Super Bowl Weekend is here finally. On Sunday the Oakland Raiders and Tampa Bay Buccaneers will meet in San Diego for the Lombardi Trophy.
Not much in the way of controversy or suspense in their respective conference championship games … although the Buccaneer’s handling of the Philadelphia Eagles was considered an upset.
We’ll have to root for the Raiders at our house. Thanks to Son Two’s interest in Oakland, we get to extend our interest in the sport past the Browns’ season.
It’s not too hard to tell why he, at nearly 14, likes the Raiders. It’s a rebellious age and the Oakland fans are the epitome of football fandom counter culture. Cleveland’s Dog Pound can’t hold a candle to the macabre and outlandish costumes Raiders’ fans wear to sit in The Black Hole.
I wonder what Vince Lombardi or George Halas would think about them.
A little further down the calendar comes one of the top international sports events, one held every two or four years, or whenever the holder of The America’s Cup decides to hold it.
February 15th, the Swiss Yacht, Alinghi will begin a nine race series against New Zealand, which won the Cup four years ago.
Alinghi won the Louis Vuitton Cup, and the right to challenge for the America’s Cup, by beating the U.S. boat Oracle, sponsored by American computer magnate Larry Ellison.
Alinghi’s score was 5-1 over Oracle. It might have gotten a little closer than that, had Oracle not run into the stern of the Swiss yacht in race three and drawn a penalty. Conditions in that race seemed to favor the lighter U.S. boat, but overly
aggressive sailing and the resultant penalty cost the victory and put Alinghi up 3-0. Oracle eventually won the next race but lost the last two in the finals.
Nothing to complain about, Alinghi clearly was the faster boat upwind and not that much slower downwind. Coupled with nearly flawless tactics and execution by Alinghi’s crew and skipper Russell Couts, the Swiss boat was unbeatable.
Gotta love the irony. A landlocked, mountainous nation is represented in the finals of arguably the biggest ocean going sporting event in the world. It is less surprising when you realize that Couts and most of the crew are natives of New Zealand.
I guess it’s logical that Olympic games and presidential elections are held every four years. Both are politically driven.
Now it seems that Marty Mankamyer is being pressured to resign her position at president of the U.S. Olympic Committee. An Associated Press article says that all five vice presidents and two other powerful members of the committee say that she is to blame for infighting in the organization.
According to the article, Mankamyer tried to get CEO Lloyd Ward fired for using his position to try to steer business to a company run by his brother. Sounds like the proper thing for the president of the USOC to do, but the Seven claim that she failed to follow the committee’s ethics procedures.
Mankamyer took over her current position last year after Sandy Baldwin resigned because she had lied about her academic credentials.
The article says that, a couple of weeks ago, the USOC’s executive board accepted a report from the ethics committee that said Ward may have made some technical mistakes but did not commit ethics violations.
After that, three members of the ethics committee, one member of the executive board and a staff member who was the ethics liaison all resigned.
According to the AP article, the USOC has had a dozen CEOs since it was formed by an act of Congress in 1978 and four since 2000. Alaska Senator Ted Stevens reportedly has called the committee leaders to Washington to talk about changes in its structure.
And to think, in Iraq, where one of Saddam Hussein’s sons is chairs their Olympic Committee, they just torture athletes by making them crawl over fresh asphalt.