Athletics has generally been stricter in that regard, at least since the days of Zola Budd's fast-track passport: Lagat's 2004 Olympic medal for Kenya is still under question, and after revealing his new citizenship, he served out a mandatory one-year ban before competing for the US.
None of that means that an American-by-choice, who took the test and swore the oath is any less American than what you might call 'Americans-by-accident' whose citizenship is based upon geography or ancestry.
posted by etagloh at 02:58 PM on November 03
Wow. As one of the commenters there noted, Darren Rovell is technically an asshole. That's the kind of nativist BS that you'd expect to hear on right-wing radio. While there are unquestionably ringers in international sport -- Brazilian Georgians in beach volleyball, Kenyans who now run for Qatar, etc. -- Keflezighi clearly doesn't fit into that category.
Having been smacked around by commenters, Rovell has walked back his earlier piece, though his claim that "I never said he didn't deserve to be called American" rings fairly hollow. As someone said in comments to that piece, if the marathon had been won by a guy who'd emigrated from Dublin or Milan as a kid, I can't imagine hearing him being described as "technically American". To dig the hole deeper, Rovell says this:
I said that Keflezighi's win, the first by an American since 1982, wasn't as big as it was being made out to be because there was a difference between being an American-born product and being an American citizen.The winner in 1982? Alberto Salazar, born in Havana.
posted by etagloh at 01:47 PM on November 03
No one has heard of- nor cares about this blog.
ESPN cares enough about it to instruct its staff three years ago specifically never to use it as a source.
Harlow said the suit singled out Gawker as a defendant because of their "concerted" efforts to single out their client, despite the reporting of others.
Uh, no: the suit singled out Gawker because Nick Denton has enough money in the bank to make it suing, or just subjecting it to the legal costs of defending the claim. And everybody's doing it these days. Frankly, I'd laugh and laugh and laugh if one of the anti-Gawker suits took Denton to the cleaners, given that he basically courts it, but my guess is that this won't be the one.
posted by etagloh at 02:15 AM on October 26
I've had an eye on Rolle since news of the Rhodes scholarship broke, and I think he'd be a standout regardless of the campus.
One factoid to take from that piece: Rhodes Scholars can choose to join any college, and while many sign up with graduate-only colleges, which have more international students but can sometimes be fairly cloistered, Rolle has gone with Teddy Hall, a traditional rugby-playing college slap bang in the middle of town with 400 undergrads and 200 grads. That shows a real desire to throw himself into the Oxford experience during his time there, both as part of the Rhodes House community and as an active member of his college. That usually works out pretty well.
There's a Q&A with Rolle on the NYT Quad blog, which touches on the situation at FSU as well as expanding on his experience so far in Oxford and his hopes for the future.
posted by etagloh at 06:10 PM on October 24
The ref is being "rested" this coming weekend. Meditation good for the judgment?
That's the sound of a stable door being bolted when the horse has disappeared over the horizon. I'm sure that every other Premier League ref is thinking, without admitting it, that they'd have let the goal stand too. And Gallagher, Poll and the other ex-refs, none of whom covered themselves with glory in their careers, are guffing when they say otherwise. I certainly believe that players or ex-players like Bruce had no idea of that rule in the book: the general rule of thumb has been to use natural stoppages to clear out any crap from the goalmouth. I can't even remember it being a game-stopper during the odd craze for inflatables in the late 80s.
More amusingly, LFC's entire stock of 'holiday beach sets' has been bought up, with suspicions falling on Evertonians, or the Man Utd fans visiting Anfield this coming weekend.
posted by etagloh at 02:02 AM on October 20
As the BBC commentators said, they should race at Interlagos every week. Or at least, have tracks of that quality for every grand prix.
Brawn GP sealed the constructors' championship today as well, and without taking anything away from Button, I'm sure that he'd lay plenty of credit his team -- on the brink of leaving F1 after Honda's pullout -- for helping make the opposition look pedestrian, particularly in the opening half-dozen races.
posted by etagloh at 07:01 PM on October 18
Former FIFA referee Graham Poll told the BBC the referee should have stopped the game and given a drop ball.
