Jak's View of Vancouver v.3

This morning, the British cyclist Simon Yates won the Vuelta a Espana grand tour. That event capped off a wonderful summer of sport — in cycling and cricket, at least — for British fans.

Simon Yates

Yates majestic victory in the Tour of Spain meant that all three of cycling’s Grand Tours — Giro d’Italia, Tour de France, and the Vuelta — were won by British riders in 2018; and that three different riders (Chris Froome, Geraint Thomas, and Simon Yates) accomplished this shows the depth of British cycling these days.  Six of the last seven Tours de France have been won by Brits (Wiggins, Froome & Thomas), while Froome and Yates have taken the Spanish title for the last two years. This is a level of dominance at the top by one country that we haven’t seen for a while.

Now, for the fall, we look forward to the World Championships.

Joe Root, ENG Captain

Last week also saw the last cricket Test Match to be played in England this year. England played five Tests against India and won the series 4 games to 1. Earlier in the summer a 2-Test series against Pakistan was drawn 1-1.  I love our team right now — they are unpredictable and exciting; sometimes they collapse in a heap, sometimes they reach the pinnacles of the sport, but they are finding ways to win. And many of them are young. With the last ball of the last Test, England’s James Anderson took his 564th Test wicket, making him the greatest fast bowler in the history of the game.

In October and November, England tour Sri Lanka, including 3 Tests. In January, England travel to the West Indies to play a full series of 3 Tests, 5 ODIs and 3 T20Is.  That’ll be a good winter’s viewing.

Mitakeumi

Sumo has been especially interesting this summer. There are now a number of YouTube channels that feature all the day’s bouts which we can stream while we have breakfast instead of staying up until 2 each morning. That helps. More importantly, the upper ranks of sumo seems to be undergoing a periodic renewal, with older rikishi fading away and bright newcomers (such as Endo, Mitakeoumi, and Abi) moving up the ranks. In fact, the young Mitakeumi won the last tournament in July. But, it has to be said, that was partly because the three yokozuna (or “grand champions”) failed to show up: Kisenasato and Hakuho deliberately sat out, while Kakuryu was injured early on). But the hesitations of the yokozuna have made the tournaments (or basho) a lot more open and interesting.

We are now half-way through the September basho. All three yokozuna showed up, and two of them are currently leading.

I haven’t seen much boxing this year, but I did manage to catch the magnificent World Middleweight title fight last night in which Canelo Alvarez barely beat Gennady Golovkin to take the title.  Skilful scientific boxing from both instead of the brawling we often get these days.

Finally, I caught the second half of the rugby game between the All Blacks and South Africa a day or so ago. It was an historic win for the Springboks and, more importantly, allows all us others to believe that the All Blacks are not invincible.  It makes the northern hemisphere Test season something to look forward to.

I watch a lot of football (or soccer as it so quaintly known in North America) but I don’t usually watch MLS, no matter how well or badly the Whitecaps may be doing.  However, this evening, I watched the second half of the game against Seattle that the Whitecaps won by a single goal; and I tried to analyze why I don’t follow MLS more closely.

I worked it out:  the MLS is rather like a no-contact schoolboy league game and is therefore quite boring to anyone used to the best.

Modern football, as epitomised by the major European leagues (the English EPL, German Bundesligia, Serie A in Italy, or La Liga in Spain, for example), is a super-fast full-contact sport played by hard men (many with exquisite skills, but hard men nonetheless).  There is a certain level of brutality, I suppose, but that is the way the game has developed. It is hard to imagine any of the players I saw tonight coming off well in any clashes with a top European half-back.  I  can see them crawling off the pitch and crying into their yoga mats.

Perhaps more importantly is the lack of speed.  MLS forward advances seem ponderous at best and old-fashioned in their rigidity.  Top-class footballers follow their team’s prescribed shape at top speed but are always willing to tweak the tactic for an opportunity.

Finally, if tonight was any guide, the MLS officials are mediocre and proscriptive.  They also seem to miss a lot of the action and get little help from their assistants. They reminded me of European hockey refs who call a lot more contact penalties than an NHL official ever would.

