Author: Beau Dure

The guy who wrote a bunch of soccer books and now runs a Gen X-themed podcast while substitute teaching and continuing to write freelance stuff.
olympic sports, winter sports

Sochi recap: Cross-country skiing, women’s skiathlon

Posted on by Beau Dure

No surprise here — Norwegian legend Marit Bjoergen is still going strong, and she never seemed troubled on her way to her fourth Olympic gold medal (third individual). Norway took two medals and showed some tears on the podium as they mourn the sudden death of teammate Astrid Uhrenholdt Jacobsen’s brother.

Date: 8- Feb

Sport: Cross-country skiing

Event: Women’s skiathlon (7.5k classical + 7.5k freestyle)

Medalists: Marit Bjoergen (Norway), Charlotte Kalla (Sweden), Heidi Weng (Norway)

SportsMyriad projections: Marit Bjoergen (Norway), Therese Johaug (Norway), Kristin Stoermer Steira (Norway)

How U.S. fared: Not a factor in the classical phase, but Jessie Diggins pulled out something special in the freestyle and led a chase group to take eighth place overall, 1:31.9 seconds back. Liz Stephen was also in that group, taking 12th. Sadie Bjornsen placed 31st, 2:36.1 behind Bjoergen. Holly Brooks was four minutes back in 47th.

What happened: A lead pack of about 12, including all the favorites, pulled away over the second lap (of two) in the classical phase. It dwindled to six heading into the transition, where skiers switched skis and poles. It all went wrong there for Poland’s Justyna Kowalczyk, who slipped just before the changeover point and lost a few seconds right away.

The top five, including three Norwegians, were separated by only 2.1 seconds after the transition, and they stuck together through the first lap of freestyle while Kowalczyk chased. But the Polish favorite, better at classical than freestyle, lost ground.

With 1.7 kilometers left, the five leaders were still within 1 second of each other. On the last hill, Sweden’s Charlotte Kalla threw down, surging ahead. Only Norwegian favorite Marit Bjoergen could respond, leaving the other three battling for bronze a little more than 10 seconds back. Bjoergen shot past Kalla down the stretch for her eighth Olympic medal, fourth gold. Heidi Weng made it two medals for Norway, just edging out fellow Norwegian Therese Johaug and Finland’s Aino-Kaisa Saarinen.

Quote: “My fantastic girls … You are my strength in thick and thin. Thanks for the commemorating armbands. Forever grateful, whether there will be medals or not.” – Astrid Uhrenholdt Jacobsen

Full results

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olympic sports, winter sports

Race and the Winter Olympics: Is this a joke?

Posted on by Beau Dure

Slate took the odd step this week of re-running an odd piece from 2006: “White Snow, Brown Rage: The racial case against the Winter Olympics.”

It’s a laundry list of stereotypes. Snowboarders are stoners who aren’t doing a real sport. Winter sports people are named “Muffy, Buffy and Tad.” (Being relatively close to Dracula’s homeland, Sochi could probably use a Buffy.) The only black people are Jamaican bobsledders.

The comments on Slate this time around are divided. Some say this piece is terrible. Some say it’s a joke that would have made more sense if it had run in National Review, the publication for whom author Reihan Salam usually writes. Move over, Jon Stewart!

But in the comments and on Twitter, the piece sparked some arguments among people who clearly don’t think it’s a joke. And we Winter Olympics fans have long had to deal with people who want to dismiss it all as an exercise for Muddy, Buffy, Tad and a lot of skaters in sequins.

So, for the record, let’s smash those stereotypes:

1. Team USA is not a country club. Bode Miller grew up in a cabin without electricity or running water. Even Nancy Kerrigan, so often posited as the princess against working-class underdog Tonya Harding, grew up in a middle-class household.

2. Athletes are sacrificing a lot, financially. Athletes and the federations seek out sponsors, a bit of crowd-funding, and occasionally food stamps.

And this should make the National Review happy — unlike a lot of other countries, the federal government puts barely a nickel toward Olympic sports. This is a country in which a baseball team extorted more than $600 million from the nation’s cash-strapped capital to build a danged ballpark. And in a country in which one of the top issues is whether we’re all “exploiting” college football and basketball players by offering them nothing other than a free education, room and board, and a lot of incidental perks.

