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A Non-Traditional Sports Fan in America #0002
by Zach Bigalke
20 March 2009
This column originally appeared at FanNation from February to September 2008. You can find Bigalke riffing about a range of stories from sports around the globe weekly here at Informative Sports.
I sit here, nursing the lone Guinness which survived the onslaught of debauchery that is the passing of yet another St. Patrick’s Day. Spring is on the horizon and in the air. The changing seasons are a nexus for the various threads of the sports world. Leagues across the globe, from Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer to professional cycling and men’s and women’s tennis, begin their nascent seasons with hope springing eternal for the athletes.
Others -- the NCAA Tournament, the UEFA Champions League, the NHL and NBA, and domestic soccer leagues throughout Europe -- are reaching the fever pitch of their championship campaigns. As one season nears completion, another steps up to fill the void. You just have to know where to look. So consider this your tour through the clover patch that is the world of athletic entertainment. Let the shamrocks fly as we stroll on through...
The father had earned his Alaskan glory the hardest way possible. In a mad dash down Front Street in Nome, snow flying from the collective tumult of several dozen dogs churning up the road, two mushers battled for the biggest prize in their sport. When the flakes had settled, the results showed Dick Mackey had edged out defending Iditarod champion Rick Swenson by a single second to take the 1978 crown, preventing the latter from his shot at three straight titles.
Thirty-one years later, the son would face no such drama as the end came into sight. With Nome on the horizon and every other team still in the race still hours behind, Lance Mackey had plenty of time to thank the true athletes -- his fifteen loyal companions who had battled valiantly over the past ten days. Joining the rarified air previously occupied only by Susan Butcher and Doug Swingley, the younger Mackey had sealed his place as a race legend with his third consecutive victory.
Having offered introspective congratulations to his companions, and without the stressful finale his father endured three decades prior, Mackey remounted the runners and ran the last half-mile into Nome. His arms high overhead, the musher from Fairbanks had succeeded in his quest to join Swingley and Butcher. Pinning his entire season on this race, Mackey delivered.
The chip off the old block has grown in stature until the block’s achievements paled in comparison. With time to revel in the victory -- it would be six hours before second- and third-place finishers Sebastian Schnuelle and John Baker would join Mackey at the finish -- the victor continued to deflect praise onto his team. A musher is only as good as his dogs, after all, and Mackey knows that better than most. His two alternating lead dogs, nine-year-old Larry and three-year-old Maple, joined him on stage for the presentation of this third award...
As the powder settles in Alaska, so too does it settle on the career of one of Canada’s most celebrated technical skiers. Just eight months after coming back from his first retirement, Thomas Grandi hangs up his skis once again. Recognizing that his wish of reaching the podium at the Vancouver Olympics next year -- his stated reason for coming back to the sport after his 2007 retirement -- was increasingly looking like little more than a pipe dream, Grandi recognized that his time in the sport had passed.
Grandi’s career began way back in the 1992-93 World Cup season. A promising skier from a country that has rarely produced top-class technical skiers, Grandi succeeded in ways no countryman ever had before. His back-to-back victories in the giant slalom, two days apart at Alta Badia, Italy and Flachau, Austria in December 2004, gave Canadian fans their first taste of success in the cutthroat world of technical skiing. With nine total World Cup podium finishes in fifteen seasons, Grandi’s modest successes have paved the way for a new generation of Canadian slalom and giant-slalom specialists.
His groundbreaking achievements would ultimately prove his downfall. With the Canadian team growing ever stronger in his signature events, Grandi found it ever tougher in his comeback to regain the form of his prime. Never able to achieve Olympic success, he decided to give it one last shot. But recognizing that his wife, 2006 Olympic silver-medalist Nordic skier Sara Renner, had a better shot at achieving success in Vancouver than he, Grandi ultimately determined family to be more important than his flagging dreams.
There isn’t always a celebration at the finish line, but as Grandi crosses over into his post-athletic life, there is certainly grounds to celebrate his athletic life. Positive accomplishments come in many forms, and too often an athlete will hang on to the last vestiges of former glory until the body gives way to obsolescence. It takes a strong character to recognize when the skills are no longer there in the same abundance as before...
