Off Topic Other Sports Thread

Spoiler: Spoiler

this is ot over. It's even too much for inters??

 

It was a exciting race for once. Gutted for Norris, he deserved the win. Max up to second though

 

As the slow cars were at the front the field was bunched up.

The ending robbed norris and it think max actually close the points difference to hamilton which is crazy.

Bottas was absolutely useless. Ends up 5th due to rain from 15th where he was toiling round being told he should get 5th if he'd pushed a bit earlier on. Luckiest driver in f1 imo

 

Russell inevitably sank throughout too. Can't wait to see what he can do in the Mercedes next season, just hope he's not shackled

 

Hamilton is rapidly going to be yesterdays man.

The issue for me is that if someone like Rosberg can finally realise that you have to get nasty to stand up to hamilton then bottas has failed.miserably in that regard.

Mercedes and Wolff seem extremely political and if you dont fight your corner for mechanics and make the calls to suit yourself then you'll find you are their bum boy.

Bottas should have told them many times he is not doing things to help anyone else and to stuff it.

However bottas is also simply not a racer either. Fast but just not a hard racer.

Russell will need to learn early to exert himself and push hamilton aside.

Hamilton will be 37 before next season. A young man should run him into the ground.

 

Quite.

RYDER CUP | ALASDAIR REID
Ryder Cup: Not one fan was thrown out of this drunken hellhole

Alasdair Reid in Wisconsin is baffled as to why officials failed to react to record levels of abuse for Europe team
Alasdair Reid

Sunday September 26 2021, 10.05pm, The Times
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Wisconsin bills itself as “America’s Dairyland”, so it was only to be expected that the galleries at the 43rd Ryder Cup would feature some kind of bovine behaviour. Throw in Milwaukee, the nearest city of any size to Whistling Straits, and a boorish backdrop became even more predictable.

It is not exactly news that American golf fans enjoy a beer and can get a little noisy at times. When that is as far as it goes, then nobody should get too pious about behaviour that offers a welcome counterpoint to the sport’s stuffier, old-world traditions. But it went far, far further here, as fans scraped the barrel — in every sense — with their deepest dive into outright obnoxiousness yet.

Padraig Harrington made a bold but ultimately fruitless effort to win over the galleries when he and his players turned up on the first practice day sporting the “cheesehead” hats made famous by followers of Wisconsin’s Green Bay Packers. With almost no travelling support, Harrington was clearly on a charm offensive to win over the American fans, but it was only partially successful. He turned on the charm; they got more and more offensive.

In fairness, plenty did not. There were many Americans who had no difficulty behaving with decency and politeness, cheering good shots by their own players and maintaining a dignified silence when Europeans hit poor shots. But there were too many others, seemingly dredged from the shallow end of the gene pool, whose braying, booze-fuelled taunts will sour the memory of Whistling Straits for years.

And there is no mileage in the claim that European fans have been just as bad at recent Ryder Cups on their side of the Atlantic. Yes, they have been noisy and, yes, they have given their team lusty support, but the overwhelming majority have come nowhere close to overstepping the mark. In America now too many seem completely unaware that any mark exists.


Nor should comparisons be made with other sports. Of course it is true that violence and hooliganism blight European football, but that, quite literally, is a different ball game. Rory McIlroy expressed it beautifully when he said: “People will make the argument that, well, it happens in every other sport. But I would say that we’re not any other sport and I think golf should hold itself to a higher standard. I mean, the players are certainly held to a higher standard than other sports, so why wouldn’t our fan base be?”

One cameo from the Friday four-balls summed up the atmosphere — which, of course, worsened as the day and the drinks wore on — around the course. As England’s Tommy Fleetwood and Norway’s Viktor Hovland walked towards the 12th green, a puffy-faced and heavily libated spectator, clad head-to-toe in stars and stripes, shouted at Hovland: “Why are you playing with him Viktor? England has left Europe. He’s a f***ing traitor!”

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Course officials had insisted that they were taking a zero-tolerance approach to abuse before the competition started
PA
Quite aside from the sheer offensiveness of it all, it was a spectacular display of ignorance as well as intoxication by a man whose knowledge of geopolitics clearly did not stretch to an understanding that Norway is not a member state of the European Union either.

