Category: Following Sports

Winter Olympics: Ice Hockey, Cross-Country, and Reflections

The Olympics are over. I’m so glad I was able to go in person although, as you’ll read in a bit, the last couple days were frustrating. On my second to last day at the Olympics I went to both the Men’s Ice Hockey semifinals. On my last day there, I went to the Women’s Mass Start 30k Cross-Country Skiing race. Then I took an overnight train to Rostov-on-Don, a city in Russia about ten hours North of Sochi. After a day or rest, recuperation, and a little Olympics TV watching, I’m flying to Istanbul tonight.

The Men’s Ice Hockey Semis were the events I was most excited about seeing. When I first thought of going to the Olympics, they were the big investment I made in terms of money and emotion. Seeing the best four countries in the world was going to be great! After Russia lost to Finland, I was disappointed both because I felt bad for the host team and country (the Russians took this event so seriously that Putin apparently said that if the men’s hockey team won gold, no one would care what else the Russians won in the Olympics and if they didn’t, no one would care what medals the Russians did win) and I also felt robbed of what would have been an amazing experience to be in the stadium for an important Olympic home game. Nonetheless, I was excited to see Finland play Sweden and VERY excited to cheer on the U.S. against Canada.

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It wasn’t until the U.S. lost that I realized how much I had invested emotionally in that game. I felt like crying. It felt like I had come thousands of miles to see this game and then we had lost. Not just lost, but lost 1-0 which means I never got to celebrate; there was never a moment of joy to look back on fondly. The team looked like it was moving in molasses from the first minute of play while the Canadians danced around on the ice. Ugh.

Here’s the thing: the Olympics are about so much more than sports. They are a travel experience of a lifetime for many. I talked to a woman whose son had competed for the U.S. in Snowboard Cross and she had never left the country before! For her and her son, the Olympics are an achievement to be proud of for the rest of their lives. The Olympics are a great way for cultures to mix and people to meet one another. The Olympics are an opportunity for the host nation and people to welcome the world to their shores proudly and show themselves to be a fine people — which the thousands of Russian volunteers and people of that region certainly showed me. The Olympics are also a commercial enterprise for its sponsors and broadcasters. But for sports fans… the Olympics are about sports and for me at that moment, the event that meant the most to me had just gone wrong. Ugh.

Now, a few days later, I’m beginning to get over it. Before I left Olympic park that night, I made sure to put everything aside and take a few minutes to just enjoy being there. I grew up watching the Olympics with my Mom on television and playing my Dad and Brother in an Apple IIe game called the Olympic Decathlon whenever I could wrangle a game out of them. I never really thought about going — I don’t like big masses of people, it’s expensive, etc. — but being there connected me with myself and my own history in a wonderful way. I’m glad I went.

Over time, my memories of the event and my memories altered by my photos of the event will take precedence in my head but I’ll also never forget the impotent feeling of watching the U.S. lose to Canada without ever scoring a goal. At the same time, I’ll never forget walking out of the bar in Manhattan where my boss and I had snuck off to watch U.S. vs. Algeria in the 2008 World Cup and reeling with disbelief at how amazing Landon Donovan’s extra time goal had been or riding in a taxi to Brooklyn with my friend James to a party at his house which he had skipped to watch Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals the year the Penguins won the championship. I guess that’s part of being a sports fan.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra

P.S. Oh — right, I promised to write about going to see Cross Country Skiing in person. Don’t do it unless you’re with a group and have a big supply of booze, flags, and ideally cowbell. You stand there for fifteen minutes and then some people ski by really fast for about ten seconds. Then you wait again.

Winter Olympics Day 4: Women's Curling Gold Medal Game

And on the fourth day of my Olympic adventure I went to see the Women’s Gold Medal Curling game. I have to preface this by saying that I thought it was a little dull most of the time. No wonder Canadians like it so much? Sorry, sorry, I’m just sore from their comeback against the U.S. in the Women’s Ice Hockey finals later that night. Dull or not, there was a lot to observe and learn from. Here are some of my observations.