And that, perhaps, is the best analogy:  MLS football is to European football as the British Hockey League is to the NHL. They all play the same game, but ….

Previous This Sporting Life epsiodes.

With the completion of today’s Individual Time Trial, and with the exception of the almost-celebratory run into Paris tomorrow, this year’s Tour de France is now complete; and it has been a quite marvelous race.

There was a clear expectation by most observers that this year’s Tour would be a closely fought battle between Alberto Contador and Chris Froome.  However, with both of them being forced to withdraw during the first week, the “lesser lights” who normally would have been supporting their leaders were given a lot more freedom to go for stage wins and high rankings in the overall classification. This opened up the race and made for some spectacular days.

Vincenzo Nibali (nearly always my second choice after Contador) has been the leader almost from the beginning and will win tomorrow by more than seven minutes; a victory thoroughly deserved.  He has looked cool and prepared on every single stage, winning a major mountaintop finish, handled the difficult cobble stage, and competing effectively in the time trial.  In hindsight, I suspect that he might well have won this year even had Froome and Contador stayed in.

Peter Sagan is such a consistently good performer that he has swamped everyone else in the green jersey (sprinters) competition without winning a single stage (though he has a chance still tomorrow morning).  In the King of the Mountains polka dot race, the young Pole Rafal Majka wins after an exciting contest. Majka reminds me that this Tour has thrown up a new crop of your riders, raiders we will be seeing at the top of the lists throughout the next decade.

Just as important, this year has been the best in a full generation for the French with their riders taking 2nd, 3rd and 6th place.  In addition, with the collapse of the Sky team this year, French team AG2R Las Mondiale will win the team competition by a wide margin.

It has been a great race — a true Grand Tour — and now we look forward to the Vuelta d’Espana later this summer which may well have the finest group of riders for many years with Contador and Froome trying to make up for their TdeF failures.  I will probably be supporting the young Colombian Nairo Quintano.

Previous This Sporting Life episodes.

In my sporting life  there have been some wonderful high points this year, but today just wasn’t one of them.

After giving the Australians a right thrashing in the Test series in England during the summer, our cricket team travelled to Australia for the winter series primed for victory and with all the odds in our favour.  Today, we find ourselves down four Tests to zero after yet another comprehensive defeat by the Aussies.

Our cricket has been shockingly bad — batting, bowling and captaincy; and it looks as though we need to have a thorough shake up of the entire team — just when we thought we had a group together that would be victorious for years to come.

Bitterly disappointing.

Still, we have the next sumo basho in a couple of weeks, and the cycling season starts with the Santos Tour Down Under in three weeks.  This sporting life can only improve!

Regular readers will know that I am a longtime devotee of bicycle road racing.  Back in August when he was hiding from the truth I wrote a piece about Lance Armstrong as garbage so the release this week of the USADA report doesn’t make me think anything worse about him (that would have been impossible.)

But what it does do is focus attention on the faults of UCI and its failed leadership under Verbruggen and McQuaid.  They need to go, and soon.  If they really care about their sport they will leave voluntarily as a way to clear the decks and allow a brighter future for cycling.  I doubt that will happen, though.  I expect McQuaid to throw Verbruggen under the bus but to fight for his own position.  That will be a noisy shame.

We also need to see the dopers’ manager, Jan Bruyneel, fired from his position at Radio Shack, because the report makes clear that he was as guilty as any of the racers.

Finally, I have to note my genuine disappointment at the continuing supportive position  taken by Nike and other sponsors of the man at the centre of the greatest cheating scandal in the history of sports.  Boycott of their products seems the only sensible solution to bring them to their senses.

I am looking forward to the 2013 season.  It is clear that most participants have now fully bought into the no-doping programme and we will see the cleanest season for almost two decades.  There will still be those trying to cheat but they will be caught and punished.  Ride on!

People around most of the world know that the Paralympics is going on right now in London.  The Brits, including broadcasters BBC and Sk and the national newspapers, have done a great job of covering the event.  But if you are in the US you could be excused for thinking this part of the Olympic movement has ceased to exist.

