Monday mash-up: On to San Diego
We've moved on quickly from the footy, but there were plenty of other treats this morning, especially if you're Spanish
Remember when $15 could feed a family of five at the fish ’n’ chip shop, milk was delivered to your gate and a hard-fought test win against England would have generated three or four days’ worth of tightly spun journalistic angles?
They were more innocent times.
The All Blacks beat England by eight points across two hard-fought and at times gripping tests. We’re left with:
Beaudy was great;
The lineout was a mess;
The All Blacks under Robertson are a work in progress.
That’s it. Take your medicine. As the once-mighty NFL coach Bill Belichick, would say: “We’re on to San Diego.”
Maybe it’s for the best, but just who will start in numbers one to 15 is probably the only real point of interest in the Fiji test at this stage.
The other obvious angle is how many people in San Diego really care? A quick cast around the highly regarded San Diego Union-Tribune website turned up no stories.
I did spot this column, however, and in keeping of a hankering for days of yore, it’s a classic of the old-man-shouting-at-clouds genre.
America has become a speed trap.
We have entered the era of athletic tachycardia. The heart cannot have patience with its patients. It must race.
Sports have become all about speed. And Distance. And height.
Maybe we’ve always been a bit like that with All Black rugby. It’s never about the win. It’s always about how and how many.
Learning to move on quickly might be a healthier place to be.
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There was plenty of other rugby to pore over.
The Black Ferns made no contest of their transtasman clash at historic Ballymore, romping home 62-0, with Katelyn Vaha’akolo adding four more tries to her explosive start to international rugby.
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Ireland’s 1-1 series draw in South Africa was meritorious but having sat through the 80 minutes of the visitors’ dramatic 25-24 win, I can’t hand on heart say that rugby is in a better place as a sport because of it.
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The Wallabies started life under Joe Schmidt with a 2-0 series win over a bang-average Wales side and like here, it appears nobody’s breaking out the bunting just yet ($).
Relief was the correct emotion for the Wallabies after a flawed win over Wales on Saturday, although you would have to be fairly hard of heart not to appreciate the smiles back on the players’ faces after the final whistle.
It took three moments of individual brilliance to eke out the victory, with Andrew Kellaway’s superb breakout from close to his own try line the pick of those moments.
However, the Wallabies’ inability to generate momentum from phase play and their trouble in defending the maul are obvious areas in need of sharp improvement.
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Three events in Europe this morning across three vastly different sports, with the winners all demonstrating the sort of mastery that makes sports viewing such a pleasure, even when you’re neutral to the outcome.
Carlos Alcaraz beats Novak Djokovic to win Wimbledon
Alcaraz is just 21 and he has four grand slam titles to his name. It might be facile to mention this so early given how far we are projecting ahead, but might we already have a challenger for Novak Djokovic’s male grand slam record.
We are in the drawn out process of waving goodbye to three of the greatest who ever laced them up in Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Djokovic, who succeeded not just in redefining the idea of what was possible in the four major championships, but also took a bunch of titles off each other. Who knows, in another era Andy Murray, Stan Wawrinka, Marat Safin and Lleyton Hewitt might have been pushing for plus-five slams?
What are the chances of a three-headed beast emerging just one generation later?
Jannik Sinner is just 22 and has already claimed the No 1 ranking, so there’s him, it’s questionable as to how consistently the likes of Alexander Zverez (27, zero slams) and Daniil Medvedev (28, 1 slam) can challenge for the majors.
Alcaraz was asked to predict how many grand slam titles he might win. “I don’t know my limit,” he replied, “but at the end of my career I want to sit at the same table as the big guys. That’s my main goal.”
That’s doing a lot of projecting, however. The beauty of an individual sport is that the next young genius can appear from seemingly nowhere.
