7 posts categorized "Olympics"
By Pete Bodo
Hi, everyone. I'll start turning my attention to the US Open tomorrow, and on Thursday, Heidi and I will represent the TWibe at the official US Open draw ceremony. On Sunday, I wrote an exclusive post for Sina.com, one of China’s premier websites, and as it will be translated into Chinese, I won’t just link to it. So here’s the English version, containing a few tweaks to eliminate content I’ve covered before and other not-entirely relevant material.
The Olympic tennis event did not, in the end, belong to the Chinese women. The squad secured the bronze medal in women’s doubles, and narrowly missed adding one in singles as well when Na Li fell to Vera Zvonareva in a tight third-place match. But the Chinese women fared well, coming up with a performance that would have done them just as proud if it had taken place at a Grand Slam event. This is no small feat, because they were performing on a far larger, more significant stage, and facing as intense a degree of pressure as any athlete might encounter.
In fact, it occurred to me at one point that the timing of the Beijing Olympics was just a little off; if the Games had been in 2012, we might have seen more Chinese on the medal platform, because the Chinese tennis arc is still developing at a bracing pace.
The Bejing tennis event was dominated by Rafael Nadal and the Russian women, and it would have taken nothing less than a few gold and/or silver medals by the Chinese to change that. Even that might have been insufficient, when you consider the way Nadal left his imprint on the event, and not entirely through on-the-ground events in Beijing. The games belonged to Rafa for three interrelated reasons:
1 – Nadal managed to impose order on an event that is, more often than not, a crap shoot, filled with improbable and surprising results. This is usually because the Olympics is a different kind of beast than a typical tournament. It’s most comparable to Davis and Fed Cup, and we’ve seen how often the established order crumbles when players must play not just for themselves, within the comfort zone of a neutral tournament site, but for their nations. Although the home court advantage, and the pressures it brings to bear, could have influenced only the Chinese, the weight of national representation is one equally borne by all the Beijing competitors.
2 – Nadal’s two-plus year drive to overtake Roger Federer happened to reach critical mass right before the Olympic Games, putting him under an even harsher than usual spotlight. The world eagerly held it’s breath, hoping for a final-round clash of the two titans. Nadal withstood the pressure – as well as the temptation to just kick back and enjoy Olympic participation - and showed up at the appointed hour. Federer couldn’t make the date; it was disappointing, but not critically so.
3 – Nadal’s performance gave Olympic tennis a degree of credibility it has, at some times in the past, lacked. Tennis players often rationalize that Olympic tennis is an oddity, a strange interlude rather than part and parcel of the entity we think of as the pro tour. Remember, Andy Roddick chose to skip the Olympics altogether, in order to concentrate on the US Open, and very few people criticized his decision.
But Nadal made a big statement that tennis fans ought to welcome in Beijing, because it probably enhanced the status of the game in the eyes of many sports fans who ordinarily don’t follow tennis. I was near Helena, Montana, at the start of the Games, and when I picked up the local newspaper, the lead sports story – taking up fully half of the entire front-page of the sports section - was devoted to tennis. It featured giant photos of the Top Three players. Suddenly, I felt very good about our sport.
These elements all sent out the signal that tennis ranks high in pecking order of international sports that matter. You can argue about whether or not tennis should be in the Olympics until the cows come home, and my own feelings on the subject have changed. I think it ought to be in, less because of its relative heft as a fixture on the world sports scene than because it is, by nature, so intrinsically and gloriously international.
With all due respect to Nicolas Massu and Mardy Fish, if those two players had contested this final, tennis would not featured so high on the public's radar. But Nadal's efforts seemed to captivate everyone. And let's face it, compared to the Olympic Games audience, the viewership numbers for Wimbledon and/or the US Open are a drop in the bucket. Nadal also demonstrated that the Olympics are as important for tennis players as any other athletes. Having such a competitive, exciting, satisfying tennis event did wonders for the game – especially among sports fans who still consider tennis a niche sport.
When it comes to the Russian women, their Olympics performance as a group may have lacked the sheer sex appeal of Nadal’s feat. But their sweep of the singles medals finally made good on the unrealized promise posted when the horde of Russian players followed Anna Kournikova’s footsteps onto the tour. While the Russians have been a powerful force in Grand Slam tennis, this was their most striking, significant and clear demonstration of the ancient principle, A rising tide lifts all boats.
