If you're a sports fan you're in heaven these weeks. We've just wrapped up the Australian Open in tennis and the Super Bowl in American football. Depending on when you read this maybe you're settling in for the NBA All Star Game in basketball, not to mention the mother lode of winter sports that is the Winter Olympics. If you want to root for a team or individual to win a crown by hitting, hooping, running or sliding, you're in luck.
While there is certainly crossover if you watch more than one event, you're hardly alone: we're talking a huge amount of eyeballs. The Olympics alone garners some 2 billion viewers globally, with the Australian Open close behind. While the Super Bowl dominates in the US, its global reach is a good bit smaller though still sizable. And were it in any other playing field the NBA's 5 million viewers would be significant, though it's tiny in this context. Still, add them all up, and across the globe we're talking a rough total of 4.1 billion people cheering someone or something on.
That doesn't mean that all the other championships in other contests are standing on the sidelines. It's just there are only so many minutes of airtime and column inches in the sports report or section. And so you have to dig a little deeper to find out the exploits of England's Judd Trump (snooker) or the Dragons of Wales (rugby) or Philippines OG's (esports) as they compete with the best in the world for their respective cups.
Let's start on the other side of the globe at the Badminton Asia Team Championships. This is not your backyard version of the sport, with pros routinely smashing the shuttlecock (you called it a birdie as a kid) at speeds over 200 miles per hour; the record is 351 mph. In the finals last weekend Japan won their first men's title stunning last year's winner China, while the South Korea women shutout their Chinese counterparts by three to zip.
Meanwhile, the ICC men's T20 Cricket World Cup is in it's first week, with matches being hosted by India and Sri Lanka. Twenty teams are playing a total of 55 matches, including Italy making its tournament debut. All eyes are on Group A, the so called "Group of Death" featuring heavyweights India and Pakistan alongside the Netherlands, USA, and Namibia. India enters as the #1 ranked team, having won 33 of their last 41 T20 matches, and features Abhishek Sharma as the tournament's top-ranked batter, with a 2025 season average of 42.95 and a strike rate near 200. (My good friend Nana, a cricket fanatic, may be one of the few reading this who understands just how good that really is.)
And in Paris they are heading into the finals this weekend for the Rainbow Six Siege World Championship. RSS is one of the games in the world of esports, this one developed by Ubisoft. A tactical first-person shooter game, it's described as different from "run-and-gun" games like Call of Duty, being much more of a "chess match with guns." In these 5 vs. 5 matches one team defends an objective (like a bomb or a hostage) inside a building, and the other team tries to infiltrate and neutralize them. Top contenders include the FaZe Clan team which is based in Brazil. They are looking to repeat as winners and take home the $1 million prize.
To be sure congratulations are due to Carlos Alcaraz, the Seattle Seahawks and Swiss skier Franjo von Allmen for taking the first gold at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina. But let's not forget to offer kudos to Switzerland's Lisa Bauman for capturing the cup in Châtel, France at the UCI Snow Bike World Championships. Bauman beat out France's Vicky Clavel in the Women's Elite Super G, a sort of downhill ski race on a bike, with a time of 1:58.270. And while the aforementioned Judd Trump got snookered this time by getting knocked out in the first round, Zhao Xintong of China triumphed over his countryman Zhang Anda by 10 to 6 at the 2026 World Grand Prix of snooker in Hong Kong. As for the T20, Nana, just keep cheering that Team Blue will be in the finals come March 8: "Jeetega Bhai Jeetega, India Jeetega!"
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Marc Wollin of Bedford doesn't' follow any particular sport. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.
