Category: Sports

A handful of great moments from NBC’s Olympics announcers:

“Oh, the air came out of the balloon and with those mighty lungs from America’s Midwest, Paul Hamm filled it up and gave himself belief that this was possible, and it was. And it is.”— Al Trautwig, on Paul Hamm’s comeback in the gymnastics all-around.

“Despite the beauty of the marathon, some unfortunate continuing squalor elsewhere.”— Jim Lampley juxtaposes the sublime with the nefarious, commenting on Olympic doping cases.“For them, the Olympics have been an up and down rollercoaster ride.”— Ted Robinson, on the up and down rollercoaster that is men’s beach volleyball.“This is one of those overwhelming moments of sheer participation.”— Marathon commentator as last of women runners neared the finish line.

“The Japanese men will climb to the podium and hear the national anthem of their nation.”— Trautwig on which national anthem is the national anthem of Japan.

“It almost defies believability to think that when Blaine Wilson crashed to the mat at Madison Square Garden in New York in late February with a torn bicep that he would be in this position for his team in these Olympics.”— Trautwig defies logic to underline a gymnast’s drama.

The quick takeaways:

–It’s a little hard to take in the dimensions of Lance Armstrong’s accomplishment. On the sporting level, I think it’s on a par with Muhammad Ali’s domination of the heavyweight division before he was drafted or Michael Jordan’s taking over the NBA. They existed on planes above their contemporaries, and so does Lance.

–His accomplishment will remain under a cloud, I think, until there’s a definitive answer to questions about whether Armstrong used “illegal substances.” (Good piece in Velonews on this today from former racer and l’Alpe d’Huez stage winner Andy Hampsten.) The cynical assumption, from which I’ve tried to refrain, is that he’s been on something. Maybe the definitive answer will never come and the cynical assumptions will win the day. What a shame.

–The Tour next year: Will Lance ride again? It’s hard to imagine him not defending the title. One thing I’m interested in what will happen to race coverage here when he’s finally out of the race. The Outdoor Life Network has had a ready-made hometown superstar to promote and has done a good job of building its coverage around him. But what if the favorites were a German, an Italian, and a Russian? For serious cycling fans, the Tour would still be compelling. But I think OLN would lose most everyone else without another legitimate U.S. threat.

–Speaking of the next U.S. threat: Who is it? I have no idea, and that means nothing, because I don’t know much about what’s happening in the pro cycling ranks. I think it’s fair to say that when LeMond’s star faded, few saw Armstrong’s rising as a great Tour rider, and virtually no one saw him as a future champion.

–Speaking of OLN: As I said, they did a nice job building and marketing a month-plus of programming built around Armstrong (even if “The Cyclysm” is a cataclysmically dumb banner for the programming event. But: You wonder if they could do better with the broadcasting team. On the plus side, Bob Roll is great: Knowledgeable, funny, with a winning way of never taking himself or the Tour too seriously. But Al Trautwig combines lack of cycling knowledge with a suave, empty broadcasting style that’s got to go. And the play-by-play/color team of Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen are trapped in a cyclysm of gasping superlatives, butchered metaphors, and pure and simple miscalls of the action. The final one came today, when Liggett announced that Fabian Cancellara, the young rider who had won the prologue three weeks ago, had gone off the front on the next-to-last lap of the street circuit in Paris. Both he and Sherwen narrated his big push up the Champs Elysee and his attempt to stay clear of the peloton. Then, after a good two or three minutes of this, the rider made the turn just before the Arc d’ Triomphe and voila, the OLN twins noticed it was not Cancellara at all but Juan Antonio Flecha. Think about that kind of mistake in any other sporting event you can think of. Hard to imagine it being tolerated.

Favorite moment in today’s stage: Lance’s dash for the win, natch.

Close second: Kloeden, one of the Germans on the T-Mobile squad, giving a firm shove to a guy running alongside him waving a German flag.

Third: Paul Sherwin’s comment on another one of the roadside lunatics, a guy in a chicken suit who ran in front of the lead group for about 100 meters: “It’s a pity that some of these people are so crazy.” Sherwen also observed during a replay of the finish that Lance had been “determinated” to win.

