medal projections, olympic sports

2012 weightlifting: Only the strong survive

Posted on by Beau Dure

We simply can’t write about weightlifting without calling in this classic Saturday Night Live bit:

A sport that measures sheer strength at its core does indeed provide temptation to cheat. But the 30 reported doping incidents in 2009 (see PDF) are still less than the number reported in, say, cycling. These folks know the rules.

Asia is the hotbed for this sport these days. China won nine medals at home in 2008, Russia took seven, and South Korea, Kazakhstan and Belarus combined for 10.

World Championships are held in every non-Olympic year, so we have 2010 results to check out now while we await the 2011 edition in November.

But rankings in weightlifting are the most objective in any Olympic sport. They’re not based on points from various competitions. They’re based on how much weight someone lifted. Whether the athlete lifted that much weight in a World Championship or smaller competition doesn’t really matter. It’s still the same weight. Even track and field has a few variables, such as wind and temperature, that affect an athlete’s times and distances.

So we’ll make these projections really simple. The sole basis will be the 2010 rankings. And we’ll come back and re-check after the World Championships in 2011.

It’s just that simp … wait … it’s not? Each country can only nominate 10 athletes, two per event? Six men, four women.

Grrrrrr. OK, we’ll try to bear that in mind. And naturally, it’ll be relevant — China won 11 medals at Worlds.

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soccer, sports culture

MLS All-Stars, overreaction and reaction

Posted on by Beau Dure

Hysterical overreaction is as much a part of the Internet as inappropriate photos and conspiracy theories.

Given that, I’m a little surprised I haven’t heard today from the dude who kept Tweeting at me last week about MLS “fixing” games by playing reserves in the second half … of friendlies. Oh no, it couldn’t be a prudent decision to rest starters and give reserves some experience in a game that won’t count in the standings. It’s a crime.

The Internet is noisy. After any event that draws hype, many people will sound off. And just as the UFC survives to fight another day when a main event is disappointing, so too will MLS survive a round of friendlies in which European elites have basically wiped the field with indifferent, inexperienced or inferior teams.

All that said, MLS fans and the blogopundits are well within their rights to look at last night’s game and ask whether the league has any players capable of hitting the broad side of a barn from the penalty spot.

The league has already set a record for scoreless ties, and it’s not even August, as Steve Davis laments in a sound analysis. Then last night, the MLS All-Stars laid a goose egg.

Yes, Manchester United is one of the world’s best teams, and yes, they’re clearly taking this U.S. tour more seriously than many teams have taken it in the past. Their attacking flair was brilliant last night, and it’s hard to begrudge an All-Star team that never practices together the four goals it conceded to Rooney, Berbatov et al.

Yet United gave the All-Stars plenty of space, appropriately enough for a friendly. No one’s getting “stuck in” on a challenge in a game like this. (Jamison Olave left with an injury, but it wasn’t caused by contact.) The All-Stars, though unfamiliar with each other, completed 86% of their passes and managed 13 shots, two more than a well-oiled Man U machine. Goals? Zero. And it’s not as if Man U’s two keepers had to dig deep to keep the All-Stars at bay.

Can we prove anything from one game? No. Is it one more sad piece of evidence to the well-supported theory that MLS players can knock the ball around all day, just as they do in those ubiquitous possession drills, but can’t put the ball in the net? Certainly looks that way.

And fans have every right to say, while supporting the league in near-record numbers, that GMs should be looking for goal-scorers and coaches should be devoting a bit more time to finishing drills rather than possession exercises.

That’s not an overreaction to one game. The All-Star Game isn’t even the last straw. It’s just a well-publicized example of a legitimate problem. The result — Manchester United winning — doesn’t matter. Overreacting to the game is silly. Reacting is not.

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medal projections, olympic sports

2012 taekwondo: Slightly more violent than Riverdance

Posted on by Beau Dure

Hop, hop, hop, hop, KICK, hop, hop, hop, KICK, hop, hop, hop, hop, hop, hop, hop, hop, hop, hop …

It’s a curiously constrained combat sport, and it has gone through some changes recently. The new scoring system (see the rules PDF) gives 1 point for a punch or kick to the chest, 2 points for a “turning” kick to the chest, 3 for a kick to the head and 4 for a “turning” kick to the head.

They’re also wearing sensors on their feet and chest, making the sport resemble fencing with feet.

