A lot of talk has been made in the wake of Japan beating the juggernaut U.S. softball team for the gold medal and whether the U.S. loss is actually a good thing for the sport of softball, since it was recently voted out of future Olympic competition due to U.S. dominance in the sport.
"Maybe people will get off our backs and realize that there is some parity in this game," U.S. coach Mike Candrea said after the loss. "I've always felt that the rest of the world is getting better.
I'm sorry, but when did a single loss equal parity?
This summer in Beijing, the U.S. team didn't lose a game until the finals and soundly beat Japan 7-0 and 4-1 before its gold medal game loss. Even with their slim defeat (by a score of 3-1), the U.S. still outscored Japan by a total of 12-4 over the course of those three games. Whats more, the U.S. softball team had beaten its competition by a staggering margin of 108-3 in the past two Olympics. No matter how you slice it, that's utter and complete domination.
So could the U.S. stumble in the gold medal game really save Olympic softball? I hardly think so, unless of course this loss is the beginning of a trend that demonstrates an actual narrowing of the gap between the U.S. and softball teams worldwide. Until that happens, there's no legitimacy to the claim that parity exists in international softball, and little reason to continue the sport in Olympic play.
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3 comments:
I agree that 1 loss is hardly parity, but think of what the Dream Team did in 1992 and how quickly the rest of the world caught up. I just looked up the stats: the closest game they played was the gold medal game which they won 117-85. It would have seemed unthinkable in 1992 that the US would not win the gold medal in 2004. But of course, there was a bit more marketing of basketball globally from 1992-2004 than I expect there to be for softball in the next 12 years.
The Chinese women have won every springboard diving gold medal since 1988. Why not take it out of the Olympics? There's clearly no competition!
Yeah, I had the the original Dream Team in the back of my mind when I was writing that last post, but it's tricky to compare them with the U.S. softball, for reasons you noted.
I'd like to see softball in the Olympics (it was voted out by the narrowist possible margins, if I'm correct), but we can't have endless sports represented at the Games, so if softball has to go for a while, I can live with that.
My question: where's cricket? I guess the Olympics would need to last months for that to happen!
The lack of cricket is a very good point. I would argue that it's no worse than the third most played sport in the world. Definitely behind soccer and maybe behind basketball. There are certainly powers, but there is a good bit of parity and turnover at least from decade to decade among who those teams are. And matches don't have to go on for days. In the cricket world cup (which was most recently in 2007) the matches are limited to one day and only take 4-6 hours (or less if it's a blowout). There's no reason they couldn't have a 12 team tournament like basketball, soccer, etc... with games every other day for 2 weeks. That's basically what the world cup is anyway.
I played fantasy cricket during the last world cup with a friend from India and a friend from Australia/South Africa. Despite not even knowing the rules at the start of the tournament, I really got into it and ended up following the games in real time online. If you like baseball type statistics, cricket has it in spades. For the record, I won our fantasy league :)
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