Graham Poll can bugger off. And Danny Baker has an obvious lead-in next week. I want to hear about park games with in-off-the-dog goals.
posted by etagloh at 11:15 PM on October 17
Here and here. I'd say "beach ball" over "balloon", but Liverpool definitely had the wind knocked out of them by it (ka-dunk).
posted by etagloh at 05:44 PM on October 17
Plaintruth either has a personal interest that he ought to disclose, talking out of his plastic-paddy arse, or trolling us.
posted by etagloh at 07:30 AM on October 17
"By Jesus, says he, I'Il brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I'll crucify him so I will. Give us that biscuitbox here."
I can imagine it being a somewhat crude joke -- a flip on the Blazing Saddles gag about the Irish -- but his "explanation" suggests he just dug a hole for himself and kept digging.
posted by etagloh at 07:27 PM on October 16
The opening week is likely to be interesting. There might not be the same crosswind surprise attacks that came this year -- the route doesn't head directly west across Flanders, where that's always a factor -- but those drags across Holland and Belgium have a very different character to the ones in most TdFs, even without the pav, which is going to put the willies up all the teams.
The Pyreneean spotlight makes up for a fairly pedestrian first week this year, though I wonder if the dynamics of the race will mean that the teams will declare tacit truces on some of the mountain-top finishes, depending on the GC. Still, Cavendish is going to have to spend the offseason honing his survival skills if he wants a dig at the green.
posted by etagloh at 05:43 PM on October 14
Ah, the oligarchs are coming. So that means it's only six years until the Nets are banned from all trades and draft picks.
posted by etagloh at 03:58 AM on September 24
The touchline time-keeper and the stopped clock are already standard for NCAA matches. Having watched a couple of matches, it feels wrong to me, but that's clearly not sufficient as an objection. The TV timeouts are, though, and the continuous clock remains a defence against that.
The rugby model of blowing up for half- or full-time when the ball goes out of play feels wrong for more easily defined reasons: one distinctive element of football is that the players can't do anything to end a match. (That's why the golden goal rule didn't work.)
posted by etagloh at 05:39 PM on September 23
John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman love Delonte West, and if they didn't cover it in this week's podcast, they'll talk about it next week.
posted by etagloh at 04:39 PM on September 19
Agreed about the way divisions even things out -- with promotion and relegation, most of the time -- but there's meant to be pretty fine-grained handicapping even at the high school level in the US. Admittedly, the looser scheduling means that you'll have those powderpuff games in American seasons that are designed to perpetuate old rivalries or pad the win column by bribing a weaker team to come and get hammered, but the blowouts aren't always in those mismatches. (Every week of the NFL will also have one or two games where you could imagine a mercy rule kicking in, as the Panthers will testify after Sunday.)
I wasn't aware of the details behind the 'roos left Oceania -- thanks for that.
posted by etagloh at 03:52 AM on September 17
a high school landscape increasingly aware of sportsmanship issues
Let's expand this out a little and avoid retreading old ground: is one of the structural disadvantages of the big American sports their greater tendency to set up routs, hence the need for mercy rules and palliative coaching? I'm quite certain that every week of this NCAA football season, for instance, there'll be a fair amount of games, not just powderpuff ones, that are basically over by half time.
See, I absolutely understand the don't-rub-it-in attitude when the scores are lopsided -- empty the bench, don't go for the showy long pass, don't steal bases, don't run the full-court press -- but I also know that situations like that are pretty rare in classic British school sports, i.e. soccer, rugby, cricket, hockey, netball. Even obvious mismatches don't create the same ethical quandaries. I just can't imagine a British school or youth club football coach getting sacked for leading a team to a 15-0 victory, or a cricket coach telling his batsmen to drag things out any more than caution dictates after the bowlers have skittled the opposition.
posted by etagloh at 02:56 AM on September 17
(A bit of explanation: the Guardian, in a bid to get people buying the print newspaper, has been including facsimile copies of classic comics every day for the past week or so.)