But let’s also acknowledge the Chinese women. Psychologically, playing for bronze may be the most daunting challenge in Olympics tennis. Start with this: the finalists are assured medals, and the worst either of them can do is silver. The finalists are playing with house money. And let’s face it, the Olympic silver medal is a far more cherished object than a runner-up trophy, even at a Grand Slam. In fact, I can’t really recall anyone winning a silver medal at the Olympics and choosing to give it back (now when it comes to Swedish wrestlers and bronze medals, that’s a whole other story!).
Bronze medal combatants - and China had to fight for bronze in both women's events - face a feast or famine situation that simply doesn’t exist in everyday tennis. They are coming off painful and emotionally draining losses in the semifinals, but overnight they have to rally the courage and confidence to bring full focus and energy to a match that may, in the end, be even more critical than the semifinals. For if they win, they’ve earned a coveted Olympic games medal; if they lose, they go home with no greater acclaim than has been accorded the first-round losers, or thousands of other Olympic competitors who failed to earn a medal.
All Olympic competitors have earned our profound respect, but in no other athletic contest is the dividing line between failure and success as clearly and bombastically drawn as in the Olympics. There are Olympic competitors and Olympic medalists – two different classes of athlete. I almost wish they would award bronze medals to both losing semifinalists in tennis, but I’ll be the first to admit that the nature of tennis is such that it’s obviously sensible to have a third-place match - even if playing one goes against all of a player’s instincts, and presents a rare and uncomfortable challenge.
For those reason, my heart went out to Na li in the singles. She played Safina tough in the semis, and Safina has been one of the great success stories of 2008 in tennis. Singles is the lonely game, and Na’s doomed effort was made even more poignant by the success of Zi Yan and Jie Zheng in the doubles. I wondered during the bronze medal doubles match if Na didn’t wish, just for a moment, that she could be out there playing doubles instead – doubles, where you have the emotional comfort and sheer physical help offered by a partner. Na is a tough, purposeful and focused competitor though – I expect more good things from her in the future.
Here’s another thing: while gold is better than silver and silver better than bronze, it’s less about the color of the medals than the medals themselves. So just look at the nations who did not earn a single medal in tennis in Beijing: they include powerhouses like France, Argentina, Australia and the Czech Republic. The Serbian women came up short, and the "it" nation in tennis finished with the same number of medals as Switzerland – home of Martina Hingis, Federer, Patty Schnyder and former gold medalist Rosset - and the newcomer, China.
The Chinese have much to be proud about, but then so do the Swiss. Federer is an Olympic gold medalist – just like Bolt and Phelps, Venus and Serena, Kai and all the others. Just like Rafa. Nobody gives a hang whether it’s in double or singles, and that’s one way in which I think the Olympics is genuinely different from tour tennis. It's refreshing, just like Davis Cup doubles is refreshing. I’m going to leave my thoughts on Beijing with a prediction: China will win the Fed Cup before the next Olympics rolls around.
by Pete Bodo
[note: because of Tennisworld's increasingly robust and expert stable of commentators, including Rosangel, Ed McGrogan and Andrew Burton, our new policy is to by-line every post that appears here]
As of tomorrow, Rafael Nadal - singles gold medallist today at the Beijing Olympic Games - will assume the world no. 1 ranking, ending what has been one of the most well-deserved and hard-earned runs to the top of the game in Open era history. As I write this, Nadal is still nominally the world no. 2, and has never seen the top number attached to his name. This is extraordinary, given his five Grand Slam titles and overall record in the most important of sub-major events and Davis Cup.
For a number of weeks now, I've been developing the theme that Nadal has faced a formidable set of obstacles and almost mythic-grade trials by fire; that he has passed nearly every one of them establishes him as an athletic personality of heroic dimensions. This undoubtedly is why so many of his most ardent fans easily see past the rough-hewn and unorthodox technical aspects of his game and embrace him as the ultimate embodiment of that greatest of virtues - courage. That he appears to be such an ingenue - boyish, sincere, unaffected - only adds spice to this coming-of-age narrative.
It was fitting that on the eve of his epic achievement, Nadal had one final test to pass at the Olympic Games - the gold medal round of the tennis event. In that, he faced one of the most unpredictable and dangerous of hard-court players, Fernando Gonzalez (in six matches, Gonzo was 3-3 against Nadal, and had put up two of those wins, as compared to none by Nadal, on hard courts). Gonzalez was also a seasoned Olympics competitor, having won bronze in singles and gold in doubles at the Athens games.