Curling is the bar-game of Olympic sports. As such, even the best curlers in the world are pretty average looking when it comes to body type. It’s funny to imagine them living in the Olympic Village among the sex-crazed elite athletes trying to pick each other up constantly. The fans, perhaps mirroring their favorites, also seemed a little… perhaps decrepit? Maybe there are some conventions about staying quiet for the shots but even when there was cheering it was subdued and repetitive in nature.

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One thing the curlers are absolutely elite at was communication. I think curling would be a great sport to use as a team-building activity. There’s one person who throws the stone, one who is standing near the target, and two sweepers. The two sweepers follow instructions without comment, primarily from the person standing near the target but also from the person who made the throw. There were a lot of screams of “Haaaaard” or “VERY HARD” and there was a visible difference between those two “settings.”

Curling, like Tennis, has alternating ends (games in tennis) when one team has a clear advantage over the other. In tennis, the player who is serving is expected to win the game. That’s called “holding” serve and losing a service game is called a “break.” In Curling the advantage comes from who goes first and who (therefore the other team) has the final shot. The team that has the final shot has the advantage and should earn at least a point. There were some ends like the sixth that went pretty much exactly the way you’d think it would go. The first team put a stone down, the second team knocked it off, repeat, repeat, repeat, until the last team to go took their final shot. This was exceedingly boring. But some of the ends were much more complicated with five or six stones on the board at once, creating interesting tactical and geometric conundrums.

Even sitting in the first row, I found myself looking at the big screen in the arena when there were multiple stones in play. It was showing the shot, familiar to TV, from directly above the target, looking down. Although you lose all sense that these are three dimensional objects, it really is the perfect view for insight into the tactics of the situation. It occurs to me that almost every sport is better live AND every sport is better on television. People have figured out, especially for sport like curling or speed skating that have very predictable movement, exactly where to put the cameras and how to move them to best convey the game to the viewer. You lose all that live, and while the atmosphere at the arena and the extra stuff you see during breaks or somewhere that would be offscreen is great, you often lose some sense of what is happening in the game itself.

Watching curling was interesting and I’m glad I went but it was the first of the sports I’ve seen here that didn’t make me want to join a league when I got home — Ice Hockey, yes, Speed Skating, yes, Curling? Not really. Today I’ll be watching some more Ice Hockey, this time Men’s. It’s the semi-finals: Sweden vs. Finland at 4:00 OT/7:00 ET and Canada vs. USA at 9:00 OT/Noon ET.

Go USA!

Winter Olympics Day 3: Speed Skating

Day 3 was a beautiful, mostly sunny day in Russia and I want to see the Women’s 5,000 meter speed skating event. 5,000 meters is a little over 3 miles. It’s the longest of the women’s speed skating events and it takes the best in the world a little under seven minutes to complete the race.

The race took place in Adler Arena (hooray Adler! That’s the town I’m staying in) and my first impression was, “whoa! that’s a long rink!” The speed skating track is a skinny, elongated oval 400 meters around. So the race was a little more than 12 laps. Although there are only about a dozen rows back, because the rink is so long, the arena holds 8,000 people and tonight it was pretty much packed. The fans were predominantly Russian but after that, dominated by the Dutch. The Dutch, who are traditionally and currently dominant in speed skating were out in full force and it seemed to me as if the arena had actually been designed for them. There was a clear orange motif (the color of the Dutch) throughout — orange seats, orange boards around the rink, etc.

I had never seen speed skating in person before and I was impressed. The skaters flew around the rink and, given that this is the longest distance race, I can only imagine how much faster they go in the sprints. When the crowd was not roaring for a Russian skater, the arena was so quiet that you could distinctly hear the snicks of the skates digging into the ice as a racer went by.

