The Walrus � j u n e 2 0 1 3
Sports
The Game
NOt Played
Christine Sinclair, the greatest female soccer player
in the world, won’t get the career she deserves
by Richard Poplak
photography by bruno bebert
out of this world
Christine Sinclair factored
in 65.9 ­percent of goals scored
by Canada in 2012.
n september 2011, when John Herdman was named coach of
the Canadian women’s national soccer team, he sat down with
his laptop and composed a diptych. The first image portrayed
Christine Sinclair, the best female soccer player in the world,
impersonating roadkill. She stares into the distance, eyes dead,
nose smashed inward and to the left. An unidentified teammate
places a consoling hand on her head, but she remains disconsolate. The
picture was snapped right after the team’s second game in the 2011 International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) Women’s World
Cup, a 4–0 trouncing by France. The result eliminated Canada from
the competition, and after four years of merciless toil the team would
­return home with nothing but grass stains and painkillers.
Alongside this memento mori, the coach slotted a stock photo
of the newly minted 2012 London Summer Olympics medals: Nike,
­goddess of victory, bearing her robes through Athens’ Panathenaic
Stadium. Misery and triumph, separated by a pixel. “I have a vision,”
Herdman told the players he spoke with over the course of that terrible
autumn. He conjured Sinclair atop a podium, brandishing a glinting
disc of Olympic bounty. “I see you up there,” he insisted. “Together,
we can make this happen.”
The power of any diptych lies in the conceptual peanut butter sandwiched between the canvases, in this case the wholesale rebuilding,
reconstitution, and rehabilitation of the Canadian women’s squad,
premised on the fact that the football gods, to say nothing of football
fans, are owed the full weaponization of Sinclair’s dexterous feet.
31
The Walrus � j u n e 2 0 1 3
The Olympic semifinal loss to the United States in 2012 — in which Sinclair scored three goals on the way to the best individual effort on a soccer pitch this country has ever seen, and
wherein Canada was subjected to a series of controversial refereeing calls that only FIFA officials are capable of engineering — will
one day be recounted in song (hopefully not by Nickelback).
When Herdman’s fateful predictions came to pass and S
­ inclair
did indeed mount the podium to accept bronze, a klatch of ethnically d
­ iverse women flooded the talk-show circuit, pitching
Just Do It self-affirmation to a country unaccustomed to the
cruel beauty of soccer. Suddenly, it was safe for Canadian girls,
many of whom now spend their childhoods on the soccer pitch,
to idolize celebrities who ate food.
Bronze, however, is not gold. Upcoming, the FIFA Women’s
World Cup, scheduled for Canada in 2015. Home soil advantage and new-found success bring unimaginable pressure. It is
unfair to both the players and the coaching staff to suggest that
winning depends entirely on Sinclair, but it is no less absurd to
­suggest that anything can be achieved without her; she factored
in 65.9 percent of goals scored by her team in 2012. She is Daniel
Day‑Lewis among a team of Paul Danos, and while her dominance is acknowledged in North American soccer circles, football
is a global game. We tend not to give statistics, even statistics as
compelling as hers, the necessary credence until there is a shiny
piece of FIFA-emblazoned hardware to back them up.
So, scorer of 145 international goals; bearer of the Maple Leaf
at the Olympic closing ceremony; winner of the 2012 Lou Marsh
Memorial Trophy for Canadian athlete of the year; consensus
pick among her peers as the best all-around female soccer player
in the world. Unjustly — and football is manifestly unjust — it all
adds up to far less than the sum of its parts. At stake in the next
two years are not just the pride of a nation and the local popularity of a rising women’s game, but the historical standing of
the player without whom it can only rise so high.
eaf
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Troph year; consen ers as
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Unjust to all adds up
far less
than the
of its pa sum
rts.
the officials, who still brandish the sign emblazoned with her
name, as if reminding her of her own identity. Before long, she
is stuffed into a minibus, along with her bags, and whisked off
into Chongqing’s foggy bowels.