In its brief Open-era history, Olympic Games tennis has developed a unique character. It's usually a bit wild, woolly and unpredictable - like the full-blown gunfight at the climax of an old-fashioned western. But tennis is more like real life than are those flicks; the "good guys" (for our purposes, the top players) usually get taken out by wild shots flying around in all that confusion, and finally the smoke clears to leave a lone survivor that nobody would have predicted - a Miroslav Mecir, Marc Rosset, Nicolas Massu, maybe even Andre Agassi (who won singles gold in Atlanta while he was in the midst of a horrific career depression).
 Of course, tennis is a sport in which there are enough first-rate players to ensure that the actual champion at any major event is a quality competitor. To get the real measure of how volatile the Olympics tennis event is, just look at who fails to make the championship match, or the list of semifinalists. Or just look at this year's women's event. Elena Dementieva is, comparatively, a more consistent factor near the top of the game than the man with whom she shares a special Olympics gene, Gonzo. But her victory in the women's singles (in which Dinara Safina almost surreally morphed into the double-faultin' 'Lena we know and love from days of yore) is pretty emblematic of Olympics tennis. She's both a worthy and unlikely gold medalist - a bit like Andre Agassi at the Atlanta games.
But when the smoke cleared in the Chinese corral today, Nadal was the last man standing, imposing a kind of sense on the Olympic tennis event that it so often lacks. Another day, another test. But you can pin the tin star on his chest, because he's the new sheriff in town.
Well, I got kind of distracted a few 'graphs up, but let's return to this theme of the drive for no. 1 and take a quick walk through the history of the rankings to put Nadal's feat in perspective. Let's start with the Golden Age of pro tennis, when Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe, Ivan Lendl and Jimmy Connors held sway and the ATP computer ranking system had been on-line for mere months. Connors stripped the no. 1 ranking from John Newcombe. Connnors then held the top spot for 160 weeks until his great rival Borg wrenched it away in a long battle that has echoes of Nadal vs. Federer. Borg had four Grand Slam titles before he accomplished his ranking mission.
Then McEnroe popped up out of nowhere to strip Borg of the top ranking with relative ease in March of 1980 - after having won just one major. Over the next few years, from 1980 to early 1983, Borg, Connors and McEnroe batted the no. 1 ranking around like a hot potato until Lendl became a new guest at the party in February of 1983.
After another 18 months of tug-of-war featuring the usual suspects (less Borg), Lendl established his authority with a 157 week run at the top. That is, there was no. first-time no. 1 for almost 11 years, but Lendl spent more weeks at the top than any of his antagonists. This was something like an old-boy network, until Mats Wilander broke up the monopoly of the Golden Age's Big Four. This was in and of itself an extraordinary saga, because Wilander had won 7 Grand Slam events (in a whopping 11 finals) before he finally rose to the coveted top spot. He would never win another major and held that precious top ranking for a mere 20 weeks before he began his career fade. It makes me wonder if, in some of his less confident moments, Nadal ever took cold comfort in this truly bizarre chronology.
The next first-time no. 1 was Stefan Edberg, who exploited the seam presented by the slow fade of the Big Four - and the quick fade of Wilander - when he took the top spot in August of 1990, with three majors on his resume. The title was soon wrested from his grasp - with relative ease - by Boris Becker in January of 1991. Becker had to collect five Grand Slam titles before he punched through, putting him (and now Nadal) behind only Wilander in that department. A little over a year later, Jim Courier became the third first-time no. 1 in a span of 18 months. Courier had two Grand Slam titles to his credit at time, and his cause was aided by the maturity issues that impeded the progress of the two countrymen and rivals who would end up dominating tennis for nearly a decade, Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi.
In April of 1993, Sampras managed to take the top spot from Courier - even though Sampras at the time owned just one Grand Slam title, earned more than two years earlier at the US Open. By the time Agassi joined the no. 1 club in April of '95, he had three major titles. Eight months later, Thomas Muster crashed the party, propelled by his terrific clay-court game and a Roland Garros title. Through all this time, the rankings were being tweaked a little this way, a little that. Some efforts were made to boost the prestige of what have evolved into Masters Series events by awarding more points to those who won them. All of this helped to account for a sometimes heated controversy over the relative value of events, as well as an avalanche of first-time no. 1s.