Given their dumbass coverage of the Summer Olympics, it comes as no surprise that NBC is supplying no live broadcasts of the Paralympics; but for them to segregate their taped-delay packages away from the network and onto a sports channel is simply disgraceful.  And it is not just NBC:  I just checked the online editions of the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times and USA Today without finding any coverage of the Games.

This is not an issue about sports.  This is about a deep lack of respect for the differently abled, and an attempt to hide them from public view by failing to include them in such normal cultural outlets as TV and newspapers.  I guess it is no coincidence that the US is nowhere near the top of the Paralympics medal table.

And the Olympic Movement needs to accept a big share of the blame, too.  I can see little excuse for separating the Paralympics and the Olympics. “Separate But Equal” has never worked anywhere in any circumstance.   There should be one Olympics (if Olympics there has to be at all) and it should include all of the Paralympic event.  The Olympics could be expanded from 15 days to, say, 21 days to accomodate all the sports and still be less expensive than staging two separate and unequal Games.

With the medal tables unified, even the US networks with their ultra-jingoistic attitudes to winning would have good reason to show more.

There’s little about my sporting life that can be bad on the day when England complete their crushing of arch-rivals Australia 4-0 in a cricket series!

And with Canadian Rider Hesjdal winning the Giro D’italia, Brit Bradley Wiggins leading the Tour de France by a wide margin, and my two favourite rishiki (Kisenasato and Kakuryu) starting well at the Nagoya basho, my summertime sporting life is as good as it can be.

What a great weekend for sports this weekend:

• First thing in the morning, there will be Stage 6 of the Paris-Nice Classic. Bradley Wiggins is making a wonderful start to a season in which he hopes — expects — to be on the Tour de France podium in July.
• Pretty soon after that finishes, Wales plays Italy in Rugby Union’s Six Nations tournament.  Wales has already won the Triple Crown and I fully anticipate them taking the Grand Slam this year.
• In the evening the Vancouver Canucks comes onto the ice to thrash the Montreal Canadiens.
• Saturday night closes with the first day of the Spring Basho — that’s sumo, you know.  If Baruto from Estonia wins the tournament we will likely have the first European yokozuna in the history of this very ancient sport.  I’ll be cheering for the Japanese rikishi Kisenasato.
• Finally, on Sunday morning, England plays France in the Six Nations.

Cycling, rugby, sumo and hockey — sometimes I just get lucky!

Regular readers will know  that my wife and I are devotees of sumo. This year has been a sorry one for fans of the sport as we had to deal with the remnants of last year’s betting scandal which was immediately followed by an even bigger match-fixing scandal.  The latter was so serious that it cost the jobs of a dozen or so rikishi (wrestlers) and managers who were thrown out of the sport.  The Sumo Association was forced to cancel the March basho tournament entirely while Japan TV refused to cover the next basho in May. There were times we seriously wondered if the ancient sport would actually survive.

But the July basho was held and televised, and will end tonight.  An interesting bunch of younger rikishi were promoted to the ranks of those now departed and it seems we might be back to normal.

One of our favourite rikishi is ozeki Harumafuji and I was pleased a couple of years ago to report here when he won his first yusho (championship). To be frank, he hasn’t been very good these past couple of years. He has been injury-prone and has barely done enough to keep his rank of ozeki. Since he won that yusho, the age’s greatest rikishi, Asashoryu was forced to retire for “lack of dignity” and the sport has been dominated by Hakuho who has won the last seven yusho in a row, equalling Asashoryu’s record. But last night Harumajui defeated Hakuho to win his second Emperor’s Cup.  It was a great and worthy fight and I cheered and cheered at the end.

More sumo here.

In other sports news, I have to report that my man Alberto Contador was just not up to snuff in the Tour de France this year.  But, luckily, the Schleck Brothers couldn’t win either and this year’s race will be won tomorrow by Cadel Evans, the first Australian to do so.  He thoroughly deserves the title.