3. The Games (and the rest of the world) are more diverse than you think. What do a Dutch speedskater and a Russian biathlete have in common besides their unpronounceable names and skin color? Not much. Now consider Japan and South Korea — both powerhouses on ice. Not a lot of Tads and Muffys on these teams.

Now think about this: Why do we have a terror threat at these Olympics? It’s not a bunch of people in Afghanistan’s caves threatening the USA. It’s people in disputed territories that creep within 100 miles of Sochi. Imagine if Quebec’s separatists had been in active conflict with Canadian and American forces, and other armed ethnic groups had joined the mix in a complex patchwork of unease and distrust. Now imagine holding the Olympics in Lake Placid.

(I don’t see it online, but I recommend Alexander Wolff’s pains-taking look at the sports and politics of Georgia and the surrounding region in Sports Illustrated. Strong research, powerful work.)

4. The Games are fun to watch. You may not like figure skating, but you might like hockey. You might not like hockey, but you love snowboarding. You might not like snowboarding, but curling is pretty cool. And a lot of these things aren’t televised on a regular basis in the USA. This is your chance to watch.

Let’s close with a bit of irony. The story in question mentioned Indian luger Shiva Keshavan. He’s back again, though he’s competing as an “Independent Olympic Participant.” That’s because India’s Olympic federation is in shambles, and it has nothing to do with the Olympics being some activity for white folks. Keshavan actually trains with the Americans and teaches them yoga.

Then in training this week, he provided one of the highlights of the Olympics. Watch this.

And we’re just getting started. Have fun watching and following all the action at SportsMyriad, where a bunch of us are excited to be getting up at all hours to watch the Games unfold.

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olympic sports, winter sports

Sochi recap: Snowboarding, women’s slopestyle, 2nd heat

Posted on by Beau Dure

A couple of favorites struggled, and American Ty Walker did the bare minimum to keep going. But Jamie Anderson lived up to her favorite status.

Date: 6- Feb

Sport: Snowboarding

Event: Women’s slopestyle qualifing, second heat

How U.S. fared: Gold medal favorite Jamie Anderson was smooth as silk in the air and on all her landings in her first run, posting a massive 93.50. With her qualification safe, she opted not to take her second run.

Ty Walker was the first rider, but she bypassed every ramp. Her score: 1.00. (One judge gave her a 2.) Then she skipped her second run. Why? She’s hurt, and all she had to do to make the semifinals was make it down the slope once. Strategically, nothing wrong with it — just very strange to watch.

The stunner was Karly Shorr. The inexperienced 19-year-old slipped on her first run. On her second, needing to beat 77.75 to qualify for the final, she nailed it — 84.75.

Jessika Jenson slipped a little on each run.

What happened: Another surprise was Anna Gasser, a solid fifth in the X Games but not expected to post anything like the 95.50 she laid down on her second run.

Sarko Pancochova (Czech Republic), one of the favorites, had a so-so first run but still stood fourth with a 77.75. She didn’t try to improve on the second run, doing a few grabs but no twists or flips. Then she watched Shorr take away her direct qualification spot. Oops.

Norway’s Silje Norendal, first in the current World Snowboard Tour rankings, didn’t post a clean run and will need to go through the semifinals.

The direct qualifiers: Gasser, Anderson, Switzerland’s Elena Koenz, Shorr.

Quote: “It definitely wasn’t how I imagined my Olympic run, my first run in the Olympics, to be. But you just gotta play the cards in your hand and put myself in the best position for Sunday.” – Ty Walker

Full results

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olympic sports, winter sports

Sochi recap: Snowboarding, women’s slopestyle, 1st heat

Posted on by Beau Dure

Torah Bright and Isabel Derungs posted the top scores, while contender Kjersti Buaas had a painful accident.

Date: 6- Feb

Sport: Snowboarding

Event: Women’s slopestyle qualifying, first heat

How U.S. fared: They’re in the second heat, coming up next.

