May 16/17: The weekend some sports restarted (fanless)
Even if worldwide some sports have continued to play and be broadcasted and streamed, this is the first weekend we can say some major sports have really restarted, obviously in empty venues, both in the US and Europe.
Bundesliga restarted games with a 4–0 Borussia Dortmund vs Shalke 04 and a great goal by the 19 years wunderkind Haaland.
PGA Tour held a charity golf tournament with Rory McIlroy and others.
NASCAR restarted racing at full speed :).
Let’s have a close look but first congrats to all those involved behind the scenes.
Bundesliga
The resumption of Bundesliga behind locked doors on Saturday was viewed by over six million fans in Germany, which is a new record for broadcasters Sky. The domestic figure is more than double the usual audience for a typical round of Saturday matches.
According to AFP, matches were televised by more than 70 broadcasters worldwide, all on previously-agreed deals.
With Bundesliga matches played behind locked doors in near-empty stadiums, Sky Germany broadcast the ‘Konferenz’ on it’s free-to-view Sports News Channel.
Update: record viewing in Italy (500k) for Bundesliga matches on Sunday.
The idea was to discourage fans in Germany from meeting up to watch matches in places with a Sky subscription.
- Good football — the level of play was good and apart from some early injuries I could not spot a major difference
- Empty stadiums — weird but has some magic, the audio of the player and the ball being kicked, the reverb sound, the noise of the net — one of the first time we could hear it. Not bad.
- Social distancing celebrations — that maybe the new/next normal. I honestly prefer them to the usual one which got really boring after a while at least we saw some innovation
- The final tour to thank empty fan stands showed respect from the players
- Have not seen production innovations I expected apart from closer shots to avoid stand more than normal (but I may need more info here)
We know France has closed the season so let’s see what Spain, Italy and, England will be able to achieve in June.
PGA Tour
Sunday’s match at Seminole in Florida between the teams of Rory McIlroy-Dustin Johnson and Rickie Fowler-Matthew Wolff was the cornerstone of a charitable effort as live televised golf was played for the first time since the golf calendar was shut down two months ago due to the coronavirus pandemic.
With neither team able to win the decisive 18th hole, the match went to a closest-to-the-pin contest from 120 yards at the par-3 17th, with the six final skins available for $1.1 million. McIlroy, the reigning FedExCup champ and world №1, won the contest with the final shot of the day, as his ball finished closer than Wolff’s.
The final skins increased the total charitable skins winnings of McIlroy-Johnson to $1.85 million for the American Nurses Foundation. Fowler-Wolff won $1.15 million for the CDC Foundation. The UnitedHealth Group donated the $3 million for the skins contest.
“It’s different,” McIlroy said when asked about the pressure of playing for charity. “When you’re not playing for your own money, but you’re playing for someone else and playing for another cause, it sort of starts to weigh on you a little bit.
“I’m really proud to be a part of an event to entertain the people at home on a Sunday afternoon but also to raise money for people who really need it.”
NASCAR
The hours leading up to Sunday’s 400-mile race at Darlington Raceway — actually, the months leading up to it — were so strange. The moments immediately following the event, as Kevin Harvick reached a rarely achieved career milestone and did his celebratory donuts in front of an empty grandstand, they too were like nothing NASCAR has ever felt or seen before.
But the 3 hours, 30 minutes and 34 seconds in between? Those felt perfectly normal. The most normal that anyone in the NASCAR community, fan or competitor, has felt in nearly 2½ months.
“I just want to thank everybody from NASCAR and all the teams for letting us do what we do,” Harvick said, “I didn’t think it would be that much different if we won the race, but it’s dead silent here. We miss the fans.”
What NASCAR and its teams did was a lot, designing and then adhering to a health-conscious protocol aimed at protecting competitors during an event held in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
Everyone at the racetrack had their temperatures checked before admission into the garage, and that garage was spread out past its normal confines and throughout the Darlington Raceway infield. Working and walking lanes were marked by miles of red tape, with promises of ejections and fines should anyone dare not to stay in their prescribed social-distancing lanes or refused to wear protective face masks. NASCAR said that none of the nearly 900 people on the racetrack grounds were found to be symptomatic, even so much as a slightly elevated temperature.
The only hiccup in the protection plan came during the race, when 40 team spotters, normally crammed into a tiny area atop the press box, drifted away from their designated spots scattered throughout the empty front stretch grandstand and began to congregate. When they were shown on television, many among the television audience questioned the closeness of their formation and NASCAR officials warned them to spread back out.
