Klopping on the wrong door

Bulls president Willem Strauss drew an interesting comparison when discussing the team’s failure to win a United Rugby Championship (URC) final.

The Bulls have lost in three of the four finals since the competition was revamped. They went down to the Stormers in Cape Town in 2022, Glasgow Warriors in Pretoria 2024 and earlier this month to Leinster in Dublin.

“I think Jurgen Klopp [the former Borussia Dortmund and Liverpool manager] lost in seven finals before he won one. Hopefully the law of averages will also turn in our favour,” he said.

It is perhaps worth pointing out, irrespective of the results, that Klopp zealously protected his players and they in turn adored him.

Amateur hour

Sanabo, the body responsible for amateur boxing in South Africa, will decide at its elective AGM on July 19 whether to join World Boxing, the governing body they need to be a member of if they plan to send any boxers to the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics.

In the meantime, Sanabo president Siya Mkwalo has been appointed to the African Boxing Confederation normalisation committee by the International Boxing Association (IBA) — the previous governing body that has been shunned by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). We will then find out if Sanabo care more about Olympic boxing or administrative gat-kruiping at IBA which, we’ve heard, is not shy to splash the cash.

Nike fooling faithful

Oddballs wonders whether PT Barnum discovered the elixir of eternal life and is now running Nike’s marketing campaigns, like the ridiculous circus around Faith Kipyegon’s failed sub-four-minute mile attempt this week. The Kenyan is a superstar athlete, but she’s not super-human. Expecting her to knock just more than three percent off her 4:07.64 world record was simply insane, and nothing more than an obscene publicity stunt.

When Ruth Chepng’etich took nearly two minutes off the women’s marathon record last year, that was a reduction of less than 1.5%. Some people loved the fanfare around it, but as Barnum is rumoured to have said, there’s a sucker born every minute. 

Dashing Dhawan

Shikhar Dhawan, the former India opening batter, made a startling revelation about life on tour in his memoir, The One: Cricket, My Life and More. One of the most devastating batters India has produced, Dhawan recalled how he “smuggled” a woman he had met at an airport in Australia into his hotel room during an India A tour in 2006. The only issue was that he was sharing the room with Rohit Sharma. After swapping phone numbers, the two attended a few parties.

“She was very beautiful, and suddenly I was in love again! I thought to myself: ‘She is the one for me, and I am going to marry her’. After every game, I would go over to meet up with Ellen, and I soon started smuggling her into my hotel room, which I was sharing with Rohit Sharma. Now and then, he would complain in Hindi: ‘Will you let me sleep?’”