Category: Sports

So Get A Replacement

Marketing / Advertising, Sports

Seems like Britishland’s little darling has been having problems:

Emma Raducan, 21, shot to fame after winning the US Open in 2021 as an 18-year-old. She had been handed a £125,000 911 Carrera GTS Cabriolet under a lucrative sponsorship with the luxury motor brand which began in 2022.

However, what sponsors giveth, they may also taketh away:

However, last month Raducanu saw her pride and joy taken from her after the company “took it back”.  One of her associates is quoted by the Daily Mail as saying: “Emma no longer has a Porsche.  They took it back. It used to have pride of place at her home.”

Porsche has a history of suddenly pulling the plug on sponsorship deals they do not feel are value for money, including when athletes are not meeting expectations.

…and our little girl has won pretty much nada  since her US Open victory, so perhaps it was unsurprising.

Anyway, she had a two-word comment of joy the other day, because apparently Porsche gave her another one (I suppose because they didn’t want to look like the heartless bastards they are).

Had I been a well-paid tennis star going through a bad patch, I know what my two-word response would have been after the snatchback:  “Hello, Ferrari.”

Along with several more words, few of them printable in a newspaper, and not very complimentary towards Porsche either.

But that’s just me.

Afterthought:  Of course, Emma could always have gone with Mercedes, judging by their own recent losing record in Formula One… kindred spirits, so to speak. [/snark]

No Excuse?

Sports

Here’s a little bit of silliness from Formula 1, from Lewis Hamilton:

Lewis Hamilton has called for a Formula One race to be held in Africa, claiming that there is “no excuse” for the sport not to return to the continent.

There has not been a Grand Prix in Africa since the 1993 South African GP, with Hamilton insisting that it is time for a comeback.

Asked if it was the right time for the F1 to return to Africa, Hamilton replied: “100 per cent. We can’t be adding races in other locations and continue to ignore Africa, which the rest of the world just takes from.

“No one gives anything to Africa. There’s a huge amount of work that needs to be done there. I think a lot of the world that haven’t been there don’t realise how beautiful the place is, how vast it is.

“I think having a grand prix there, it would really be able to highlight just how great the place is and bring in tourism and all sorts of things. Why are we not on that continent? And the current excuse is that there’s not a track that’s ready, but there is at least one track that’s ready there.

“In the short term, we should just get on that track and have that part of the calendar and then work on building out something moving forward.”

…because “equity”, you see.

Actually, I can see several reasons (not “excuses”) for Africa to be ignored by F1.

The only country capable of staging a Grand Prix is South Africa, with its Kyalami circuit north of Johannesburg.  I invite Lewis to visit the place — but without any kind of security (no bodyguards etc.).

If Kyalami were off the table, then Cape Town could probably build a street circuit (it’s been mooted before), as they did with the Formula E race last year.

But Formula E isn’t Formula 1, and it should be noted that Cape Town is Eco-Green Loony Central (which would no doubt please Hamilton).  The arrival of all those smelly, Gaia-destroying F1 cars is unlikely to find much support there.

Elsewhere in Africa, forget about it.  Unless Liberty Media were to undertake to build a new track in, oh, Kenya — the only African city outside South Africa with a halfway-decent airport — and build in all the infrastructure (electricity, water, roads etc.) to support it, it would never happen.

Even if they did — and they won’t — it would take years before the project would be completed.  With current trends, F1 will be racing wind-powered cars before that happens.

Don’t even think about any of the countries north of the Sahara either, because the infrastructure issues would be even worse than in South Africa, with the added flavor of radical Islam to spice things up.

Like all DEI dreams, the idea of a Grand Prix race in Africa sucks, for practical reasons.  But of course, when it comes to DEI, that nasty reality has no place — and Lewis Hamilton is no different from any other dreamer.

For Pity’s Sake

Sports

Aaaaaargh apparently “our” Dallas Mavericks are taking on Boston’s Celtics in the annual championship netball game tonight.

This means that for the next ten days or so the only thing that I’ll hear, on any media channel, will be basketballbasketballbasketballbasketballbasketball, which interests me less than stories of Kim Kardashian’s ingrown toenail.

It’s not the games per se  that bore me to tears (although why anyone bothers to watch the first three quarters of any pro basketball game is beyond me).   No, what drives me into an absolute coma is the endless commentary both before and after, mostly by pundits whose last basketball game was with their teenage sons in the driveway.

Charles Barkley?  Larry Bird?  Magic?  Michael Jordan?  Them, I’ll listen to… perhaps.  But when the talk becomes something along the lines of “when he drives to the paint for a layup” is when I reach for the on/off switch and/or the Southern Comfort.

And oy… try finding a bar around here which won’t have the pre-game prognostications, the game highlights, the post-game blather, all at earsplitting volume… as Doc Russia so often says:

“The game itself:  fine.  People talking about the game:  ugh.”

I don’t even do that shit when it’s a sport I love — cricket, football, F1, women’s professional nude gymnastics* etc. — and when it’s stupid basketball or Australian underwater wrist-wrestling…

Pass.

*Okay there’s no such sport, but there should be.

See Ya

Corporate Fuckery, Sports

Looks as though Sports Illustrated has decided to cut the fat:

No, not that fat.  This fat:

The owner of Sports Illustrated has ended the employment of the publication’s entire staff, leaving the very existence of the nearly 70-year-old magazine in doubt.

Then follows a while bunch of publishing industry gobbledegook (good luck trying to understand this nonsense — it reads like the article’s author didn’t understand it either):

The licensing group that owns the sports mag has terminated its agreement with The Arena Group to continue publishing the magazine three weeks after Arena missed a $2.8 million payment, a deficit that breached the magazine’s licensing deal, according to Front Office Sports.

Authentic bought SI out from Meredith in 2019 for $10 million. If it continues publishing, the magazine will turn 70 years old this August.

An email announcing the decision says in part, “We were notified by Authentic Brands Group (ABG) that the license under which the Arena Group operates the Sports Illustrated (SI) brand and SI-related properties had been officially revoked by ABG.”

Got all that?  There will be a test.  Not that it matters, because here’s the crux of it:

“As a result of this license revocation, we will be laying off staff that work on the SI brand.”

Crap magazine, terrible writing, stupid stories, and let’s not forget the idiotic decision to put fatties in the Swimsuit Issue instead of hotties like oh, Leryn Franco.  Ergo, from this:

…to this:

“Oh noes… why did people stop buying our magazine?  They must all be Christianist Trumpists!”  or some such twaddle.

SI  never recovered from the loss of writers like Pete King, Frank DeFord and Rick Telander, to name just some.  And the arrival of Internet reportage shot them in the gut, just as what happened to many print magazines in other industries.

Won’t be missed.  Mediocrity and crap hardly ever is.