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Bulls & Bears: ‘Indoor’ audience record marks pandemic period punch-up

While live audiences’ return to U.S. venues gives us a lift, there’s a letdown with NHL schedule, blue-collar market blues, ‘nag-ing’ derby doping dilemma

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Bulls of the Week

While pandemic fatigue is taking its toll on fans in Canada, the accelerated return of live spectators to sports events in the United States is reflecting a largely successful vaccine rollout south of the border. The poster child for the reopening to American fans was last week’s slugfest between Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and Billy Joe Saunders. The title unification bout drew 73,216 fans to AT&T Stadium, home of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys. It is the largest attendance ever for an “indoor” boxing match and the biggest crowd to watch a live sporting event since before the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Bears of the Week

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The National Hockey League awkwardly skates into its 2021 Stanley Cup playoffs with its three U.S.-based divisions beginning play this weekend. The Canadian teams, however, won’t get underway until next Wednesday and Thursday as the league awaits the end of a meaningless turtle derby between the Vancouver Canucks and Calgary Flames. Those two teams — both of which failed to qualify for the post-season — need until next Wednesday to play out the string of their compressed 56-game regular season.

They’re doing so because of a coronavirus outbreak that sidelined the Canucks for three weeks last month and to allow the league and its member franchises to preserve as much as they can in the way of national and regional television rights fees, local radio revenues and sponsorship income. The scatter-gun approach isn’t a good look for the NHL, especially when you consider the Canucks are playing five games in seven nights; not exactly a best practice in the realm of player safety and injury prevention.

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It is an equally awkward time for the Oakland Athletics, who have been officially encouraged by Major League Baseball to pursue relocation options while Alameda County politicians consider stadium financing for a new home for the American League West Division leaders. How long before the A’s join the NBA’s Golden State Warriors (now playing in downtown San Francisco) and the NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders as ghosts of a blue collar market that in its heyday in the 1970s was one of the most storied in North American professional sport.

Medina Spirit, ridden by jockey John Velazquez, crosses the finish line to win the 147th running of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky., on May 1.
Medina Spirit, ridden by jockey John Velazquez, crosses the finish line to win the 147th running of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky., on May 1. Photo by Tim Nwachukwu /Getty Images files

Yet you can’t have a better example of the peaks and valleys of the stock market of sport than what’s been going on around Kentucky Derby winner Medina Spirit these past two weeks. Just one week ago, we were bullish on horse racing in general and the Derby in particular after Medina Spirit declared its Triple Crown ambitions with a one-half length win over Mandaloun in front of a peak U.S. television audience of 15.7 million Americans and an average viewership of 14.5 million on NBC. Those were good, bounce-back numbers for the Kentucky Derby and gave the sport of horse racing some positive footing going into the most important part of the year.

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Yet all of that much-needed positivity in the face of the now 14-month-long COVID-19 pandemic evaporated in the face of a doping scandal that has left the Kentucky Derby championship status of Medina Spirit — who tested positive at Churchill Downs for the presence of the anti-inflammatory corticosteroid betamethasone — up in the air pending the results of the mandatory follow-up tests.

Instead of rallying casual sports fans around the potential of a second Triple Crown horse in three years, the apparent doping violation has put trainer Bob Baffert — arguably the most famous name in the equine industry — on the defensive and put the spotlight back on the dark side of horse racing that is represented by performance-enhancing drugs.

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Marketing communications executive and sport business commentator Tom Mayenknecht is a principal in Emblematica Brand Builders and the host of The Sport Market on BNN Bloomberg Radio 1410 and TSN Radio nationally. Follow Mayenknecht at: twitter.com/TheSportMarket

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