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Speed skating is all about efficiency. The less the racer moves, the faster they are able to go. You’ve probably seen speed skaters tuck one arm behind their backs on TV. In person I noticed that some of the racers had a thin rope tied around their waists so that they could loop their thumb into it behind their backs to take a little strain off that arm. Of course, uninitiated spectators like me think that a racer who is moving more is probably going faster. It’s actually the opposite. The faster they look, the slower they are going. As some of the racers got tired, you could notice their heads bobbing slightly and their arms whipping about a little more. Any wasted movement is counter productive but it’s natural that as you get tired, you lose the ability to control every motion so carefully.

The best of the best skated aerodynamically throughout. It’s amazing how angular the racers look while they are skating — their bodies remain at close to a ninety degree angle the whole time. Even after they finish, and are trying their best to catch their breath, they stay bent over like that. It’s only when they finally stand up straight that you go, “whoa!!” and remember that this sport is powered primarily by the butt. The only real exception to this rule was the winner of the competition, a skater from the Czech Republic named Martina Sablikova who looked far to stick-like to have the power for this sport. I suppose, like Usain Bolt who is “far too tall for a sprinter,” the best are sometimes outliers even from a population of outliers.

I have to give a lot of credit to the speed skating crowd. As I said, the size and shape of the arena made it hard to feel connected to the rest of the fans but when a Russian woman was skating there was a roar of cheering and flag waving that looped around the course just ahead of her like the crowd was doing the wave at Olympic record pace. As the Dutch woman I was sitting next to said, “when you yell at her, she goes faster.” She added that “all Dutch people are like that” but I think it probably applies the same to Russians because it seemed like the Russian skaters took energy from the crowd. The best of the Russian skaters just missed the podium by 11 hundredths of a second. Heartbreaking, especially because the crowd must have known that its beloved Russian Men’s Ice Hockey team was losing to Finland at the same time.

Up next, Curling!

Winter Olympics Day 2: A Women's Ice Hockey Double Header

Today I saw my first Olympic events in person! I went to two women’s ice hockey games: Germany vs. Japan at noon Olympic Time and Russia vs. Finland at 430 OT. Germany beat Japan 3-2 and Finland beat Russia 4-0. But I know you don’t come here for the scores, so let me give you some of my impressions.

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Women’s Ice Hockey is not the same as men’s and it took a little while to get used to. The biggest difference in the rules is that body checking is not allowed in the women’s game. You’d think that by disallowing body checking, you’d get a game that looks the same, just without the body checking. Totally untrue! The biggest difference is that by disallowing body checking, you give the hockey players all sorts of freedom unavailable to men. The women today were doing all sorts of things like skating towards the boards to retrieve a puck with an opponent barreling down on them or looking down to gather a bouncing puck while skating through the middle of the ice that are totally impossible in the men’s game because anyone who tries it will be flatter on the ice than a pancake within thirty seconds. It took almost the first whole game for me to stop having the cringing “oh my god, don’t do that, you’re going to get crushed” instinct. Tactically what this means is that puck possession is an even bigger imperative in the women’s game because it’s so much harder to get the puck from an opponent if you can’t hit her.

The other major difference is that the puck looks heavy. This is something you don’t often think in the men’s game because everyone who plays it at a high level is so darn strong that the puck looks weightless. In the men’s game, the puck moves in straight lines whether being passed or shot. In the women’s game, except for one or two of the most impressive players, the puck moves in curves. Shots have arc and passes noticeably dip as they run out of steam.

The atmosphere was great. Shayba arena seats around 5,000 so it’s very intimate. There are only around 20 rows of seats in two tiers surrounding the rink. The Japan vs. Germany game had around 2,000 people attending; the later game, because it involved Russia, was almost full with over 4,000 fans. During the first game, the crowd shouted “Shaybu! Shaybu!’ I asked some fans what it meant and they said it meant “let’s see a goal!” I wondered if it was a little bit of a sarcastic comment shouted when a fan feels the game is lagging. Later on, when the whole crowd was shouting it fifteen seconds into the Russia game, I understood it was just an exhortation. The crowd seemed to be tilting towards rooting for Japan. Not sure if there are socio-political reasons for that or if the Russian crowd just preferred the team that was loosing for most of the game.

