HERE ARE SOME SPORTS YOU MISSED. A post-Olympics roundup

North Korea's youth soccer dynasty, a huge upset in the world of Fancy Cycling, an American call to action in a sport that's kinda like baseball, and more.

A lot of you really seemed to like my daily Olympics coverage on this Substack. Over two weeks, I had about a 60 percent increase in total subscribers and a 150 percent increase in paid subscribers. Pretty good!

Then the Olympics ended, and nobody knows what to do when the Olympics end. (Least of all the Olympians who spent their entire life training for the Olympics and all their dreams come true and then uhhhhh it’s over time to go home and get a job in, like, marketing.) I started writing about college football again, because I love college football. But I’m sure the thousands of you who wanted Olympics stuff are like “why is this email about Army football in my inbox?” Sorry about that.

So here’s the plan: I’m going to keep writing college football stuff every week, and then, once a month, I’m going to send you a roundup of all the best things that happened in the weird world of sports which don’t get enough attention.

The months immediately following an Olympics are pretty dry—like I said, nobody is sure what to do after the Olympics—so we’re just gonna include all of September and all of October and a smidge of November in this one.

The USA Cricket honeymoon is over

Remember a few months ago, when a scrappy squad of American immigrants shocked the world by beating Pakistan in cricket and advancing to the group stages of the T20 Cricket World Cup?

Surely, they built on that performance with a series of wise strategic decisions poised to wake the sleeping American cricket giant and push the team onwards to future success, right? RIGHT?

Alas. USA Cricket has fired head coach Stuart Law, the experienced Australian head coach who took over the team in April and guided them through their surprise performance in the tournament. There’s seemingly no performance-based rationale for the sacking: Not only did they overperform in the T20 World Cup, they’re currently on top of the table in Cricket World Cup League 2, recording recent sweeps over Canada, Namibia, Nepal, and the UAE. (That puts them in solid position to qualify for the 2027 Cricket World Cup, which would be the first major cricket event they’ve ever qualified for without getting an autobid for hosting.)

American cricket journalist Peter Della Penna reports that Law was on the wrong side of a power struggle with captain Monank Patel. Patel got injured celebrating the Pakistan win on the team bus—still unclear exactly what happen but I imagine some sort of elaborate dance move at the exact moment the bus hit a big bump in the road. Law wanted to replace him on the squad with a healthy player, but Patel pushed back and got to stay in the roster despite not being fit to play. Lines were drawn, and after a poor run of post-World Cup performances, Law was out. Patel and other Indian-American teammates reportedly filed a formal discrimination complaint against Law, but it’s unclear what exactly they alleged and USA Cricket didn’t mention the complaint when announcing Law’s departure.

American Cricket will be back on the big stage in four years, when cricket is a part of the 2028 Olympics and we will once again get an automatic bid. They’ve got a few years to overcome their dysfunction and build on their very real success and talent, but it’s hard to be optimistic about an organization that can’t get out of its own way.

Europe’s American football powerhouse

There will be an NFL game in Munich on Sunday–but Germany actually doesn’t need to import American Football. The European League of Football held its championship game in Gelsenkirchen in September in front of 40,000 fans, enough to fill a Bundesliga stadium. The Rhein Fire beat the undefeated Vienna Vikings 51-20 to win their second straight championship:

Over the last two seasons, the Fire are 28-1 including the playoffs, outscoring opponents by 718 points—an average margin of victory of about 24 points. They averaged 39.9 points per game this year—and 11,000 fans per home game. Those are FCS numbers! In Dusseldorf!

How are they doing it? I could do an in-depth analysis of their roster or grind film…. but instead I’m just going to give all the credit to their head coach, Jim Tomsula, best known to Americans for his single year as head coach of the 49ers. I talked to Tomsula a few years ago for an article about football in Germany, and the dude just loves coaching there. He basically told me that the 49ers had to pay out his whole contract when they fired him so now he can spend the rest of his life pursuing passion projects like “building the best football team in all of Germany” which the absolute coolest late-career passion project possible.

I’ll try to write more about the ELF ahead of their 2025 season—I don’t think Americans fully understand how many people across the world already care about our big dumb sport.

The upset of the year came in Figure Biking

Let’s stay in Germany—except this time, not the track cycling world championships, where riders race against each other indoors. The indoor cycling world championships feature two disciplines—artistic cycling, which is essentially figure skating but with bikes, and cycle-ball, which is essentially soccer but with a bicycle.

The last eight men’s world championships had been won by Lukas Kohl. If you want to see what the sport looks like, here’s Kohl’s winning routine at the 2021 world championships. It is nuts. That man is doing the pommel horse but on a moving bicycle.

Germany absolutely dominates artistic cycling. German cyclists had won the last 18 men’s singles titles and 36 of the last 37, as well as eight in a row in the women’s competition and all 38 gold medals ever awarded in the mixed pairs.