What happened: Three-event threat Torah Bright (Australia) laid down a conservative first run and was as surprised as anyone else when she got the top score of 85.25. Switzerland’s Isabel Derungs took over that top spot with 87.50 in the second run. Qualifying straight to the final: Derungs, Bright, Canada’s Spencer O’Brien and Finland’s Enni Rukajarvi. Everyone else in the heat must go through the semifinals.

Norway’s Kjersti Buaas, the 2006 halfpipe bronze medalist, had a nasty wipeout in Run 2. She got off-kilter in the air and was in obvious trouble. She landed on her side, thankfully with plenty of time to get her arms out and protect her head. She got up on her own but was limping heavily and needed medical help.

Rukajarvi also took a spill on her second run, bouncing off her board and landing on her back. But she bounced up again and finished on her own power, and her first-run score kept her in the top four.

Other than Buaas, the only other contender to miss out on qualifying directly to the final was Switzerland’s Sina Candrian. The World Championship runner-up had two wobbly runs.

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medal projections, olympic sports, winter sports

2014 medal projections: Final changes

Posted on by Beau Dure

Having gone through the last week of World Cup stuff, season standings and slopestyle accidents, the following medal projections have changed:

Alpine skiing, men’s super-G: Patrick Küng (Switzerland) bronze, Christof Innerhofer (Italy) considered

Alpine skiing, women’s giant slalom: Jessica Lindell-Vikarby (Sweden) gold, Tina Maze (Slovenia) considered

Biathlon, men’s individual: Emil Hegle Svendsen (Norway) bronze, Andreas Birnbacher (Germany) considered

Bobsled, two-man: Alexander Zubkov (Russia) bronze, Lyndon Rush (Canada) considered

Freestyle skiing, women’s skicross: Marielle Thompson (Canada) bronze, Kelsey Serwa (Canada) considered

Snowboard, men’s slopestyle: Staale Sandbech (Norway) silver, Max Parrot (Canada) bronze, Shaun White (USA) withdrew), Torstein Horgmo (Norway) injured

Adding to “considered”

Cross-country skiing, men’s sprint: Josef Wenzl (Germany)

Luge, women’s: Kate Hansen (USA)

No change in curling, figure skating, ice hockey, Nordic combined, skeleton, ski jumping, short-track, speedskating.

The final medal count: Norway 39, USA 35, Canada 30, Russia 26, Germany 23.

Games start in three and a half hours.

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soccer

Single-Digit Soccer: Don’t specialize … really

Posted on by Beau Dure

The chorus against specializing in one sport at an early age is growing.

Just today, I’ve stumbled into two pieces:

– Specific: NPR on kids suffering back injuries.

– General: Changing the Game author John O’Sullivan at Potomac Soccer Wire, presenting mountains of data.

It’s such a temptation, isn’t it? Your awesome athletes get overrun by a team that’s practicing twice a week through the whole school year and doing a few things in the summer, and you feel like you need to keep up, right?

(Of course, it’s also tempting for me to print out O’Sullivan’s piece and present it to the gloating parents in our indoor league, but that’s another rant.)

For the Single-Digit Soccer book, I’ve already interviewed a lot of famous athletes. The vast majority played more than one sport growing up.

So you need to ask — is it your goal to develop a good high school (or college or even beyond) soccer player and a well-rounded person? Or to win U9 games?

Update: Thanks to Setting the Table for pointing me to a radio discussion with John O’Sullivan and radio host Marc Amazon. I like the host. Then he gets a scary caller — “Dave from Columbus,” who says he’s a coach of elite 9- and 10-year-old football players. He’s not worried about burnout because the only players who burn out are the ones that stink.

So, so many things wrong with that statement:

1. What can you tell about a kid at 10 years old? You can’t even tell that much at age 17. Freddy Adu and Lionel Messi were once close to the same level. U17 stars wash out all the time. So you’re telling me you can tell who’s a good player and who isn’t before kids even hit puberty? Suppose your good little running back goes through a growth spurt and ends up 6-4 and scrawny? Suppose your big lineman doesn’t grow much more? Suppose you had a 9-year-old who was going through a clumsy growth spurt and settled into being a pretty good athlete by age 11, and you told him to go away at age 10?