All of this is on display in this clip of a dramatic and controversial comeback in the 2011 World Championships, in which a Spanish fighter controls the bout until a Chinese fighter lands a 3-point head kick (or so they say) with three seconds left.

Ready for some more complications? Check out the qualification system, in which the sport offers four weight classes per gender but forces countries to pick two in which to enter. And that’s whittled down from the eight weight classes per gender offered in World Championship and world rankings. South Korea, the Chinese women and the Iranian men will have tough choices.

To keep things simpler here, I’m just linking to the World Championship results page and the June 2011 rankings, and I’m not going to show as much of my “work” as usual.

That’ll reduce the confidence level in these projections, though we know that South Korea (4 for 4 in 2008) is a solid favorite in whichever classes the country chooses. The USA, thanks in large part to the Lopez family, also has solid medal chances throughout.

Note that we have two bronze medals per weight class:

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medal projections, olympic sports

2012 tennis/table tennis: Who’s your Venus?

Posted on by Beau Dure

The big news for 2012 tennis: Mixed doubles is in! But only in tennis, not table tennis. Seems a little unfair, really.

TENNIS

They’ll play on grass at Wimbledon, so we’ll let this summer’s results from that hallowed venue weigh heavily in the projections. That said, we have little idea which players will view the Olympics worthy of their participation.

The tournament will be included in the ATP and WTA points races, so that may sway some people.

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olympic sports

Euro envy continues

Posted on by Beau Dure

I’ve been exploring a few Net radio options these days, and I settled upon UK station talkSPORT yesterday to catch this exchange in a free-wheeling discussion of international sports:

CALLER: My daughter’s a swimmer, though she’s at the bottom right now.

HOST: Well she’ll have to get to the surface to be any good.

This was after the two hosts concluded that Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde were the first two people we should guess when asked who said something particularly witty.

It’s a little disappointing that talkSPORT’s site says it’s aimed toward “men who love to talk sport.” A few women were included in the discussion yesterday, both as athletes and as callers, so I don’t see the need to exclude them.

On the other hand, perhaps it’s refreshing that they think men have the intelligence to follow such discussions.

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medal projections, olympic sports

2012 shooting: Bang, bang, bang on the door, baby

Posted on by Beau Dure

Would you believe one of the most dramatic events I ever covered was an Olympic shooting final? Believe it.

This is another one of those sports in which the Olympic program has changed a bit over the years, but not in this Olympic cycle. That’s good for those of us who like a bit of consistency.

The ISSF (shooting’s federation) has a handy updated guide to help us all navigate through the confusing quota system they use for qualification.

We had full World Championships in 2010, with shotgun-only World Championships to come in September.

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soccer, sports culture

Choke! Why there’s no double standard for women’s soccer

Posted on by Beau Dure

Let’s rewrite history, shall we?

1. 1988 World Series: The Oakland A’s choked in Game 1, when Dennis Eckerley got out to an 0-2 count with two out in the ninth and a 4-3 lead but hung a slider that Kirk Gibson, so hobbled he might have been thrown out from left field, hit for a home run. (Sure, Nate Silver lists this as a choke in passing, but we remember Gibson in that situation much more clearly than we remember Eckersley. Silver also points out the ugly aftermath of living with a “choke” — Donnie Moore’s 1989 suicide.)

2. 1982 NCAA Championship: Georgetown gave away the national men’s basketball championship when Fred Brown passed the ball straight to North Carolina’s James Worthy. Oh yeah — some guy named Michael Jordan hit a big shot before that, a shot that some report today as a “buzzer-beater” even though it hit the net with 15 seconds left.

3. 2010 World Cup: Oh boy, did Slovenia and Algeria choke!

Get the picture?

Frankly, “choke” is a term that doesn’t interest me, mostly because I associate it with insecure guys trying to exert some sort of power over the sports they watch. It’s a word for the keyboard warrior and frustrated fan, and it’s not applied with any sort of consistency to either gender or any sport. If you think it doesn’t apply to women, talk to Daniela Hantuchova.

“Choke” is sometimes used as a way of distancing ourselves emotionally from a loss that would otherwise be painful. Our college hoops team lost? Oh, they choked. Our baseball team blew a 5-game lead in September? Choke! Scott Norwood missed a difficult 47-yard field goal — or a “chip shot” in the words of revisionists — that would’ve spared the Buffalo Bills the indignity of being perennial runners-up? Choke!

