We’ve covered men’s and women’s running (and walking) events. Now we bring out the tape measure for the events you’ll see in great detail (long jump, high jump, shot put) and those you won’t (hammer throw).
ATHLETICS: Field events
Same three sources for 2010 performances: the ever-handy list of top performances, this terrific chart of Diamond League performances and the Diamond League site’s event recaps.
The typical trend for men’s running events: The Americas (USA, Jamaica, other Caribbean) battle in the sprints, African nations split the distance events, and British hearts slowly break until they all watch Chariots of Fire and reminisce.
No real reason so far to think that’ll change, but the World Championships (Aug. 27-Sept. 4, Daegu, South Korea) might unearth some talented runners who haven’t earned Diamond League slots.
ATHLETICS: Men’s running events
Good sources for 2010 performances are the ever-handy list of top performances, this terrific chart of Diamond League performances and the Diamond League site’s event recaps. The Diamond League launched last year, combining the Golden League and a few other top meets, filling the gap between World Championship years.
What we learned and what happens next after UFC 126:
– Former WEC fighters looked great. Chad Mendes and Demetrious Johnson plowed through Japanese stars Michihiro Omigawa and Kid Yamamoto. Donald Cerrone’s maturation process continued in a clinical but thrilling win against Paul Kelly. Miguel Torres left Antonio Banuelos punching at shadows.
– Jon Jones hasn’t been fast-tracked quite as quickly as Brock Lesnar, but his rise is similar. Even his one loss, he looked dominant. Ryan Bader was supposed to challenge him with superior wrestling and dangerous stand-up, but it never materialized. He has cleared out the second tier of light heavyweight challengers, and once the new rankings come out, he’ll be the highest-ranked 205er who has not yet held the 205 belt. Given that, his title shot against Shogun Rua seems early, but not too early.
– Worst corner chatter of the card: Rich Franklin’s corner saying he won round 2. He didn’t, and he didn’t seem to realize he needed to finish Forrest Griffin to beat him. Easier said than done, of course. Hard to tell where Franklin goes next, but he’s still a viable veteran who could give an up-and-comer a good test.
– The 205 title picture is as murky as ever. If Jones wins, Rashad Evans says he’ll change weight classes — perhaps back up to heavyweight, where he won The Ultimate Fighter — rather than face his friend and teammate. Maybe Griffin gets the next shot to reclaim his title?
– Let’s quit pretending Anderson Silva is going to wipe people out from the first second. Unless someone steps forward and presses him, as Forrest Griffin did, Silva is going to go through a feeling-out process with everyone he faces. Most fighters are going to be cautious against him, so you’re going to see a minute or two of circling before something happens. But when he catches you, good night.
– The first karate technique I ever saw was demonstrated by a middle-school classmate. He leaped with his left knee up as if to kick with his left, then slammed his right foot upward. (Fortunately, he was demonstrating on air, not a classmate.) I’ve often wondered if that would work in MMA. Silva’s knockout of Vitor Belfort makes me think it might. It helps, of course, to be as quick as Silva.
– So now the biggest potential fight in UFC history — Silva vs. Georges St. Pierre — hinges on whether GSP can beat Jake Shields. No pressure.
– The brilliance of the UFC at this point is that we talk about what happens next. In boxing, on the rare occasions in which two interesting fighters face off, the next superfight is always too far away to discuss. We’d talk about Pacquiao-Mayweather, but with all the stakeholders involved, we know it’s likely never to happen. Silva-GSP, on the other hand, is basically one fight away.
Time for another Midweek Myriad, also known as “stuff that happened while I was at Disney World.” I’ve saved the most serious item for the end, which is either “building suspense” or “burying the lead.”
SOCCER: Americans move at transfer deadline, with only 1 of 4 going in the “right” direction
U.S. fans longing for more Americans to succeed in Europe are thrilled that Michael Bradley is leaving Bundesliga bottom-dweller Borussia Moenchengladbach on loan to mid-table Premier League club Aston Villa, though playing time is far from assured.