I was really thrilled to get to see a Russian team play in person but unfortunately they never really had a shot in that game. Finland’s goalie (just like the men’s team) was rock solid and their top line of forwards, #77 Susana Tapani in particular was head and shoulders better than everyone else on the ice.

Women’s hockey was lots of fun to watch in person and it gave me a few ideas about rule changes. It drives me a little crazy that the rules prohibit women from body checking but I also understand that the men’s game is prohibitively violent, particularly as we understand more and more about the long term effects of brain injuries. So, if you think about it this way, that it’s not because the players are women that the rules are stricter, it’s because the game is more recently established and it’s certainly easier to establish strict rules than to change established ones to be stricter. Here’s my proposal — it seemed from watching that women could make contact with an opponent to shield the puck from her, just not in an effort to take the puck from her. Men are allowed to hit each other as long as the puck is nearby. Why don’t we meet in the middle — outlaw any body check that is not clearly intended to either keep the puck or get the puck?

Speed skating tomorrow!! Thanks for reading,
Ezra

Winter Olympics: Day 1 Continues

When I awoke it was around 11:00 so I struggled out of my slumber. My missions for the day were to get acquainted with the lay of the land, collect my spectator pass, and hopefully buy some tickets to events on Wed and Thu (I already had tickets for Tue, Fri, and Sat.)

There’s a place to pick up your spectator pass in Adler about a 15 minute walk from my hotel. I walked down a block or two to the boardwalk and turned left. (Quick side-note which I forgot to add to my first post: The woman who helped me in the airport said “that’s so poetic” when I told her the name of the hotel. Mechta u Morya apparently means something like “Dream by the Sea.”)

Somewhere, probably on the internet, I heard someone describe having the Olympics in Sochi as like having them in Atlantic City. Maybe it was even me, but I doubt it. [Editor’s Note: I was the one who said that. Don’t try to steal my thunder, Ezra Fischer!] There’s definitely some truth to that but the boardwalk in Adler is a bit more decaying-industrial than it is decaying-casino. The walk was quite pleasant and before long I was passing nice restaurants with large outdoor patios featuring big screen TVs playing the Olympics. I resisted and walked on into an oddly deserted western-ish mall. By asking a dude dressed head to toe in Canadian gear (note — there seem to be way more Canadians than US citizens here or maybe they are just more obvious,) I found the spot and collected my spectator pass.

Here’s where the misadventure part of my day begins. I asked them where I could buy tickets — in the Adler train station, they replied. Okay — it looked like a 40 minute walk judging from google maps. I’ve been using google maps non-stop while I’ve been away because data is included in this nifty plan I got thanks to a colleague of mine. NOT IN RUSSIA! Ooops — glad I picked up on that *only* a $100 into it.

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Lunch was a delicious plate of grilled lamb or pork kebab with potato, onion, two different kind of pickles, and some red sauce. MMMmmm! I ate this outdoors (sorry folks, it’s pretty warm here) and then walked to the train station.

The trains are all free, which is great, but also had the odd effect of making me somewhat careless about which one I got on. So… the fifteen minute trip in one direction became an hour and a half round trip to get back to Adler followed by the necessary fifteen minute trip. Ooops. At least on the way back, two girls who had been working since five in the morning as information guides took pity on me and gave me a small Russian chocolate.

To cut an extraordinarily long story long, I eventually found my way to the ticket office in the Olympic park, bought some tickets, got a thrill out of seeing the Olympic flame, and made it back to my hotel safely. The security around here seems reasonably tight but not in an anxious paramilitary kind of way. Everyone looks like they are happy to be the center of the world for a few weeks and I’ve been able to get by with pointing and grunting and making faces pretty well.

I’m exhausted but excited to see what Day 2 brings tomorrow. I’ll post the events I’m going to be attending in a separate post for your voyeuristic pleasure!

Thanks for following along, it makes me happy to be able to tell you all about this stuff,
Ezra

A Voyeur's Guide to Winter Olympic Viewing with Dear Sports Fan

What’s the plan? Here’s the plan!

