Monday, April 30, 2007

Wacky World of Sports

Just like the real world, the world of sports is full of oddities and wackiness.

In Major League Baseball, Minnesota Twins outfielder Torii Hunter was so thankful for the woeful Kansas City Royals' sweep of the Detroit Tigers late last season (which gave the Twins an improbable division title) that he sent them a couple of bottles of Dom Perignon champagnes just recently, to honour a "promise" he made at the time. What started as a joke got Hunter into serious trouble. He was in contravention of the rules regarding gifts given to other teams or players which could have gotten him suspended up to three years.

That's right, it's a THREE-YEAR suspension for sending champagnes to your poor cousins, tax not included.

As Dan Patrick rightly pointed out, the penalty for this innocuous and inadvertent mistake is far more serious that tested positive for banned substances (50 games for first offence, which is about one-third of a season).

Okay, so cheaters can quickly return (and keep cheating) after serving a short suspension and nothing else will happen to them, while genuinely good guys who hand out petty gifts will be condemned in hell.

Good logic.

...

When Salomon Kalou was ready to come on as a second-half substitute for Chelsea against Liverpool in the first leg of the Champions' League semi-final, he put on a jersey and was ready to go.

But there is one problem.

That was not HIS jersey. For the record, his last name is spelled "K-A-L-O-U" and his squad number is "21". A quick check on the jersey shows that the name was spelled "W-R-I-G-H-T-P-H-I-L-L-I-P-S" and has the number "24" on it.

The plan to disguise himself as Shaun Wright-Phillips was spoiled when a team member gave him HIS jersey at the very last second.

Meanwhile, Wright-Phillips also came on as a substitute later on and no, he wasn't wearing Kalou's jersey.

...

When quarterback Brady Quinn started to fall in the NFL Draft over the weekend, all eyes were on the Miami Dolphins to pick him up at the 9th slot.

Voila, despite seriously in need of a top-calibre quarterback, the Dolphins instead selected wide receiver Ted Ginn Jr., a fleet-footed athlete with excellent speed and game-breaking return ability.

Problem was, Ginn was expected to go in the late teens or early 20s', and picking him this high AND neglecting its glaring need in the quarterback position is a doubly-evil sin for the Dolphins.

While some may argue that Ginn is a perfect replacement (or even an upgrade) for the departed Wes Welker, bypassing the chance the pick up a franchise quarterback is one of the stupidest personnel move by an NFL team I have ever seen.

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Email to CBS

This entry is technically not related to sports. However, you may say that it is if you regard running with your backpack and fighting for the best position at the airport ticket counter as physically demanding.

The following is an email I wrote to CBS regarding the latest season of the Amazing Race on 24 April 2007:

"I have been a loyal follower of the Amazing Race for a number of years. I am writing here to give you ONE suggestion to resolve some of the most pressing issues of the race IN ONE GO.

The show has always been amazing and there isn't much to complain about. One of the best moves is changing the final challenge in each season into an "intellectual" one rather than a physically-demanding one, thereby leveling the playing field in the hope that teams who are physically weaker may benefit from it.

Meanwhile, there are controversies and outcry regarding
Danny & Oswald's decision to sell the rights to Yield for money in the latest season. Many people are outraged by their decision, while some call it smart.

The money issue has simply rung a bell in me and there is a good way (I suppose) to tackle these two problems at one go: Why not create a final challenge involving using the remaining money that teams have in their possession? We the backpackers know that we all have to be responsible for our money, and by creating a challenge like this, the playing field will be further leveled and teams who save the most money will benefit greatly from it. Meanwhile, teams will have to be REALLY responsible for the money they have, and we will no longer see teams spending their (it's not even their own money!) money for unworthy causes, such as buying old newspaper to finish a roadblock, and buying "immunity" from being yielded.

I hope that my below-standard English will not hinder your appreciation and understanding of my suggestion."


Now let's just hope that they won't think that I'm totally insane, or regard me as yet another nameless Joe complaining and ranting about non-sense.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Maximillian Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche is famous for saying "God is dead" (and a hell lot of other things, about which I am too ignorant to have completely no idea whatsoever). Now it's Maximillian's turn to say something similarly memorable (or so I think).

Formula One is dead.

Sunday's Malaysian Grand Prix was a mere procession, without any significant overtaking or scraps at all. In fact, all the meaningful action took place in the very first CORNER, where Lewis Hamilton managed the wrestle second place away from pole-sitter Felipe Massa, allowing his teammate Fernando Alonso to build a comfortable lead which he only relinquished during the pitstop.

Other than that, you have to count Massa's ambitious dive inside Hamilton a couple of laps later, which made him run wide and cost him two places from third to fifth.

And that was pretty much about it.

Anytime a car race turns into a mere procession, where cars follow one another like train compartments, is just not right. Sadly, this has become the norm in both races in Formula One this year.

In the first race in Australia, where history says that there would be a couple of safety car periods which would bunch the cars up together, there was none. Zilch. No safety car period, no bunching up. Cars just circled the track one by one and the only meaningful action, for Christ's sake, took place in the very first CORNER again, where Hamilton made a great move from fifth to third. And two weeks later in Malaysia, déjà vu, and once again it was Hamilton in the limelight.

Perhaps Sepang is just a bad race track which, from the first time it held a Formula One race in 1999, has never provided any race which came close to being called "good", not to say "great".

But the truth is, Herman Tilke, the lucky guy who was tasked to build the Sepang circuit, is also the designer for lots of other new circuits, like Sakhir in Bahrain and the one in Shanghai. (To be fair, his Istanbul track is one of the best IMHO.)

