Tuesday, March 16, 2010

To Be a (Sports) Fan

In the last few weeks it’s occurred to me how sports are always evolving, yet staying the same. The rules change, performance expectations go up and faces change as athletes excel through their careers towards retirement. But despite that, the reasons why athletes strive for their achievements and why fans continue to love sports stay the same.

No matter why a sport, or athlete, has fans I think that fans help anchor the sporting world in a way not many think about.

The most current example would be directly after the recent Vancouver Olympics. For a large part of the world, the Olympics are the events where they see the largest names in sports and experience their talent for the first time. As a figure skating fan, after the men’s event, I saw thousands of adds to Evan Lysacek’s Facebook Fan page, and new fan communities sprout up for several other skaters including my favorite, Johnny Weir. The skating community is rather small and it excited me to see so many new faces flocking to fan pages and finding an interest in skating. (Because, and I am an example of this, being a fan sometimes leads you into the sport itself.)

Members shared old You Tube videos and photo shoots for their new found favorites by the dozens and I think that’s what made me start thinking about being a sports fan and what it means. Many of those videos and photos I had already seen, having been a fan for over eight years now. (I remember when the quad was just second nature to most men’s skaters!) And yet, I started somewhere too. I remember when it was all new to me and other people were like, yeah yeah old news.

With Johnny Weir’s recent announcement that he will not be attending Worlds, several new fans found themselves severely disappointed and it made me feel guilty that I had five full years of his skating career already with me and I know the end is coming for his career. And I’m at peace with that because of my experience. I’ve seen him win a National title in person, and watched him compete on the grandest stage in the world, twice. But I was in their place once too. It was in 2002 when Alexei Yagudin won Olympic gold and pulled me into the sport. And due to his congenital hip disease, he ended up retiring in 2003. I didn’t have the previous years to see him place fifth in Nagano, or watch him battle with Evgeny Plushenko for the next 4 long years. I barely had time to love his skating career before it was over.

Similarly for another small sporting community, in 2008 there was a huge flock to the swimming fandom which excited and thrilled us all. Michael Phelps did something that no one had ever seen before. Those of us, who had watched swimming, or even just the 2004 Athens Games, had one of those “Yep, that’s MP” moments all the while shrieking and hollering with this new group of excited fans that had added so much to the sport as a whole. There was a lot of “Why didn’t I watch Athens???” afterward and I completely understood that. I still envy those who were fans in Sydney and able to watch Ian Thorpe win his first Olympic gold, as I didn’t jump the Thorpedo bandwagon til 2004. Re-runs help, but nothing is like seeing it in real time.

I guess what all this means is that as the athletes come and go, so do we. We all have been fans for a different amount of time and we all experience our favorite sports differently based on when we “saw the light”, but the one thing we have in common is that we are sports fans right this moment and we need to take advantage of it. Throughout our lives as fans we will see many faces come and go, see Champions made and the new blood rise, see many breathtaking events and record breaking moments. We need to say thank you to whoever has given us this opportunity because as a fan we are guaranteed to see things that will go down in the history books and that people will talk about for ages to come. And, most importantly, we’ll be able to share them with the fans that came before, and after, us.