Running The Point » Uncategorized

Our apologies

Dan Bilicki — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 19:30:18 +0000

Sorry about the delay between posts, folks.

We had some administrative issues which has since been resolved. Now back to our regularly scheduled ramblings.

GSP is no athlete of the year

Dan Bilicki — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 17:22:31 +0000

I have to take serious exception to the Rogers Sportsnet poll that they are running to decide the Canadian athlete of the year. In case you haven’t seen it, here is a link.

Canadian Athlete of the Year

Now, I have no problem with Sidney Crosby making the finals. He scored the gold medal winning goal at the Olympics. He had an outstanding season with the Pittsburgh Penguins and a nice playoff run. And this season, he’s tearing it up yet again.

But Georges St. Pierre? This has to be a joke. Or just an example of how popular that Mixed Martial Arts is getting. Now, I like the UFC as much as any other warm-blooded male but GSP should not have made it this far in the voting.

He’s a fine athlete and one of the best pound-for-pound fighters in the world. He’s the welterweight champion in UFC, the world’s biggest MMA competition. But, he only fought two fights in the past year, is that enough to be named athlete of the year?

He also couldn’t defeat either opponent in the ring and had to take the bouts to the judges’ cards, even though he won those decisions unanimously and handily. Also, Dan Hardy was a weak opponent and GSP had already beaten Josh Koscheck before.

The person that won the Lou Marsh Award for outstanding Canadian athlete and the person who should win every Canadian honour this year is Joey Votto. He remarkably led the Reds to the post-season, finished among the leaders in the three triple crown catergories and won the NL MVP award.

That’s a resume that’s much more deserving than a guy who competed for 50 total minutes this year.

So, sure, give St. Pierre the fighter of the year award — something he truly deserves — but don’t tell me he is the athlete of the year.

Seriously Alberto Contador?

Dan Bilicki — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 14:18:01 +0000

Seriously Alberto Contador? Seriously?

It is finally time to completely give up on cycling forever. For the umpteenth time, the guy who won the Tour de France has failed a doping test.

How many times are we going to be put through this mess? A guy gets caught by the sport’s increasingly improved tests, he makes up a lame excuse, another sample comes back positive and then he blames something else.

That’s pretty much the line that Contador is taking right now. First, he was caught with a small amount of a banned substance in his blood He predictably blamed something stupid: Eating tainted meat. Next, another sample showed that he had high levels of plastic residue in it. That sort of thing would weird, unless you had a blood transfusion, something that Contador also denies.

It is actually quite the clever idea. Transfuse your own blood to work the drugs out. I’m surprised that someone else hasn’t thought of it sooner. In fact, they probably have and were just never caught.

Either way, right or wrong, it’s time to completely ditch cycling. Between the many Lance Armstrong allegations, Floyd Landis and his ridiculous excuses and now this, a three-time Tour winner being sullied, how much more can this sport really take?

It’s time for the Tour de France and all of cycling to take some time off. End this mockery of a once-proud event. Why not at least suspend it for a year to try to regroup and recoup some of the sport’s credibility? It only makes sense to back off, or risk this same hurtful cycle happening again next summer. And then the next summer. And then the next …

RTP goes Up in the Nosebleeds

Dan Bilicki — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 05:13:36 +0000

It took a little while to get it up a running, but it looks like our twin blog, Up in the Nosebleeds, is live.

The address — in case the above link doesn’t work — is:

http://blogs.canoe.ca/nosebleeds/

You can check out our writings there or here. Our entire archives will still — and always — be available here at RTP and not the new site though. Feel free to hop around the site’s other blogs too. You might find something you like.

The longest match ever

Dan Bilicki — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 14:49:29 +0000

After seeing what happened with the Wimbledon final last year between Federer and Roddick and now this year’s epic of Isner-Mahut, maybe it is time for the English club to change their tiebreak rule to the current one.

Seriously, matches that span three days and last 11 hours and five minutes – the fifth set alone lastest longer than the previous record holder for match length – have no place in this game. It was no doubt borderline torture for these two poor players.

6-4, 3-6. 7-6 (7), 7-6 (3), 70-68. That sort of line is just ridiculous. There were 980 points played overall, Mahut won more, 502-478, but couldn’t come through in that one last set. What a player he is. To call him the loser of this match is slap in the face. He and Isner both fought to the very, very elongated end of this marathon and both should be commended.

And predictably, Isner’s next match wasn’t so great. He lost and did so quickly: The first set lasted 15 minutes. He fell 6-0, 6-3, 6-2 to Theimo de Bakker on Friday.