Tuesday, February 18
Women’s Hockey Consolation Rounds at 12 noon Olympic Time (OT,) and 3 a.m. ET and 4:30 OT/7:30 ET. Not sure who the teams are but it’s the bottom of the bracket.

Wednesday, February 19
Ladies (as they say) 5,000 meter speed skating at 5:30 OT/8:30 ET. Adopted Dutch allegience FTW!

Thursday, February 20
Ladies Curling Gold Medal game at 5:30 OT/8:30 ET. Great Britain play Canada in one semi while Sweden play Switzerland in the other.

Friday, February 21
The MOMENT I’ve all been waiting for! Men’s Ice Hockey semifinals at 4:00 OT/7:00 ET and 9:00 OT/12 noon ET. Unless something strange happens, the US will play Canada in one semi. The other side of the bracket has a little more doubt. Russia has a difficult matchup with Finland to get through to play (almost definitely) Sweden.

Saturday, February 22
I finally plan to make it up to the mountain to see the Women’s Mass Start 30k Cross Country Skiing competition at 1:30 OT/4:30 ET.

I’m hoping to take pictures and bring back my impressions to you!

Winter Olympics: Day 1, My Adventure Begins

Hi Everyone,

I’m writing from Sochi!! Well, really I’m in the town of Adler which seems to be much closer and better connected to virtually every transit option than Sochi but if I said Adler, no one would know what I was talking about. Anyway… OLYMPICS!!

I landed in Sochi airport (Adler airport) at a little after 4 am this morning. It was a hour and forty five minute flight from Istanbul which is two hours off from what I will now call Olympic Time which is nine hours ahead of EST. I was prepared and dreading having to spend an entire other day awake but I was pleasantly surprised. When I landed, I trickled through customs. The only heightened security I saw was a surprisingly thorough attempt to rattle me by feigning an issue with the passport scanner for about three minutes to see if I would start exhibiting signs of nervousness. I think it would have worked if I had anything to hide or if I didn’t speak the universal language of hardware problems.

Next I spoke to a very nice woman at the information desk who arranged for a taxi while her colleague slept slumped at the desk. I ran upstairs, withdrew some rubles from an ATM, and then I was off in a cab. I was a little nervous about getting into the cab at 5 a.m. because if there was no one to let me into my hotel, I was going to be stuck outside in the rain in the middle of the night.

My cab driver didn’t speak any English but his GPS doubled as a speech translation machine. And it actually worked really well! The future is here. He translated something and I said back “I’m impressed with the machine.” After reading the translation, he spoke Russian back at it and up popped the English text “that is because it is Russia[n]!” I LOL’d. He topped off the virtuoso performance by getting out of the cab and ringing the hotel doorbell and making sure there was someone to let me in.

There was! In fact, there were two women who blearily checked me in while I apologized repeatedly for waking them up. As I expected, my room was occupied by people leaving today. Unexpectedly, they offered to let me have another room for the morning. Even less expectedly, they said I could keep that room if I wanted it — it was not so nice but only 3/4 of the price of the room I had reserved. Give me the cheapest room you’ve got, I said.

The room is small and the two twin beds must have been premies because they’re tiny. The mini-fridge is unplugged and somewhat discombobulated, there was a slight water running sound in the bathroom, and one of the overhead compact flourescents had a little trouble turning off. Compared to the fear-mongering newspaper stories, that’s five star! It’s really quite fine and I’m happy with it and the price reduction. Oh — there’s also wifi and if the former Soviet Union had just specialized in water pressure, they’d still be around.

I got situated and trailed off to sleep as the sun rose to the beautiful accompaniment of — are those ROOSTERS? Damn.

To be continued…

2014 Super Bowl: Omaha Edition

Omaha is the largest city in Nebraska. It’s also become the focus of an incredible amount of attention leading up to the Super Bowl. Why? Because Peyton Manning, quarterback of the Broncos, screams “OMAHA” at least a dozen times a game. It’s become his signature phrase and a trending topic culturally.