This year, the Chinese tournament is contested by Canada,
­Norway, South Korea, and the host nation. It is the first set of games
Canada has played since winning bronze, an inexcusable organizt is january 2013, and Christine Sinclair has just cleared
ational lapse on the part of the Canadian Soccer A
­ ssociation (CSA).
customs after a long flight. She leans in to interpret the
Six months without kicking a ball in anger is far too long. The
nattering of several football bureaucrats, the number- team puts up seventy kilometres from the a­ irport, at Y
­ ongchuan’s
less men in puffy jackets who converge on tournaments
­Minghao International Hotel, which my wife ­describes as “huntin the world’s least accessible crannies. Their solicitous- ing lodge baroque crossed with Q
­ ing-era opium overdose.” This
ness is edged with threat. “Remember,” they seem to be say- is where I find Christine Sinclair, amid the clutter of a buffet,
ing, “FIFA is everywhere.”
overlooking a standard Chinese ­pre-apocalyptic vista. Behind
We are in Chongqing airport, gateway to China’s vast, restive
us, her teammates caterwaul their way through dinner.
“Air’s pretty grim, huh? ” I say, gesturing to the window.
west. Since the Olympics, Sinclair and FIFA have been locked in
an icy détente. She is here to support her team in the 2013 Four
“Yup.” Sinclair slides in across from me and braces for the
Nations women’s football tournament, but she is not ­allowed worst. Her manager insisted over the phone that she was eager
to play, serving out a four-game suspension for tangling with
beyond words to meet me. It turns out that the only accurate
­officials at the Olympics. She brushes off the spat with the usual
part of that statement is “beyond words.”
footballer banalities: “Oh, it’s no big deal. The media has made it
The diminishing privacy of stardom has not been easy on
a lot bigger than it really is. And they won’t leave it alone. I mean, ­Sinclair, for whom the term “introvert” is somehow too garrulous.
I’m here, training, which is what I need to do.”
Her backstory was meticulously established over the course of
She has a distinctive way of carrying herself, which hints at
the Olympics, mostly during a summer press orgy that ­depicted
her comportment on the pitch. Switchblade lithe, she pushes her her Burnaby, BC, family performing rote ­Canadian ­activities such
baggage cart with arms akimbo, like a musclehead contending
as barbecuing, waving Maple Leaf flags, and hugging Grandma.
with recently pumped lats. Her standard facial expression is “ ‘Go, Auntie Canada, Go’: Christine Sinclair Makes Family Proud,”
ironic bemusement, and a vein is always prominent on her right read one Calgary Herald headline, with a picture of adorable niece
temple. Her eyes are a limpid, wintry blue. She cocks an ear at Kaitlyn on the lap of the family matriarch, Peggy Gant.
32
Richard Poplak � T h e G a m e N o t P l ay e d
Football is, and always has been, the familial glue. The standard narrative — and from this the Sinclairs do not deviate — is that Christine reluctantly took up the sport as a four-year-old.
Whatever older brother Mike did, she wanted to do ­better. She
was a gifted child athlete, with an unshakable ability to focus
on kicking a ball farther, harder, and with greater accuracy than
the Platonic ideal of a footballer instilled in her through family
lore. Insofar as men’s soccer has contributed to Canadian sports
royalty, her uncles Bruce and Brian Gant would qualify as lesser
nobility — stalwarts in the now defunct North American Soccer
League (NASL), and in Brian’s case a fourteen-cap midfielder
for the men’s national team. According to Sinclair, there was
no obsession with Manchester United or Galatasaray; unlike so
many local soccer families, the Gant/Sinclairs are unhyphenated Canadians.
“I don’t even know who Mike’s favourite player was,” she tells
me. “Or mine. In terms of who was on our walls, I had Roberto
Alomar of the Toronto Blue Jays. I played soccer, but I didn’t know
there was a national team. There was no Internet, no games on
TV.” This purity, unsullied by anything as crass as cheering for
a foreign team, is fundamental to her football ethos.
