Loyalty up for sale
and resources — wound up allowing her to take part in this year’s tournament. In April, Wimbledon officials responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by barring players from Russia and Belarus from participating. It brought Rybakina’s duality into greater focus, and during a year that keeps challenging how we perceive loyalty, allegiance and custom in sports, she made the perfect, complicated champion.
Afterward, reporters didn’t just want to know more about who the 23-year-old late bloomer was. They probed with questions about whose she was. It was an extreme, geopolitical, wartime example of the conundrum in sports right now.
“I don’t know,” Rybakina said when asked whether Russia would politicize her triumph. “I’m playing for Kazakhstan for a very, very long time. I represent it on the biggest tournaments, the Olympics, which was a dream come true. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I mean, it’s always some news, but I cannot do anything about this.”
The issues that she had to confront are far more important than scrutinizing Durant’s legacy now that he’s a wandering basketball mercenary or worrying about what happens to the Bedlam rivalry after Oklahoma leaves Oklahoma State behind. But Rybakina’s tale still manages to underscore the awkwardness of this time.
No matter the circumstances, these seemingly dissimilar sports stories intersect at devotion. In this capricious rejection of long-standing norms, who owes what to whom? We are forced to reckon with what devotion now means and where it fits as the power dynamic keeps shifting, the money keeps increasing, and everyone involved keeps opting for cutthroat business over classic sports values that often require greater sacrifice.
The current atmosphere toggles between seeming refreshingly liberating, particularly for athletes who had been abused and exploited by old practices, and regrettably catastrophic.
It might be impossible to stop college athletics from rumbling toward a superconference era. While that could prove worthwhile in the short term for television executives who dream of an NFL-like inventory of elite, big-school matchups, regionalism is the soul of college sports. National competition is a sweetener. Turf has always mattered most. It defines rivalries and recruiting bases. It stirs fan passion. Historically, regions influenced style of play, but nationalization has already changed much of that. More charm will be lost as geographically senseless megaconferences take form. Past realignment has shown this to be true, and those mergers weren’t as jarring as inviting two southern California teams to Big Ten country.
I’m no rigid traditionalist. There’s nothing wrong with thoughtful, well-intentioned change. But money-grab decisions sold to the public as survival tactics don’t qualify as thoughtful or well-intentioned.
It’s also reckless to consider a leadership void as permission to make a power move when it’s so disruptive to the fan experience.
In sports, loyalty is often a word tossed around for control purposes, to shame people into doing what’s convenient for the institution. A player empowerment movement has democratized the athlete-team partnership, making the commitment only as sustainable as the level of competence on each side. Customer loyalty is the bond that truly matters, and that’s the greatest concern with these money-driven changes. For as obsessed as sports fans are, it’s asking a lot for them to adjust and compartmentalize all the instability.
Many grew up developing their love of sports because stars stayed in the same place for a long time, because rivalries were eternal, because of the traditions around which they built a sense of community. Consistency is a huge part of sports escapism. While real life is crazy and unreliable, there’s a lot of dependability in the sports world. The results can be unpredictable, but you can navigate everything else with your eyes closed. The uninterrupted routine inspires faith.
Now, all parties are loyal only to their business interests.