“The work of helping drowning people is the work of drowning people themselves.” I love the work of Ilf and Petrov. It seems that they wrote not a hundred years ago, but literally today.
No, not only do our sports and physical education not resemble a “drowning person,” but in a way, on the contrary, they float. Everywhere I go, I see new sports fields, gyms, and running tracks. And yes, ski slopes too. Anyone with eyes cannot help but see and appreciate that the state is investing huge sums of money in the very possibility of playing sports.
Here, for example, in the photo we are with Nadezhda Sergeevna Stepanova, a cross-country skier, walking in the new park in our native Yelizovo. Class! But the illuminated treadmill is practically empty (although two girls were still running), as is the power camp. But from the pavilion comes the discordant hum of “literball athletes”. They communicate in a low voice, without shouting. Maybe they are still warming up, maybe they are afraid of the police patrol. Although I would like to hope that they are ashamed and feel uncomfortable that a sports park was built for them on the site of an abandoned wasteland, which Davos in Switzerland would not refuse. But they only enjoyed the comfort of the gazebo.
The problem is ourselves.
Kvadrobika, who has been making so much noise lately, has retired from the sport. Kenichi Ito, “the main father of all quad athletes”, was a good athlete. His “100-meter record” for running on all fours is 15.7 seconds. Most modern teenagers cannot withstand such speeds, even on two legs. And the masks of cats and rabbits come from the desire of teenagers to stand out, to be different from these boring adults. Young people follow trends, but someone creates and accelerates trends.
Adult uncles and aunts can demand the banning and stopping of something as much as they want. Yeah, how did your parents manage to ban rap or heavy metal? All trends have faces, opinion leaders. Yes, yes, the same ones with blue hair and piercings in their noses and eyelids. How about communicating with famous quad players and organizing a tournament for the “So-and-so TV Channel Cup”? What do they compete in? Running or overcoming obstacles? Wonderful. I would also put them on skis.
By the way, about skiing. We had a wonderful sports holiday this week. Russian Summer Ski Championships. The name itself should already attract attention, right? Summer, but skiing? Intrigue! For those who do not know: this is the name of the national roller ski championship, in which skiers participate. In order not to be confused with the national roller ski championship, in which roller skiers participate, they have a different technique, it is rather a different sport, closer to speed skating. Roller skaters race in some of their traditional places where we have never been and on tracks that are hardly similar to ours. “Our” championship is always held on the ski slopes – Tyumen, Malinovka, etc. – and in September, when the main season is approaching.
Athletes come from all over the country – in total, about 250 people took part in three races. Plus dozens of coaches, judges, etc. Let’s count 300 in total. That was far more than the number of spectators in the stands of the magnificent Pearl of Siberia stadium. The tracks are world-class, there are several Olympic champions among the participants, but there are no spectators.
Because the program of this powerful event includes “two long time trials (races with individual starts), which do not interest the average viewer.” I quote commentator and great friend of the leadership of our ski federation Andrei Romanov.
As an athlete who won the majority of every time trial she entered last year, I would say that the time trial is the most objective indicator of an athlete’s strength.
As a viewer, I will say: it is absolutely impossible to watch them. It is boring, nothing is clear! The viewer in me beats the athlete. You can’t imagine a race, even 100 meters, even 42 kilometers, in which athletes start sequentially, right? In skiing, the “cuts” remain from the times when the tracks were one and a half meters wide and trampled by the skiers themselves. And their audience is watching, who mostly remembers those times. You know, when the snow was whiter and the sky bluer. And sports TV channels are fighting for the category “M 14-59 100,000+”. In translation – young people and men in the prime of life, living in cities with a population of one hundred thousand. I am afraid that “cutting fans” and the “target audience” are two different groups of people.
I don’t want to be misunderstood. The idea of eliminating the usual competitions and replacing them with “races for young quad riders” seems to me even too radical. But it seems obvious to me that we must study closely the tendencies of young people, try to understand what makes them popular and introduce them into traditional sports.
I also have a specific proposal: to invite Petter Northug as an expert. A man who has won everything and is respected both in Scandinavia and in Russia. Most importantly, the man who made skiing three times more popular at the peak of his career than it is today. Because he knew how to make a show out of everything that interested people. And now he is trying, even going so far as to organize his own competitions “according to bad rules”, proposing new formats and new rules.
But Norway also has its “connoisseurs of traditional cups”, they disapprove of Petter! Let’s invite him – high-quality football players, hockey players, volleyball players and coaches come to us now, right? And let’s untie his hands. I assure you that in three or four years everyone will forget about the world championships and rush to the Northug Russian Cup. And this is nothing special, I speak as a person who grew up practically on the shores of the Bering Sea. Remind me where the Russian patriot Vitus Ionassenovich came from?
More sports news in our telegram channel .
Source : MatchTV
I am Sandra Jackson, a journalist and content creator with extensive experience in the news industry. I have been working in the news media for over five years. During this time, I have worked as an author and editor at various outlets producing high-quality content that attracts readers from different demographics.
