Category: Sports

By way of a bicycle-club mailing list I’m on, a good read in the Los Angeles Times (free registration required) on the Furnace Creek 508, an ultramarathon cycling race held in the Southern California desert every fall. The writer competed on a four-man relay team and gives a beautiful portrait of the race and his teammates:

“Only one thing remained constant: Ron’s speed. At the chilly 9 a.m. start in Santa Clarita, he bolted to the front of the team race. The 44-year-old corporate wellness coach from Lawrenceville, Ga., flung himself past the wind-bent juniper trees on the long, 2,500-foot climb out of town and onto the flat, Joshua tree-studded Mojave Desert with the same abandon he had in 1996. …

“By noon, riding strong tailwinds, Ron had blown through tough, windmill-covered hills and a vast airplane-repair graveyard, miles on his way into California City. He finished his 82-mile segment in an average speed of 24 mph, impressive, given the 5,000 feet of climbing, and miles ahead of everyone else. ‘He’s sending a chi statement,’ said Steve, who owns a Tarzana yoga studio. ‘There is no duality in his dharma. This is karma in action.’ ”

Two excellent pieces in The New York Times Magazine today.

The first is a feature on IMG Academies in Bradenton, Florida, a private school set up to provide intensive sports training in baseball, basketball, soccer and other sports side-by-side with traditional academic subjects. It’s sort of the logical conclusion to the long-term trend of kids’ sports having become a scheduled, programmed, largely parent-driven part of kids’ lives. The story, by Michael Sokolove, captures the inherent strangeness of families that have decided to make huge investments in their children’s abilities to throw or hit a baseball or shoot a jumper (in some cases, parents are shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars over the kids’ youth sports careers).

“As Tommy stretched and played catch along with about 30 other boys, his mother, Lisa, sat on a lawn chair in a shaded area, watching practice as she did every day. She was living with Tommy and his sister, Jacki, a college student, on IMG’s sprawling 180-acre campus in a $310,000 condominium that the family purchased last year, when Tommy enrolled at IMG as an eighth grader. Her husband, Chuck Winegardner, had stayed back on the Eastern Shore of Maryland to tend to his car dealerships, but he visited frequently for long weekends. Lisa called after every practice. ‘I need to give my husband full reports,’ she said. ‘What they’re working on, how he looks, is he paying attention.’ ”

The story touches on another phenomenon that I used to sit in the bleachers and bitch about when Eamon and Tom were playing youth league baseball: that the only sports experience the kids were having was of the organized league variety. Sure, I played some organized ball when I was a kid. But not a lot. I just wasn’t very good when I was younger. But I could always play in pick-up games and did whenever I had a chance. And eventually I grew into sports and developed a huge passion for them (people I’ve played with would probably say it went beyond passion to an unhealthy competitive intensity, and I can’t deny the evidence of that). Anyway, it always seemed sad to me to look out on a baseball diamond and see kids, sometimes my own, who looked like they’d rather be doing anything but getting steered around the field by whatever adult was in charge. Sure, I’m forgetting all the unhappy episodes that can and do happen when we organized our own games, but the point was we were out doing something we had a blast doing, most of the time, and it had nothing to do with what adults wanted us to be doing or with parents discharging their responsibility to make us well-rounded or with moms and dads living vicariously through our on-field exploits.

The second piece I really liked in the Times magazine today is “Sandlot Summer,” a short personal essay by Melissa Fay Greene. It’s just a nice take on an experiment in trying to give kids back some sense of the joy in spontaneous, unorganized sports you do because, gee, you just feel like doing them:

“My 16-year-old son, Lee Samuel, ran a baseball clinic with his teammates Andre Mastrogiacomo and Matt and Palmer Hudson. Here’s what the teenagers didn’t require of their players: tryouts; advance registrations; birth certificates; assignments to teams by age, sex and skill level; uniforms or team names; parent volunteers; snack schedules; and commuting to fields in distant counties in search of the appropriate level of competition.