2. What’s the point? You just want to coach kids who look like the total package at age 9, and the rest can just go sit on the sofa?

3. “If these kids don’t specialize, how are they going to make any money?” How many pros do you know, Dave? How many of them specialized? Not many. A lot of NBA players played other sports. I can’t think of a soccer player I’ve interviewed who played nothing else.

But Dave is also an old-school soccer basher who thinks soccer is a sport for weaklings and isn’t American. Bully for him.

I think Dave has built a business convincing parents they need to pay him so little Billy will be a D1 football player. And guess what? No one can promise that. I’m not going to call Dave from Columbus an outright fraud, but he’s not looking good.

“So how do I know you’re not an absolute idiot,” Amazon asks him. Good question. The next caller also buries Dave, pointing out how many prominent NFL players are crossover athletes. Some NFL players barely even played football growing up. And there’s another three-word argument: Michael. Jordan. Baseball.

So Dave clearly falls into the Friday Night Tykes school of stubborn old-school idiocy. We don’t have any of those coaches in soccer. Right?

Another update: Another tangentially related link — participation levels in youth sports are dropping as the “casual” player is left out.

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olympic sports, winter sports

Unfinished Sochi and Olympic deprivations

Posted on by Beau Dure

Some of the stories about the Sochi Olympics range from the sad to the horrifying — immense costs, terror threats, something about stray dogs I don’t have the heart to investigate, etc.

Then you have the head-scratchers that provide the low-hanging fruit for journalists who can’t help but notice them. Like the double toilets — yes, they’ve found another one. Organizers should probably just drop the defensive tone about them and claim the double toilets are some sort of game inviting people to find them, like Easter eggs in a video game.

This weekend, The Washington Post ran a cheeky piece on the state of media hotels. The story came across a little silly — honestly, who hasn’t had the occasional missing light bulb or faulty TV remote in a hotel at some point? And why are we supposed to be aghast that the hotel didn’t have a room ready for someone who arrived earlier than her reservation? (And then accommodated her, anyway?) But the photo gallery at the bottom shows a few things in the usually tidy Olympic venues that look nowhere near ready for prime time.

The bigger story on media hotels: Some of them aren’t ready. That’s bad. And I checked — one of them is the hotel for which I held a reservation before deciding against the Sochi trip.

While all these little oopsies fit into the larger narrative that Russia has spent $51 billion and accomplished very little, I have another thought: Flashbacks to Torino.

Eight years ago, I arrived in Italy on a plane that looked and sounded like it was struggling to climb up and over the Alps. I landed in a tiny airport where a lot of confused people pointed in different directions to direct the arriving media to shuttles to their “media villages.” Three of us wound up in a cab that made a few loops along a traffic artery in Torino, then stopped in the median. A 10-minute phone call followed. Then we somehow made it to our dorms.

That would not be the only time I would get lost in Italy, but it may have been the only instance for which I could hold the Olympic organizers directly responsible.

Torino had plenty of additional idiosyncrasies, though. You had the media center sinks, which had one pedal for ice-cold water and one for HOLY BERLUSCONI THIS IS MELTING MY SKIN! The media center sundries shop had no cough drops but several varieties of condoms. The biathlon venue had no video display or anything that would let those of us in the standing area know who’s winning.

And they clearly had last-minute preparation issues. I arrived two days before the opening ceremony. The next day, I saw a crew working on the monorail track — all 300 yards of what apparently remains from a 1961 expo.

[cetsEmbedGmap src=https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Palavela,+Turin,+Italy&hl=en&ll=45.021335,7.668886&spn=0.003024,0.00523&sll=45.058198,7.695065&sspn=0.008549,0.020921&oq=palavela&t=h&hq=Palavela,&hnear=Turin,+Piedmont,+Italy&z=18 width=450 height=425 marginwidth=0 marginheight=0 frameborder=0 scrolling=no]

Check this photo and my blog post from the time, and you’ll see a star-shaped sculpture. At night, it’s supposed to turn and lift water from the pond below. About halfway through the Games, they finally filled the pond with enough water to make it work. By that time, the bathrooms in the Media Center had taken a turn for the worse.

