4 Sports Things You Missed while I was covering the cricket

featuring AN EXTREMELY TALL BASKETBALL PLAYER, a poor American performance in American football, and an unfortunate fall

Last week I said I was planning on getting up four posts, unless something ridiculous happened, like Vogue sending me to the Team USA swimming trials. Well, close enough: GQ sent me to Barbados to cover USA Cricket playing in the Super 8s of the T20 World Cup. I said yes immediately, ignoring my obligations everybody paying for my Substack. Sorry, guys—I hope you understand. It was an incredibly cool experience, and that article should be going up any minute now—I’ll link over when it’s pubbed.

I missed a lot of sports while I was out watching cricket, interviewing cricket stars, and lounging around drinking beer. But I think I’m caught up now, and wanted to get you caught up too.

I thought this was AMERICAn football!

I’d say my #1 field of expertise is International American football. I covered the 2015 World Championships… and they haven’t held another World Championships, because it’s extremely expensive and impractical to host 50-man teams from around the world for a two-week tournament when only 2-3 countries can feasibly field teams.

But they have continued hosting the World Junior Championships for players 20 and younger. This year’s edition is in Edmonton—they relined the Elks’ stadium so the field is only 100 yards instead of 110—and the event has led to two headline-making performances.

The first was surprising because of how much the winners dominated. Canada played Brazil in the first round and won 110-0—or, according to the broadcast scorebug incapable of displaying triple digits, 10-0.

I can’t find full stats from the game anywhere, but reports indicate the Canadians had 383 rushing yards and Brazil had 17. It goes like this every time. In 2016, Australia beat Canada 74-0 and 72-0 in two separate games. In 2014, the hosting Kuwaiti roster lost their four games against Canada, Austria, France, and Germany by a combined score of 308-0. At the 2015 World Championships, I wrote a story about Team USA beating France 82-0 that went mildly viral, and then the next day I interviewed all the French players, who were bummed that people were making fun of them for losing 82-0, but luckily didn’t seem to realize that I was partially responsible, and I’ve felt bad about it to this day. I think this is the first time a single game got into triple digits.

The second headline result had to do with who won. Japan beat Team USA 41-20, and it honestly wasn’t that close. Japan was up 27-0 with some breakaway runs before slowing the game down late.

But this actually happens regularly. Team USA lost 33-9 to Mexico at the 2018 version of this event, and 24-6 to Canada two years earlier. Canada has won back-to-back championships at this event and apparently is so invested in competing in this event that they actually fielded two teams. (”Canada 2” beat Brazil by a much more competitive scoreline of 56-7.) Not to do the “this is their Super Bowl” thing, but… this is the most prestigious event players from some foreign nations get to play in, while Team USA rarely puts together a roster with elite talent. If you were a Division I coach, are you letting your prized recruit play in an international tournament a month before they report for camp?

The tournament isn’t over. The championship game will be between Canada and Japan, but Team USA still has the bronze medal match with Austria. Come on boys—hang 100 on em!

Don’t Trip

In most sports, the American Olympic team is decided by trials, which is generally the fairest way to do things—but, on occasion, tremendously unfair. It’s fair because it ensures that those precious Paris spots are decided by merit rather than politics. If you want to be the best, you get to prove you’re the best. It’s unfair, though, because it puts everything onto a single moment. Sometimes an athlete suffers an injury which would’ve healed by the Olympics, or false starts, or simply has a bad day—and there’s nothing anybody can do about it.

It doesn’t get much crueler than what happened to Athing Mu, who has projected as the greatest middle-distance runner in American history since winning Olympic gold in Tokyo in the 800 meters just 18 years old. Mu went onto win the world champs in 2022 and after dabbling with the 1500, set the American record in the 800 last September. She had the fastest time in the world in the 800 in 2023… and 2022… and 2021. If they wanted to pick the best American athlete in the event, they didn’t even really need to run the race at trials.

But they did, and it all went wrong. Mu’s heel caught a leg before she was able to break away from the pack. She fell and finished in last place by 20 seconds, ending her Olympic dreams.

Jonathan Gault of LetsRun.com noted that tripping has been Mu’s “personal nightmare” during her career, and that she takes unnecessarily long turns while in the lead because she believes it makes her less likely to trip—after all, she’s so much better than the competition that it’s essentially the only way she can lose. But it happened in trials, making Team USA significantly less likely to win gold in Paris—the winner, Nia Akins, has the fourth-best time in the world this year, almost two seconds slower than world leader Keely Hodgkinson.

Olympians dedicate years to maximizing their capabilities, and their successes at Olympic games go on to define their careers. How can we base such a massive, life-changing decision on a single moment? But then you remember: that’s literally how the Olympics work.

Giant Alert!

My #2 field of expertise behind international American football is Extremely Large Basketball Players. I can’t stop writing articles or making videos about them. (Gonna have some more YouTube heat coming soon. Not about tall basketball players, but still, it would make me personally happy if you subscribe!) There’s something fascinating to me about becoming a basketball player almost against your will—because every single person you meets says “do you play basketball?”, and you need to pay the bills for your large shoes and clothing and beds.

Well, good news: We got another one. 7-foot-3 17-year-old Zhang Ziyu has turned the Asian U18 championships into a farcical display of dominance. They’re still in the group stages, but Zhang is averaging 33 points per game on 90 percent shooting.

Against Japan, she set a tournament record with 44 points on 20-for-22 shooting. (And she rebounded her two misses.) Her teammates are lobbing her some of the most half-assed entry passes of all time and, yeah, that’s probably. the correct strategy. Japan’s centers were 5-foot-10 and 5-foot-11, so that’s the equivalent of J.J. Barea guarding Wemby. And that was their best option. Even triple-teams weren’t going to work.

Ziyu would already be the tallest WNBA player ever—the only 7-footer in league history is the late Margo Dydek, by far the league’s all-time leader in blocks. Ziyu is at least three years away from the WNBA, which requires international players be at least 20 years old before entering the league.

It’s hard to imagine Team USA losing a women’s basketball competition in the near future, but China finished second at the 2022 world champs behind the performance of 6-foot-10 Han Xu—who deserved more minutes when she was on the Liberty, not that I’m bitter about it or anything. And now they have someone even taller. At the very least, the statlines will be fun.

Swim-off! Swim-off!

Swim races come down to hundredths of a second, but sometimes that’s not enough. When there’s a tie for a medal spot at the Olympics, the IOC will simply give out two medals. But when there are ties to see who advances to a final, there will often be one-on-one swim-offs to break ties.

There were a ton of them at the USA swimming trials in Indianapolis. In the 50 meter freestyle, Adam Chaney and Jonny Kulow had identical semifinal times for the 8th and last slot in the final. So they had a swim-off… and tied again, an impossibly rare double tie. Chaney won the second swim, although he was unable to secure an Olympic spot in the final—presumably, he was tired.

But the true drama came when Erika Connolly and Katie DeLoof both finished the 100m freestyle in 53.86 seconds. That was only good for a tie for sixth place—but Team USA takes six swimmers to be part of the 4x100 freestyle team, to help lessen the load on potential 100m medalists, who already have to swim in multiple individual and relay preliminaries. So Connolly and DeLoof—good friends and former roommates—went head to head for an Olympic spot, believed to be the first time there had ever been a swim-off for an Olympic spot.

Connolly won and will likely win a medal with the 4x100 team. DeLoof didn’t and won’t.

I’m not sure I can go back to watching regular swimming now. Why are we putting 8 people in the pool to find the best 3 swimmers when we should be having a NCAA Tournament-style single-elimination swim tournament? Just figure it out, guys!