In the middle of this tidy biography, gloom settled in. Her
­mother coached Christine’s club teams until she was almost
eleven. (When I ask about their routine, she tells me s­ harply,
“In terms of practices with my mom, I have no idea. I can’t
­remember. No idea.”) Soon after relinquishing her coaching
­duties, Sandra Sinclair developed symptoms of multiple s­ clerosis
that put her in a wheelchair. The family doesn’t hide her condition, but it is nothing Christine is keen to discuss.
As if on cue, a commotion from the buffet: “Christine’s my
hero!” yells backup goaltender Karina LeBlanc. “Sincy for
president!” insists another.
Sinclair blushes. “Aw, guys, c’mon,” she pleads. Laughter from
between the chicken kung pao and the garden salad.
This gentle joshing, these grim hotel buffets in unpronounceable towns in faraway lands have been the major components of
Sinclair’s life since her mid-teens. Now turning thirty, she earned
her first ­national team cap when she was sixteen, and she has
not been off the roster since. Most of us leave sports trips behind after high school. We do not stay in hotels with a group and
a coach and a chaperone and a schedule. The lifestyle has not
resulted in suspended development per se, because the cruelties of life ­ignore no one, and they certainly have not ignored
Christine Sinclair. ­Rather, she has existed in an unaltered state
of junior high ­social interaction.
“Is this a normal life? God, no,” is how Maeve Glass, the team’s
equipment manager and den mother, puts it. (She is basically
an old school chaperone, keeping an eye out for perverts with
cameras and other lurking dangers. “We do get some stalkerquality types,” she tells me.) Sinclair has thus evolved, or frozen,
into a superannuated preteen. “When I go home,” she tells me,
“nothing has changed. It’s like I’m ten years old.”
“Silent,” “humble,” “jokester,” “really actually incredibly
funny” — I hear them all during the course of my days in China.
Also, less charitably, “surliness mixed with girliness.” But my
­initial impression lingers: Sinclair is not diva difficult, merely
diffident. And she has not yet perfected the art of concealing
33
her deep streak of unhappiness behind the sheet metal of a
­public persona. “Yeah, she sure keeps her counsel,” Herdman
tells me. “You know, I’m not sure how many conversations I’ve
had with her since coming on board. She’s just — quiet. That’s
who she is.”
f christine sinclair has a signature, it is this: A ball
is booted up from the attacking back line. It rolls toward
the defending back line. Stalemate. As if from nowhere,
a figure bolts forward, usually off the right wing. The ball
is at her feet, and she makes directly for the goal. Then a
shot — hard, soft, to the top right corner, doesn’t matter. ­Sinclair
almost always finds a way to finish. She is the most preternaturally calm striker the women’s game has ever known.
In an effort to see this in the flesh, I hitch a ride on the team
bus to the Yongchuan Sports Centre, a fifteen-minute drive
from the hotel. The Canadian Women’s National Team is an
­assemblage of young athletes oozing a vitality and haleness I
can only hope is contagious. Spray tan has been liberally a­ pplied;
the bus smells like an explosion in a Body Shop. And there is no
way to glean the names of family members or dead homeboys by
reading an arm or a thigh, as there would be with men’s teams.
It would be difficult to find a group of young North A
­ merican
females with less visible ink. After the short ride, we file out
into the stadium, where cranes crowd the arena like browsing brontosauruses. “Jeez, it smells nasty here,” says one of
the players.
Almost every girl in Canada will kick a ball at some point.
Gathered on Yongchuan’s cold pitch are the twenty or so who
have made it all the way. The first thing the observer notes is
that, no, they have not touched the ball enough. The instinctive ball handling is missing, the 10,000 hours of interminable,
lonesome practice that forms a soccer player, much of it ideally
before puberty. Sinclair has banked the hours. Her teammates,
for the most part, have not.
Instead, this group represents the relentless professionalization of the women’s game. Herdman is a short Geordie who
sports one of the several hairstyles Real Madrid’s Cristiano
­Ronaldo wears during La Liga games. When he was hired as
coach, ­Herdman ­imported the support organization he ­developed
as the New­­Zealand national women’s team coach. He is no
screamer. Rather, science is his cudgel. There is not one a­ spect of
the ­athletes’ physiology or play that goes unmeasured. VO2max,
turn percentage, pass percentage, body mass index, sprint
speed, everything.