More worrisome are the players making what ambitious folks would consider something less than a “lateral” move. At ESPN, Jeff Carlisle worries that Jozy Altidore and Eddie Johnson are following the same career path of loans without upward progress. Carlisle doesn’t even mention Freddy Adu, who is mentioned in a similarly downcast piece by Soccer America‘s Paul Kennedy.
Altidore’s move isn’t bad, really. He’s not seeing time at Villarreal, and he gets to hop into a title race in Turkey with Bursaspor. The snag is that the club also signed Scottish striker Kenny Miller.
Johnson is a few years older and settling into Championship-level soccer. Nothing really wrong with that, and no one’s looking to him as the future at forward for the U.S. national team these days. He’s on loan from Fulham to Preston North End trying to save the club from relegation.
The stunner is Freddy Adu, who quietly went on loan to Rizespor in Turkey’s second division. Even Adu’s harshest critics would’ve had a hard time predicting that he’d be so low on the European club ladder at age 21. I’d say Freddy has to set the Turkish second division on fire to put his career back on track, but in Turkey, the fans usually set the fires.
What’s strange is that no one can really tell us why Adu’s career has taken such turns in the past couple of years. For a while, his European misadventures were easily explained — he couldn’t break into the lineup at Benfica, and he was in a terrible situation in Monaco with an American-education club chairman who brought him in without seeing if the coaching staff had any interest. But we don’t know why Greece’s Aris lost interest in him or why he couldn’t latch on anywhere else in this transfer window.
And this just in (HT to Grant Wahl): Robbie Findley, newly transferred to Nottingham Forest, may be out three months.
SOCCER: NASL, fans damn the torpedoes
The NASL is undaunted (see Brian Straus story) over an initial rejection of second-division sanctioning and the need to start a Carolina team from scratch after previous owner Selby Wellman, a leading figure in the NASL breakaway, was unable to find a a supplemental or replacement investor. The RailHawks trademark sold on eBay for $14,999.
NASL fans also are undaunted, releasing a letter to U.S. Soccer complaining about the lack of D2 status. Kenn Tomasch calmly shredded the letter, mostly by reminding NASL fans that you have to play a few seasons, or at least a few games, before boldly proclaiming yourself a model of stability.
TRACK AND FIELD: Millrose Games surprises
– Ethiopia’s Deresse Mekonnen ended Bernard Lagat’s domination of the mile.
– Jamaican sprinters were a step ahead of the Americans in the men’s and women’s 60.
– The USA shot put train keeps rolling: Youngster Ryan Whiting upset Christian Cantwell, Reese Hoffa and Adam Nelson.
Recaps from the New York Times and Universal Sports, plus full results. (Big round of applause for the Millrose site for putting its results on one easy-to-read page rather than making us click for every event. Take note, track and swimming organizers.)
In less entertaining indoor track and field, some U.S. athletes went overseas after sleeping on the floor at JFK and lost to other international “teams” at the Aviva International in Glasgow. The biggest upset was a repeat from last year, with Britain’s Jessica Ennis beating Lolo Jones in the 60-meter hurdles.
MORE MYRIAD HEADLINES
– Winter X Games: Shaun White, Lindsey Jacobellis and Kelly Clark are still really, really good at snowboarding. The only surprise in that trio: Clark landed a 1080. Nick Baumgartner upset Seth Holland in the men’s snowboardcross.
– Soccer: Ridge Mahoney points to a major issue that could derail the Cosmos-to-MLS train: the league’s lucrative adidas deal. (Update: Grant Wahl, who has done the most extensive interview on the Cosmos to date, says the club has prepared to go adidas if it gets into MLS. Ridge’s piece is still worth reading as a reminder of how much power adidas wields.
– Handball: Olympic champion France keeps rolling, winning another men’s world title with an extra-time win over Denmark. Spain edged host Sweden for third, and Croatia beat my buddies from Iceland for fifth. All close games in the world championship of the sport that have the highest popularity-to-English-language-coverage ratio in the world. (AP)
– Figure skating: The highlight of the U.S. Championships in my beloved former hometown of Greensboro was Alissa Czisny’s remarkable comeback from afterthought status to win a battle of three former national champions. Christine Brennan, who has stuck with the sport through thick and thin, has the analysis.
