Of all the curious decisions the IOC has made in recent years, the vote to add the land-hungry sport of golf just in time for Rio 2016 is one of the most curious. Too late to switch it to a putting contest?
Rio court asks for modifications, puts 2016 Olympic golf course in turmoil – ESPN.
My hand is out of a splint after three weeks, though my typing speed is still diminished by a bit of tape on my two still-aching fingers. I may need to put my goalkeeping career on hold for a while.
I’m also relatively not sick. I have no idea how I’ve had waves of sinus and throat problems through the most mild summer of my lifetime, but a doctor has assured me she’ll figure it out. I got back from vacation to find Northern Virginia had become a sauna to start September, and after leading a couple of youth soccer practices in Venusian conditions last night and walking a couple of miles this morning, I actually feel better. Go figure.
Enough complaining. I’m back, and it’s time to give a quick update on the blog, my writing priorities over the next few months, and what happened in the sports world while I was healing.
The blog: Expect more links and fewer 1,000-word pieces. I want to keep sharing Olympic sports news, but I’m going to do that more efficiently. No more Monday Myriad (in part because my youth soccer practices are on Mondays), so this will be the last “roundup” post for a while. My analysis will more commonly be on …
The podcast: Hoping to do another one this week, depending on my guest’s schedule.
Medal projections: By next year, I hope Olympic sports news will be in the context of my medal projections. I’ll be working on that, along with …
Enduring Spirit epilogue: The tentative plan is to re-release the book (electronically only) with the epilogue added. I’ll also release the epilogue separately at a low, low price, so if you already bought the book, you won’t be shelling out another six bucks. I’m going to do a few postseason interviews, so don’t expect this right away.
Single-Digit Soccer: This project keeps gathering momentum. I’m planning to speak and gather input at the NSCAA convention in January, and I hope to finish it by next summer.
Other than that, I’ll still be writing at OZY, a site you should check out even if you never read anything I write. And you may still see an MMA book I finished a while back.
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So what happened while I was out? In no particular order:
Badminton World Championships: South Korea wins men’s doubles, China won three other events, and the women’s singles went to … Spain? First time for everything, and this is a terrific photo:
Judo World Championships: Olympic champion Kayla Harrison was the only U.S. medalist, taking bronze.
Rowing World Championships: Britain won 10 medals, New Zealand won nine, Australia and Germany eight each, and the USA won seven. The World Championships include a lot of non-Olympic events, so don’t use this for medal projections. These championships included some para-rowing events, which accounted for one U.S. medal. The sole U.S. gold went to, as always, the mighty women’s eight.
World Equestrian Games: The sole U.S. medals so far are in the non-Olympic discipline of reining. Britain, Germany and the Netherlands are cleaning up. Olympic quota spots (earned by the country, not the athlete) are available in dressage, eventing and show jumping.
Also, Ollie Williams (the man behind Frontier Sports) looks at the Olympic prospects of horseball. Yes, horseball. They compare it to a mix of rugby and basketball, but I think it’s a mix of polo and quidditch.
Triathlon, World Series grand final: Gwen Jorgensen didn’t need a great finish to clinch the world championship. She did it anyway. Too early to declare her athlete of the year?
Swimming, Pan-Pacific Games: Phelps, Ledecky and company have it easy compared to Haley Anderson, who won open-water gold after a jellyfish sting, a race postponement and a race relocation.
Track and field, Diamond League finals: Half of the events wrapped for the season at the Weltklasse Zurich over the weekend; the rest finish up Friday in Brussels. Check the Monday Morning Run for a recap that includes fellow Dukie Shannon Rowbury diving along with U.S. teammate Jenny Simpson as the latter took the women’s 1,500 title in style.
Today’s Frontier Sports wrap has a couple of track and field links (along with helpful links on badminton and much more), including “the often-told, never-dull tale of how (Brianne Theisen-Eaton) almost impaled (Ashton Eaton) with a javelin.”
Overall Diamond League winners include Simpson, Michael Tinsley (USA, 400 hurdles), Christian Taylor (USA, triple jump, took title away from teammate Will Claye at final), Lashawn Merritt (USA, 400 meters, Kirani James wasn’t at the final), Reese Hoffa (USA, shot put), Veronica Campbell-Brown (Jamaica, 100), Dawn Harper-Nelson (USA, 100 hurdles — Americans won every Diamond League race), Tiana Bartoletta (USA, long jump) and Valerie Evans (New Zealand, shot put, swept).