I was never a regular reader of RotR, though I got a few annuals at Christmas, and I'd guess that lots of people's recollections are filtered through those. But it felt nostalgic even in the 1980s.
Did Americans have sporting comics in the 70s and 80s?
posted by etagloh at 02:24 AM on September 17
Every year, I keep half an eye on Seattle to see if they have a chance of the playoffs. I hope that Ichiro has a chance to make it back to the postseason, given the Pyrrhic character of that 116-win first season with the Mariners.
I'll go with it being a borderline record, but anything that celebrates Ichiro's gloriously idiosyncratic MLB career is fine by me. Having played half of his career in Japan, he's not going hit the standard career marks for longevity and consistency -- the 3,000 hit club, the various Rickey Henderson records. If that means reaching back for a record that gives Ichiro his fair due as a player, then so be it.
posted by etagloh at 02:23 PM on September 15
There's a much better piece waiting to get out from that (pretty sloppy) one, which is to talk about Foxworth as part of a growing number of African-American athletes who have used their wealth to become collectors and curators of historical and cultural artifacts.
I already knew about Grant Hill's art collection; I didn't know about Art Monk, Chris Webber and others. There are clearly dealers and collectors who have begun to cater to the interests of black players, and I'd like to know about the development of that infrastructure, as well as the relationship of those private, ad hoc collections to institutional collectors of African-American art and historical items. That hint of condescension in the piece, whether deliberate or not, points to the story behind the story.
posted by etagloh at 02:09 PM on September 15
He blames the "speed and the enormity of the Internet" for the reaction it drew.
I blame his desire to phone in a column over the holiday weekend. Or, if you like, the 2009 calendar for making Labor Day so late.
posted by etagloh at 01:30 AM on September 15
LBB: c'mon. I was responding to MW12's argument that Serena should sit out some tournaments until the organisers and officials start showing her the respect that her status demands. That kind of attitude poisons sports: no one player (or official) is bigger than the game. Might be worth asking back: who's going to be the next line judge to call a foot fault against Serena?
You already know what I think about the status of the foot fault. (You can also compare the latest Ashes series and the number of no-balls that were missed on wicket-taking balls.) Tennis has been pretty good at adopting technology to address the subjective, split-second decisions that go into line and net calls, and I'm sure that the head honchos are already thinking about ways to use replay for foot-fault calls.
posted by etagloh at 04:12 PM on September 14
Let's not forget that Adebayor had put the boot into van Persie's face earlier in the match. (That jab from Gary Lineker to Alan Shearer on MotD, recalling this moment, was priceless.)
Nicholson's always good for a contrarian jab. The nostagist in me sympathises with his love of the drama of player-terrace confrontations, born from his days in the Ayresome Park chicken run. (As Danny Baker once said, part of the joy of scoring is rubbing the opposition's nose in it.) And he makes some good points about the Arsenal fans' treatment of Adebayor, and van Persie's reputation as a whining, diving, fouling little shit.
But I do think he's over-romanticising the days of a more permeable "fourth wall" between players and crowds, especially given that those days were usually marked with explicit, repellant racism from the stands. If the cost of stamping that out means less drama, fewer confrontations, and sanctions for those players who goad fans, then it's a price worth paying.
posted by etagloh at 03:10 PM on September 14
The only time Serena got close to anybody is when she said to the tournament director that she had not said what she was accused of saying.
And then admitted that she'd misheard what the line-judge had told the umpire. Like I said upthread, if she hadn't gone back for second helpings, the umpire probably wouldn't have called over the line-judge, and it would have been for the Tour authorities to make the call after the match.
Players in all sports yell at refs, umps, judges all the time. A typical response is to ignore it, or dismiss it.
Well, no. What's "typical" depends upon the sport. In rugby, you can whack someone in the nads in a scrum, but if you so much as question the referee's authority, you'll be off to the sin-bin.
