Bulls & Bears: Encore for Vancouver Olympics sought, not so much for cheating Astros
Credit to Author: Gord Kurenoff| Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2020 22:26:16 +0000
The 10th anniversary of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics has not only triggered a lot of golden, memorable moments from the XXII Games, it has some sport leaders — starting with former host organizing committee CEO John Furlong — advocating for a second kick at the can.
With Italy poised to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Turin 2006 at Milano Cortina 2026, and with capable and desirable Olympic host cities at a premium, don’t rule out the prospects for Vancouver 2030.
The notion of rotating or recycling a select list of host cities and the facilities and infrastructure they spend billions of dollars building — instead of starting from scratch every Olympic cycle — makes more than just economic sense.
As Furlong himself suggests: if done right, it can help redirect money to where it’s really needed, including social priorities such as housing, education and health care. It’s admittedly a romantic notion, but one that could help make the Olympics truly transcend sport.
Meanwhile, the second coming of the XFL is far from a sure, sustainable thing, but it continues to make the case for how strong the appetite for football is in North America.
That’s particularly true in the United States where the NFL and NCAA make football the favourite sport of 37 per cent of Americans, more than the other four major sports combined (basketball 11 per cent, baseball nine per cent, soccer seven per cent and hockey four per cent).
Average audiences of about three million Americans have watched the first two weeks. In St. Louis, which lost its NFL Rams back to Los Angeles four years ago, the XFL Battlehawks scored local ratings of 6.0, twice the 2.1 registered by the defending Stanley Cup champion St. Louis Blues.
Yet no league created more of an impact this week on television and social media than the NBA. And it did so on the strength of the most unlikely of events — its all-star game.
Rarely has an exhibition game of this sort generated the kind of Twitter love that the new format inspired by the tragic death of Kobe Bryant did for the NBA last Sunday. It was not only entertaining, it may have been the most meaningful NBA All-Star Game ever.
TV numbers were up eight per cent year-over-year, with an average national audience of 7.3M viewers on cable television’s TNT. Even more impressive was the 15 per cent spike in ratings for the weekend of celebrity, Rising Stars and skills competitions, including a 19 per cent bump on the pre-game tributes to Bryant.
It has been an awful couple of weeks for Major League Baseball and its commissioner Rob Manfred.
The Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal refuses to go away, even as spring training and pre-season exhibitions get underway in Florida and Arizona.
Houston owner Jim Crane failed to show genuine contrition, trying to downplay the significance of the cheating that will now be forever associated with the 2017 World Series won by the Astros. What’s worse, the widening of player, media and fan outrage over baseball’s worst crisis in 20 years is an entirely self-inflicted wound caused by the commissioner’s inability to contain his own flippant comments.
Dismissing the World Series trophy as a “piece of metal” was not inspired oratory by Manfred and it caused considerable pushback from players, many of whom want their own union brethren subject to more punishment — even retribution.
This will get worse before it gets better for MLB.
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