Three Sports You Missed, a weekly roundup, Vol. 3

An incredible American performance in sliding, The Best Driver In The World*, a cricket hosting catastrophe... and because you asked, a look at upcoming events around the world!

Happy Monday, it’s time for some Sports You Missed.

Read Rodge subscribers will be getting NCAA basketball content in their inbox pretty much every day for the next couple of weeks starting tomorrow. I’m hoping I’ll still be able to hit next week’s Sports You Missed entry on Monday even with some Selection Sunday content I’m planning, but don’t be mad if it gets pushed to Tuesday.

Now on to the Sports You Missed!

Oh Say Can You Slide

Last week sliding sport journalist Ken Childs dropped in to talk to us about the bobsled and skeleton World Championships… and I’ve gotta say, his predictions were spot on. Especially the part about how Team USA was going to kick ass on their home track in Lake Placid! The Americans have already won four medals at the IBSF World Championships, including two golds the team’s best showing since… the last World Championships in Lake Placid all the way back in 2012. And there are still two events left to go!

The most exciting result has to be Kaysha Love’s victory in the women’s monobob. Here’s the video of her last trip down the track, which had the fastest start by any racer in the competition:

In 2023, Love won a world championship bronze medal at the as the push athlete in the back seat of a sled piloted by Kaillie Humphries. Shortly after that, the former UNLV sprinter transitioned to piloting her own sled—and just two years later, she’s already a good enough pilot to beat the best bobsledders in the world. She’s got a lot of career ahead of her, and she’s already hitting her best case scenario.

Team USA now has a good problem: They have three Olympic gold medal contenders in the monobob, and will only get to enter two sleds in Italy next year. Love is the reigning World Champion, but Humphries and Elena Meyers Taylor brought home gold and silver in this event at the Beijing Olympics. (Who else kept their TV tuned to NBC after the 2022 Super Bowl?) Meyers Taylor won bronze this weekend while Humphries was off the podium in eighth.

In skeleton, Team USA hadn’t won a world championship medal since 2013. At these world champs, they won two—a mixed team gold by Austin Florian and Mystique Ro, the first ever gold medal in that event not won by Germany, and an individual silver by Ro, who has the best athlete bio I’ve ever read. (“Has an incredible fascination for hyenas,” among other great sentences.)

The question is whether Team USA’s strong performance means our sliders are just absurdly good on their home track, or that they should be considered medal favorites heading into next year’s Olympics. Of course, if Italy experiences a few minor setbacks building their track, we might not need to worry about that distinction.

Again, thanks to Ken for his incredibly accurate predictions, and for letting me use his pictures in this post. Go follow him on Bluesky or look at his website, Sliding on Ice.

Being a guest is more fun anyway

You’d think that losing to the United States was the low point for Pakistani cricket. But their attempt at hosting the ICC Champions Trophy¹ may have gone even worse. Not only did their most bitter rival end up winning their home tournament, they didn’t even really get to host the event, specifically because their biggest rival performed so well.

The Champions Trophy was supposed to be a big moment for a country which hadn’t hosted a major international tournament since 1996²…. but India’s government decided they didn’t want Indian teams playing in Pakistan. (As you may have heard, the governments of India and Pakistan do not get along.) Normally, if a country says “we’re not sending a team to compete in this international sporting event,” everybody says “ok cool” and carries on. But you can’t really do that with Indian cricket, whose fandom and finances carry the sport globally. India and the ICC arranged a model where all of India’s games would be played in Dubai, where the ICC is headquartered, while the rest of the tournament was held in Pakistan.

Pakistan was understandably upset about this. Pakistan had sent teams to India two years ago for the 2023 Cricket World Cup, and now India was unwilling to do the same. And they spent millions to renovate their stadiums, and were hoping to recoup those expenditures with sold-out India-Pakistan matches.At one point, they offered to let India play all its games in Lahore, close to the border with India. But Pakistan eventually agreed to the hybrid hosting model, under the condition that their teams will get to play at alternate sites during two upcoming tournaments hosted by India, this year’s Women’s World Cup and the 2026 T20 World Cup.

So India set up shop in Dubai. That meant they were acclimate to one venue, and in cricket every pitch is a little bit different. It also meant that all the rest of the teams had to travel around Pakistan (not exactly a small country, BTW!) and fly to Dubai for every matchup with India. India won all their group stage matches to advance to the semis, which were moved to Dubai to accommodate India. They beat Australia in the semis, which meant the final was also moved to Dubai to accommodate India. Their opponent in the championship was New Zealand, which had flown from Pakistan to Dubai to play India in the group stages on March 2nd, then flew back to Pakistan for a semifinal on March 5th, then flew back to Dubai for the final on March 9th. That’s a heck of a lot of advantages for a team which is already the best in the world. India won, and got the white jackets that go to winners of the Champions Trophy. (We should get all the NFL Hall of Famers, ICC Champions Trophy winners, and Masters winners to hang out with their cute colored sports jackets!)