So, let's take a reckoning: you claimed that no-one could hear, when the on-court microphones and cameras made it very clear, and put CBS's editors to extra work. You've claimed that abusing the officials without punishment is standard practice, which simply isn't true. Oh, and you've basically said that enforcement of the rules should be dictated by the demands of top-ranking players.
posted by etagloh at 02:22 PM on September 14
The foot fault in top-flight tennis is a bit like the double dribble in the NBA: it's in the rules, but it happens so rarely that it's a shock when it gets called. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be called, but I can imagine a double-dribble call in the final play of an NBA game provoking the same response from the players and crowd.
What surprised me about that post-match press conference was Serena's "ah, it's in the past, la-di-da" attitude. Especially when you can imagine what that line-judge would have been feeling at the same time.
Plus, as the replay showed, Serena might have escaped that point deduction if she hadn't gone back for a second gobful. I'm not going to say "suicide by cop" here, given the exchange that happened at the umpire's chair, but it felt like a slightly cheap way out of a match where she was outplayed, knew she was being outplayed, and was frustrated by her game.
posted by etagloh at 12:52 PM on September 13
Let's see if we can unpack anything from that fairly crappy assemblage of comments from Arum.
i suppose you can pair it with Floyd Mayweather saying in July that "there's no white fighters in boxing that's dominating, so they had to go to something else and start something new". As the commenters to that linked post note, that's BS: there are plenty of dominant white fighters, but few of them (with Kelly Pavlik as a notable exception) are American. So I think there's a grain of truth in the notion that the cold, hard business side of MMA (especially PPV) has a particular demographic in mind that won't pay to watch title fights.
posted by etagloh at 06:13 PM on September 12
The fact that you can be a great (or the greatest) in your sport and a total jerk is why I've always found the whole "hall of fame" concept, and the various controversies surrounding admission and exclusion, fairly tedious. Perhaps Jordan feels the same. And it's not as if he has problems with the Hanes advertising contract portraying him with a giant stick up his rear.
posted by etagloh at 05:57 PM on September 12
Yet again, the operations of the IAAF have leaked like a colander, this time to the Australian tabloid (and Murdoch-owned) press. That's pretty damning, and you can understand the anger (albeit politically-driven) at the perception that confidentiality and sensitivity go by the wayside for a black African athlete if the western press is calling.
posted by etagloh at 09:09 AM on September 12
It was a fun comeback to watch, but really, yeah, the serving ability and basic consistency of the Russian Clone Army leaves something to be desired. Clijsters-Serena, on the other hand, may be a tasty one to watch.
posted by etagloh at 01:03 AM on September 09
Makes me wish U.S. sports had promotion and relegation.
Ah, but that would deny baseball fans a first month of the season in which Pittsburgh wins a few games, perhaps leads its division, and everyone saying "could this be the year in which the Pirates are not shit?" only to know by the All-Star break that all is as it was in the world, and the Pirates are indeed shit.
(Detroit, alas, has broken its long trend of reliable crapitude, and Jim Leyland is once more to blame.)
posted by etagloh at 12:57 AM on September 09
In case it needs spelling out, the 4x1500m has probably been run no more than a handful of times since 1977, but it's an IAAF-ratified distance. You'll get the occasional non-standard event at the grand prix meets, and the organisers choose them when there's a good chance that a record will be broken. So, stunt scheduling (presumably with a good insurance policy as part of the deal) but high entertainment.
posted by etagloh at 08:23 PM on September 05
It's also worth remembering that the 800m world record for women is the longest standing of the standard IAAF competition events, dating back to 1983. (The 400/800m records were set by Eastern Bloc women during an era of institutionalised doping; the 100/200m belong to Flo-Jo, who was dogged by accusations of doping and left the track just as mandatory testing began.)
There's a reason why certain times haven't come close to being challenged in 20 years -- you can also point to the 1500/3000/10,000 records, all set by Chinese athletes in one week, at the 1993 Chinese National Games, during a time of extreme suspicion at their emergence from nowhere. (Six other athletes coached by Ma Junren were kicked out at Sydney in 2000.)