More striking still was the indifference of tournament officials, for this happened just a few feet from two security guards, who did precisely nothing about it. This despite the clear message that was flashed across giant screens around the course throughout the event: “Any individual or group that verbally abuses, taunts or shouts insults at players, caddies, captains, officials or their families will be immediately removed from the premises.”



As the final day’s singles matches got under way, a PGA official said that not one fan had been ejected for abusive behaviour up to that point (a police officer later confirmed this to me, although he did say that a couple had been chucked out for ticket fraud). It was a staggering admission, as anyone following a match would have witnessed at least a dozen violations on every hole. The alarming reality is that Ryder Cups in America have descended into their drunken hellholes with something close to complicity on the part of those who run them.

Cheeseheads are all very well. Pissheads are a different matter. American exceptionalism, American triumphalism and the post-Trump emboldening of certain sections of American society may all have played a part in creating a particularly nasty atmosphere around Whistling Straits, but if police, officials and security personnel actually did their jobs and propelled a few numbskulls towards the exit gate then the rest might just get the message.

To their immense credit, some US players appealed to the crowds to tone down the abuse of the Europeans. Dustin Johnson, Jordan Spieth and Tony Finau all did so more than once. But the frat-boy antics of Justin Thomas and Daniel Berger when they chugged beers on the 1st tee during the Saturday four-balls and then threw a few cans into the crowd were pathetic, childish and, in the circumstances, an appalling example.

That would be the same Justin Thomas who got a fan thrown out for heckling him at the Honda Classic event three years ago. “He said something like, ‘I hope you hit it in the water, hit it in the water,’ something like that,” Thomas said then. “I felt it was inappropriate, so he had to go home.” Nothing remotely ironic there.

Nobody wants a sanitised Ryder Cup, played in reverential silence. Noise, colour and passion are the essence of the thing, but drunken abuse is not.

America’s commanding victory in this year’s tournament was deserved reward for an outstanding group of players and it is fiendishly difficult to see how Europeans will be able to assemble a cast capable of wresting if from their grasp in Italy in two years. But at least they can be expected to host a tournament where civilised behaviour is the norm.

 

Paris Roubaix is living up to its nickname

 

Its brutal.........fantastic finish.

I see Lizzie Deignan one the first ever womens race

 

yeah after a long lone break away . She looked like she had been dragged thru a muddy ditch by the end though happy about it .

 

any thoughts on the clowns in las vegas?

I hope wilder takes fury's head off personally.

Couldn't belei that Joshua was still on about fury wiht his head beaten off him last week. the arrogance deserves getting knocked out.

 

I hope he batters **** out of the gypo **** too

 

its not worth my money to watch it same as joshua but for me its a raging ego and drug addict verses a ****ing coward.

I'm just sick of hearing about unification bouts and then them all running away from it so for me none are good enough to be in that undisputed category.

 

They didn't run away from it. There was an agreed and signed deal for Fury vs Joshua to happen but...
1) Wilder activated his rematch clause against Fury; and
2) Usyk was mandatory challenger for one of the three belts AJ was carrying, wouldn't have been an unification bout without that belt!

 

oh man they've been at it for 3 years or more.

Be it wilder hiding under his pillow and running scared or Fury acting the cock etc.

IMo its all to drive demand as has rung false and has got dead boring. I am all for Usyk fighting wilder in 3 or 4 years time (if the pattern continues) when finally joshua and fury have been put back in their boxes.

hell i bet if wilder wins saturday there's another rematch clause

 

Wilder was running. He only took the Fury fight because he thought it would be easy considering how long he'd been out of action and the amount of weight he had to lose.

Not saying AJ wasn't avoiding the big fight either, he was being sensible and proving his career at the top. But neither AJ or Fury were running away last time, it was boxing politics.

 

both teams have been talking big and dodging. they took forever to agree a deal then jipped the arabs with the big stadium thing if that ever really existed.

 

None of its happening now anyway. AJ was never going to beat Usyk and won't do any better in the rematch. Fury will destroy Wilder again but he will have to fight someone else to fill a gap (whilst AJ vs Usyk II happens) before we get a unification fight; Fury vs Usyk.

 

I won't be watching it either. I just dislike that Manc twat intensely.

 

Joshua has the reach on usjk soits his own fault he couldn't win that on points.

 

No chance AJ is ever out boxing Uysk