– Ski jumping: Not sure what to make of the fact that Sarah Hendrickson has been at the forefront of a strong U.S. showing in international competition this year but managed only 18th in the World Junior Championships.
– Luge: No stunning world championship for the USA’s Erin Hamlin this year. She finished 14th. (AP)
– Freestyle skiing: Hannah Kearney’s World Cup moguls win streak stands at five heading into the World Championships in Park City.
– Cyclo-cross: Katie Compton took second in the World Championships. Holding this event in cold mud just seems especially cruel.
– Wrestling: Olympic champion turned Biggest Loser competitor Rulon Gardner is still hawking a 1 1/2-pound sandwich and challenging people to eat it with fries and a massive drink in 20 minutes. Maybe Rulon’s hoping to match legendary competitive eater Takeru Kobayashi, who is still skinny. (AP)
Last and not least …
At BigSoccer, Bill Archer has annoyed a lot of Canadian fans, and they have the prerogative not to be Bill’s buddies.
But aside from my own “Bill’s a good guy once you get to know him” story, I can say this — if you care about the sport, you should be reading Bill’s blog. I’ve yet to see anyone else in the Americas, from basement bloggers to professional journalists, do as much work in compiling disparate reports on the issues of FIFA, CONCACAF and other international soccer bodies. I would say to my fellow journalists — Bill is doing what we should be doing.
This piece on the utter travesty of Qatar’s Asian Cup final is a prime example.
If someone can offer valid reasons why organizers locked the gates before kickoff, separated families and brought out the riot police, fine. Let’s hear from them. But let’s not act as if this isn’t news.
We the American soccer media/blogosphere shouldn’t be moving on so quickly from FIFA’s extraordinary World Cup decisions to an exclusive focus on the MLS preseason or slobbering all over the latest EPL transfers. My challenge to all of us: Keep watching FIFA and Qatar. If Qatar is an absolutely unsuitable host for the Cup and FIFA is an unsuitable guardian for the game, these things can be and must be changed. Silence won’t get it done. If Al Jazeera can talk, so can we.
One of the joys of following a hundred sports or so is that you’re not stuck dissecting the Super Bowl to the point that it becomes joyless. Instead, we have all this:
– Marta signs with Western New York. A WPS shocker. Good news from a media point of view because it means more of us will be paying attention to veteran Rochester reporter Jeff DiVeronica, who jokes on Twitter that Marta will push him up to 1,000 followers.
The conventional wisdom would be that Marta would sign with The Club Formerly And Still Partially Known As The Washington Freedom But Also With Magic Jack In The Name (TCFASPKATWFBAWMJITN) so that Dan Borislow would have a marquee player to market in South Florida and perhaps somewhere in Washington once the team hires marketing and sales staffs and finds venues in which to play. Instead, Borislow has given us the best WPS smack talk in the league’s brief history, via Our Game: “This came as a total surprise. I am glad she will be playing in the league. She will discover we are the team to beat, so I hope she is at the top of her game when she plays us.”
For all the talk in MLS about “Rivalry Week,” maybe we should be circling the calendar for TCFASPKATWFBAWMJITN’s visit to Rochester.
– Nadal loses. And it’s a pity. Tennis could use a Grand Slam charge from the charismatic, humble Spaniard, but an injury has derailed his Australian Open campaign. Nadal didn’t want to use the injury as an excuse, but he wasn’t fooling opponent David Ferrer. Class acts all around. (NYT)
– Winter X Games time. And the NYT notes that several more X sports may be joining the Winter Olympic program. No word on women’s ski jumping, though that sport has a better-defined set of rules and so forth.
The Summer Olympics might be too big. The Winter Olympics aren’t, and it’s hard to begrudge slopestyle its place. But if the IOC adds the X sports without women’s ski jumping, the excuses will ring hollow.
– Handball heaven. It’s only $20 away. At least the highlights are free, so I was able to scout semifinalist France in their win over my buddies from Iceland in a rematch of the 2008 Olympic final. (Dan Steinberg also enjoyed covering that team in Beijing and linked to my highest-read blog post ever.)
Iceland plays Croatia for fifth place on Friday. The semifinals the same day: France-Sweden, Denmark-Spain.