Manning uses the word as part of his snap count. In our post a few months back to answer the questions “What is a Snap in Football?” we wrote this about the snap count itself:

The phrase “snap count” is pretty common but has two only tangentially related meanings. One meaning refers to any vocal cue that a quarterback gives to his own team to synchronize their movement with the snapping of the football. Because only one player on the offensive side is allowed to move at a time before the snap, a good snap count provides the offense with an advantage over the defense; it knows when to start moving and can get a head-start on the defensive players. Once in a while defensive players will mimic a quarterback’s snap count in an effort to get the offense to move at the wrong time. This is illegal and a defensive team may be penalized for “simulating the snap count.” Another meaning of the phrase snap count is the number of plays a player is a part of, usually in a single game. In this use, the snap is representative of a play and the count is just the act of counting the number of plays or snaps someone is a part of.

In Manning’s case, we’re concerned with the first meaning — the vocal cue. Manning uses the word “Omaha” as a vocal cue to his team and its meaning is unknown to everyone but them. Deadspin and the Boston Globe wrote articles recently which tried to decipher the meaning of “Omaha.” Neither got very far. The Globe story contained a retelling of Manning having a little fun with reporters at a recent press conference:

Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning went to the podium Wednesday in Englewood, Colo., and humorously explained that “Omaha” is a running play.

“But it could be a pass play,” he said, “or a play-action pass, depending on a couple of things. The wind. Which way we’re going. The quarter. And the jerseys we’re wearing. So it really varies play to play.”

 The truth is, no one except for Manning and his teammates are ever likely to know how they’re using the word “Omaha” but that hasn’t stopped the rest of us from having a ton of fun with it.
The Denver Airport creatively edited their departure board in the spirit of “OMAHA!”

Omaha

The Omaha chamber of commerce found a way to do good while having fun:

As opposed to the Governor and Lt. Governor of Iowa who just tried to start a border war:

A roadtrippers group created a sincere guide to the city including places to eat, drink, and visit.

And of course, an enormous number of people are betting on how many times Manning will say “Omaha” in the Super Bowl itself. According to this Fox Sports post, the over/under on how many times Peyton Manning says “Omaha” has been set at 27.5 and is the second most popular prop bet behind the length of the national anthem. For what it’s worth, I would take the under — what if he does switch to “Cedar Rapids?” If you need a refresher course on Super Bowl betting, check out our guide from last year.

That’s it for the Omaha edition of our Super Bowl preview. If you missed the British edition, you can find it here. Thanks for reading!

2014 Super Bowl: Explaining Football, British Edition

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Why this computer generated image of what looks like the Manhattan Bridge has a football field super-imposed onto it, I have no idea. And I’m not even British!

In the midst of all of Dear Sports Fan’s Winter Olympics previews we’ve neglected to cover the big football game coming up this Sunday, the Super Bowl! Luckily, the game between the Denver Broncos and the Seattle Seahawks has received a lot of coverage from other sources. Some of the coverage has been focused on explaining football to the layperson! And for some reason a lot of it has been focused on British people — maybe because they are a group of people who can safely be assumed to be free of knowledge about football without insult. Here’s a few of the most humorous or most helpful highlights.

From Buzzfeed, found on Deadspin, a group of British people making vague guesses and comments about the nature of the Super Bowl and football in general. My favorite is the description of football as being “like the Matrix but in padding.”

There’s also a wonderful and totally fake (and even more hilarious for being so) impression of what a football game would sound like if announced by a British person who has no idea what’s going on. My favorite line in this one is the droll description of a kick return: “A lucky fullback catches it, runs a bit, gets tired, fallls over.”

This video is written from the perspective of an American American Football fan who tries to explain football to “Liberals, Ladies, and Limeys.” “Limeys” is of course a slang term for Brits which derives (apocryphally?) from the British Navy’s practice of adding lime juice to sailor’s ration of rum to prevent scurvy. The tone of this video is a little obnoxious (we on this site don’t think ladies, liberals, or the British are necessarily ignorant about football) but it’s extremely well animated and manages to cover a lot in just a couple minutes. It’s a fine companion piece to our posts about football, most of which you can find here, including positional descriptions and answers to questions like Why Do People Like Football, How do I Begin to Enjoy Football, How Does Scoring Work in Football, and What’s a Down in Football.