Articles about Pakistan’s hosting experience are legitimately depressing. In the end, Pakistan only got to play one home match in their home tournament: one of their three group stage matchups was rained out, and their matchup with India was moved to Dubai. Without homefield advantage, they lost that game… badly. Of the 12 games in the tournament, five were played in Dubai, more than any of the venues Pakistan renovated to host the tournament, including the big-ticket semifinals or finals. And oh yeah—Pakistan lost every single game they played and had to sit on the sidelines while their biggest rivals won the tournament. Rough deal!

The official greatest driver in the world*

One strange thing about motorsports to me is how they’re half-contests of driving skill, half-competitions to see who can build the fastest and best car. (OK, probably closer to 75 percent competitions to see who can build the fastest and best car, 25 percent contests of driving skill.) Surely, we’d get more interesting racing if we could watch a bunch of racers in perfectly identical cars, but the whole reason motorsports exist is to serve as advertising for various car brands, so that’s never happening… EXCEPT IN THE RACE OF CHAMPIONS, an annual event which puts drivers from all over the world in identical cars to see who can complete a two-lap course the quickest.

This actually allows us to learn which series has the best drivers. Is it NASCAR? IndyCar? Formula O—okay, I’ll save you the suspense. It’s rally car drivers. It’s rally car drivers every time.

French rally legend Sebastian Loeb won his fifth ROC this weekend in Sydney. Loeb swept every one of his best-of-three matchups 2-0, and also helped France win the Nations Cup event. Loeb is the all-time winningest driver in the World Rally Championship, winning nine straight titles before retiring, presumably due to boredom. Now he’s the winningest driver at the ROC, passing fellow rally drivers Didier Auriol and Mattias Ekström, who each had four championships.

Here’s the clinching heat of the championship matchup of the bracket-style competition, where Loeb defeated Australian driver Chaz Mostert in front of a home crowd in the stadium from the 2000 Olympics³.

In fairness, this event doesn’t necessarily get the best drivers in the world. NASCAR and Indycar seasons are underway, and F1 starts next week, so this event didn’t feature any of their active racers, although it did have recent racers from those series like Kurt Busch and Valteri Bottas. But still: You’d think rally drivers, whose chosen field is driving hundreds of miles across mixed terrains, would struggle in a minute-long race on a stadium-sized track decided by milliseconds. Nope! Basically everybody who wins this race is a rally driver.

An American has never won the event, although Team USA did win the Nations Cup in 2002 with Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson. NASCAR just isn’t putting our racers in the best position to win the ROC—we must replace the Daytona 500 with the Cannonball Run to have a chance.

Some sports you won’t miss

I’ve gotten several requests to include a look at upcoming sporting events in this column. I was hesitant to do this for two reasons: One is that I’m generally disorganized and have been putting this together haphazardly each week—I don’t have a master spreadsheet of upcoming events, I just kinda scanned social media and Wikipedia for interesting stories and hoped for the best.

The other reason is that the post is titled “sports you missed.” Letting you know about them will prevent you from missing them! I’ll make my own column useless! But ultimately, I want us all to explore these undercovered, undiscovered sports worlds together. So here you go—maybe future entries will be easier if I actually, for once in my life, do organizing and planning?

IBSF World Championships (skeleton/bobsled): Still ongoing in Lake Placid. Final events in bobsled on March 15th and 16th, and they’ll be streaming on Youtube. 👍👍👍

IHF Emerging Nations Handball Championship: March 11-16th in Hungary. Team USA is playing, and it’s streaming on Youtube. 👍👍👍

World Single Distances Speed Skating Championships: March 13th-16th in Norway. Streaming on Peacock 🦚🦚🦚

World Short Track Speed Skating Championships: March 14th-16th in China. Streaming on Peacock 🦚🦚🦚

NCAA Division I Indoor Track and Field Championships: March 14th-15th in Virginia Beach. Streaming on ESPN Plus 🐭🐭🐭

NCAA All-Division Rifle Championships: March 14th-15th in Lexington, Kentucky. Streaming on NCAA.com 👍👍👍

World Women's Curling Championship: March 16th-23rd in South Korea. Think you’ve gotta pay to watch it 👎👎👎

1. Generously, the purpose of the Champions Trophy is to hold an international cricket event that only features the best teams in the world, while World Cups feature developing teams like the Americans; it’s probably more accurate to say it’s simply an excuse to hold another big-money international cricket event in between the T20 World Cup, the regular Cricket World Cup, and the Test World Championship.

2. (They’d been chosen to host the 2008 Champions Trophy, but that was moved to South Africa over security concerns.)

3. Yeah, they build a little race course in non-racing stadiums for this, it’s pretty sick—the 2017 event was held inside Marlins Park in Miami, in the shadow of the silly home run sculpture.