– Also this weekend:
I’m surprised no one within Google’s almighty reach has invented the word “entitleninement.” A couple of generations into the Title IX-fed growth of women’s sports in the USA, we’re still seeing a few patronizing attitudes.
The College Sports Council often resorts to disingenuous arguments about the impact of Title IX. Internationally, we see many more opportunities for women in Olympic sports, yet women’s ski jumpers have been kept out of the Olympics with arguments ranging from the condescending to the absurd.
Yet the CSC makes a few legitimate points as well, and it takes pains to distinguish its fight to save men’s sports from a fight to deny women opportunities. And within women’s sports, and Olympic sports as a whole, we’re seeing more of a realization of the difficulties of building and maintaining pro competition.
All of which makes softball player Jessica Mendoza’s post for ESPNW rather curious. She explains why she and other U.S. national team players have decided to concentrate on building a pro league rather than playing for the national team, which no longer has an Olympic presence every four years.
The key paragraph:
As much as I want to see softball return to the Olympic Games, there is something this sport needs even more: an opportunity for women to play softball for a living. Not as a side job. Not just recreationally. Instead, they should be able to make a living playing the sport they love so dearly. Softball players shouldn’t have to stop playing at age 22 because there are so few opportunities out there. And they shouldn’t have to live abroad, like basketball players did in the pre-WNBA era, because only other countries’ pro leagues are willing to pay them to play. I have seen more and more women in other sports (snowboarding, basketball, tennis, BMX and golf, to name a few) create opportunities to play for a living because of the professional opportunities they, and sponsors, have created. My dream now is to create these same professional opportunities for every young softball player out there.
That’s ambitious. But is it realistic?
Mendoza cites Billie Jean King as a mentor and gives a brief history of the women’s tennis movement that has proved so successful. Snowboarding also has women’s stars alongside men’s stars, and many Olympic sports have women whose fame and fortune hardly lags their male counterparts. Think Lindsey Vonn, Michelle Kwan, Allyson Felix, Dara Torres, Kerri Walsh, etc.
But at the same time, the LPGA is limping along. Women’s soccer is trying to re-entrench itself in a smaller niche. And most women’s basketball players still go overseas in the WNBA offseason because they’re not raking in the dough while the league tries to keep the ship steady in the USA.
Softball deserves better than it got from the IOC, which has made a mockery of its supposed gender-equity aspirations. But after covering the WPS draft last week in a mid-sized convention room with no players present, I’m not sure I could be bullish on another women’s sports league starting from scratch. And you won’t see any soccer players this summer turning down an invitation to the World Cup to give 110 percent for Sky Blue FC or magicTalk SC / Washington Freedom. WPS made it to a third season only through a couple of owners’ determination to persevere and a couple of new owners’ enthusiasm for moving up to the highest level and, in the case of MTSCWF, promoting a brand name.
If National Pro Fastpitch succeeds, it’ll need either a few benefactors who believe in some combination of the sport itself and the opportunity to get some marketing/self-satisfaction from attaching brand names to it. It won’t succeed merely because that would be the fairest outcome for 22-year-old college softball standouts who somehow deserve a chance to devote themselves fully to their sport. Plenty of people have talents that can’t pay all the bills — in Olympic sports, mixed martial arts, music, creative writing, art … even journalism.
The question will be: How many professional softball players can the USA support? In women’s soccer, we can easily support a national team of 25-30 full-time players, and we’re working on pushing that number to a couple hundred. In beach volleyball, both men’s and women’s, the AVP’s demise has reduced the opportunities so that just a couple of elite teams playing internationally have much of a chance.
Creative solutions can help. Americans are lucky to have college scholarships to provide training environments and an education. Sometimes, an employer like Home Depot comes up with a program to give Olympians flexible jobs to let them work and compete.
Nothing wrong with aiming for full-time professionalism. But staying open to creative business plans will surely increase pro softball’s chances.
Personal bias alert: Though I tend not to name favorite athletes because I’m a good objective journalist, Lindsey Jacobellis has always been one of my favorites because (A) she’s really good at what she does, (B) I interviewed her before most people knew who she was, (C) she was on my plane to Europe for the 2006 Olympics and (D) she has continued to be successful after being rotated on the spit of short-attention-span American public opinion after losing gold with the board grab late in the medal race in 2006.
