RUGBY IN VEGAS, TOUR DE FRANCE IN SCOTLAND.
by Bob Ramsay
Sports tourism used to mean spending a week in Dunedin watching the Jays in spring training, or running the Berlin marathon with a gang from the Beaches Running Club, or going to New York to watch the US Open, or across to Jersey for the Super Bowl. No more.
The days of flying somewhere to see your favourite team have morphed into your favourite team flying somewhere to see you. This spring, The Wigan Warriors played theWarrington Wolves, two Northern England towns just 18 km apart, to a packed Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, among them 15,000 British rugby fans who didn’t have to fly 8,400 kilometres or spend thousands of US dollars each to see a rugby match, but did. As The Financial Times drily noted: “And when it’s all done, it’s not a soggy pie and a traipse home in horizontal rain, but a smilingly ushered stroll back across Frank Sinatra Drive to the near-endless unsleeping attractions of the Las Vegas Strip.”
Sports tourism today generates 10% (that’s $600 billion) of the world expenditure on tourism, and the World Tourism Organization estimates the sector could double in value in the next five years. Indeed, there’s a straight-line relationship between the yeast of sports tourism and the bread of tourism. In 2022, Qatar hosted the FIFA World Cup. 3.4 million soccer fans flew in to see it. The next year, tourism arrivals rose by 58%.
Next year, Barcelona will pay 8 million EUR for the first three stages of the world’s most famous bicycle race to start in the Catalonian capital, and in 2027, the Tour de France will start in Edinburgh.
Las Vegas is already thinking of hosting the world championship cricket tourney, The Ashes, and of course the Tour de France is in its sights as well. Which begs a question: How will those millions of immigrant tourists get past the US’s border controls?
As with life itself, wretched excess lurks one step beyond. In 2029, the Asian Winter Games will take place in Saudi Arabia at Trojena, a purpose-built mountain resort in the desert. We live in an earth-torching, sportswashing world where the Jamaican Bobsled Team has been shorn of irony. But I digress…
And what is Canada doing in the world of sports tourism? Not much: there’s the Montreal Grand Prix, the National Bank Tennis Open, and of course FIFA soccer matches in Toronto and Vancouver next summer. But nothing big and new is on the horizon. So how about inviting the Asian Winter Games to come to Vancouver and Whistler? After all, nearly 30% of British Columbia’s 5.7 million people are Asian, and 21% of Canadians are Asian as well.
Meanwhile…
1. This Canada Day, have a good cry. I think of Wade Davis as Canada’s chief patriot. The Bowen Island writer (and so many other things) wrote a piece about his country in this month’s Canadian Geographic that brought me to…well, you know. So this coming Tuesday, July 1, if you’re looking for something chest-thumpingly Canadian to do as you drive to the cottage or sit around the fire, divide up his 4,000 words among you and everyone read their bit aloud to the others. It takes 25 minutes to read it all. An exercise in weepy nation-loving.
2. Trick questions. What’s the most used room in your home for media? Your bathroom. How does white people’s math work? What happens to your brain on Chat GPT?
3. Born on 3rd base and think you hit a home run? First, can one be too virtuous? And by the way, your life doesn’t suck. Oh, and Mr. Crusoe, please go home. And as someone said: “This is why there’s no free health care in America.”
4. Lapham’s Quarterly relaunches. Four times a year, it would take a huge subject, like the Sea, Money, Foreigners or Youth, and fill it with primary source material from history. Named after the beloved editor of Harper’s Magazine, Louis Lapham, who died last year, Lapham’s Quarterly breathed its last the year before. Its website was soon resurrected and now, the beloved and much-thumbed print edition, will return this summer.
5. How to have a cleaner toilet. This is just one of Martin’s Home Hacks, with tips on everything from securing your door lock, cleaning your kitchen, to hanging your clothesand using hair conditioner in new ways. Plus a raft of DIY tips too.
6. A world in conflict. Now this is a conflict of interest. Plus Ted and Tucker ‘debate’ each other. Plus who the real haters are. Plus how to really manage your ADHD. Finally, you’re a top Iranian commander and one night last week your phone rings and…
7. Field Notes. Every occupation has them, the minutiae of how to do your job, but in little brochures decades old. This one’s from a farmer. But Field Notes are those little books where you write notes that sometimes turn into books – and even a film festival. As they say, when you fill one, the next will come.
8. DOA. When two big new technologies – facial recognition and drones – advance quickly in synch, this is one entirely predictable result. And when you add in AI with orders to go smarter, smaller and cheaper, this is another.
9. Two summer music festivals worth tuning in. In Parry Sound, there’s the 46th edition of The Festival of the Sound, from July 25 to August 9. And two hours east of Toronto near Campbellford, running through Aug. 3, is The Westben Summer Festival.Neither overtouristed.
10. You’re in a room with 100 strangers. How do you compare to them?ThanAverage is a small, unscientific investigation into how you measure up to your nameless peers.
Plus, what’s out there on the web about you, You, YOU? Go to the Results About You page at Google, and fill out the form. It will take several days to weeks before you get results back showing what the public web shows. You can ask Google to delete each instance, but it only deletes it from its search results and not the web. (For that you need to contact the site displaying it.)
NOTE: There will be no OG blog on July 5. I will be cavorting with Putti in the hills of Umbria.