PARIS—Bonne année, mes amis!

No, that’s not a typo in the title of this post (unless I ended up spelling playoff “pleighophe” – whoops, good thing I just checked it!). I’m retiring from this whole predictions business, at least for the rest of the NFL postseason.

I did, if you’ll recall (hint hint), pick seven of the 12 playoff teams way back in September. If things had gone differently on the season’s final day, I could have hit ten. Impressive, no? Of course, I don’t think the 13-3 8-8 New Orleans Saints are going to be winning the Super Bowl this year, so there’s that on my record now. Great. (more…)

PARIS—One year ago, when The Walrus accidentally gave me permission to write about the wide world of sports on their website, I announced a set of goals for the upcoming season.

Now, every good sports writer knows that revisiting one’s archived opinions and predictions is the recipe for a healthy serving of humble pie, with a generous scoop of regret-flavoured ice cream. It’s trouble, is what reflection is (who was it that picked the 63-99 Padres to win the Series? Oh, right). (more…)

PARIS—Let’s get one thing straight here: there’s nothing wrong with kissing your sister. In fact, I’ve frequently found your sister to be a pretty quality smoocher, on the whole.

Likewise, I have no ideological problem with ties in sports. Sometimes the old “kissing your sister,” as they call it, is a perfectly satisfactory result for two teams, when neither can produce a particularly convincing argument for victory.

Of course, not all ties are created equal. France’s national football team finished off a dismal 2008 campaign with a 0-0 tie on Wednesday night, in a friendly against Uruguay. The match was so dull and devoid of good chances that I turned it off after 70 minutes. (more…)

At the Dublin Marathon, I stuck to my plan of drafting off the Kenyans for the first 24 miles

DUBLIN—I’m sorry, Trotteriacs. I feel like I’ve failed you. I gave it all that I could, but in the end, I didn’t win the 29th running of the Dublin Marathon. Good thing I didn’t make any money-back guarantees.

In the end, it was Ukrainian runner Andriy Naumov who was first across the line in Merrion Square, managing to hold off my valiant challenge by a barely perceptible gap of one hour, 43 minutes and one second. I appealed the result immediately, petitioning the race jury to review the photo finish, but it turns out the exposure time of the finish-line cameras is significantly less than one hour. Amazing what they can do with technology these days… (more…)

PARIS—I don’t wear a watch anymore. Stopped sometime in 2002, I think. In the entire time I’ve been with my wife, she’s never once seen me with a timepiece around my wrist.

I don’t wear a watch when I run, either, which seems odd even to me. I mean, I’ve spent a lot of time training for a marathon, running, trying to get faster and stronger. But I’m not really going to be able to measure my progress — I’m not going to go out there and lose a race one week and win a race against the same competitor the next. All I have to measure my speed against is the ticking of a clock. And yet I can’t be bothered to strap a Timex to my wrist. I’m stubborn like that. (more…)

PARIS—In 490 BC, a Greek military leader entrusted the messenger Pheidippides with an important communiqué: the Greek army had triumphed over the Persians in the Battle of Marathon. Pheidippides travelled 38 kilometres on foot from a battlefield near the coastal village of Marathon to Athens, maintaining a brisk running pace. Upon delivering the good news, the messenger promptly dropped dead.

And now, two-and-a-half millennia later, people do this sort of thing for fun?

Sorry, sorry guys. I know that’s not how I’m supposed to start one of these sessions. Here goes: Hello, everybody. My name’s Andrew, and I’m a distance runner. I haven’t run a full marathon in 17 months, but I’m scheduled for a relapse ten days from now, in Dublin. So consider this the first in a trilogy of columns on my destructive, enthralling 42.2 kilometre mistress. (more…)

PARIS—Sports and music make strange bedfellows. When they agree to jump in the sack at all, that is.

How strange can it get? Last week, hot-stuff rapper Lil Wayne started blogging about sports for ESPN.com. I should have noticed this, seeing as I spend upwards of 8 hours (equivalent to a 21-overtime hockey playoff game) surfing the Worldwide Leader’s archives.

But embarrassingly, it was actually pointed out to me by a friend of mine, Dave, the music editor at Eye Weekly in Toronto, who emailed me to get my take on the depth of Wayne’s sporting chops for his weekly web-music column, Totally Wired.

(The joke that got away, i.e. the one that came to me after Dave’s deadline: “Seriously, Lil Wayne? Dumping Ben Roethlisberger for Kurt Warner, just because Ben looks like he’s not going to turn it around, is like ditching Rihanna for Queen Latifah because Rihanna threw up on your shoes at the Grammys afterparty.”) (more…)

PARIS—Hola, Sportstrotter amigos. How’s it hanging? I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya, but the lines on the field don’t paint themselves here at Sportstrotter-MGD Stadium.