Here she is winning her third world title and adeptly dealing with a curious line of questioning that could only be explained by the language barrier. Great race on what appears to be the only snow in Spain.
Video (not embed-ready, apparently)
The other favorite I’ll name is Hannah Teter, because the combination of achievement and charitable work she has compiled at such a young age is staggering.
Most Americans love England in some respect. They might be Monty Python or Doctor Who fans. They might think London is lovely. They might admire the country’s love affair with a sport that spreads to four professional leagues and scores of semipro and amateur leagues all wrapped up in a neatly organized pyramid. They might think the English are generally better educated and more reasonable, though that could be a stereotype that fails to account for, say, booing an opponent’s national anthem.
What we don’t like the English insistence that, as great-great-grandchildren of the people who wrote soccer’s rules and successfully exported them to the world, they must know better than we do. About everything.
That insistence has faded. The Premier League is built on foreign talent and, in many cases, foreign coaches. American players in particular are much better respected today than they were 15 years ago.
Yet we see vestiges of it on the Web, along with vestiges of all other prejudices. Just check the comments on Paul Gardner’s Soccer America piece quite rightly questioning why David Beckham wants to drag his long-battered body over for a couple of months of being knocked around in the Premier League.
The commenters — clearly unaware that Gardner is himself English and was writing eloquent pieces about FA Cup finals before they were born — don’t address Gardner’s points. They simply refuse to believe that “someone in America” would dare to criticize anyone as brilliant as Beckham.
One doesn’t have to have been raised on Match of the Day and disgusting meat pies to understand the following:
1. A minor point: Beckham would actually be a good candidate for an Olympic overage spot, just as Brian McBride (a player the English might recall) lent his experience to the 2008 USA squad.
2. For those who clearly didn’t read the piece before commenting: The issue is not that Beckham has been limited by playing in a low-quality side. The issue is that Beckham takes off on these loans and comes back injured from playing too many games. He’s not young. He needs to give his body a break. And regardless of what you folks think about MLS, Beckham thought enough of it to sign a contract and pledge himself to playing here, and it’s high time he lived up to his words.
3. For Patrick Cormac — this may seem petty, but if you’re going to complain about education, you should consider spelling “nouveau” correctly. And you should realize that whatever complaints people have about Gardner, he’s not exactly “nouveau.” One of his most brilliant pieces is an account of the 1953 “Matthews final.” A first-hand account.
4. For Jeff Jefferson — Americans did not invent the word “soccer.” The English invented that word to distinguish the game from other codes of football. Americans aren’t alone in calling it “soccer.” Say “footy” in Australia, and you’ll be greeted by a gaggle of men chasing after an oblong ball and trying to maneuver it through three giant posts at either end of a massive oval.
Frankly, it appears that these folks could use an education not just about the realities of the game in the USA but the history of the sport as a whole. Perhaps they should start with Gardner’s book The Simplest Game.
Gardner, in his decades in this hemisphere, has come to the position that the USA should take more inspiration from the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries in the Americas than from Europe, particularly as the USA becomes more Hispanic through immigration. His critics would say he belabors the point. But if you’re going to base your entire response on an appeal to authority, you’re going to lose.
I’ve crunched a few numbers to figure out pages that drew at least 0.1 percent of my total page views for the year. (The percentages are slightly lower than they should be due to some extraneous stuff in the stats — scripts, other ways of reaching a page, etc. — so 0.1 may actually be 0.15 or so.)
Here are the top pages, with an unofficial category added to show the post’s topic. You might notice a pattern.
Beach volleyball has come a long way from California. The North American AVP tour went coast-to-coast with a few stops in between. As with a lot of Olympic sports, Europe has been a gracious host for many events.
But if you check the 2011 FIVB tour, the first since the AVP’s demise (IMG and USA Volleyball will team up for a short domestic series), you’ll find:
– A lot of events in central Europe
– A tour of the beaches of China and Scandinavia
– The lone stop in Brazil, a hotbed of beach sports, held in far-inland Brasilia
– No events on anything the Western world would consider a traditional beach
Just check the map:
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Duresport.com 