Vancouver has been in the sports news a lot lately. In addition to the upcoming Olympic Games and the likely playoff berth of the Canucks, the innuendo has proven true -- on the cusp of its season premiere, Major League Soccer has revealed that the Vancouver Whitecaps will be moving up from Division I of the United Soccer League in 2011 to become the league’s seventeenth team. The Whitecaps, which was formed in 1986 as the Vancouver 86ers (a play on both the year of formation and the year of the city’s founding a century earlier), has won two of the past three USL Division I championships.
The Whitecaps join Seattle (2009) and Philadelphia (2010) as the league’s newest expansion franchises. Since its inception in 1996, the league has doubled in size. As more teams build soccer-specific stadiums and the sport gains further acceptance, the league looks to be able to grow in popularity. Portland, Ottawa and St. Louis are in the running to be awarded the franchise rights for the eighteenth team, putting them in line with many European leagues in size.
Giving the league a second Canadian presence (Toronto FC joined MLS in 2006) and a natural rival to the Seattle Sounders, this looks to be sensible growth. And the next team to be added -- hope for Portland, so that I may be but an hour and a half away from games -- to bring the league to eighteen establishes the legitimacy of numbers and demonstrates its desire to position itself to compete for viewers with other domestic leagues around the globe. Here’s to hoping for its continued success, and the development of a healthy Vancouver-Seattle-(Portland?) derby. The MLS needs to establish such rivalries to enhance its greatness...
Greatness, though, is ultimately determined by whether the drama keeps the fans coming back. And this Sunday, the fans will flock to the roads of northern Italy for the centenary edition of Milano-Sanremo, the cycling season’s longest of the one-day classics. For a hundred-plus years fans have lined the route from Milan the along Lake Como and toward the Ligurian coastal city of Sanremo to watch the sport’s best compete to win the first monument up for grabs on the season.
With Paris-Nice (won by Luis-Leon Sanchez) and Tirreno-Adriatico (Michele Scarponi) in the books, this race regularly attracts one of the biggest peloton of the season. Lance Armstrong will be making his return to European racing when he lines up with his Astana teammates in Milan. Tom Boonen looks to put this elusive notch in his victory cap; his Quickstep team will be committed to propelling him to the line on the Via Roma, with Australian speedster Allan Davis as a wild card. Ivan Basso continues his return from his suspension for involvement with Operacion Puerto and the blood-doping ring operated by Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes with his new team, Liquigas. Former winner Filippo Pozzato will be lining up for new Russian outfit Katusha along with three-time Tour de France green-jersey winner Robbie McEwen by his side. Another former winner, Alessandro Petacchi, returns from his own suspension -- for salbutamol, a product in his asthma inhaler! -- with LPR Brakes. Julian Dean and Tyler Farrar are both looking to lead a young Garmin-Slipstream team to victory.
A guy like Armstrong or Basso, better suited to the rhythm of a longer stage race and the ability to dictate the cadence day after day, is not likely to challenge for the title in Sanremo on Sunday.
Not since Sean Kelly in 1992 has a grand-tour title holder won Milano-Sanremo; the sprinters are unlikely to allow it to happen again. Even with the twin hills, the Poggio and the Cipressa, stacked near the finish line to attempt to break up the battle royale along the Via Roma, we’re likely to see a large pack battling for supremacy. But the best shot, in my mind, has to reside in the explosive kick of brash British sprinter Mark Cavendish. A two-time world champion on the track and already the holder of six grand-tour stage wins just from last season, Cavendish has the potential to give guys like Pozzato and Boonen and Petacchi fits for many years to come. Coming off his victory in the final stage of Tirreno-Adriatico, he’s proven himself to be on form and thus I like Cavendish’s chances. Boonen and Pozzato and McEwen and Petacchi should be close behind, but will likely be unable to match the younger rider’s kick...
It’s all about finishing, and alas, that’s what we must do again here. Just as the Guinness must eventually run out, so too must our space for this week. And while March Madness is sure to provide loads of excitement for fans across the country, remember that there are exciting and inspiring feats being performed across the wide swath of sports society out there. Shake off that St. Patrick’s Day hangover, and don’t hesitate to reap the global bounty that spring has to offer in the sports world...
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