But what about the cars?

I am not a technical guy, but it's fair enough to say Ferrari and McLaren are the ones to beat, and their domination so far suggests that no one else can catch them. That's why you can expect that barring any technical problem, the top four places of the starting grid to be filled by these two marquees in the remaining races this season. And once the race starts, these four cars will be gone sooner than you expected.

I always say that 1982 is the best season ever in Formula One (or perhaps in racing of any kind). It's a season full of surprises and the unreliability in car performance made it virtually impossible to predict the result of each race.

My only hope is that the 2007 season will develop into something truly interesting as it goes on. Remember, the first two races in 1982 were won by Alain Prost in a Renault, who at that point was looking like to be the dominating force that season. But he would go on to score just 16 more points in the remaining 14 races.

That's amazing, isn't it?

But would that happen again this year? Sadly, I don't think so.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

A Real Champion

When you talk about famous athletes in Hong Kong, windsurfing diva Lee Lai-shan would most definitely be at the very top of a lot of people's mind. She is the first Hong Kong athlete (which looks and sounds like an oxymoron, just like the phrase "Swiss Navy") to be crowned World Champion and has won all sorts of accolades in international competitions.

And she is also the culprit for discouraging lots of people from becoming parents in Hong Kong when she said in a frighteningly scary TV commercial for an international bank that "it takes $4 million to raise a kid".

After Lee, most people in Hong Kong would name "King Fu" Marco Fu as the second most famous athlete in Hong Kong, for his wonderful exploits in the Caucasian-dominated world of snooker, the highlight of which was his victory in the Premier League Snooker in 2003, and his amazing run into the final four in last year's World Snooker Championship.

Then there is the underrated cyclist Wong Kam-po, in my money the best athlete Hong Kong has produced in many years. After winning all sorts of major trophies in Asian competitions, including winning the gold medal in the road cycling race at the Asian Games in 1998 and 2006, Wong, at the ripe old age of 34, finally became a World Champion when he surprisingly won the 15km scratch race at the World Cycling Championship in Spain recently.

Compared with Lee's international success, Wong's victory is a complete shocker. While windsurfing is a finesse sport which requires more skills than strength and stamina, cycling is an endurance sports which has always been dominated by the physically-stronger Caucasians. While diminutive cyclists from South America (especially Colombia) have snatched major victories from time to time, they have nonetheless benefited greatly by the high altitude on which they train.

Wong though, never enjoys similar benefits since he dropped out of school at the age of 16 and started training full-time. Since his victories have started piling up, he has been attracting attention from top professional teams (like Selle Italia) and was offered the chance to race in some of the most prestigious races as a professional rider. But he turned them down and stay in Hong Kong, to help developing young and promising local riders.

And when he entered the World Championship, he had no intention of racing in the scratch race. Yet he changed his mind at the very last minute and somehow outwitted all his rivals and broke clear in the final laps for an unlikely and improbable victory.

His reward is the much coveted rainbow jersey (which has nothing to do with homosexuality) which he can put on in scratch races this year, and a lukewarm welcome by a small crowd at the Hong Kong International Airport.

That is not what we call a hero's welcome, but I am sure Ah Po won't mind a bit. If he ever does, he would have stopped cycling years ago, and not many people would have noticed. Instead, he stuck at it and finally has won some sorts of international recognition he truly deserves.

Monday, April 02, 2007

Hiding Kovalainen

There have not been such highly-anticipated Formula One debuts in a long time. Of course there are newcomers in Formula One every year, but we seldom have rookie drivers driving for contending teams. The last time a rookie driver for a top team who had generated so much buzz before the season even began was in 2001 when Colombian Juan Pablo Montoya joined the Williams team.

Yet Montoya was a rookie by definition only. When he made his Formula One debut, he was already a proven veteran in other racing series, most notably winning the CART (now Champ Car) series in the USA in 1999 and the famous Indianapolis 500 race in 2000.

This year, we have not one, but two "true" rookies, Lewis Hamilton and Heikki Kovalainen, driving for the McLaren Mercedes and Renault teams respectively, two of the elite teams. While Hamilton shined in the first race in Australia, Kovalainen had a nightmarish race and a weekend to forget.

For Kovalainen, things started to go wrong during pre-season testing at Bahrain, when he had a heavy shunt in one of the fastest corners and seriously damaged the brand new Renault R27. Kovalainen was lucky to escape serious injury, but the damage sustained by the new car meant that the team has lost significant time in setting up their cars for the upcoming races.

When the team arrived in Melbourne, Kovalainen suffered another setback, when hydraulic problems cost him valuable time on a track which he has never raced before. And despite setting some impressive times during free practice, he could only qualify 13th for the race.

And just when things finally seem to go right for him, when he climbed to the final point-scoring position in eighth late in the race, he went wide on the first corner (which was caught on live TV as the director happened to switch to his on-board camera just seconds before he went off the track, a midas touch indeed), allowing the feisty Felipe Massa to go through. Understandably, his disappointing performance was panned by his team boss, Flavio Briatore, as being "rubbish".

To his credit, Kovalainen acknowledged and accepted the criticism and vowed to fight back in the coming rounds. And I personally want him to appear in the podium at the expense of his fellow Finn, Kimi Raikkonen.

That's because Kovalainen is by far the more articulate and interesting interviewee of the two, and his presence would make the post-race interview far more entertaining. And those who believe that fans will be interested in listening to Kimi's mumbles after watching an hour-long procession without any overtaking have clearly lost their minds.