Between the beginning of 1996 and the end of 2000, seven different men managed to secure the no. 1 ranking for the first time, however briefly. Only three of them (Gustavo Kuerten, Pat Rafter, and Yevgeny Kafelnikov), were multiple Slam winners at the time they closed the deal, and one of them (Marcelo Rios) did so without having won (or going on to win) a major. But the big guns, Agassi and Sampras, were always in the mix, too, and of the seven men cited above, the only one who ended up as the all-important year-end no. 1 was Brazil's Kuerten.
The next man to join the club was Lleyton Hewitt, who finished his climb less than a year later, with one major to his name. Almost two years later, Juan Carlos Ferrero made a brief appearance at the top, to be replaced by the last no. 1 before Roger Federer, Andy Roddick. Roddick and Ferrero both had one major each when they landed on top.
If the no. 1 ranking history demonstrates anything, it is that the degree-of-difficulty attached to gaining the top spot is constantly in flux, and sometimes more powerfully affected by what a player's rivals are doing than by what he is doing. This can't be said for the year-end no. 1 ranking, where nobody gets to play king for a day because the game is in transition, or the big dogs are sleeping under the porch for a few weeks or months. Nobody ever earned the year-end no. 1 ranking (although Rios came awfully close) without winning at least one major.
Given all this, it's easy to see how getting to no. 1 was a far less challenging task for Roger Federer than staying there, as he has, uninterrupted, for a mind-blowing 237 weeks (since February of 2004). There will be great weeping and gnashing of teeth in Federlandia tomorrow, but let's keep in mind that his record is unlikely to be surpassed. It will stand as one of the epic "iron-man" achievements of the Open era, a thrilling parallel-universe tale for anyone contemplating the monumental effort it took for Nadal to unseat him.
I have to confess, watching Federer and Stanislas Wawrinka (should we re-consider that old chestnut delivered by Peter Fleming, who said that the best doubles team in the world is "John McEnroe and anyone?") win doubles gold yesterday almost brought tears to my eyes. Did The Mighty Fed look extraordinarily vulnerable, and therefore lovable, despite that triumphant moment, or was that just me?
But this is Nadal's day, so let's close with a final thought on his ascent. Only two men, Borg and Wilander, were so persistently and consistently forced to clear as many hurdles on their journey to the top as has been Nadal. Oddly enough, both of them expended so much energy and effort in accomplishing the task that neither was able to hold onto the no. 1 ranking for more than Borg's 46 consecutive weeks.
What, another test for Nadal? Of course, but then this a less concentrated, urgent one, embodying fewer immediate pressures. And remember, this is a kid who does tests well.
By TW Contributing Editor, Ed McGrogan
Hi everyone. Pete is back from vacation, but I want to milk these 15 minutes of fame as long as I can.
Heading into Friday morning's matches, I was hoping for some memorable tennis because overall, the Olympics had been average so far. The quality of the matches was the biggest culprit. I called at least three matches every day, but very few struck me as memorable (or even went to a third set).
I also felt that the crowds in Beijing added to the "averageness." If you read any of my match commentary, I often railed on the crowd's behavior. They deserved it after countless reminders from the chair umpire to stay in their seats, be quiet during play, among other things. I also noticed many players getting perturbed about their lack of etiquette. The AP even wrote a story about it. Worse, many significant matches were sparsely attended early on.
At least for one day, things changed for better. Friday's crowds were plentiful and alive, especially in the later semifinals featuring Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer, and the Bryan brothers. I was even reminded, ever so slightly, of the ambiance of a night match at Ashe Stadium. Maybe that was because I was so used to the crowd's general apathy and idiocy since the beginning of the week.
The tennis was also refined. Just look at the abundance of articles written about the James Blake/Fernando Gonzalez saga, as well as the Nadal/Djokovic classic. But I was surprised at how little has been mentioned about the doubles semifinal between Switzerland (Federer/Stanislas Wawrinka) and the United States (Bob and Mike Bryan). I understand why; doubles is rarely discussed in the mainstream tennis media. But this one felt different, mainly due to the presence of a 12-time Grand Slam singles champion.
If you don't know what happened, this video tells all:
(UPDATE: I found another YouTube clip that works - for now.) After trying to decipher Roger and Stan's celebration (whatever it was, I found it hilarious), I started thinking about Federer's possible gold medal in doubles. Could a triumph boost his clearly slumping singles play?