From The Times ($):
Djokovic managed to haul himself from the operating theatre in Paris on June 5 to the final at the All England Club on July 14, but beating Alcaraz for a record 25th major singles title was a challenge far beyond anything he had faced here. Before the final he had not taken on a player ranked higher than No15 in the world.
Even on a day when he was feeling fitter, though, Djokovic would probably have struggled to get the better of his 21-year-old opponent. Alcaraz was majestic at times as he romped to a fourth grand-slam title in his fourth final with a 6-2 6-4 7-6 (7-4) victory, overcoming a minor wobble at the end.
Djokovic will have more chances to break free of his fellow grand-slam recordholder Margaret Court, but this was another nod to the transition that men’s tennis is going through.
Alcaraz is the leading light of this new era and has now joined Rod Laver, Bjorn Borg, Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Djokovic as the sixth man in the open era to complete the French Open-Wimbledon double in the same year.
The women’s final might have lacked the apex players, but as a match it had far more drama. Czech Barbora Krejcikova beat Jasmine Paolini, runner-up both here and at Roland Garros, 6-2 2-6 6-4 to win her second grand slam title.
The victory was a fitting tribute for her late coach Jana Novotna (from the BBC).
The memory of Jana Novotna, Wimbledon champion in 1998, has been ever-present during the former French Open champion’s run to this title. When she was aged 18, Krejcikova and her parents visited Novotna’s home and asked for her help.
Novotna agreed, becoming both coach and mentor. She and Krejcikova remained close until Novotna’s death from ovarian cancer in 2017 aged just 49.
“That day, knocking on her door, it changed my life,” Krejcikova said. “She was the one who told me I had the potential and I should definitely turn pro. Before she passed away she told me I can win a Slam.
“I achieved that in Paris in 2021 and it was an unbelievable moment for me and I never really dreamed I would win the same trophy as Jana did in 1998.”
Tadej Pogacar blows away rivals with summit-finish Stage 15 win
The weekend saw Le Tour wind its torturous way through the Pyrenees, with mountain finishes on Pla d’Adet and Plateau de Beille. Stage 14 was relatively short and was expected to suit the more explosive Pogacar, which he duly won, but at 198km long and with a brutally steep finish, Stage 15 was when two-time defending champion Jonas Vingegaard was poised to strike back. With 10km to go on the final climb he attacked and only Pogacar could go with him. With five kilometres left, the Slovenian could sense weakness and powered past Vingegaard to win the stage by more than a minute and extend his lead in the general classification and king of the mountains standings.
The key point the Dane made to reporters on the finish line post stage 15 was that he is certainly not throwing in the towel in his GC battle. On the contrary, Vingegaard felt that he might still yet manage to win the 2024 Tour, for all that he was definitely on the back foot, time-wise, at this point in the race.
“Actually I’m proud of how I rode and how the team rode, the guys rode really strongly and we rode super hard,” Vingegaard said. “On the last climb I was feeling super strong, I think I did one of the best performances of my life. But Tadej was super strong — so I cannot really be disappointed.
“There is still a chance. The Tour de France is still not finished and sometimes in the past two years, Tadej has had a bad day. We have to hope that can still happen.”
At 25, Pogacar is still young and with 14 stage wins, he is nearing a place in the top 10 all time - a list headed by sprinter Mark Cavendish, who has 35.
Bonus cycling (kind of long read): Texas Monthly relives the cultural phenomenon that was the Livestrong bracelet on its 20th anniversary with this excellent oral history.
Scott MacEachern: It was during the [2013] Oprah interview where he admitted cheating that it sunk in for me. All I could do was bow my head and cry.
Kevin Filo: I took my wristband off in 2014, but I wore it every single day for ten solid years. People had started saying, “Why do you still wear that?”— the question being framed as “Lance really isn’t the greatest person to be associating yourself with.” It came up enough times that it was like, “People think I’m this Lance evangelist,” which I’m definitely not. My personal connection couldn’t be conveyed to everyone.
