The Zidane Incident

[Schneed10]

International sports are interesting. Countries like France, Brazil, Argentina Germany, and Italy put all of their athletes into one sport, Soccer. There's a some basketball going on there too, but mostly it's soccer. So it's no wonder their teams are so good at it.

Then if you go to Cuba, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic, baseball is pretty much the only game in town. And of course they're great at it.

And then there's Kenya, and pretty much all they do is run marathons. So no wonder they always win the Boston Marathon.

Here in the States we have baseball, football, basketball, golf, soccer, swimming, track & field, hockey, and a whole slew of other sports. All of our athletes spread out into different sports. So internationally, the US teams always seem disappointing because we can't match up with the countries who breed only soccer players (France), or who breed only baseball players (Cuba), or who breed only Hockey players (Canada). You see our record in international play and it's easy to start to think, "hey, the US sucks at sports." But if we put all our athletes into one or two sports, we'd DOMINATE.

If you want to look at the US dominance in sports in a fair manner, take a look at the Olympic medal count each year. We're always at the top, especially in the summer games.

Imagine if football were an international sport?

Team USA:
QB Peyton Manning, Tom Brady
RB LaDainian Tomlinson, Shawn Alexander
WR Chad Johnson, Randy Moss, Steve Smith, Marvin Harrison, Santana Moss, Terrell Owens
TE Antonio Gates, Tony Gonzalez, Alge Crumpler
OT Walter Jones, Orlando Pace, Chris Samuels, Willie Roaf
OG Will Shields, Steve Hutchinson, Randy Thomas, Alan Fanaca
C Olin Kreutz, Jeff Saturday

We'd pwn everybody. It'd be ridiculous. We have so many of our nation's best athletes in the NFL, a sport which no other countries really play. We're still the dominant sports nation. It's just we're the jack of all trades, and masters at only a few.