Technically, I'm sure nothing would change. Doubles and singles are different forms of tennis, and you have to play differently in each situation. But I really liked how Federer was hitting his volleys in this match. They were struck well and were very creative, often fooling an experienced doubles duo in the Bryans.
Roger's in a bit of a quandary at the baseline right now - he's lost some confidence with his shots, and Nadal and Djokovic have proven that they can best Federer there at times. Should he consider coming to net more? Federer can hold his own up there, and few opponents want to see a 12-time Grand Slam champion rushing towards them. If Federer's groundstrokes remain off target, mixing in more net play might help build confidence and win points.
I would expect more carryover from an emotional perspective. Watch Federer as Wawrinka and him head to the locker room. It's without question the happiest I've seen him look all year. I'm sure the celebration may have triggered some giggles, but you can tell that Federer was genuinely ecstatic with this performance. Despite losing in singles, he's embraced the challenge of trying to win an elusive gold medal - even if it comes in doubles. He even skips the customary autograph session on his way out to continue celebrating. In a rare moment of joy for Federer this year, I'm glad that he thought of himself first (though he may have just wanted to get off the court after winning two doubles matches in one day).
Will that positive energy translate over to singles? I wouldn't hurt one bit, that's for sure. Expect Federer and Wawrinka to be going all out in Saturday's match against Simon Aspelin and Thomas Johansson. No matter who wins, the celebration should be great. NBCOlympics.com has the live feed (it's the third match on Centre Court, which starts play at 4 a.m.), Steve Tignor has the live call.
Okay, I'm back. Our vacation was terrific, but this isn't really the time and place to talk about that. Instead, let's talk Olympics. I just filed a post for ESPN taking a look at the men's final. I'm not giving away the store when I say that Fernando Gonzalez is as tough a gold-medal opponent as Rafael Nadal could have drawn.
Say what you will about Nadal, the bottom line on his young career is that he's had to work extraordinarily hard for everything he's earned - both in the literal as well a metaphorical sense. Work to win all those grueling clay-court matches, work to catch the man who's on the short-list for Greatest of All-Time, work in clutch moments at key tournaments against first-class opponents.
Nadal had to beat Federer in all five of the Grand Slam events he's won. Need anything more be said? And now he has Gonzo for the gold. When Gonzo is playing well, nothing he accomplishes is surprising. The trouble is you can't ever predict when he'll play well until he's in a semi, or final, so you can't ever pick him as a favorite - or, if you're a player, see him coming at you, both guns blazing. He's probably the most dangerous player not consistently seeded in the Top 8.
Nadal has an additional burden at these Olympic Games, that of representing Spain, a nation that has torpedoed its chances of getting the next Olympic Games (for Madrid) about as thoroughly as John Edwards has destroyed his political ambitions. First, one of their female cyclists gets sent home in ignominy, for doping. In of itself, that wasn't such a big deal.
But then the Spanish basketball team gets busted for a frat-house-grade photo prank that was offensive to politically correct folks and simply sophomoric to more tolerant folks. Then a similar picture of the Spanish Fed Cup team appeared, immediately destroying one of the more acceptable examples of spin the Spanish tried to put on that episode - We were just doing it as a hands-across-the-water gesture to the Chinese, saying we can’t wait to get to Beijing! Apparently, the Spanish celebrate every win over China, in anything, by pulling back the skin at their temples to slant their eyes. Ha, ha, ha, ha!
If you're driven to find a silver lining in all this, it may be that if an American, Russian, or German team had done such things, they would have been accused of intolerable arrogance and crude athletic imperialism. The Spanish have not been so accused. Some people think they're getting a free pass, for being such sophisticated, forward-thinking Europeans, but you'll get a better explanation if you look at the medal standings. The Spanish are doing woefully in these Games. Even if you already count Nadal's guaranteed silver medal, Kazakhstan has nearly twice as many medals as Spain, and so does Armenia.
As I write this, Spain is in a dead heat with Poland, Algeria and Kyrgyzstan in the medal race. And the last time I looked, the host nation, China, has 41 (that's no typo) medals. This suggests that the Spanish athletes' "slant-eyes" gesture might have been less mockery than wishful thinking. If a nation can make an ass of itself, Spain is doing a pretty good job of it. And lest any of you think that my vacation has wrought some kind of marvelous transformation in my character, I'll add that my attitude is driven less by politically-correct notions of humor than my absolute contempt for talking the talk without walking the walk.
