Champions
Tom Brady retired, Marianne Vos won an eighth world title, the cyclocross season is over and we're heading to the Winter Olympics.
Welcome to the latest edition of SSWOS, the Sick, Sad World of Sports, where sports is the mechanism by which we learn about the depths of shithousery and assholery and dipshittery of the human soul.
I hope you find it fun or informative but not both. If you want more of this particular species of brain worms, follow @scksadwos.
I also write exclusively about rugby league on pythagonrl.com and @pythagonrl.
Champions
In the space of a few hours on Sunday morning, Marianne Vos had won her eighth world title in cyclocross (more on that later) and Sources claimed Tom Brady was about to retire.
The media had jumped the gun a little on Brady, who only confirmed his retirement on Tuesday but we were promptly inundated with nods to past glories for both athletes.
My personal view for a while has been that there’s champions of sport and then there’s Champions. One of the defining characteristics of Champions is that wherever they go, they win.
Having come to the NFL only five years ago, I was not a big Tom Brady believer and found the media suck-off that followed him wherever he went to be unbearable. Then he left the Patriots, went to Tampa and did it all again, like it was no big deal. That’s when I switched. Brady had proven himself to me, at least, to be worth everything everyone had said about him. It is what it is and we all just have to accept it.1
Marianne Vos is different, being a woman, still active at the ripe old age of 342 and a cyclist. Like Merckx, the other GOAT of cycling, her palmares has its own Wikipedia page. My favourite statistic is that she’s been a multiple world champion of road cycling (3), of cyclocross (8) and of two (2) disciplines on the track, often holding several rainbow jerseys at the same time. Of the men’s road world champions since 1960, a cursory search of their Wikipedia articles reveals only Rudi Altig and Mark Cavendish held senior world titles in other disciplines. While the structure, economics and respect given to the men’s and women’s side of the sport are vastly different, it’s clear that Vos is in a class of her own in terms of her ability to win and her versatility in doing so.
There are other examples. Formula 1’s Schumacher and Hamilton are defined by their sheer volume of victories but also by the fact that they left Bennetton and McLaren, respectively, after winning world championships and then went on to win even more at Ferrari and Mercedes. Tiger Woods’ career took a similar trajectory and while he may not be the most upstanding role model3, you can’t deny that the man knows how to play golf. LeBron James and Michael Jordan also meet the criteria and those are the examples that come to mind without diving into multi-sport athletes, like Bo Jackson, Jim Thorpe and John Surtees.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the time, space or knowledge to ennumerate everyone that might fit in this category but I think I’ve established the idea. There are limits4 but I personally find this a useful framework. GOAT debates are often tedious because they are prosecuted by idiots and the media trying to fill air time, largely resulting in people who talk past each other about what they actually value. There are few that are indisputable but we can recognise the 0.1% of the 0.1% winners of the 0.1% that become professional athletes that are Champions.
The grace, the beauty of sports
Very normal things
There’s a tried-and-true retort that gets thrown around anytime something resembling the subject of affirmative action is broached: Why not just hire the best candidate?
That question can be answered with another question: Since when have NFL teams shown they know the first thing about hiring good candidates?
Interesting to contrast the NFL’s inability to stop tripping over its own dick when faced with its obvious systemic racism, which exists despite the helmet decals and end zone dictums, and this take (which is unbelievably still up):
I think you learn infinitely more about American politics by watching its sports than you can by rattling off the names of corrupt old white men.5
But one of the more damning non-racist allegations is that the Dolphins offered to pay Flores to lose games - $100,000 per loss - which he claims he turned down. If proven, this could turn the sport upside down, while doing nothing to address the racism, which the NFL would probably prefer.
I listened to the first hour of this podcast with the aforementioned ESPN executive, discussing the nature of broadcast deals. There was nothing earth shattering in it - other than the expectation that the NBA’s deal is about to double - but an interesting peek behind the curtain nonetheless.
This was a fantastic write-up from The Ringer about the invasion of Americans into soccer ownership. I have a huge amount of time for Stefan Szymanski. I read his book Soccernomics about five or so years ago and it was one of the things that put me on the path to typing this very sentence. Szymanski is quoted extensively and hits on the same theme of excess capital sloshing around, as well as American exceptionalism:
“I don’t see anything fundamental in the structure of soccer that’s changed in that period,” Szymanski says. “I don’t see the strategy here. Unless you just think that these people are stupid and you’re smarter. The idea that the people who have tried this in the past were idiots who didn’t know what they were doing, it’s nonsense.”
This is not interesting in and of itself but, a bit like mixed relays, I was baffled by how many sports have beach equivalents and I cannot figure out why. Or more accurately, I can’t wrap my head around the commercial incentives, which is likely due to my own ignorance than anything else. Perhaps the Summer Olympics is moving to an entirely sand basis as a mirror to the snow/ice basis of the Winter Olympics?
News from around the grounds
Curling: Mixed doubles has kicked off the 2022 Beijing programme
Motorsport: NASCAR is getting ready to race at the LA Coliseum6
Basketball: Lauren Jackson appears to be making a comeback in the WNBL
Soccer: Senegal have qualified for the African Cup of Nations final
Cricket: India have made their fourth consecutive under 19 World Cup final
See the latest on the Governors and Leagues lists on Twitter.