But all that dominance came to an end in Bremen, as 22-year old Spaniard Emilio Arellano won the men’s singles world championship. (Sorry, I haven’t been able to find video of his performance.) Arellano snapped Kohl’s eight-year run and became the first non-German to win the title since 2004. Kohl took bronze and blamed himself with a remarkably German explanation: “My usual concentration of 180 percent was down to 170.”

The second-strangest North Korean dynasty

Let’s go from a Spaniard breaking a run of German dominance to somebody breaking up a three-peat for Spain. Last week, North Korea won the U-17 Women’s World Cup in a shootout, beating back-to-back champions Spain:

It was the second World Cup win by a North Korean women’s youth in a month, as the North Koreans swept both of FIFA’s youth women’s World Cups, winning the U-20 World Cup in September in Colombia and the U-17 World Cup last week in the Dominican Republic. Both times, Team USA had a chance to stop them in the semis—and both times North Korea won 1-0. Both American squads were stocked with multiple active NWSL players and developed through the same youth system that produces our World Cup-winning senior teams, but lost to a country which rarely succeeds at the senior level. (Both USYNTs ended up winning bronze after losing to North Korea.)

One key factor to North Korean success was that their best player was able to play in both tournaments. 17-year old Choe Il-Son led all goalscorers in the U-20 tournament with six goals and was awarded the Golden Ball as the best player, then showed up to play against younger competition a month later. She actually only scored two goals against her fellow 17-year olds.

Oddly, this keeps happening. This was North Korea’s second youth sweep, as they also won both the U-20 and U-17 tournaments in 2016. But the senior team hasn’t qualified for the actual World Cup or the Olympics since 2012. Part of that is because of a ban after five players tested positive for PEDs at the 2011 World Cup, with the North Korean federation claiming the players were struck by lightning and recovered by using deer musk gland ointment. It didn’t work, and the program received a lengthy ban.

Here’s a thorough attempt at explaining “the best national team nobody knows” at women’s soccer site The Equalizer.

Team USA must dominate this kinda baseball-adjacent thing

If you’re going to be the international governing body of a sport in 2024, one thing is clear: you MUST invent and formalize a fast-casual version of your sport to appeal to the Olympics. It’s worked for 3x3 basketball, rugby sevens, lacrosse sixes, T20 cricket… it really seems to help if you put a number in the name.

So the World Baseball-Softball Confederation—desperate to get back on the Olympic program after being bumped down to an optional sport—came up with its own thing. Their hastily invented frankensport is called Baseball5, and they just held the second Baseball5 World Cup in Hong Kong. (Number in the name. CHECK.)

You know how the big skills in baseball are “hitting” and “pitching?” Baseball5 asks—what if those things didn’t exist? It’s a version of the sport with no bats or gloves, making it more accessible and sustainable and a few other buzzwords… but also making it Not Baseball, imo. Batters toss the ball to themselves, slap it, then run around the bases. There are no strikeouts, because the sport does not involve a pitcher throwing the ball to a batter, and there are no home runs, because slapping the ball over the fence is actually an out.

It’s supposedly based on the Cuban game “four corners,” a street version of baseball when you can’t find bats or gloves. Sure enough, Cuba is dominant, outscoring opponents by 143 runs in nine games, giving us back-to-back entries about Communist sports powerhouses.

You’re probably wondering how Team USA did. We actually… didn’t send a team, either to the World Cup or the Pan-American qualifying event in Colombia. USA Baseball has made some acknowledgment the sport’s existence through a website which calls Baseball5 “the hip, new partner of America’s Pastime” and a Twitter account which spent several months tweeting “it’s Baseball5 o’clock” daily at 5 p.m. ET to one or fewer likes per day. But they don’t seem interested in putting together a team.

Between this and cricket, American Sports That Are Kinda Like Baseball are clearly struggling due to incompetence from our national governing bodies. We need to take matters into our own hands. Get out there in the streets and start slapping… whatever balls they use in this sport! Remember, no homers. Slap lightly.

More Mondo

Like I said, most Olympic sports have a little lull post-Olympics—once you complete the event you spent your whole life training for, you typically want a typical break. But in track and field, the Diamond League season hypothetically kept going after the Olympics.. These were generally pretty meh events—even the Diamond League final in Brussels, with a larger prize pool than most events, only had a handful of Olympic medalists competing.

But look: you hold a track meet, and Mondo Duplantis is gonna show up to pole vault higher than any person in history. Remember when he set the world record at the Olympics, an entire stadium sticking around long after he’d locked up the gold medal just to see if he could make history? Well, he came back a couple of weeks later and broke that record at a meet in Poland:

It was his third world record of the season and tenth of his career, as he’s pushed the all-time mark up centimeter by centimeter from 6.16 to 6.26. Can’t wait for next season when he hits jumps of 6.27, 6.28, and 6.29 whenever he feels like breaking those records.

