A great rinkside seat for Patrick Chan’s winning weekend skate at the Canadian Championships. Check out the quad he pulls off at the 1 min mark. Seems like after a couple of years of disappointing results at the big competitions, Chan is now hitting his stride as the best male figure skater in the world.
More super skating vids from Hasan Abdessamad here.
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It was a sad end to his career when the Sandusky scandal went down. On the surface legendary Joe Paterno did not come out of the initial allegations looking very good. He admitted that he could have done more. I do believe in allowing for innocence before proof of guilt and so I think that today – on his death from lung cancer – it is appropriate to still celebrate one of the greatest coaches of all time.
What I love about the Paterno story the most was that he was an English lit grad who was able to create one of the greatest sports organizations ever. No need for a degree in Sports Science, Joe Pa was all about human science and fully understood what human experience and therefore sports experience is about. Check out what he wrote in a piece for the New York Times in 1989:
“A hard-fought, well-fought, hairline-close game is as classical in sports as tragedy in theater. A tragedy usually ends with the stage strewn with bodies from both sides of a struggle, and you can’t tell who won and who lost. Victory is contained within defeat, and defeat is contained within victory. That’s the way it is in the best of games. What counts in sports is not the victory but the magnificence of the struggle.”
The magnificence of the struggle.
Bigger than touchdowns and wins and bowl games and trophies?
Something for all players to consider.
We all want to win. We all try to win. But we all can’t win.
And so is there something more? Something more to savour?
The magnificence of the struggle?
In an age where money and media set a very low bar for the playing experience – I say it’s not a bad way to go.
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Today the world loses a true champ in every sense of the world. Skiing and women’s sports were changed forever by Sarah. Our thoughts are with her family and friends.
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Ryan Cassidy is a New Brunswick native running for the University of Victoria.
Cassidy: "Yves who?"
Cassidy won the Junior division of the Canadian Cross-Country Championships last month on a rain-soaked morass of a course in Vancouver’s Jericho Park. (Rain? Fall? Vancouver? Huh?) He finished the 8K in 26:20 – just one second ahead of Ottawa’s seemingly unbeatable Yves Sikubwabo and another second ahead of Rob Denault, another great young Ontario runner currently competing for Villanova.
With these three continuing to perform brilliantly, and others like Xavier King and Connor Darlington in the mix, Canada’s future in distance running is brighter than it’s been in ages.
Can’t wait for track season.
Cassidy (R) leads Sikubwabo (L) and Denault through the mud on his way to a huge win
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Joe Frazier has died today from liver cancer at 67.
The boxer known as “Smokin’ Joe,” and who was Muhammad Ali’s greatest rival, was for a time the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world – a title he won in 1971 by destroying Ali at Madison Square Garden in “the fight of the century.” Ali won the title back in 1975 in Manila, in another of the most famous bouts in boxing history.
As the clip shows, Joe was a force of nature – huge, fierce, powerful, relentless.
Whatever you think of boxing and combat sports generally, and however boxing has been eclipsed – the victim of its own internal squabbles and the rise of the more elemental and extreme MMA/UFC – fighters like Frazier were larger than life in their day. They carried on the tradition – celebrated by macho novelists like Hemingway and Mailer – of man as metaphor. The names are magic, even now: Rocky Marciano, Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Jack Dempsey. In the early 1970s, at the height of Frazier’s fame, he, Ali, and George Foreman were superstars, in a way not even Georges St. Pierre is now. That run of boxing stardom ended with Mike Tyson, and it won’t be back.
Neither will Frazier. Ali is a shell, George Foreman peddles grills and god, and another icon from the generation past is gone.
RIP Joe Frazier.
Frazier v Ali, 1971
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Ontario high-school X-C runners got a great day November 5 for the provincial championship. As expected, there were some fantastic performances. For full race results, check the OFSAA page at runnerspace.com.
One especially notable result is the win by BP’s fave young Canadian runner, Yves Sikubwabo of Ottawa. Yves won the Senior Boys’ race for the second straight year – but this time his 7 km time of 22 min 25 sec was a full 25 seconds ahead of Xavier King, the second-place finisher and another very fine runner. Repeating as champ is even tougher than winning the first time, as any successful competitor knows; but Yves’ average pace of 3:07 per kilometer over the 7k must have been impossible to live with unless you were riding in the pace car. A victory that decisive is rare.
Rare, yes… but Midget Girls’ champ, MacKenzie Lemieux of Toronto, won her race by an even bigger margin – an amazing 37 seconds in a 4km race. We’ll be watching for more great things from MacKenzie as she continues her high-school running career.
Congrats to everyone who competed. Cross-country is a tough sport like no other tough sport – the training is days, weeks, & months of hard work, and the races get you nervous like nothing else. Any Ontario runner who even qualified to go to Ottawa is something special, and Best Player salutes you.
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