Cyclocross, season 2021-22
Cyclocross’ appeal is also it’s main problem. It frankly looks ridiculous, so its hard to see it ever achieving the wide popularity of road, the Olympic tradition of track or the relative cool of mountain biking. ‘Cross is probably never going to be more than a niche sport for a bunch of weirdos7. But it’s also good fun to watch, extremely and obviously challenging and you can get your fill in two hours, unlike the weeks demanded by road cycling.
This nicheness puts a maximum depth that the talent pool can achieve and it will likely remain a predominantly Belgian/Dutch sport with the occassional Stybar, Pidcock and Vas interloper, so the problem becomes the ‘cross peloton kinda sucks.
When van Aert and van Der Poel deign to turn up, and I suppose we can include Pidcock in this group now, it’s clear that everyone else are mere mortals and the win only becomes possible if there are catastrophic mechanical issues for the deities. Eli Iserbyt is the clear best of the full-time cyclocross riders, demonstrated by his season-long domination of the World Cup, finishing 130 points clear of Michael Vantourenhout. That domination came at a price, as evidenced by his obvious inability to go with Pidcock in the most important race of the season and his struggle to even stay with Lars van der Haar. Then there’s a collection of Vantourenhout, Aerts, Sweeck, Hermans, Van Der Haar and others who will win only if they resolutely focus on one race (e.g. Vantourenhout at the European championships8), the conditions and course favour them and they get some luck.
The women’s peloton is in better shape but more limited in quantity. It’s clear that if Vos focussed on cyclocross, she’d dominate in a similar manner to the male deities. She won four of the eight World Cup races she entered, losing a fifth at Val di Sole on the last corner, never finished lower than sixth and finished fifth overall despite skipping half the season. Lucinda Brand is closer to Vos in ability than, for example, Iserbyt is to van Aert, winning the World Cup, the European Championships and forced into second at the World Championships by a course that did not favour her over Vos. After that there’s a small number of veterans (Betsema, et al) and then we’re relying on under 23 riders, like Pieterse, Van Empel, Van Arooij and Vas, to provide competition. Quite frankly, they’re not up to it (yet) and nor should they be expected to be. If Ceylin del Carmen Alvarado can find her form of past years, she may challenge but that looked extremely unlikely this year. Bronze medallist at the Worlds, Siliva Perisco, managed this feat off the back of good end of season form; prior to Flamanville, she only had two top tens in the World Cup and the best was ninth place. It’s hardly suggestive of an overturning of the established order.
The result is that most of the races are foregone conclusions after twenty or thirty minutes, which is either good or bad, depending on how time poor you are. The women’s side of the sport provided more excitement this season with a few races that went down to the wire but I’m not sure how the powers that be can realistically hope to fix this. Perhaps it was ever thus (I’ve only being really paying attention the last two seasons) and this is what happens at the semi-pro/development level of sport. Someimtes true talents just kick the shit out of everyone else.
In the meantime and as the pandemic dissipates, it’d be nice to see the calendar take some more risks with course offerings. There are too many Belgian parks and not enough Val di Soles. Where’s the gravel and pave?
Time moves swiftly on. The road season started as the men’s elite race at the ‘cross Worlds was finishing with the Saudi Tour, GP Marseillaise, Etoile de Besseges and Volta a Communitat Valenciana all underway or completed. Even though I completely ignored the Australia-only pandemic-mutant offpsring of the Tour Down Under, it’s only Thursday and somehow I’m already more than a week behind.
2022 Winter Olympics
I plan to watch a great deal of the Winter Olympics, being a big multi-sport event held in a convenient time zone9. I am tempted to do a few newsletters during, covering actual sports for a change, but we’ll see how we go. I’m certain there will be some interesting stories that arise over the next couple of weeks that aren’t just “the CCP are evil and no one in China is talking about" it”.10 For example:
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The retirement suck-off seemed strangely limited to Sunday, like everyone had run out of superlatives two days before his actual retirement. Maybe they’ll need to bank them for his Hall of Fame induction.
Same age as your correspondent.
Seemingly consensual extramarital affairs with women of age and reckless driving seems pretty tame compared to what famous (white) people usually get away with.
Lachlan Coote, my go-to example, won a premiership with North Queensland then three more with St Helens but is unlikely to be considered one of the greatest fullbacks of all time, despite his success at a critical position in those teams. He doesn’t feel like a Champion and I don’t know if that’s because he “only” won four titles, that he barely had a representative career, which is indicative in itself, or just the vibes. He isn’t exactly Cooper Cronk.
The follow-up is even more egregious -
Famously, politics does not feature mindless tribalism or hero worship, even though politics is covered like sports and not the other way around.
I know it’s not worth acknowledging such obviously stupid shit but I find it telling that this is the default position of a contributor to The Atlantic and many intellectuals who simply do not understand what they do not understand and refuse to acknowledge it.
I have no idea what this is going to look like but I think I am intrigued enough to switch it on.
His face while finishing fourth at the World was both insane and very funny.
The prospect of later nights while living with a small child who does not sleep well (for the record, she is my daughter and I have no choices here) may result in my death though.
No shit, what else is new?