That's not to say that there's a long history of abject sexism from the IAAF towards what constituted a woman competitor, and I've said here before that it's been handled atrociously, through leaks and anonymous tip-offs. But dusted's got some good points -- not least because when everyone who follows athletics looks back at the bad old days of Eastern Bloc doping, that 800m record for women sticks out like a sore thumb, and anyone coming close to that time, with those associations, is going to come under suspicion.
posted by etagloh at 04:07 PM on August 27
I'm sorry to see a single issue axe what was an excellent asset to the US soccer community.
I think that's part of the problem, though: WSD had that first-mover momentum, and built up the clout to attract good guests and claim a kind of implicit authority. (It also got Cohen and Geber their original FSC gig.) For Americans, it's pretty much the only regular venue with a decent audience where MLS, the EPL and the world's leagues are all equally valid subjects for discussion. With that implicit authority comes a degree of responsibility.
The BBC's Tim Vickerey, who hosts Five Live's world football phone-in in the wee hours of Saturday mornings, was asked about Cohen's departure last week, and put it pretty succinctly: where there's an accepted, official account, offering up a widely different opinion as a broadcaster either requires evidence to justify that opinion, or apologising and keeping those opinions to yourself. Cohen just couldn't stop going there, and either thought that he was bulletproof in the US, or didn't care about the potential consequences.
I've seen the flipside in broadcasting where a major sport in one country is a minority interest in another. The US sports presenters on Five in the UK are enthusiastic, but not the most clued-up, and Americans would probably find them barely tolerable. But they're smart enough to know their limitations.
posted by etagloh at 04:45 PM on August 25
I think it's a good case study of "first-mover advantage" having its disadvantages: if you were to pick the voice of football talk in the US, you probably wouldn't have settled on Cohen and Nick Geber, but they saw a gap in the US market and filled it. As such, I'm sure there are younger viewers and listeners who accord him a kind of authority.
Perhaps he was trolling, in an attempt to generate controversy, publicity and viewers. Looking at the history, though, it just seems like he couldn't help himself: he's swallowed a standard terrace line that Liverpool fans have milked Hillsborough for two decades despite being partly culpable, and no amount of apologising is going to change that fundamental opinion, in spite of it being both disproven by Taylor and deliberately provocative.
If he'd been smart, he'd have realised that it was going to come to a head, and that he'd eventually face the kind of organised anger that makes The Sun still verboten on Merseyside. If he couldn't stop himself from pulling at that string, he could have hired someone to take over the presenting slot and moved to a production role.
I don't doubt that he's been exposed to some rough stuff, but it's not the result of some kind of free-speech martyrdom. You wouldn't even be allowed as a caller on 6-0-6 saying some of that stuff.
posted by etagloh at 12:22 PM on August 25
The captain decides the final team selection, calls the toss, picks the batting order and bowling attack, sets the field positions, decides when to declare or enforce the follow-on, and so on. The team setups these days for first-class cricket provide much more external assistance with dedicated managers, coaches and analysts to do video work and reconnaissance, but the nature of the game requires and expects a certain amount of autonomy out in the middle -- more than in most sports.
You could call the captain's role something of a historical holdover -- with the formalisation of touring parties under the MCC back in the days of "gentlemen" and "players", the captain was an amateur (often public school and Oxbridge-educated) who might not be technically proficient, but was a good chap who could confidently be delegated the authority to tell the professionals what to do, somewhat like an officer in battle. There's still a hint of Jolly Old Empire in that delegation of responsibility -- indeed, India has been captained by a handful of princes during its Test history.
So while it might be conceivable for a captain to wear a headset and take instruction from coaches watching from the pavilion on video monitors, it really wouldn't be cricket.
posted by etagloh at 04:37 PM on August 24
England need... major surgery. Despite the win, you could make a very good case that they were only the better side for very short periods over the summer.
Oh, agreed: if you look at 3-6 right through the Ashes, you just can't see the basis for a decent first innings total, and it took the lower order to make the batting figures respectable (and in Cardiff, save the match). It's not just concentration: just to pick on one person, there are some basic technical flaws to Cook's batting that need fixing, and they won't get fixed on a regular diet of ODIs and T20 cricket.