(I was in the Media Center most of the time, watching five TVs at once to keep up the live blog that I re-discovered today through the Wayback Machine.)

They did have one advantage over the Beijing bathrooms, though — you could flush the toilet paper. In the Beijing Media Center, no. They put up signs with anthropomorphic toilets asking people not to put paper in them. Trash bins full of used toilet paper smell exactly as you think.

Fortunately, most of the media facilities didn’t have these:

IMG_3316

Yes, you’re supposed to squat.

So Sochi isn’t alone in unique toilet fixtures or other novelties. And it’s not alone in terror threats. I watched helicopters fly ominously over the Salt Lake opening ceremony, and I saw police clear out a block for a suspicious package. In today’s media climate, that would’ve been a good couple of hours of cable programming. Then, it was a couple of sentences in the next day’s paper.

Torino actually had a suspicious vehicle near the Media Center, which was convenient for coverage purposes. It was eventually exploded. As I said at the time, I think the carbinieri just wanted to blow something up.

Hosting the Olympics is a unique experience. Welcome to an elite club, Sochi. Now, please, take care of my buddies over there.

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olympic sports, winter sports

SportsMyriad’s Sochi plans

Posted on by Beau Dure

Overwhelmed by Olympic coverage? Looking for one place that will give you the basic who, what and how (where and when are pretty much assumed — February in Sochi) of the 2014 Winter Games?

That’s what we’re going to do here. And I do mean “we” for real this time. I’ve got a handful of people joining me to give short, sweet recaps of every Olympic medal event and many of the preliminary events.

I still have a couple of openings in the schedule. If you’re a journalism student looking for a little bit of experience writing the concise copy that your future employers will demand, or if you’re an Olympic geek who needs an excuse to take the household TV at 3 a.m., this is an ideal opportunity.

So be sure to add the SportsMyriad feed to Feedly or your favorite reader in the post-Google Reader era, or just check out the duresport Twitter feed, where all new posts will be tweeted. And if you’re interested in writing, please get in touch.

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college sports, sports culture

College sports 2020: A plausible fantasy

Posted on by Beau Dure

Jan. 6, 2020 …

Alabama defeated Montana 35-34 tonight to win its third straight NCAA football championship.

The Crimson Tide’s experience in big games proved to be the difference against Montana, which made the NCAA playoffs for the first time after winning the Western Football League championship.

But the Grizzlies earned plenty of respect for the second-year WFL with their performance. The WFL was founded in 2017 after the Pac-12 and Mountain West conferences stopped organizing football competition.

The championship pairing showed how much has changed since Northwestern University football players won the right to organize as a labor group in 2014. The cost of football became too much for many colleges. Alabama and the SEC continued, with some programs taking direct help from state legislatures willing to do whatever it took to keep beloved traditions alive.

Football and basketball, though, are the only men’s sports the SEC schools play in the wake of a court ruling that all money spent meeting new labor regulations for football players would be considered in all future Title IX proceedings. Georgia now has 22 women’s sports programs, adding teams in synchronized swimming, team handball and roller hockey in an effort to balance the ledger between men’s and women’s teams in proportion to the student body.

At other schools, many of whom were already losing money on football before the Northwestern ruling, the former nonrevenue sports have struggled to take center stage. Notre Dame’s soccer teams moved into the otherwise vacant Notre Dame stadium, never managing to fill more than half of the cavernous structure.

Fearful of other labor movements and a possible downswing in alumni interest, many athletic departments continued wholesale cuts in their sports programs. Only 14 schools competed in Division I wrestling last season.

Many schools attempted to continue in other Division I sports while fielding a Division III football team. The NCAA refused to allow this move for reasons that are still unclear.

Meanwhile, Montana and a handful of other colleges saw an opportunity to make a name for themselves as the rest of the college football structure collapsed. They invested heavily in football, cutting all other men’s sports, even basketball.

The NCAA’s response to the crisis was hindered by its inability to find a new president. The job was offered to Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, but he was critically injured laughing at the news.

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