Scott MacEachern: On one end of the scale, the world would have been fine without the Lance Armstrong story. At the other end, the transcendent message of the wristbands and Livestrong was always bigger than one person. How does one live with the positive that endures, now with the knowledge that everything we did to bring this idea to life was built on such deceit?
Chris Brewer: You can say whatever you want about cycling, but nobody fakes beating cancer.
Spain beats England 2-1 to win football’s European Championships
Spain were clearly the best team at this tournament and were clearly the better team in the final. Very rarely did a 1-1 game with five minutes of normal time remaining seem so one-sided, so Mikel Oyarzabal’s late winner should not have felt so crushing for England fans as it might have on other occasions.
Barney Ronay summed up the final in his big-brain kind of way in the Guardian:
And fade to red. The Euro 2024 trophy will not, it turns out, be coming back with the players to England after all. The parade can be scaled back, the beds turned down, the welcome basket stashed. Monday will be a day for hangovers and regrets, which is in its own way English football’s own safe place.
But it is at least headed to a very good home as England’s footballers were eased aside in Berlin’s Olympiastadion by a supremely coherent and gifted Spanish team. A 2-1 victory, the winner coming painfully late, means Spain are now four time winners of Europe’s elite competition.
Whereas for England, well, the wait goes on, perhaps even shifting now into another phase in that ongoing psychodrama of long marches, honourable defeat and almost-but-not-quites. The age of Gareth Southgate, eight years in the making, might just be teetering very close to the edge now.
This was at least an excellent final, a full-throated affair against the team of the tournament. Spain has been the dominant football culture of the last quarter century, a tactical atelier that has fed the universal global coaching style, not least the Premier League’s own age of Guardiola-imprint possession football.
Olympique Daily
I’m currently putting together plans for an Olympique Daily newsletter during the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad. The cunning twist on my newsletter is that it will almost certainly not be daily, despite best efforts. It will have a natural bias towards New Zealand interests and will focus more tightly on sports that I am especially interested in. The specials will be for paying subscribers only, so if this sounds like your kind of bag (or you know somebody that might be interested), now’s the time to upgrade your sub!
In the meantime, here’s the “complex” story of a mountainbiker who is packing her kitbag for Paris, despite the best efforts of her own national sporting organisation who tried to keep her away.
From Radio NZ:
Sammie Maxwell, 22, was on Monday confirmed in the New Zealand team for Paris alongside two-time world champion Sam Gaze. Both will take to the cross country course at Elancourt Hill in less than two weeks - albeit Maxwell's selection is conditional on Maxwell's health needs being adequately supported at the Olympic Games.
The late announcement comes after Maxwell successfully appealed Cycling NZ’s decision not to nominate her for the Paris Games, in an "incredibly complex" case that has been watched closely by sports officials.
Maxwell, who has been open about her battles with disordered eating, had not been put forward for selection for health, rather than performance reasons…
“The past few weeks have been stressful and hectic, but I recognise that everyone involved in the process has a shared goal — to put my health and wellbeing first,” the under-23 world champion said.
Really good newsletter, thanks Dylan. It might not be banner periods for lots of teams and sports but these close matches and shared series and late winners are more enthralling in many ways. (Formula 1 managing the double of having one of the greatest drivers of all time and one of the tightest years in decades).
Not a word on the White Ferns though - says it all really. Stuff and NZ Herald only mention them irregularly too. Time for the axe to fall, hopefully not just amongst the players.
Great write-up. 'Yep - agree' re the All Blacks. In a crowded sports entertainment market, I can't help but feel some of the fan's apparent maliase is due to the continual 'stop/start' (including irritating tactical stops ...) that inflicts rugby union (and this is coming from a staunch NZ rugby fan). Ronay's summary in the Guardian of the Euro '24 final is wonderfully written, and oh so incisive. I've been traveling through Europe the last few weeks and it's been so enjoyable being here during such an massive and captivating tournament.