Under the care of César Meylan, the Swiss sports scientist
nicknamed Donald Trump for his flap of golden hair, bodies
are tuned by specifically designed, individually tailored programs. Girls are no longer called fat for carrying extra pounds,
or punished with extra miles if they are unfit. Instead, they get
their stats after every session, and the stats cannot be argued
against or bargained with. Herdman knows exactly how many
seconds he can get from players before they hit the pitch, and
he has anticipated how many times they will touch the ball in
the lead-up to the World Cup. Nudged, cajoled, and crafted by
numbers, this could be the most advanced national sporting
program Canada has ever known.
The Walrus � j u n e 2 0 1 3
No one escapes the technocracy, including Sinclair. On the
His concept is, the more passes you make, the more chances
field during drills, she appears tall and lean, more so than she
you have to lose the ball. The farther up the field the ball is, the
seems on television. The way she holds her arms away from her more likely you are to score. That was his motto.” This made for
body has the effect of making her look larger. When she runs, she
unlovely football, but it had the advantage of honing Sinclair’s
instincts as a pure sniper. The American Abby Wambach is the
hunches low and slices the air with her elbows and knees, like a
only other female player today with comparable statistics. But
piece of threshing equipment, not something you would want to
get in the way of. She is very quick. Her genius, however, lurks
Sinclair has never had the privilege of playing on teams stocked
somewhere in her fierceness, in the resolve that she has the talent with the likes of Kristine Lilly, Mia Hamm, and Tiffeny Milbrett,
to make good on. And, of course, pitch awareness — sharp pings
all 100-plus goal scorers, to say nothing of Brandi Chastain
of sonar she sends into the fray, locating gaps, speeding into and (she of the famous sports bra photo, post–America’s World Cup
through them, emerging with the game under her sway.
’99 win) and legendary goalkeeper Briana Scurry. For the most
part, Sinclair has been a one-woman show.
Most of this comes naturally, but not all. When I ask ­Herdman
how much he has had to coach her, he says, “Look, when you
When Pellured’s tenure ended, the highly touted I­ talian
work with Christine you’re working with an expert. And when
­Carolina Morace was brought in to replace him. An aesthete,
you’re working with experts, it’s a partnership. It’s a question
she was determined to introduce possession-based f­ ootball
and answer process. She doesn’t need rules. She just needs
into a system that would have seemed unsophisticated to a
some guidelines.”
­Khoisan berry picker in AD 400. But the 2011 World Cup was
For most of her career, Sinclair has played either centre for- a disaster. In the first game, playing the German hosts in front
of 74,000 beered-up partisans, Canada faced impossibly long
ward or as one of two forwards. Herdman has pulled her back
into an attacking midfield position, sometimes referred to as a
odds. But when Sinclair still managed to score after having
recessed forward. You would think this would reduce her scor- her nose crushed by an errant elbow, there was some notion
ing effectiveness, but she has only become more lethal, p
­ otting
that a Canadian epic poem was being penned with her blood.
twenty-four goals for Canada in 2012, by far her highest annual “The ­opening game of the World Cup, you break your nose,
total. She and Herdman have pored over tape of the Brazilian mid- it’s like uh-oh,” she told me. “I mean, you plan for things, but
fielder Kaka, now warming the bench for Real Madrid, as well as
never for that. I broke my nose, I scored a goal. Maybe it’s
the Barcelona geniuses Messi and I­ niesta, who play as recessed
just going to add to the story of our team doing well. But no.
forward and midfielder, respectively. “You could do worse,” Didn’t happen.”
she deadpans when I ask her why these players in particular.