Women’s soccer, NWSL final: I got back from vacation to see this, and I’m glad I did. It was a compelling final, and while Seattle would’ve been a worthy champion in every sense, Kansas City deserved it. The Lauren Holiday-to-Amy Rodriguez combo is as potent as anything you’ll see in soccer.
Kansas City now holds the top-division U.S./Canada titles in men’s soccer (Sporting KC, MLS), women’s soccer (FCKC), and men’s indoor soccer (Missouri Comets, coached by FCKC’s Vlatko Andonovski). The latter won the last MISL title before most of that league leapt to the MASL.
The league also announced it would play a full schedule next summer with a break for the World Cup, which means international players will miss a considerable number of games. The big worry: The season will spill into September, bad news for those counting on international loans or fall coaching jobs to supplement the league’s small paychecks. But the league didn’t have a lot of good options, and now they’re poised to ride a World Cup wave if one materializes again.
Basketball World Cup: Senegal over Croatia is the big upset so far, while France, Brazil and Serbia have created a logjam for second behind Spain in Group A. The USA is cruising through an easy group.
Men’s volleyball World Championships: Many people are watching.
https://twitter.com/OllieW/status/505752806159319040
The USA won a thrilling five-setter and lost an epic to Iran in early group play.
Modern pentathlon World Championships: Underway with relays.
MMA: The UFC 177 pay-per-view card had already been hit by a rash of injuries. Then one of the UFC’s most heralded recent signings, Olympic wrestling gold medalist Henry Cejudo, had a “medical issue” while trying to make weight. Then former bantamweight champion Renan Barao, set for a rematch against new champ T.J. Dillashaw, also couldn’t make weight. Joe Soto got the Seth Petruzelli-style bump from the undercard to the main event. Unlike Petruzelli against Kimbo Slice, Soto couldn’t take advantage of the opportunity.
So the most noteworthy things about the card, apart from Cejudo and Barao’s weight-cutting issues, were:
1. Bethe Correia taking out another of Ronda Rousey’s buddies, veteran Shayna Baszler. Now Rousey wants a piece of Correia, who’ll be happy to oblige.
2. Dana White launching an unholy rip of the media. Some days, I miss covering this sport — this would’ve been fun.
Overseas in ONE FC — I’m absolutely biased toward Kamal Shalorus, who works in our wonderful local dojo and is as nice as he could be. Glad to see him get a title shot, but Shinya Aoki was always going to be a tough matchup, and Aoki indeed kept the belt.
Chess: World champ Magnus Carlsen and top U.S. player Hikaru Nakamura are at the Sinquefield Cup, but Italy’s Fabiano Caruana has left them in the dust, beating Carlsen, Nakamura and the other three to go a perfect 5-for-5 halfway through the double round-robin.
And we’re a month away from Millionaire Chess. Ignore the monetary losses and enjoy.
Cycling: Vuelta a Espana in brief — Nairo Quintana fell, Alberto Contador took the lead.
Video games: A terrific glitch in Madden ’15 — a 14-inch-tall linebacker:
Coming up: Bloody Elbow is looking at the upcoming wrestling World Championships.
Glad to be back!
A once-in-a-lifetime javelin throw, Usain Bolt’s beach activities and some winning U.S. teams are in this week’s highlights:
https://twitter.com/Jason_Hickman/status/500727548821532672
https://twitter.com/jcampbelljav/status/499972769548083200
No comments this week due to the splint. Typing is hjklae.
Lori Lindsey’s retirement provoked a lot of good discussion. Would a young player coming through the ranks today stick around in amateur soccer to work her way into the national team? Who else makes that great through pass down the center?
What a great time to experiment with podcasting!
I’ve been thinking about podcasting for a while, and with my left hand in a splint that slows down my typing, it’s the perfect time. And it gives me a good excuse to put all the interviews from Lindsey’s home finale in one big audio file.
I’m learning on the fly, and I’m open to constructive feedback. If you’d prefer to skip around and listen only to the parts that interest you, here’s a quick guide:
3:20 Olympic sports recap
9:05 Setting up interviews on Spirit-Sky Blue game
10:15 Jim Gabarra’s comments on Sky Blue’s season. Techncal difficulties erased Mark Parsons’ comments on the game — basically, the occasion got to them, and everyone was trying to hit one big heroic pass instead of combining intelligently.
