Tag: Sport

It seems that Russian figure skater Evgeni Plushenko was not entirely happy about his Silver medal at the Vancouver Olympics, mainly because Plushenko landed a quadruple jump while Gold medalist Evan Lycasek (from the United States) did not. Plushenko made all manner of public comments about how he is surprised that one can win a Gold medal without doing a quad, and that without a quad, “men’s figure skating” is reduced to ice dancing.

Well, cry me a river.

Many skating observers, even armchair ones myself who really can’t tell a Salchow jump from a toe-loop jump unless the announcers tell me which is which, have thought for a number of years that skating has become too jump-focused, to the point where competitions ever since, say, Nagano in 1998 have basically boiled down to who lands the most quads without falling. When that was the reigning paradigm in skating, it was little trouble for a guy like Plushenko to win consistently, because — and here’s the dirty truth about him — Plushenko is ultimately a one-trick pony.

Evgeni Plushenko is a skater who essentially turns in boring, personality-free performances into which he inserts spectacular jumps. He’s an amazing jumper, maybe the best pure jumper ever, but everything else he does is just dull. This has tended, in my view, to be the case with Russian men in general; only Alexei Yagudin — Gold in Salt Lake City in ’02 — of the recent Russian male domination didn’t bore me with his programs. Other than him, all of the Russian men who have won since Brian Boitano’s win in 1988 have been boring skaters who won by landing perfect jumps. (The most categorically insane Olympic victory was 1994’s, when Alexei Urmanov sleepskated to Gold over Elvis Stojko’s inifinitely more interesting programs.)

Now, finally, it seems that figure skating has started to push the pendulum back the other way, taking the emphasis back off jumps in general and the quad specifically, thus making the quad less of a silver bullet maneuver than it’s been of late. That bugs Plushenko, obviously, but he’ll just have to get over it. To flip his complaint around: it’s called figure skating, not ice jumping. If he thinks that’s what should determine the winners, then maybe a new event should take place featuring jumping and nothing else. Hell, we could even get rid of the music and the funky outfits and just have the skaters come out and do jumps in front of an audience. Then Plushenko could quad to his heart’s content and dominate in the only way he really knows how.

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I always liked Florence Griffith-Joyner, the great US track athlete from the late 80s and early 90s, and I was shocked when she suddenly died.

Here’s a pretty amazing article about Al Joyner and his incandescent love for Florence.

Dreams were her gift. Every morning, she’d wake up and tell her husband, Al, how she’d dreamed about angels or daughters or catastrophe. Good or bad, she’d always wake up with a story to tell — until the day she never woke up at all.

Al never had that gift. His dreams were vague, or they’d escape him 20 seconds into his day. He had nothing to jot down like she did, nothing to file away for a conversation over dinner. Even after she died some 11 years ago, he never dreamt of her, could never summon her back into his subconscious. This frustrated him to no end, because, once he was awake, all he did was daydream about her.

But then, about 10 weeks ago, in the middle of his deepest sleep, Al Joyner finally saw Flo Jo. She had driven up in a car, smiling, and strolled casually toward him. She was stunning, as always, and wore her hair in a bun, just the way he’d always adored it. He asked her, “What are you doing here?” And her response was, “I’m just coming to check on you.” He didn’t know what to say next. Their daughter, Mary, was about to graduate from high school, and he wanted to ask, “Are you here for graduation?” But before he could speak, his alarm clock went off.

The buzzing jarred him, and his dream was barely intact now. He could see her leaving, climbing back into her car, smiling again. He wanted more, wanted a full-blown conversation, but an instant later, Al was awake, the moment over.

He sat up in bed, both agitated and wistful. That was it? That was the whole dream? He hadn’t finished. There was so much to tell her, about him and Mary and premonitions that had come true. There was also news to share, news she’d probably beam about.

The next night, he went to bed early, hoping Flo Jo would reappear, hoping the dream would pick up where it left off.

But when he woke up, nothing. He wanted to punch his pillow. Nothing.

Do read the whole thing.

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Once I was a baseball fan, but my enthusiasm for the game has taken a number of hits over the years. The game itself has become slower and slower; World Series games are allowed to start at 8:30 pm and frequently end after midnight; the steroid era has taken its toll; and most of all, my preferred team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, are on the verge of setting the all-time MLB record for consecutive losing seasons. That, in itself, is mind-boggling.

Yes, they’re a small-market club, and yes, MLB doesn’t do nearly enough to keep its small-market clubs economically able to play along with the big-market clubs. But even the other small-market teams around MLB manage to put it together at least once in a while, but not so the Pirates, who continually stink. The pattern has been set ever since 1992, the last time they fielded a winner: they bring up a bunch of youngsters; the youngsters either play well or disappoint; the ones who disappoint leave; the ones who play well are traded for more prospects, and the team stinks again. Lather, rinse, repeat: the Pirates are now on their fourth or fifth “rebuilding project” since 1992.

What they’re doing now is aggressively trading guys with the goal in mind of restocking a farm system that’s been depleted on talent during the last run of not-so-great baseball. Yes, they’re piling in prospects — not exactly blue-chippers, but they’re adding guys who could be decent major leaguers eventually, if the things I’m reading are any guide. But then, it doesn’t really matter who they add, because the guys who become good won’t be good enough to make the team a contender but they’ll be good enough to be trade-bait to other teams. They traded their best offensive player earlier this year (after signing him to a long-term deal last year), and today they swapped out more players for prospects.

So basically, the Pirates are like the Springfield tire-fire on The Simpsons. With the Pirates, the fire sale never ends!

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I was going to write a post making fun of the Pittsburgh Pirates for having signed two guys from India as pitching prospects after they won a baseball-related reality TV show over there, but then I figured that the usual process of scouting pitching talent, drafting pitching talent, and developing pitching talent hasn’t really worked so well for the Pirates lately (meaning, the last 16 years), so why not grab two fellows from an Indian teevee show? More power to them!

I do think it would be funny if, were one of these guys (or both) to reach the majors and become strikeout guys for the Pirates, after each strikeout they record, the loudspeakers at PNC Park play a clip of Apu from The Simpsons saying “Thank you, come again.” Like this.

(WAV link via)

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