Eat the Rich, End the Pentathlon
Sport should exclude people on the basis of class, right? And the USFL: finally, someone's cracked spring football.
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.
Eat the Rich, End the Pentathlon
Another week, another #ModernPentathlonWatch.
The motion to remove equestrian from the modern pentathlon passed the UIPM congress, 66-15, during the week. The representative of the athlete’s commission voted in favour, as well as most of the national federations. The predominantly European and historically successful federations that make up the bulk of the opposition are pissed but clearly outnumbered.1 President Klaus Schormann was re-elected, 72-12 unopposed.
No one has yet asked the athletes why they failed to successfully lobby enough federations, run a candidate against Schormann or contacted their own athlete’s commission to express their views.
Of course, when the coverage comes from geniuses like this:
Then perhaps its to be expected. Joe Choong made a related argument in his column on insidethegames.biz:
At the World Equestrian Games in 2014, there were 500,000 spectators across the Championships. Safe to say in pentathlon we don’t get anywhere close to that number. Seeing that figure, and then hearing the UIPM say that horse riding is an inaccessible sport... things just don’t add up.
This is an argument that falls apart with three seconds of thinking. 400,000 people might turn up to a F1 grand prix but fewer than 10,000 people in the world might even touch a F1 car2 and only a few dozen each year get to drive one. The popularity of a sport is not related - may even be inversely correlated - to its accessibility.
If your argument is then “if you can’t afford to compete, then you’re not welcome”, then I’ve got bad news. Putting aside this disgustingly classist rhetoric that belongs in the 19th century, if the 15 federations that voted against the motion were all that were able to compete3, then there the IOC would rightly revoke their recognition of the pentathlon federation. The bar is a minium of 75 and those in favour of equestrian are well short.
Notwithstanding that, the goal of the pentathlon is to recognise the completeness of its athletes. If the pentathlon is structured in such a way as to only allow the wealthy in first world nations to compete, then you cannot claim to have anything like the world’s most complete athletes competing because you’ve already excluded most of the world before the starting gun has been fired. In contrast, equestrian or F1 do not make such lofty claims, although probably suffer from related problems with their respective claims about their athletes.
It’s horse riding or it’s the superlative athlete: you can’t have both4. If you don’t have the latter, then what is the point of the modern pentathlon?
It’s clear that the incumbent athletes are determined to fight this but they can only rely on procedural arguments. They have yet to generate a response to anything like what the UIPM has argued in terms of accessibility or modernisation. Their best offer is a reformed equestrian discipline which does not solve the problem because you can reform it all you like, that still doesn’t get horses under the right people.
The UIPM has questions to answer on the procedural front. It’s not clear what the force majeure was to necessitate this particular process and the congress brooked no debate. I have some sympathy for the UIPM here, as should anyone who has tried to run a meeting that needs to finish on the same calendar day as it started, but they could have allowed a few minutes for each of the Euro feds to have their whinge and move on. There may be more to this but quite frankly, I find this topic entirely tedious and will wait for someone who has to make a decision to tell me what the outcome is. Nonetheless, if all that was needed was a two-thirds majority, the UIPM have their mandate to move on from horse riding.
Personally, it’s been a frustrating two weeks listening to these dumb arguments, which is why I plan to stop following developments closely while we wait for something important to happen, e.g. the outcomes of any CAS decision, any IOC communications or any suggestions from the UIPM as to what the fifth discipline might be. Everything else, including the stream of open letters from athlete fronts and the clucking of our idiot friend Duncan, is nauseating.
(Schormann was literally just re-elected. This week. At least three of the votes against the motion to remove horse riding must have voted for him. The opposition does not have the numbers to move for no confidence. What are you talking about?)
Then it became a little clearer for me as to why the UIPM is hammering this change through as hard and as fast as they can. It’s perhaps less the IOC pushing for change and more the desire of broadcasters to have something that there’s a risk someone might actually watch.
It might be about ten years too late. The moves the UIPM have made to modernise the sport have been largely in line with how the market has changed over the last twenty years5 but they may have too far behind to begin with.
Despite its core status, pentathlon is battling sports like baseball/softball, wrestling and perhaps other martial arts to retain a spot in the Olympics. Meanwhile, the IOC must be very keen to make some room for cricket, which has a two week tournament format in T20, and the attendant dollars, predominantly from India.
Retaining the horse riding element makes that battle a bit harder. Relying on tradition that no one else values isn’t going to work, especially in the face of arguments about attracting an - any - audience, environmental sustainability, equity of access to competition and the cost of it all.
If the tories can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the world in which they live (and largely benefit from), then the modern pentathlon will come to an end. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but someday.6 And rightfully so.
The grace, the beauty of sports
Very normal things
It’s been a big week for chaotic meetings7 and while this sounds very familiar, I guess there’s a slight difference between removing cruelty to animals and removing Qatari blood money from your organisation.
Lol.
Look at how old that motherfucker is. He’s the head of the goddamn skateboarding federation. They fielded literal children at the Olympics.
News from around the grounds
Athletics: World Athletics has announced dates for future World Athletics Series events
Rugby league: Galway will compete in next year’s RFL Challenge Cup
See the latest on the Governors and Leagues lists on Twitter.