Adil Rashid probably needs a little more time, but I'm really excited by his progress at Yorkshire. He's in the ODI and T20 squads, so he'll be down in South Africa for the Champions Trophy, but it'll take a Test to show whether his potential translates to the grand stage.
posted by etagloh at 01:59 PM on August 24
A few wags suggested that it's the first time South Africa has won the Ashes.
There's no reason to think that the same England side on tour wouldn't get flogged, either, even by an Australian side that might charitably be described as being in a rebuilding phase. I'm glad to avoid the tabloids; I hope that Stuart Broad keeps his head; Ponting may have lost two Ashes series but I hope that the Aussie post-mortem doesn't single him out for blame.
Not a classic series, true, but one that did much to restore people's love of Test cricket. The two T20s and seven ODIs that now follow are sponsor-satiating nonsense; in that context, Matthew 'TMS Jinx' Hayden's sketch of how to restore a sense of coherence and order to the game is well worth a read.
posted by etagloh at 05:32 PM on August 23
"I can definitely say I didn't expect that because I was a little bit tired," Bolt said after the race.Eff me. Seriously, I want to see Michael Johnson's reaction to that one.
posted by etagloh at 03:47 PM on August 20
If an athlete fails a dope test, their name is not released to the press until the b-sample confirms the positive and all doubt is removed. Why wasn't this done here?
Steve Cram suggested that gender tests are triggered by a protest from another delegation. I don't see that explicitly in the 2009 IAAF rules -- which simply state that the Medical Delegate has the authority to "arrange for the determination of the gender of an athlete should he judge that to be desirable", but the IAAF rules for Beijing said this:
Gender Verification: In the event that the gender of a competing athlete is questioned, the medical delegate (or equivalent) of the IOC MC shall have the authority to take all appropriate measures, for the determination of the gender of that competitor. It is understood that a confidential case-by-case evaluation will occurClearly, the 'confidential' doesn't apply here. Equally clearly, this was leaked in order to overshadow the race. There's a lot of passive-voice reporting here -- 'her gender has been questioned', etc -- but either the IAAF decided unilaterally, or received a protest after the African junior championships in Mauritius three weeks ago, and I don't think 'confidentiality' ought to apply to those details, or to who leaked the story.
posted by etagloh at 06:12 PM on August 19
Semanya just took the 800m gold, completely dominating the field. So, this one's going to stay in the headlines.
posted by etagloh at 04:09 PM on August 19
A finger should also be pointed at the Mexican authorities, both in the stadium, and in the city. They knew the size of the crowd, and how passions run high, and should have dealt with troublemakers more swiftly and decisively.
A useful point of comparison might be the 2007 lockdown on Italian club football, after a policeman was killed during fighting between "fans" of (bitter Sicilian rivals) Palermo and Catania. Italian club crowds, with their politically-tinged ultras, make the Azteca look like a kindergarten; stadium bosses and local government had contrived to turn a blind eye towards lax security and safety, and it took the national government to step in and address the long-standing problems.
In this case, it's going to take FIFA and CONCACAF, since it's a national team at the national stadium, but that requires standing up to the Mexican FA. It's one thing to cultivate an intimidating atmosphere; it's another to tacitly encourage the worst excesses.
posted by etagloh at 12:26 AM on August 18
Michael Johnson gobsmacked (while Denise Lewis and Colin Jackson go wild) in the BBC commentary box.
posted by etagloh at 02:04 PM on August 17
Kudos to NBC for showing it live, though that might have been after a few stern words from the IAAF after Beijing. (Still not a patch on the BBC, which takes athletics seriously, and an even unhealthier interest in home-country also-rans, but small steps.)
That was a serious holy-eff race. I don't think the atmosphere was quite as charged as Beijing, where it was all about what Bolt might do, as opposed to what he'd already done, but at about 30m, it was became about the time.
9.84, the time that won Donovan Bailey the 1996 gold in Atlanta, now gets you the bronze. And as this nice Wikipedia page shows, it took until 2005 for this generation of sprinters to make its impact.