So in a weird way, yelling “choke!” is just a way of saying you care. Thanks?

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soccer

Women’s World Cup: Small step for Japan, giant leap for women’s soccer

Posted on by Beau Dure

The penalty shootout wasn’t great, particularly for U.S. fans. But this Women’s World Cup was a wonderful event that demanded attention from around the world and got it.

Certainly Japan, which has suffered so much this year, won’t soon forget it. Neither will the USA, even the cynics who would like to forget it ever happened.

This tournament was full of great teams, great players and great moments:

– Germany got a sellout crowd in Berlin’s giant Olympic Stadium, and Canada gave them a game.

– Mexico, which upset the USA in qualifying, got a draw with eventual group winner England.

– Equatorial Guinea, particularly energetic attacker Anonman, was fun to watch.

– New Zealand was level with eventual winner Japan through much of its opener and got its first World Cup point with two goals in the dying minutes.

– Beautiful cities from Dresden to Augsburg got dressed up for the Cup.

– Controversial at times, Marta is still a player to behold. (Yes, Jacqueline, we’d love her if she were American. Maybe not unconditionally. I haven’t read through all 698 comments to see if anyone made that point.)

– England, a wreck at times, put it all together for a win over the eventual champions and was unlucky to lose in the quarterfinals.

– A smart, skillful Swedish team beat the USA and shook off semifinal disappointment for a well-deserved place on the podium.

– Led by the ageless WUSA/WPS veteran Homare Sawa, Japan showed its skill in a 4-0 rout of Mexico in the group stage, showed its pluck in ousting host Germany and showed its heart in winning the title.

Then there’s the U.S. team. On paper, this was not the best team you’d want to send to a World Cup. Right back Ali Krieger still seems like a newcomer. Left back Amy LePeilbet is out of position. Central midfielder Shannon Boxx doesn’t have the spring in her step she use to have, and she and Carli Lloyd often struggled to maintain the possession essential to the game Pia Sundhage would like to play. U.S. fans knew Lori Chalupny would be dearly missed while the mysterious concussion saga goes on, and Lindsay Tarpley’s injury in a friendly against Japan was especially cruel.

And yet, as they did in 2008 without the injured Wambach, the U.S. players proved to be more than the sum of their parts. Question their skill. Nit-pick their tactics. Never doubt their heart. Americans didn’t realize it, but they were cheering for the overachievers we so often claim to be and love to admire.

For those who need analogies to other sports — imagine if Butler’s Gordon Hayward had hit that shot from a neighboring county to beat a flawed but favored Duke in the 2010 hoops tournament. That’s what happened here, with Sawa as Hayward.

So what does this mean going ahead?

In the USA, repeating one more time, WPS has its own issues. League owners might be able to work things out and harness the goodwill of this great tournament to build a sustainable league. Or we might see the W-League or WPSL step forward as the most viable model. We’ll see.

Globally, this tournament should invigorate the game in Europe, where the Champions League is taking hold and teams are getting more professional. We can only hope Germany will better appreciate its Frauen-Bundesliga, which had players on many of these rosters and is already signing players who made an impact in this tournament. The game’s profile certainly won’t be hurt in Japan, either. And maybe China will be motivated to get back into it.

So don’t look solely at WPS attendance numbers and use that to gauge the health of women’s soccer. Again, WPS has its own issues. Repeat, WPS has its own issues. Repeat …

And one thing this tournament proved is that these games can be thrilling, full of skill and heart, and a lot of fun to watch. It’s not mired in the cynicism that plagued last year’s dreary World Cup final and too many MLS games this year.

Some people, naturally, confuse cynicism with intelligence. (Yes, I read your Tweets.) No one says we as soccer fans and sports fans have to accept that.

If this tournament showed nothing else, it showed this: Women’s soccer is a game worth watching.

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soccer

Women’s soccer boom, version 2.0

Posted on by Beau Dure

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen people ask aloud whether the Women’s World Cup will boost WPS. My rote response on Twitter: WPS has its own issues that no goal in Moenchengladbach can solve.

Perhaps I should explain in more than 140 characters.

1. Big events usually don’t build leagues. The buzz always dies down quickly. The overly ambitious WUSA couldn’t build a sustainable league in the wake of the 1999 Women’s World Cup, and MLS needed to survive many lean years through patient business planning. (Yes, a book on that subject exists.)

