It’s been a good weekend, sports-wise. For those of you who don’t know me so well, I kind of love watching sports. Unusual for a girl, maybe, but some of the sports I watch are F1, tennis, golf, sumo wrestling … I even watched curling when the Winter Olympics were on! For those of you who have no idea what curling is (no, nothing to do with hair appliances!), here’s a short description.

Curling is an ice game so the team players wear ice skates (OK, someone has just pointed out that they don’t wear ice skates. Some kind of special shoes? ). There are four people in each team. Each member has something that looks like a broom, and there are these stone thingies with handles on top. The first member slides down the ice and releases one stone, and the other two people skate in front of it, and they use the broom to brush the ice in front of the stone so that the stone keeps travelling forward. There’s a bulls eye at the end of the ice path, and the objective is to get your stone as close to the bulls eye as possible. The two teams take turns throwing one stone each, you can also use your stone to bump the other team’s stones out of the way.

It may sound totally weird, but when you start watching, you can actually get pretty addicted! I told a few of my colleagues about it, so they made an effort to catch it on TV, and they got hooked to it!

Anyway, you get the idea of the various sports I watch. This weekend, I was pretty excited because Michael Schumacher was racing in the Shanghai Grand Prix, and Tiger Woods was also playing his final round in the World Golf Championship.

First up, was the F1 race. I only started watching halfway through, and it was at the time when Alonso was first, Fisichella second, followed by Michael Schumacher. I didn’t have very high expectations of this race because the Ferarris hadn’t performed too well in the qualifying sessions. But suddenly, my heart started beating faster, because Alonso was slowing down! He was about 3 - 4 seconds a lap slower than Fisichella and Schumacher.

Apparently, during his earlier pit stop, his front tyres were changed, and his back tyres were left alone. Somehow, this resulted in a lack of grip causing his lap times to be significantly slower than the two behind him. From being about 15 seconds behind Alonso, Fisichella and Schumacher were right on his tail. Eventually, Fisichella had to overtake Alonso, as there was no way that he could have kept Schumacher behind him and stayed behind Alonso at the same time. Not long after, Schumacher overtook Alonso as well. YEAH! One Renault down, and one to go.

A few laps later, Schumacher came into the pit stop to change to slick tyres. The Ferarri team left this until the last minute, so that they could bring Schumacher in without Fisichella coming in at the same time, so they were running out of the pit garage with the tyres in their hands. They changed his tyres, and out he went again. Fisichella came in for his stop on the next lap, and as he came out of the pit lane, you could see Schumacher in the distance. I thought that there was no hope, because Fisichella would definitely come out before Schumacher.

But, as the commentator said, “Here is where you can see the difference between a great driver and an absolutely fantastic driver!”. As Schumacher had come in on the previous lap, his tyres were already up to speed, whereas Fisichella was still sliding around, trying to get used to the new tyres. On the very first corner, Schumacher breezed past Fisichella. YEAH!

With two races to go, Schumacher and Alonso are now tied with the same amount of points, but Schumacher leads as he has one extra race win compared to Schumacher. Fingers crossed, hopefully Schumacher will win his last F1 championship!

Next, was the World Golf Championship. There’s nothing much to say here, Tiger Woods has said it all. In final rounds where he has been in the lead after the 3rd round, he has almost never lost. Plus, he was leading by something like five shots. It’s his sixth win in a row since the US Open, where he missed the cut (I think…not so sure). He was never really in trouble in the final round, only the rain prevented him from wrapping up the tournament even faster! In the end, he won by eight strokes over the second placed guy. As one of the players said, now that Tiger Woods is taking a break from golf for the next couple of weeks, perhaps some other people will finally get a chance to win a tournament!

OK, some of you might be thinking that I only support the top sportsmen, but that’s not true at all! Here are the facts:

1. I started supporting Pete Sampras (*sniff*, still can’t believe he’s retired!) since 1994, when I shifted house and there was absolutely nothing to do except watch TV. At that time, Sampras was playing in the ATP World Championships. The first match I watched him play was the round robin stage where his opponent was Boris Becker. He lost that match, but somehow, something about him made me want to watch even more! I watched the whole tournament, and was jubilated when he won. From then on, he soared to greater career heights, with the only one blemish on his record being his failure to win the French Open.

2. For F1, one of the first few races I remember watching was the Silverstone race in 1999 where Michael Schumacher broke his leg. At that point, he hadn’t won the world title since 1995 with Benetton. The broken leg prevented any chances of him winning the world championship that year, but once again, my interest was captured. In the next year, Schumacher finally won the world championship with Ferarri.

3. Finally, in golf, I’ve always been interested in watching Tiger Woods. There was such a big frenzy in the media after he won all those US Amateur titles. It was interesting, because there aren’t that many black people playing golf, and everyone was sure that he was the next best thing in golf. I remember him playing in the Augusta Championships where he decimated the rest of the field to win the title.

Some of you might say, “Well, it doesn’t change the fact that you still only support the good players!” My defence would be…in that case, wouldn’t I be supporting Roger Federer, who some people say is the greatest player ever? Never…I will always be loyal to Pete Sampras!

Anyway, good job to Michael Schumacher and Tiger Woods!

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