11:30 Me on Lori Lindsey’s history in Washington. Somehow, I worked Landon Donovan into it.
18:00 Setting up the rest of the interviews:
18:38 Virginia coach Steve Swanson telling an old anecdote on Lori and paying tribute to her attributes that many younger players do NOT have.
(Incidentally, I don’t think that’s me laughing on this one and other interviews. Maybe Kevin Parker? Maybe the other man who was there? We had a group of about 8 people.)
20:38 Christie Rampone on Lindsey’s ability to play a direct ball with great vision
21:15 Spirit coach Mark Parsons on how Lindsey filled a couple of different roles on a playoff team this year and a last-place team last year. Also, there’s some dispute over who won a danceoff in 2013. (It was Toni Pressley, as recorded in my book.)
24:45 Ali Krieger on the Spirit wanting to win for her
25:25 Lindsey on her retirement and favorite moments
31:00 I sign off and show off my mad GarageBand skills.
Enjoy, and tell me how I can do it better.
I’m not going to do a big recap of Sky Blue’s 1-0 win over Washington for the following reasons:
1. Western New York held Chicago to a draw in the later game, clinching a playoff spot for the Spirit despite the loss. (Former Spirit Reserves goalkeeper DiDi Haracic, essentially the Flash’s fourth-string keeper, got the start.) Sadly for Sky Blue, which counterattacked beautifully in this game and got solid defensive performances from Sophie Schmidt and Christie Rampone, that result knocks them out.
2. Spirit coach Mark Parsons summed up the team’s performance with elegant simplicity: “The occasion got to us a little bit.” More specifically, “everyone wanted to hit that final pass.” He’s right. The night was riddled with ambitious passes that skidded away so quickly that Canadian artificial turf apologists will surely use the video to claim the ball is tough to control on all surfaces, not just FieldTurf.
3. Broken finger. Can’t type much.
So the lasting memory of the evening will be Lori Lindsey’s retirement. The Spirit put together a nice video tribute with comments from all over — former coaches such as Clyde Watson and Kris Ward, former teammates such as Becky Sauerbrunn and Megan Rapinoe (the funniest of a fairly witty bunch), even Mia Hamm.
Fans outside Washington or recent women’s soccer fans might not realize how important Washington has been to Lindsey (and vice versa). In the years between the WUSA and WPS, she slogged it out with the Washington Freedom (held together by Jim Gabarra, now the Sky Blue coach, who graciously congratulated Lindsey before the game). She played on this field in front of a couple hundred people at times. In those years, she pushed her way into the national team pool and wound up playing in the 2011 World Cup.
She talked a bit about those years in the postgame interview, after she signed autographs for everyone who hung around. I’m uploading the entire audio here and may add parts of it to the debut SportsMyriad podcast Sunday or Monday. Stay tuned.
Here’s Lori:
Why limit five-on-five to basketball? Why limit fighting to one-on-one?
Most people could come up with a whole list of reasons, but that hasn’t stopped Team Fighting Championship from lining up five-man teams to do battle in the … well, it’s not a cage. It’s sort of a ring, but it’s basically a mat with some loose ropes and tires.
The first question: Is it safe? In the interview linked above, the founder says yes. They have one ref for each pair of fighters, which certainly separates this from pro wrestling. The downside: It’s a format that encourages fighters to jump opponents from behind. That leaves fighters defenseless. In every other fighting format, the fight is stopped when one fighter is defenseless. Maybe refs can be sure fighters aren’t “surprised,” but that didn’t seem to be the case in the footage they’ve posted so far.
The next question: Is it interesting? And it’s really not. The human eye can’t follow five fights at once. And then when one guy taps or is knocked out, it’s over — the other team can then double-team a guy to wipe him out, and so on.
The last question: Does it feed stereotypes of MMA fighters as bar-brawlers or soccer hooligans? Yeah, pretty much.
Simply put, the “why not?” answers are more compelling than the “why?”
My poor goalkeeping form has left my left hand in a splint, so this will be a scaled-down Monday Myriad.
The lead story this week: Ten years ago, Athens hosted the Olympics in venues that were doomed to rust. The lesson isn’t to avoid hosting the Games. The lesson: Don’t do it like Athens.
The big events: USA Swimming championships, determining teams for the Pan Pacific meet AND next year’s World Championships. Yeah, that’s odd, but …
The week:
TOUR OF UTAH: Prettiest event in the USA?