Lance Armstrong won another mountain stage, and everyone’s crowning him the winner of this year’s Tour. One thing I wonder about is, given the continuing allegations that he’s been “doping,” is what the French and other European fans think about him. (No, I don’t believe the accusations, just as I don’t truly believe the suggestions that Barry Bonds has been using steroids; but sometimes you wonder if maintaining that belief is more than a little like clapping your hands to revive Tinkerbell in “Peter Pan.”)

Anyway, as Lance was approaching the summit on the l’Alpe d’Huez climb, there was a great aerial shot from a TV helicopter. I was checking out all the slogans the cycling fans had splashed on the road to encourage their heroes. The overwhelming majority of the thousands of messages cheered for favorites like Jan Ullrich, Richard Virenque, Ivan Basso, and yes, even Lance Armstrong.

But in one short stretch, Armstrong rode across messages that said “Lance EPO” (a reference to a blood-doping substance), “Lance Sucks,” and “F*** Lance.” Wow — seems kind of hostile. On the other side, though, there was this battle cry: “Rip Their Balls Off, Lance.””

I should know better, but the sports jerks still get to me when they start talking every summer about how the Tour — you know, the Tour — isn’t really an event. Driving through Baltimore on our way to the airport to come home, I heard Rob Dibble and another troglodyte start in on Lance Armstrong and the Tour. Dibble said that cycling isn’t really a sport because “the bike does a lot of the work” and Lance can “coast on it and sit on it.” So when we got to the airport, I wrote the following and sent it off:

Dear Rob Dibble and ESPN Radio:

Every year at Tour de France time, sports boneheads cut loose about what a joke bicycle racing is. And every year people like me, who actually know something about sports that don’t involve throwing, hitting or kicking balls or pucks or people, try to show you what boneheads you really are. So here we go again, but maybe with a difference.

First, your comments dismissing cycling as a sport show such amazing ignorance that it’s hard to tell where to begin. But let’s try the statement that during bike racing, the bike is doing a lot of the work and that the physical exertion is nothing like that encountered during running. Rob that’s about the same as saying that your shoes are doing a lot of the work when you throw a fastball; and in baseball, spiked shoes help you get the leverage you need to throw. It’s true that bicycles have a marvelously efficient way of converting muscular energy into motion. But at the professional level, that translates into extraordinary results. If you take a look at the speeds attained and energy spent (in terms of watts or calories or any other way you want to measure it), bike racers are putting out the same or more effort as long-distance runners; in sprints, which may come after hours of tough riding, the energy output is very similar to that of sprinters in track and field. What the bicycle does is make it possible for a trained athlete to go farther faster and longer than someone on foot or on cross-country skis, for instance. So, to go back to the baseball shoes for a moment: There’s no way wearing the same model shoes you wore would make it possible for Lance Armstrong to throw a 95 mph heater. And there’s no way that putting you on Lance’s bike would make you anything more than a sad, sweaty, out-of-breath retiree.

Rob, I’m sure you doubt all this. But I think I could prove my point to you and your audience. I think a fair test would be to pit you, an elite one-time professional athlete who utterly dismisses the idea that bike racing is challenging, against a retired pro cyclist. Someone like Greg Lemond, who’s been out of the game for awhile. But you know, that might be stacking the odds against you. What I’d really like to do is get you on a bike myself and do a little race. Maybe 20 miles or so. A route with some climbs and some descents. I’m 50. A run-of-the-mill cyclist. I’d love to have you show me how easy the sport is.

And one last thing, Rob: You got mad on the air because some Cubs pitcher might have exercised some poor judgment and was said to have committed a “Dibble-ism..” You wanted to know what a Dibble-ism is. Well, throwing a ball into the stands, as you once did in Cincinnati, hitting a hometown fan, is one example. Disrespecting fellow athletes because you don’t understand their sport is another.

Hope to see you on the road.

Great read in the Washington Post on the growing popularity of bull-riding. The story claims that bull-riding on TV is outdrawing NBA regular season games.

Increasingly, and largely because of the sport’s dependable violence, Americans beyond the traditional country rodeo audience are embracing bull riding. Capitalizing on its notoriety as the most dangerous eight seconds in sports, the event has hit the big time, attracting television deals, huge crowds, serious money and major corporate sponsors.

The story claims that bull-riding on TV is outdrawing NBA regular season games. The Professional Bull Riders Inc. site includes a rundown on what equipment the "bull athletes" wear. Bicycle shorts under their jeans, but no protective cups.