Lots of smart people still think Bolt might be a better 200/400 runner than 100/200. If he concentrates on the 400m, then Michael Johnson's 43.18, set ten years ago, can't be safe. But it may be some time before he moves up.
posted by etagloh at 07:35 PM on August 16
ESPN in Britain actually showed the Everton-Arsenal match -- Sky had the UK rights for Chelsea-Hull. The Grauniad's minute-by-minute report on ESPN's debut is worth a read.
posted by etagloh at 09:19 PM on August 15
I'm trying (and failing) to think of a sport that is more globally popular and that isn't already in the Olympics. Anybody got one?
I heard that karate is the most popular non-Olympic sport in terms of competitive participation, and has never got in the door because the IOC's South Korean delegate was also head of the taekwondo federation, and basically kept karate out. (It was on the shortlist for 2016, but missed out.)
The problem with baseball, as I hinted, is that MLB just ain't going to play ball with an August competition. Softball, on the other hand, was considered plain uncompetitive back when the decision was made to drop it. (The US went and lost the 2008 gold medal game, but they swept the prelim round, scoring 53 runs in 7 games and conceding 1.)
posted by etagloh at 10:33 PM on August 14
This is a consequence of ESPN buying up a portion of Premier League rights after the Setanta UK collapse, giving ESPN its first branded presence in the UK market. It also presumably means that Setanta US is on very shaky ground.
posted by etagloh at 10:17 PM on August 14
I don't think the U.S. men's basketball team stays in the village, do they? I wouldn't expect the golfers to.
There were a few unlikely village residents in Beijing, but yeah, the golfers will probably fly in on their private jets, do their thing, then fly out. Still, if golf's going to be at the Olympics, make it matchplay. Or crazy golf through windmills and tunnels. Not another 72-hole tournament. (I'm equally blah about Olympic tennis.)
Squash really is the Rodney Dangerfield of racquet sports, as far as the IOC's concerned: tennis, table tennis and badminton are already in. It had preliminary approval for 2012, but missed out because of the previous requirement for two-thirds approval and a "one in, one out" rule. Millions of players, immensely popular worldwide, especially in places that don't win that many medals for their large populations, and an Olympic tournament would have immediately become the crown jewel of the sport.
Baseball and softball were always going to have trouble getting back in, on account of MLB's indifference and the relative weakness of non-US competitors, respectively. But Sevens will be a good addition, I think: it's already in the Commonwealth Games, and has just the right structure for the Olympic schedule: good pace, crowd-friendly, high-scoring, easy to complete a full tournament in a few days, perhaps even sharing a venue with another event.
The addition of women's boxing for 2012 is relatively small-scale: three weight divisions, 36 competitors in total. One of the men's divisions will be dropped to keep the total numbers the same. But Rogge was a big advocate for its inclusion, and it's either a testament to the fast growth of the sport, or a sad reflection on what the IOC thinks will get viewers, depending on your point of view.
posted by etagloh at 03:44 PM on August 13
I've come to my own conclusions about THX-1138.
I'm a fan of Taibbi, and it's good to see that his politics tear doesn't stop him writing about sports. It's one of those curate's egg sounding-off pieces, half snark, half serious -- but it's silly to focus on the snark and ignore things like his suggestion of a weight limit that might save a few linemen from dropping dead on the training ground or soon after retirement -- and discourage college players from bulking up excessively to match them.
posted by etagloh at 11:04 AM on August 13
"Ravi Bopara is a good player." Hm.
posted by etagloh at 11:00 PM on August 10
This piece from the Telegraph gives a good sense of the reaction among fans. A legend of the North, indeed: and perhaps the last of that particular generation.
posted by etagloh at 01:03 AM on August 01
Respect is the word, and it often came long after the fact.
His time as England manager now gets viewed without the tabloid sniping that always accompanies the job; his achievements at Ipswich are perhaps second only to Clough in terms of taking a small provincial club to the top ranks; his ability to deliver on the continent often gets forgotten, because it came just before the Champions League and Sky made European club competition ubiquitous. Jose Mourinho was his translator at Sporting, and became his assistant there and at Barca. He brought the best out of Ronaldo.
