Montréal–One thing about sports: people like what they like. If your buddy is a diehard NASCAR fan, you’d have a tough time convincing him that the upcoming F1 season will feature more compelling storylines, better racing and a more thrilling title chase. Even if your opinion is correct, it doesn’t matter: fandom doesn’t reside in the objective world. Buddy likes NASCAR better than F1? That’s the way it is.

With that in mind, I present my entirely subjective preview of the 2008 sporting calendar. These are the tournaments, title games and races that will consume most of my time and thus prevent me from being an otherwise productive and engaging member of society. A few notes about the subject, which is me in this case: as mentioned previously, I’m moving to Paris with my fiancée Sarah in February, and I’m jazzed to more fully explore the Eurocentric sporting events I’ve followed at arm’s length over the past years.

Thus, while my 2007 sporting calendar might have had a big red circle around the two weeks in late August that comprise the U.S. Open tennis tournament — I love those intense late-night matches from steamy, kooky New York, where the fans are second to none — 2008 for me is all about the French Open at Roland Garros. The gist of the argument: please don’t leave a comment chiding me for omitting the 2008 Beer Pong World Championship in February from my calendar. I like what I like, you like what you like, and there’s no … wait, there’s an actual Beer Pong World Championship!? Wicked.

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Super Bowl XLII — February 3

Everyone expects this game, at Peter Eiseman’s stunning new stadium in Glendale, to feature the New England Patriots as the AFC representative, with the league’s new supervillain hoping to close out an undefeated 19-0 season. And as delighted as I would be to see the Pats lose a game in the next two weeks (and I once counted myself a Pats fan, having lived in Boston for four years at the start of the team’s neo-dynasty), I can’t help thinking a Pats-Packers matchup would be the most-watched Super Bowl of all-time. Brett Favre vs. Tom Brady; the league’s most passionate smalltown fan base vs. probably the most sports-crazed sports city in North America; the feel-good team of the year vs. those damn Patriots: who doesn’t watch this game?

Since everyone’s hoping for this matchup, I’m sure we’ll be enjoying a Jacksonville-Seattle clash. That’s just how these things seem to work out.

MLB Opening Day — March 31

After the dire prognostications that preceded the previous two baseball seasons, this coming year really will be all about the steroids. Full disclosure: in contrast to most hockey-mad Canadians, I grew up loving baseball and it’s still my favourite sport. So the prospect of another full season devolving into “that steroid gameâ€? has me about as excited as a cycling fan circa 2003. This off-season saw the publication of the Mitchell Report on steroids, and the club owners and managers — not to mention the sport’s horrendous excuse for a commissioner — got away blame-free as the media attention focused on the “outedâ€? players who used steroids, when none of the game’s stewards bothered to test them or punish them for doing so.

Am I the only one concerned that we’re presuming the guilt of players named in Mitchell’s report rather hastily? Now, I hate Roger Clemens as much as the next guy, but what happened to due process, and the presumption of innocence, and all that stuff? Really, we’re going to just take the word of some flunkies hoping to save their bacons in the face of federal indictments? My fiancée is even more fired up on this subject than I, and has taken to calling accused steroids users “Communistsâ€? as an homage to the thousands of innocent people thrown under the bus by an American political and media elite in the 1950s that was eager to demonize some of its own for a vague association with the presiding evil of the day. McCarthyism is alive and well in baseball. The 2008 MLB season — feel the excitement!

UEFA Champions League Final — May 21

The first ever Champions League final to be held in Moscow, this game at Luzhniki Stadium will be contested between two of the sixteen teams that advanced to the knockout stage of the competition between Europe’s top club teams. Four English clubs, three Spanish clubs, three Italian clubs and squads from Scotland, France, Portugal, Greece and Turkey remain in contention.I’m pulling for my new “home side,” Olympique Lyonnais, and the underdogs of Turkish club Fenerbahçe Spor Kulübü.

French Open — May 25 to June 8

Rafael Nadal has won the past three men’s titles. Justine Henin has won the past three women’s titles. But everyone knows that the real champions at Roland Garros are the corporate fat cats atop the laundry detergent industry. Look for me in the nosebleed seats at the semifinals, and enjoy the inevitable and not-to-be-missed Nadal-Federer duel in the men’s singles championship.

