Bulls & Bears

Tom Mayenknecht is host of The Sport Market on TSN 1040 and TSN Radio, where he regularly rates and debates the Bulls & Bears of sports business. He reviews the major winners and losers of the past week every Saturday in The Vancouver Sun.

BULLS OF THE WEEK

With honourable mentions to outgoing Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig and the fan engagement value of his second wild card and the Toronto Raptors for the marketing outreach garnered through their NBA Canada Series visit to Vancouver this weekend (and Montreal on Oct. 24), no individual, team or league could hold a candle to the European continent when it came to yet another bullish performance in the Ryder Cup international team competition against the United States. It was continent over country for the third straight time. Once the exclusive domain of the Americans, the Ryder Cup is quickly becoming the perfect metaphor for the globalization of golf in general and the rise of European players in particular. After dominating the competition with 18 wins and a tie against only three losses from 1927 to 1977 when it was the U.S. against Great Britain, Europe is 10-7-1 since 1979 and a remarkable 6-1 since 1999. That 25-year-period has also been paralleled by increasingly consistent European and international players’ success on the PGA Tour. In 1999, non-Americans won only 10 of 47 PGA Tour events, including two of four majors. This year, that rose to 17 tournaments and three of four majors. The growing American frustration was vented by veteran Phil Mickelson in his public criticism of U.S. captain Tom Watson, who had trouble parlaying his iconic status as one of the best players of all time into effective leadership at Gleneagles in Scotland. Yet no American Ryder Cup captain can be blamed for the depth of talent advantage at the top of the PGA Tour that is held by Euro golfers, headlined by Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy.

BEARS OF THE WEEK

It is jaw-dropping how far the International Olympic Committee saw its stock fall this week. After the withdrawal of Oslo, Norway, left only Beijing and the Kazakhstani city of Almaty in the running for the 2022 Olympic Winter Games, some were suggesting the current Olympic hosting model might have truly jumped the shark. It’s not the operating template — which has hovered around $2 billion per Winter Games for about a decade — that’s the albatross. It’s the spending frenzy around infrastructure that is officially out of control, with Sochi 2014 representing more than $50 billion in venues, airports, hotel accommodation, highways and land reclamation. When democratic countries generally accountable to taxpayers look at those costs and the white elephants standing in previous host cities for Summer and Winter Games, it’s easy to understand why Olympic hosting has lost its lustre. It’s also little wonder Oslo joined Munich, Stockholm and Lviv, Ukraine as cities bowing out of the so-called race for 2022. Even Tokyo is having trouble galvanizing widespread support for an Olympic Stadium that will cost $1.7 billion as part of its hosting in 2020. The IOC has two paths: Either rely entirely on autocratic countries bent on using the Olympics as propaganda or consider rotating among a dozen Summer and Winter host cities equipped with sufficient infrastructure over the mid and long terms. Of course, the path may wind up defaulting to a limited rotation of cities in countries such as Russia and China.

Listen to The Sport Market on TSN 1040 Saturdays 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. Bulls & Bears air at 9 a.m., followed by Weekend Extra with Sun Sports at 9:30 a.m. Follow Tom Mayenknecht on Twitter @TheSportMarket