Warsaw Drift

In 2019, the FIA (widely despised as the organization that runs Formula 1) launched the Motorsport Games, an event which can essentially be summarized as the Carlympics. In October, the 2024 edition was held in Valencia, with teams from 84 countries competing in 26 car-related events, like karting, rallying, and the Auto Slalom. (Many of those countries seem to have competed primarily in the eSports driving events rather than actually sending cars to Spain, which seems expensive.)

But one event pops off the page: Drifting. Here’s the gold medal match:

It’s a head-to-head event, but contrary to the sport’s depiction in the Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, the sport is judged rather than time-based. And to think I had previously trusted the Fast franchise for its staunch dedication to accuracy and realism…

I guess Tokyo Drift did get one thing right—although the sport was pioneered by Japanese drivers, people from other countries showed up and started winning Poland’s Jakub Prygonski won gold over Norway’s Simon Olsen.

A basketball battle for second

FIBA are the people in charge of international basketball. Their big problem is that people love basketball, but mainly care about events which do not generate money for FIBA, like the NBA. So they have launched a ton of tournaments which they already own, like the Basketball Champions League, an event with the best teams from across Europe. Never mind that a league for the best teams from across Europe, the EuroLeague, already exists and is extremely popular–now there’s one owned by FIBA.

In 2019, they relaunched a tournament called the FIBA Intercontinental Cup, which has existed in some form or another since the 1960s. The tournament supposedly pits champions of the best leagues from around the world. But, like, be real. The NBA is not showing up. NBA players make a lot of money and already play too many games. So the USA has been represented by various other entities in various versions of this tournament. Back in the 1960s, we sent amateur club teams like the Akron Wingfoots. Then we sent college teams. In 1974, the Maryland Terrapins won the tournament over an Italian pro team.

Since the 2019 relaunch, we’ve sent G-League teams. At first, we sent G-League champions, like the Austin Spurs and the Rio Grande Valley Vipers. Last year, we sent G-League Ignite, the league’s NBA-owned developmental team filled with draft prospects—but that team kinda sucked. They went 2-32 in G-League play and the program was disbanded after the season. They finished in fifth place at the Intercontinental Cup, only beating a team from Bahrain.

For the 2024 tournament, the G-League needed a new team, so they invented one. They threw together a G-League All-Star squad called G-League United and sent them to Singapore to play in the ICC. Their mission? According to Juan Toscano-Anderson, who won an NBA title with the Warriors in 2022, they wanted to prove that they’re the best… you know, besides the NBA. “I believe the G League is the second-best league in the world, and we want to show that,” said Toscano-Anderson.

In the group stages, the GLU Guys beat champions from Australia and Argentina. That set up a matchup with Unicaja Malaga, the winner of the FIBA-authorized Basketball Champions League, itself considered a step down from the Euroleague. The Spaniards won, 75-60:

We’re never going to get a legitimate NBA vs. Euroleague showdown—and quite frankly, we know what would happen. The NBA would win. But Toscano-Anderson makes a compelling point: This weird tournament nobody asked for is actually a rare opportunity to compare the talent between America’s minor league and the world. I kinda do wanna know who’s No. 2.

The Clutchest Man Alive Has No Arms

It’s been a while since the Paralympics, which I thoroughly advised you to watch. If you did, you got to see the clutchest performance of the 2024 sports year: Matt Stutzman, the armless archer, winning his first ever Paralympic gold in near-impossible perfection in his last event before retirement.

In the second round, he tied Finnish archer Jere Forsberg and went to a one-arrow shootoff. Forsberg scored a ten—but Stutzman shot a perfect bullseye, within two millimeters (.07 inches!) of the center, and advanced by having the closest shot. In the next round, he won by a single point over Great Britain’s Nathan McQueen. Next, in the semis, he scored 148 out of 150 possible points, bringing up another shootout with China’s He Zihao. He shot a nine… and Stutzman shot a ten to advance to the gold medal match. And in the final, he scored 149 out of 150 possible points, setting a Paralympic record beating China’s Ai Xinliang for gold.

In summary: His path to gold included two shootoffs, a one-point win, and the two highest scores in Paralympic history. This is probably when I should once again mention that most of his opponents have arms and he does not.

Here’s the whole miracle run in one video:

I interviewed Matt in April. His sense of humor and eagerness to talk about how he lives his life shine through:

But he was also eager to mention how Paralympic archers use the same bows, shoot from the same distance, and use the same scoring system as able-bodied archers. (Stutzman has competed in able-bodied events before, but chose to focus on Paralympic qualification for most of his career.) So you can directly compare performances and see that Stutzman’s score in the final rounds would’ve won the 2021 compound archery World Championship, which had a final score of 145-143. And—maybe you’ve forgotten at this point—he has no arms.

Paralympic archery was originally intended to be for athletes with leg impairments, Then Stutzman showed up and said “hey, why not all extremities?” He igured how to shoot a compound bow in a seated position using his feet to steady the bow and his head to pull the bowstring. At 41, that complex task was starting to put a strain on his body. He announced the Paris Paralympics would be his last. Which increases the clutchness ranking of his ridiculously clutch performance 10x or 100x.