Stanley Cup Finals — June

The past three NHL championship duels have each featured one of Canada’s six franchises — Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa. Toronto stinks this year (again), and Montreal was the last Canadian team to hoist the cup. (FYI: I’m in Montreal this week visiting my sister and look forward to the Habs game versus the hated Bruins on Thursday night at a local bar. Allons-y les Habitants!). The current hope to continue the trend are my beloved Vancouver Canucks, led by the best goalie in the world right now, Roberto Luongo. The only fan more excited than I about the prospect of a Canucks Stanley Cup win is my brother Michael, who’s holding a $10 wager placed at the Las Vegas Hilton back in December that pays off 25-to-1 if the ‘Nucks win the Cup (I get him the same Christmas present every year). Come on big money!

UEFA Euro 2008 — June 7-29

The ‘08 event I’m looking forward to more than any other. I lived in Dublin during the 2002 World Cup; there’s nothing like being in a soccer-mad country in the throes of an international tournament. And since most of the countries with teams in the Euro have fought wars against one another in the past hundred years, the tension is ratcheted up to levels that exceed the World Cup. This year the tournament is in Switzerland and Austria, but rather than attending the actual games, my plan is to visit as many European capitals of nations competing in the tournament as I can, and live in various Continental pubs on match days.

Stay tuned, as this will be the Sportstrotter’s fixation numero uno come summer.

Tour de France — July 5-27

What was I saying about drug scandals? International cycling is surely loving the baseball brouhaha going on right now, if only because it’s deflected some of the attention from the world’s other most tainted sport. You’d think with all the attention paid to doping in the past three or four years of cycling, the athletes would figure out this year that they’re going to be tested for everything under the sun, and get back to racing with the legs that their mommas gave them. This year’s tour begins in Brest and takes a two-stage detour into the mountains of Italy. I’ll be living a short walk from the tour’s final stage, and I hope to see at least one untainted rider cycle triumphantly down the Champs-Élysées.

Beijing Summer Olympics — August 8 to 24

The big question of this Olympiad: with air pollution levels currently two or three times the levels deemed safe by the WHO, will the winner of the marathon be able to break the three-hour mark? And how gross will the winner’s blackened snot be when he blows his nose at the finish line? Inquiring minds need to know.

Beijing Fun Fact #1: To minimize the chance of rain during the opening and closing ceremonies, Chinese scientists will shoot rockets full of silver iodate pellets into the atmosphere several days before the ceremonies to seed clouds and induce preemptive rains. Wowzers.

Fun Fact #2: The Beijing National Stadium, a skeletal structure designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron (pound for pound, the best architects working in the world today, in my humble opinion), is totally wizard. I think it looks like a wedge cut from a giant rubber band ball, but that’s just me.

The Beijing Olympics Drinking Game: Tune in to NBC’s Olympic coverage and knock back a shot every time a weepy-voiced announcer waxes over a sentimental music cue how the presence of Iraqi athletes at the games shows “just how far we’re come in bringing freedom to the Middle East.� You’ll be wasted by lunchtime. (Somehow, I don’t anticipate hearing this line quite as often from the French media covering the games.)

The 37th Ryder Cup Matches — September 19 to 21

I love the Ryder, the biennial three-day match play tournament between the top golfers of America and Europe, but have only ever seen it from the North American side. So I look forward to the European media coverage of this tournament, which is held at Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville, Kentucky. Paul Azinger and Nick Faldo are the captains for the Americans and the Europeans, respectively; Azinger and Faldo were two of the main players at one of the most dramatic and hostile matches in the history of the competition, the 1991 Ryder Cup at Kiawah Island Golf Resort in South Carolina, contested with great patriotic zeal at the height of the first Gulf War. Europe has won the last three Ryder Cups and five of the last six.

October to December

Besides baseball’s World Series, these late-fall/early-winter months see the start of regular season competition in American and European football, hockey and basketball, so there aren’t really any big tournaments or championships to circle on the calendar. But lest you think that there are no champions crowned in the last quarter of the year, here are some of the sports that contest their World Championships on the back pages of the annual sports calendar: Chess; darts, judo, bingo; wushu; rock, paper, scissors; Rubik’s cube; and Magic: The Gathering.

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Posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 8:04 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.