Finally, for the design lovers or soccer people out there, there’s this brilliant website, Football as Football, which re-imagines NFL football teams’ logos as European soccer logos. Each team has a logo in the style of a Spanish, English, German, or Italian football club. If the Super Bowl were being played between the German soccer version of the Denver Broncos and the Seattle Seahawks, this is what it would look like:

Broncos GermanSeahawks German

 

 

Federer – Nadal For the 33rd Time

We take a brief break from Olympics previews and Super Bowl hype to talk about a tennis match that’s going to be played on Friday morning at 3:30 a.m. ET in Australia between two rapidly aging tennis players. Why is this worth breaking into our regularly scheduled programming? Because for almost 14 years, since the first time they played, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal have been the most compelling personal rivalry in sports and there’s a chance that this could be the last time they play until they’re both on the senior exhibition tour. So grab your television remote, program your DVR for ESPN at 3:30 a.m.. Don’t make any mistake about it — delete some stuff, add an hour or two to the scheduled end time, and make sure nothing else supersedes it. Then figure out how to call out of work on Friday.

What’s so Great About their Rivalry

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Federer, regal, Nadal, resolute.

[Editor’s note — I wrote another post about Nadal and Federer way back in 2011. It’s still available here.]

There’s many factors that play into a rivalry. One is the consistent excellence of both players in comparison to the rest of their competition. During the heart of their careers, from 2003 to 2011, Federer or Nadal won 26 of 32 grand slam (Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, or the U.S. Open) tournaments. More impressive in a way is that for their careers, all but three of their losses in Grand Slam finals have been to each other. From 2005 through 2010 either Nadal or Federer was the number one tennis player in the world and the other was second.

As remarkable as those numbers are, they are augmented by the ease with which Nadal and Federer’s rivalry can be translated into narratives. Federer is almost five years older and was established as the number one tennis player in 2004. For three years beginning in 2005, Nadal sat in the number two spot. Able to surpass all his other competition but not Federer. Then in 2008, the younger Nadal finally overtook Federer. Time takes its toll on everyone, right? Not so fast — Federer battled back to be number one in 2009, only to have it stolen back by Nadal in 2010. The story would have been great if it had just been “younger great player overtakes older great player” but the back and forth, the rallies by each player that mimic the rallies within a tennis match, make it epic.

Epic too is the stylistic clash between the two players. Federer is often described as a magician. When he is at his best, he makes creative, surprising shots that no one else would think of, much less have the ability to make; and he makes them seem effortless. Nadal is his natural opposite. He’s a fierce competitor who wears his opponents down by taking their best shots and returning them faster and harder than they were hit. Federer is right handed, Nadal is left handed. Federer dresses himself like the tennis royalty he is, replete with golden insignias and elegant tennis bags. Nadal favors neon colors, sleeveless shirts, and at one point in his career, capris. Federer projects calm and control on the court. Nadal is all furious grunts and obsessive compulsive pre-serve routines.

Although it used to be common, Federer and Nadal have only played each other twice in grand slam tournaments since 2009. This Friday will be the third time in the last five years and there’s a chance it could be the last. Federer is 32 years old, which is quite old for a tennis player to be competitive. Nadal is only 27 but has been hampered by serious knee injuries in the last few years. It’s definitely a “fourth-quarter” competition towards the end of their rivalry. This only makes it more compelling to me. I love it when two players who have such history with each other play. There’s a sentimentality, a respect between the players that is rare; and a deep seeded hatred. Regardless of what they say in public, while they are still playing, these guys want to beat no one more than the other. That this might be their last significant meeting only brings the magnifying glass down a little closer. And based on the weather in Australia these days, things could get pretty hot!