USFL: This time it's different
The United States Football League is back, baby. The history of the 1980s edition fo the USFL is well documented in Small Potatoes: Who Killed The USFL?. The central thesis is that Donald Trump is largely to blame for the orgnisation’s demise, as he led the pivot from spring to autumn football.
Given everything we’ve learnt about Trump since Small Potatoes aired in 2009, this seems like an incredibly accurate summation of events. Trump undoubtedly wanted the social clout that came with being a NFL owner and was unable to buy his way in, so took over another league and, instead of investing in and growing that, used the USFL as a means to bring legal action with the NFL as an opening gambit to force his way into the owner’s club. If only this aspect of his personality had been more widely known, he may have never been elected president!
Some blame has to be shared by the other owners who failed to sufficiently resist the Trumpian cult of personality. Personally, I would think a person who has made a small fortune out of a large fortune shouldn’t be trusted for business decisions but what would I know?
The USFL had significant issues in the way it was initially run but nothing that most start-up leagues don’t face and they probably could have been resolved in time with the right mix of personalities at the helm. Alas!
The USFL has been revived for 2022, defibrilated by Fox in another element of our never-ending stream of nostalgic reboots to satisfy the cultural demands of demented boomers8. Eight franchises have been announced, including Trump’s own New Jersey Generals, Birmingham Stallions9, Houston Gamblers, Michigan Panthers, New Orleans Breakers, Philadelphia Stars, Pittsburgh Maulers and Tampa Bay Bandits, all reviving marques from the original USFL. The franchises will be centrally owned and operated, so the social media output from each is very similar and teams will have a tough time crafting an actual identity to separate them from the rest.
The balance of markets is a little weird, with Houston the farthest west but this keeps travel costs down and means they don’t have to waste time with west coast content that is live at insufferable hours on the east coast. The intention is to play all games in one city, likely Birmingham, in the first season.
The trick will not be falling into the myriad of holes that have claimed the AAF, XFL, the previous USFL and various arena football formats. Fox’s money is useful, and should at least mean they complete any season they start, but will need returns to justify the investment. They might be banking on legal sports gambling providing a buffer on top of sponsorship, attendances and ad revenue, which seems to be the strategy for all American sports right now.
It’s hard to know exactly how this is going to pan out but I’m not convinced the USFL is different enough to justify a “This Time It’s Different”. The likely scenario is one to three teams will find a decent enough following and the rest will fall somewhere between muddling along and failing, and Fox will likely deem it not worth the effort and pull the plug.
But you never know. The demand for football seems insatiable and if the intent is to create the USFL as a football equivalent to the NBA’s G League, then that puts some caps on expectations and the need for raw dollars to be shovelled in. At its most optimistic, the success of the USFL might slightly accelerate the demise of baseball, in favour of football, as the American national past time.
Mailbag
Reader Britannia Madalitso of Hanam, Korea, writes:
How would you resolve the impasse in modern pentathlon over the fifth discipline?
That’s a great question, Britannia. A simpler solution might be for the UIPM to evolve into the UIP and oversee a variety of pentathlon formats, including:
Ancient, based on the traditional Olympian pentathlon of running, javelin, discus, long jump, pankration (the latter diverging sharply from the heptathlon/decathlon and so avoiding stepping on the toes of World Athletics)
Classical, based on the five day format used by the modern pentathlon from 1912 to 1992 but with women this time around
Modern, run over 90 minutes in a single stadium with the equestrian and maybe fencing replaced with other disciplines. May I suggest MMA and chess?10
The modern format would be suitable for broadcast and remain in the Olympics as the UIP’s main commercial driver. The ancient would be relatively cheap to run on the side and the classical can fund itself from the two dozen rich tories that currently compete in it.
Mail in your questions with a stamped, self-addressed envelope to Sick, Sad World of Sports, Locked Bag 6969 in your capital city or bawl at @scksadwos.
Thanks for reading. If you liked what you read, use the Share button above. If you really like what you read, you can get every update delivered to your inbox using the Subscribe now button below.
The same meeting recognised Chad, Croatia, East Timor, Eritrea, Iraq, North Macedonia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, South Sudan and Sudan as members. More nations for who horse riding is probably not easily accessible.
I’ve done the pit walk at Melbourne and you do not get within metres of the actual cars.
After removing Samantha Murray’s “ghost” federations.
It’s also not clear to me why a discipline where another animal does most of the actual athleticism is considered part of the skillset of the most complete athlete. There must be other disciplines which better demonstrate an individual’s endurance, strength, reactions, flexibility or whatever than show jumping.
It’s interesting to note that each time the format has been changed by the UIPM over the last twenty years, the athletes have protested and then later admitted they were wrong and the change was good, actually. I really don’t know what they expect to happen this time around.
Later that day…
At least the availability of the chat function on Zoom will not be a significant element of the subsequent court case.
And increasingly, equally demented millennials.
It will never cease to amuse me that these leagues always target Birmingham, Alabama. Even the Canadians tried it. They don’t want y’all when Bama is right there.
There’s your complete athlete. I’d also suggest chess goes before MMA, as concussion might be an issue.