“Here’s what the players didn’t miss: almost none of the above. (Uniforms are pretty cool.)”

This sounds familiar: The Tour de France organization has unveiled a route for next year’s race that’s designed to make sure Lance Armstrong has a tough time defending his title. When the Tour unveiled the 2004 route, marked by extremely challenging mountain stages, including a time trial up l’Alpe d’Huez. The route would make it more challenging for Lance, who looked vulnerable in 2003’s mountain stages, to grab his sixth consecutive TdF championship. He responded with one of his most dominating Tours.

The Tour organizers’ apparent strategy this year is different: Go easy on the killer climbs and cut the length of the time trials. That way, Lance’s greatest strengths will be minimized. The organizers have an interest in keeping the race competitive, though the biggest factor in next year’s outcome — whether Lance will compete in the TdF in 2005 — is beyond their control. Still, last year’s route ought to have made a couple of things plain: Make the race tougher for one, and you make it tougher for all. And for the cyclists at the very top of the sport, the result is about preparation (and to a much smaller degree, luck; I’m thinking of Alexander Vinokourov here, who rode a beautiful race in 2003, then crashed before the Tour and couldn’t start in 2004). All of the other riders who were expected to threaten Lance last year cracked, partly because the route was brutal for all of them, partly because none was so prepared for it as the defending champion.

Yesterday, my friend Pete and I got on our bikes and rode the 100-mile route in the annual Tour of Napa Valley. No wine, no pate or cheese or anything like that. Just the bikes, bananas, sports food, and plenty of water. A year ago I was just coming off the ride of a lifetime, the 2003 Paris-Brest-Paris randonee, and kind of took my cycling fitness for granted. I’ve been thinking I’ll do another PBP-length ride (1,200 kilometers, roughly 750 miles, in an 90-hour time limit) next year — the Davis Bike Club’s Gold Rush. But though I finished with no big problems yesterday beyond a sore butt and some minor problems eating, I realized that the year that’s gone by and the 15 or so pounds I’ve gained since PBP has dramatically eroded my strength and that maybe it’s wise not to think too far into the future about huge demanding efforts like a 1,200k ride; even having done one, it’s a huge thing to contemplate.

When you have a little blog like this, one thing the software includes is data on people coming to the site. Not real detailed data, but enough to be fun. On Typepad I can see referrals, the link someone hit to get here. If someone arrives via a Web search, you can hit the link back to the search page and see the term they were searching on. For instance, just now somebody came to the page by way of a search on the words “al trautwig sucks.” Must be a fan club. Anyway, the latest Trautwiggery, by way of my friend Pete, is this priceless bit, produced during coverage of the Olympic women’s triathlon last night:

“Now they’re getting out of the water and will have to get their sea legs out of their heads.”

This guy’s angling for his own version of the Phil Rizzuto-as-poetry book.

My all-time Olympic hero has got to be Paul Hamm, our accidental gymnastics champion. It’s not his fault that the Olympic judges screwed up and mis-scored an opponent’s routine and apparently awarded the wrong guy the all-around gold medal. And just like no one has any real obligation to correct a cashier’s mistake when they’re handed an extra 20 bucks in change, Hamm’s under no compulsion to take matters into his own hands and correct the situation. What’s hard to stomach, though, is the bleating — his own and others’ — that he won fair and square and should be allowed to enjoy his Olympic moment without all the negative attention.

That’s fine, but: Just imagine how Hamm and all the American commentators would be behaving now if it was the Korean who’d benefited from the officials’ failure. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. This would be an injustice for the ages, just like the Soviet Union’s basketball victory over the United States in 1972. The Yanks were convinced the officials manufactured an opportunity for the Soviets to win the gold, and they refused their silver medals (which are reportedly still in a bank vault in Switzerland). That’s 32 years of grudge and counting.

This is the way Team USA (all 293 million of us) looks to the rest of the world: When we win, it’s all about our hard work and perseverance. When we lose, like as not the fix is in. And if we win by mistake: Tough — that’s your problem. No wonder everyone loves Team USA.