I was listening to commentary on the England-Germany charity match organised for his foundation last Sunday, there was mention that he might be too sick to attend, as if the commentors knew how sick he was, but he made it to St James', and I doubt there was a dry eye in the place.
They lowered the flags to half-mast in Sunderland. That says it all.
posted by etagloh at 10:18 PM on July 31
That's a very good speech. Thorpe hints (though never explicitly mentions) the amount of money that the Australian government has funneled into producing elite competitors at sport over the past few decades:
I, as many had, made an assumption; Australia is a rich country, don't we throw a lot of money at that problem?Because that's what Australia had done to win gold medals, with Thorpe as one of the beneficiaries. While the funding for Australian sport is a drop in the bucket compared to the investment required to address Aboriginal health and welfare, Thorpe's clearly aware of the privileges accorded to him, which is why it's great to see him give back in this way.
posted by etagloh at 01:58 PM on July 29
FINA has made a pretty terrible blunder by not reining in those suits sooner.
It's hard to see how they could have done so. They announced a ban in May, got threatened with legal action by the manufacturers, and the FINA executive reversed the ban in June.
As I said in the follow-up to my earlier post, a lot has changed in a year: in Beijing, the LZR was the only high-tech suit in town, and Speedo the only major sponsor of elite swimmers. Now you're not just dealing with the technology but the duelling endorsement deals: Phelps has been under contract to Speedo since he was 15, and his six-year deal runs out at the end of the year, which I assume has been in the back of many officials' minds. (When Phelps' coach says he won't swim again until the new rules are implemented, he's thinking about that deal as well as the results in the pool.)
As it stands, this year's world championships are a joke: you have Jaked and Arena and other manufacturers dishing out suits at the meet, endorsees dumping their sponsors' suits, and swimmers acting like it's the crazy last hour of a party before the cops arrive to break things up.
posted by etagloh at 12:33 PM on July 29
Late back to this, but I'm ambivalent. The F1 analogy doesn't quite hold up because the car's the star (and there's a constructor's championship to make the point). You also have plenty of lower-tier series where the chassis is But that leads to another issue: swimming, like all Olympic sports, doesn't permit mechanically-powered transport, but the top equestrians have the best horses, the top cyclists the best bikes, the top bobsledders the best sled, and so on.
I suppose the real issue here was that the regulations had become entangled in the elite swimmers' endorsement deals, with the Speedo endorsees coming out against the Jaked J01. And you also had those elite swimmers (such as Jason Lezak) saying explicitly that the suits were distorting the results. So FINA was basically left in a position where it was going to be spending all of its time approving new suits on an individual basis, and it made more sense to establish a new baseline -- and to go back to F1, it's worth remembering that the steps taken to tame and then ban turbos through the 1980s, primarily for safety, but also to make the racing competitive.
posted by etagloh at 06:28 PM on July 28
In a way, I think that it's the kind of thing that the league needs, in order to shake off its overseas image of being "where clapped-out stars go out to pasture". Now, you might say that Beckham's desire to remain on the international radar backs up that impression, but it's clear that the fans are no longer comfortable with it.
The chicken run, for better or worse, ought to be a vital part of every club's support, to use the word in its loosest capacity.
posted by etagloh at 01:19 AM on July 21
No, we should be celebrating Tom Watson, the oldest player on the course, tied for the lead after a turbulent second round.
posted by etagloh at 04:54 PM on July 17
SportsFilter: The Wednesday Huddle
Bahraini middle-distance runner Rashid Ramzi was stripped of his 1,500-meter Olympic gold medal Wednesday and four other athletes were disqualified because of doping at the Beijing Games.
Davide Rebellin had his road race silver taken from him on Tuesday, too. Having samples kept for eight years tightens the classic race between dopers and testers: if you can't test for known doping agents at the time, you can still develop the tests and go back to the samples later.