USA SWIMMING
https://twitter.com/ESPNOlympics/status/498420710004359168
ELSEWHERE
https://twitter.com/ESPNOlympics/status/498617751447928833
IN MEMORIAM
When I was little, I learned about war and sports at the same time. I browsed World Almanacs and other reference books and read statistics, my young brain not yet able to distinguish the gap in meaning between Hank Aaron’s 715th home run and the 140,000 people (give or take tens of thousands) killed when the atomic bomb hit Hiroshima. “Innocent” and “ignorant” are close cousins.
“War annihilates innocence, and no war more than this one,” says Brian Phillips in this brilliant Grantland piece on World War I and soccer. In Phillips’ view, Europe was wholly unprepared for the brutality of the conflict it had unleashed, thinking of it in terms of the sport that had grown so quickly in the generations since the last major war.
Phillips’ view here is dark, seeing the “war as sport” view as an insidious trivialization of what was happening on the gas-clouded battlefields of Ypres and elsewhere:
(W)e still make the same mistakes, because we still understand war through analogy and our analogies still fail. Now we see it as a video game, or we see it as a component of the NFL’s set of minor paraphernalia, jet flyovers part of the same combo pack that includes beer commercials and classic-rock riffs.
(I’m reminded of a sports journalism colleague, not normally a left-leaning guy and certainly a big fan of the NFL, who muttered that if we saw some North Korea, Saddam’s Iraq or some other country doing military flyovers at a sports event, we’d be horrified. So why is it OK if we do it?)
He’s right, of course, but the war photos and histories also provide us a view of soccer as a means of providing some joy and hope in horrible times. We need to cling to something — a loved one’s photo, a favorite food, or a soccer ball.
After Sept. 11, I wrote a column about soccer’s place in the world. I never got any feedback on it, and perhaps rightly so — it’s not as brilliant as Phillips’ work here. But I expressed a bit of optimism in soccer’s role as a peacemaker:
Games remind us that we are all not so different. The people we see as our enemies become sportsmen and sportswomen against whom we can test our skill. They even become our teammates. Our friends.
As we listen to commentators dividing the world into “us” and “them,” we can look on a soccer field and remember that the “us” far outnumbers the “them.” Players of Middle Eastern descent have graced MLS rosters and will continue to do so. Greater freedom in Iran has yielded a few stars of Germany’s Bundesliga. World Cup qualifying this year included a team called “Palestine,” representing the hopes that all nations share — to play in the greatest event in the world.
We can’t all make it to the World Cup. We can’t all play well. But we can share this unique experience with all who take advantage of whatever freedom they have to enjoy this game — a game that captures the human spirit in every corner of the world, even and perhaps especially those that are suffering or mourning.
Play the game.
Live the game.
My optimism is limited, of course. Soccer didn’t end World War I. It won’t end the conflicts in Ukraine or Gaza. And yet there’s something about this sport that has the power to remind us of our common humanity.
I’ll give the link again to Phillips’ piece, Soccer in Oblivion. And I’ll celebrate the fact that when France (or England) and Germany (or Austria) meet now, they dispute nothing more than the occasional call by the ref.
(So once again, England fans, you can stop booing the bloody national anthem any year now, all right?)
The basic U.S. women’s plan for the foreseeable future: Katie Ledecky wins the distance races, Missy Franklin wins everything else.
But hold on a minute. Ledecky met Franklin in the 200-meter freestyle Thursday at the U.S. nationals and won. By 1.24 seconds.
So within U.S. swimming, we’re going to have a nice friendly rivalry, one that caught the attention of Alan Abrahamson and USA TODAY’s Nicole Auerbach, for a few years to come.
Now we’ll see if they’re as quotable as Lochte and Phelps.
Also Thursday — Franklin dominated the 200 backstroke as usual, and Lochte fell well short of 2012 gold medalist Tyler Clary in the men’s 200 backstroke.
[gview file=”http://www.sportsmyriad.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/USA-Swimming-2014-Day-2.pdf”%5D
Missy Franklin, Katie Ledecky and Cammile Adams were on target on the first day, but the depth in the 100-meter freestyle left Michael Phelps and Natalie Coughlin in seventh place in their respective events. Time is cruel.
[gview file=”http://www.sportsmyriad.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/USA-Swimming-2014-Day-1-1.pdf”%5D
Duresport.com 