I’ll tell you where I’ve been the last couple weeks: holed up in my tiny apartment, with the heat on (winter starts early here in Paris), half-dressed and huddled under a desk with my laptop, obsessively reading the news and trying not to piss myself. With a virulent mixture of abject, tremble-inducing terror and maniacal, Joker-esque amusement, I’ve been following along at home as the world self-destructs. Economics, politics, society, science, culinary, environment — you name the topic, and one undeniable truth pervades: we’re fucked.

Worse still: a Cubs pitcher recently threw a no-hitter; the Buffalo Bills are 3-0; even the Yankees, ever-fueled by Steinbrenner’s billions, missed the playoffs this month. If that’s not a sign of the apocalypse, I don’t know what is. (more…)

This honeymoon is lasting forever. Can I get back to watching sports please?
CAGLIARI, SARDINIA—This honeymoon is lasting forever. Can I get back to watching sports soon, please?

I promised I wouldn’t write any dispatches these last four weeks, while I was off in B.C. getting married and then traipsing across Italy with my new wife, Mlle. Trotter.

But then, the NFL season kicked off Sunday, so I was just going to jot down my predicted order of finish in each division, partly because I haven’t done a lick of research or paid any attention to the off-season moves (Brett Favre is still retired, right?); and partly because this is still my honeymoon, at least until I arrive home in Paris and can finally use the interweb again. It takes brevity to make a marriage last, after all.

But then the Mlle., who adores football (a big reason I married her) and who still hasn’t decided whether she’s changing her name to Mme. Trotter in this space (unlikely—she thinks “Madame” makes her sound old, and she didn’t change her actual name either, much to my grandmother’s passive-aggressive consternation), played the “half card.” As in, “half of what’s yours is now mine, including the digital soapbox The Walrus so foolishly provides you.”

So I’ll do my “what I did on my summer vacation” report once everything is unpacked, but for the time being, here are my predicted orders of finish for the 2008 NFL season, and Mlle. Trotter’s team-by-team analysis. Think of her as the Tony Kornheiser of this column’s Monday Night Football booth: all irrelevant commentary and virtually no substance (too bad she doesn’t have a fantasy team to talk about). (more…)

PARIS—Now that the biggest, most important sports story of this summer (and possibly of ANY summer, ever) has been tidily wrapped up with Brett “The One” Favre’s trade to the J–E–T–S Jets Jets Jets (seriously, how was this guy not lumped in with the celeb-triumvirate of Brit, Paris and Barack?), we are free to concentrate on the second-biggest sports story of the year.

The Games of the twenty-ninth Olympiad begin today, a crazy eights sort of day in Beijing, China. Here in France, where a recent poll in La Tribune noted that only forty-five percent of French claim to be “excited” about the games, they still call the host city “Pékin.”
In all the newspapers and television programs, it’s Pékin this and Pékin that. This always strikes me as a little anachronistic, for some reason. Linguo-geography buffs, you have the floor. (more…)

It’s not fair. I followed the rules. So why am I the one who feels cheated?

PARIS—It’s not fair. I followed the rules. So why am I the one who feels cheated?

Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme, at the outset of this year’s race, was doing and saying all the right things to convince the casual sports fan that this was the year that the Tour would break free of the doping scandals that have diminished its reputation over the past ten years.

And then, the Italian star-in-the-making Riccardo Ricco, winner of two stages, holder of the Tour’s polka dot jersey (top-ranked climber) and white jersey (top-ranked rider under 25), a popular rider with a decent chance of finding himself on the podium next weekend in Paris, flunked a drug test. He was later charged by the French gendarmerie with possession of a controlled substance.

And so here we go again. Guess we know why Ricco was so fast in the Pyrenees. (more…)

PARIS—The withdrawal symptoms have graciously abated. It’s been twelve days since I went cold turkey on international football. I’ve been following the advice of my doctor, taking each day as it comes, and keeping in mind that—however strong I might feel in the weeks and months and years to come—it would take me just a careless channel-flick past an ESPN Classic broadcast of the 1970 West Germany-Italy match to fall off the wagon.

Like a smoker who succeeds in quitting, only to find himself addicted to a replacement crutch, Diet Coke or chewing gum or coffee, I’ve found a new fix: the Tour de France. I’ve never been much of a cycling fan, but then again I’ve never lived in France until this year. When I mentioned the other day to an old friend that I was excited for this year’s Tour and he replied, “Oh, yeah, you always loved watching that back in the day” (not true), I realized that my sports obsessions are fertile ground for all kinds of dangerous revisionist history.

For the record, I’ve never:

1. Bet an unborn child of mine on the result of a Kansas City Royals spring training baseball game.

2. Won the New York marathon by cleverly riding the entire race in a yellow taxi cab to within twenty metres of the finish line (as if I’d have the kind of money to pay for a scheme like that—twenty-six miles is a hell of a fare!). (more…)