All of this makes me feel for Nadal, who, based solely on his appearance, could be just as easily be taken for Chinese - or Asian, at any rate - as Spanish. Has anybody else noticed that he might have been separated at birth from short-track ice-skating marvel Apolo Anton Ono? Granted, a silver medal for Spain might be good reason to call for a national holiday, but we all know that while silver would be just that much more icing on Nadal's 2008 cake, failing to take the gold - after beating Novak Djokovic and seeing Federer meekly fall out, early - will have an ever so slightly bittersweet flavor.
Then we had that controversy in the extremely tense semifinal that Gonzalez won from James Blake (11-9 in the third, after Blake had three match points with Gonzalez serving at 5-6). Personally, I couldn't tell from the television replays if the ball hit Gonzalez's racket or not, but that point has now entered the Controversy Hall of Fame (curator: Ken Flach). And most people seem to think that ball did indeed glance of the shaft of Gonzo's racket. Blake, who's a good sport and in the second best position to see and more or less "feel" what happened (Gonzo having been in the best position), clearly felt his ball was going to land in - until it was presumably knocked off its trajectory by Gonzo.
The one thing we know about Gonzalez is that he's not a professional liar; a real pro would know enough to simply deny that it hit the racket: What racket? I saw the ball sailing past and thought, 'Great, it's going out! It was the hemming and hawing that crept into his presser - he even went for the absurd Flach defense, which is that it's ultimately the umpire's call - that was troublesome, and suggested that he wanted to win the match badly enough to ignore the customary dictates of conscience.
I'm not going to make excuses for Gonzalez, but in the context of a critically important match, the lapse - if indeed that's what it was - was understandable if not excusable. Maybe it's no coincidence that we just don't see these controversies boil up during second-round matches in Indianapolis. Put yourself in Gonzo's shoes: in the heat of combat, his sense of sportsmanship is short-circuited for a split-second by his desire to win. He's not trying to pull a fast one, but he immediately goes into denial when the circuits blink back to life. Cheat? Me? No way, I'm one of the good guys therefore I couldn't have cheated!
The moment to be a good sport has passed; now Blake is calling out Gonzo (in essence, already questioning his integrity) by turning to the chair umpire. Denial must be Gonzo's natural reaction, as is an innate understanding that feeling guilt, or even humiliated, is not an option under the circumstances. You just naturally want to believe that you aren't sure; that you were "really tired", that it's the umpire's call. All the mechanisms of rationalization kick in and the worst thing is that you just can't back out; psychically, there's just too much at stake in a game as mentally intense as tennis.
I don't know of Gonzalez will have a sleepless night because of the controversy. I tend to doubt it, because top tennis players are a strong-minded lot (although it seems somewhat ironic to characterize the startlingly inconsistent Gonzalez that way), for whom moving on is a way of life. Still, if Gonzo was less than fully truthful - and I'm sure that he knows whether he touched the ball or not a player always knows that - a splinter of something must be lodged in his heart.
Afternoon, everyone. I'm back from vacation and will have some thoughts on today's momentous events a little later - meanwhile, you can keep the discussion of same going right here. It's good to see y'all!
The Olympic Games are on, so let's forget tennis for a moment. How are you all feeling about these winter Games?
I got home last night, all fired up to watch the Olympics, now that that Davis Cup is over . . . . I haven’t seen any of the women’s downhill competition—an awesome event, made that much more intriguing this year by a spate of crashes in training runs—or much of the highly underrated short-track skating (a race with real people skating/skiing/running against each other, rather than a clock, is always superior in my book). And what do I get when I flick on the tube?
Figure skating. Men’s short program.
Call me crazy, but does it strike anyone else that it’s just a little bit weird to watch a bunch of men flitting around on the ice, swanning and swooning, dressed in costumes featuring sequins and fishnets? I mean, am I missing something here? Aren’t you supposed wear a uniform in sports, not a costume? The whole thing looked like a drag show, which is OK, I guess, if that’s what you’re into. But this is supposed to be the Olympic Games, right?
And then one of these skaters gets some NBC face time and starts bashing “Republicans” and babbling about how much he loves being who he is (or some equally confusing New Age garbage), after which he segues into comparing his program to a shot of vodka instead of a snort of coke, or vice versa, I forget which, but it made me wonder—why am I watching and listening to this self-infatuated, arrogant little jerk?