2. WPS has had the deck stacked against it. The league launched during a recession, which is obviously bad for sponsorship and attendance. The downsizing mainstream media wouldn’t touch it. AP ignored it. A small band of beat writers (Craig Stouffer, Jeff Di Veronica, William Bretherton and others I apologize for missing) got out and paid attention.

The good news was that a hardy band of indie media — Jenna Pel, Jeff Kassouf and Jennifer Doyle, along with ESPN’s Jacqueline Purdy and the enterprising staff of Our Game magazine — jumped into the vacuum and frankly everyone’s concepts of women’s soccer. (Suffice to say I’ll be reading a lot more of Jenna’s Frauen-Bundesliga notes this year after touring Germany and seeing the league’s players in action on several national teams.) They’ll be around whether WPS sticks around or not.

3. We don’t know yet whether magicJack owner Dan Borislow is saving or killing the league. Borislow bought the Washington Freedom, moved it to South Florida an renamed it after his company. For that, he can’t be faulted — plenty of people in the D.C. area have the money and the supposed interest in women’s soccer to have stepped up to the plate and kept the Freedom in place, and they did not do it.

Borislow and the Sahlen family, which moved its W-League team up into WPS as the Western New York Flash, kept the league at a viable six teams. They also showed the will to splash plenty of cash on players. The Sahlens signed Marta and a sizable chunk of the Canadian national team. Borislow literally has the spine of the U.S. team — Hope Solo, Christie Rampone, Shannon Boxx and Abby Wambach.

The Flash settled neatly into WPS. Borislow, on the other hand, has been feuding with the league all season over everything from maintaining a Web site to putting up signage for sponsors. (He says he’s willing to do both but that the league makes it too expensive or too difficult.) He has been defiant through multiple fines and suspensions.

And magicJack has not been a typical pro team in many other senses. Coach Mike Lyons was reassigned after a couple of games, and the head coaching role has been assumed by a revolving cast of assistant coaches, players and Borislow himself. (Borislow already is the team’s PR contact, and it’s unclear whether Briana Scurry, the GM at the start of the season, is still playing much of a role.) Players have been only intermittently available to the media, and when you talk with them, they all give pat answers about how their owner is a sweet guy who just has his own way of doing things.

The cynics would say they don’t want to rock the boat when they have perks such as nice condos near the beach. Borislow has been quite willing to send players packing when they fall out of favor for whatever reason, but so far, no one has left the magicJack organization and vented about anything.

WPS has expansion prospects. But the questions are these:

– Will anyone be put off by an owner who has demonstrated such contempt for the league office?

– Will anyone be willing to spend the money to compete with someone who spends like the New York Yankees of WPS? Even in the middle of the season, magicJack simply bought Megan Rapinoe — yes, the Megan Rapinoe whose crosses in this World Cup have become the stuff of legend — from Philadelphia, which has been a viable contender this season.

– Will some owners prefer the business models in the W-League and the WPSL? The main drawback in those leagues is the schedule, which is far too short because of draconian restrictions on the college players who must fill out the talent pool. But a couple of teams have tested professional models in those leagues, and perhaps there would be enough to break away and play a season of a reasonable length. Even back in the mid-2000s, players like England’s Kelly Smith and France’s Marinette Pichon hung around in the States to give the W-League a whirl.

MLS succeeded by imposing a top-down single-entity structure with a salary cap, containing costs and putting all owners in the same economic boat. That might not work for women’s soccer — it only worked in MLS because Philip Anschutz, Lamar Hunt and Robert Kraft stuck with it after everyone else bailed out.

No matter which leagues and teams survive the Darwinian battle of business models now underway, someone has to have the patience (and deep pockets) of Anschutz and the practicality of Hunt to make this work. They paved the way for sensible owners who have made soccer work in Seattle, Portland and even the long-derided Kansas City market. A few owners opening their wallets with starry eyes after another Wambach goal or Solo save in Germany won’t translate into a sustainable league.

All that said, as Pia Sundhage says in nearly every press conference, the glass is half-full. The USA has shown it can fall in love with women’s soccer more than once. The ratings for Sunday’s final may well beat the ratings for baseball’s All-Star Game.

And if that attracts a wave of patient, rational investors with reasonable expectations, pro women’s soccer will be here to stay.

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