I think they should throw figure skating out of the Olympics. It isn’t really sports, any more than ballet, modern dance—or drag shows—are. This whole thing with costumes is crazy, even when it’s women wearing them. Why should you get jock points because some designer came up with a better looking costume than the next lass—or lad—has? If anything, they should all be forced to wear the same, simple kit, so that people can focus on what is—presumably—the important part: skating proficiency.
For the credibility of sports, they should throw out all the men’s events but still allow pairs (and what’s with this reactionary mixed gender thing; why shouldn’t two men—or two women—be allowed to skate as pairs, if we’re being so progressive?). It’s not like this would kill the “sport” either; you have a flourishing fan base and a huge, official infrastructure that puts on all kinds of skating events, right up to world championships. Tennis wasn’t in the Olympics until relatively recently, right?
But the real problem posed by skating is bigger. The real problem is that the Olympic Games allows sports that are judged by humans, who invariably exercise their subjective, aesthetic preferences. Aren’t you sick of the endless scoring controversies (never mind the outright examples of corruption, horse-trading for scores, logrolling, etc.)?
Subjective scoring goes against the grain of sports, period. The whole idea of sports is to compete against an objective standard; a scoring system that makes you a winner or loser against someone else, or a clock. A part of me would hate to see all the human judgment–based sports go, because I like snowboarding and freestyle skiing, and it would really, really hurt to see boxing have to go.
Call me Judas; I’ll give up boxing if you can get figure skating out of my line of vision.
There’s my Olympics rant, now let’s get back to the tennis, shall we?
I find this bit of control freakery coming out of the IOC (and, apparently, the ATP and WTA are going along, bleating every step of the way!) simply astounding.
Adidas has worked long and hard to make the three-stripe logo a kind of transcendent symbol of athletic performance. They've done a wonderful job of that, without being crass or overly commercial about it.
The three-stripe design is elegant, unobtrusive, and artful. It has survived the test of time beautifully, meaning it's timeless. And like blue jeans, three-stripe Adidas has absolutely transcended class, race and gender. There’s nothing elitist about the three stripes (by contrast, think Ralph Lauren), nor anything self-consciously and pathetically downmarket (think of your local indie filmmaker, with his soul patch and baggy jeans, babbling about some MTV video he just made: “Man, like, it’s so edgy, so . . . street.”)
The three-stripe story is a simple—and rare—one of success meticulously built over decades, utterly earned and well deserved. I'm not even sure I ever saw a television ad for Adidas three-stripe products until two or three years ago, much less remember Adidas unloading the kind of benumbing ad bombardment Nike lauches every 34 minutes or so.
Of course, now the competition is whining and protesting, because their own lame logos and cheesy, desperate-to-please-everyone strategies don’t have enough boost to swoosh them into the rarefied air occupied by Adidas.
Think I'm overstating Adidas preeminence? Just look at how the system has worked in tennis. Adidas historically has found, supported, and signed the most interesting and appealing players on the planet—going all the way back to Ilie Nastase and continuing through Anna Kournikova and Steffi Graf, and Marcelo Rios and Marat Safin.
Often, some other company would then see what a good call Adidas made and, as the player became a star, move in to lure the player away with barrels of cash. Adidas would just shrug, and move on and find another gem among the youngsters and launch the process all over.
The Nike-Adidas comparison is a paricularly interesting one. It seems to me that Nike is IBM, Adidas is Apple; Nike is studio movies, Adidas is indie films; Nike is a luxury sedan, Adidas a sporty convertible. You can’t say Nike without thinking “branding” or “marketing." Say Adidas and you think "sports" or "three stripes."
Of course, we’re not talking sinner vs. saint here. Both Nike and Adidas are corporate entities with the same goal, seeking profits. They just go about it differently. I guess if you wanted to argue it from the opposite perspective you could say that Adidas is stealthier than those ham-fisted Nike folks with their self-consciously hip ad campaigns, and therefore more insidious.
But I don’t think it’s that important. It’s just sports and marketing, after all. Both companies charge way too much for their products anyway.
But banning the three stripes is a silly move that punishes the company that has gone about meeting its commerical aims admirably, without becoming a symbol of commercialization of sports. If anything, Adidas is the role model in sports marketing.
No good deed goes unpunished, I guess.
|