Now the technocracy is turning her into an emblem of the
The growth chart of most professional football players, men
twenty-first century, a data-driven sports professional, down
and women both, resembles a gentle rise upward to a rolling
to the last vitamin-fortified cornflake.
peak, and then a similarly slow decline. The profile of Sinclair’s
development mimics Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest
t is 6:30 p.m., and the schedule demands “grow time,”
building: a series of heavenward leaps followed by the briefest
which I mishear as “grill time,” assuming it is when Herdof plateaus. The first great jump came courtesy of Clive Charles,
man turns up the heat on individual players by adminisa West Ham United player turned coach who helped transtering a verbal spanking backed up by video. No — “grow
form the University of Portland in Oregon into a soccer f­ actory
time.” The team gathers in the small conference room off
over the course of the ’90s. He played with Sinclair’s uncles
the dining area. A screen is unfurled, and video from the day’s
in the NASL, and he might as well have recruited her out of
practice session is cued up. “I want the formation working to
nursery school.
the beat,” Herdman says, pointing out the rhythm of a certain
In Portland’s contained universe, under Charles’s ministra- play. “That’s the one non-negotiable.”
tions, she became one of the most awarded student athletes of
The teammates in this room are no longer the faceless canher generation. In 2001–2002, she scored twenty-three times, non fodder of the Pellured years, but shifting components in
was rated freshman of the year by Soccer America magazine, and
an ­unfolding World Cup 2015 drama. There is the teenage
won her first of three Academic All-American considerations. Nichelle Prince, “a raw striker,” as one CSA official puts it, “and
She was the first athlete selected as a first-team Soccer Buzz
a star in the making.” There is my personal favourite, midAll-­American four years in a row, and she holds the National­ fielder ­S ophie Schmidt, who may one day be considered allCollege ­Athletic ­Association record for most goals in a sin- world. And, hunched in on herself, watching the screen with the
gle year, ­scoring on thirty-nine occasions as a senior. Her last
same unflinching ­intensity she applies to everything, ­Christine
NCAA game was a 4–0 thumping of the University of ­California, ­Margaret Sinclair.
Los ­Angeles, for the title, when she scored twice. Those two
Well, not everything. Certainly not interviews, where she is so
markers and the subsequent trophy were in memory of Charles, clearly uninterested that a conversation (and we have had three)
who died of prostate cancer in the summer of 2003. He was
becomes mutually agonizing at roughly the ten-minute mark.
fifty-one years old and widely loved. Few loved him more than
I cannot help but recall a CTV morning show appearance she
Christine ­Sinclair did.
made shortly after the Olympics, her hair coloured and straightAbout the national team coach Even Pellured, who lasted from
ened, her grey plaid shirt seemingly mis-buttoned, the basket
1999 to 2008, she says, “He had a very direct style. Literally, our of Tide detergent she was hawking occupying pride of place
goaltender would get the ball, and they’d bash it up the field. ­before her. She weathered the inane banter as best she could,
34
Richard Poplak � T h e G a m e N o t P l ay e d
with a quickness of wit that matched the speed of her footwork,
but as the interview progressed the TV lights exposed a sheen
of effort on her forehead.
Indeed, almost everyone I spoke with over the course of my
research expressed some concern for her future. In the grim
­calculus of female athletic sponsorship, where Maria Sharapova
makes the most of her estimated $27.9-million (US) annual haul
for how she looks rather than how she plays, how will Sinclair
get her (financial) due? “But see, I am selling Coke,” she snaps
when I bring up the subject. “There are things in the works.
­Before the Summer Olympics, there was nothing for women’s
soccer players in Canada. Nothing. It’s only been six months
since then. I’ve signed with Tide, I’ve signed with Coke, and
we’re working on a few others. These things don’t happen overnight. It’s my job to train.”
Of course, she is right. Except that six months equals ten lifetimes in a celebrity culture like ours. Contrast her circumstances
with the abundantly blond, blue-eyed midfielder Kaylyn Kyle, a
spirited but average player who has, “in terms of sheer market
value, been great for us,” a team official tells me. In central C
­ anada,
Kyle is basically Kate Middleton in short pants. Busted Coverage,
a website that shaves 100 IQ points off Maxim while upping the
cleavage quotient by 40 percent, claims Kyle could “easily pass as
Carrie Underwood on good days.” The site posted the following
piece shortly after the Olympic loss: “The hottest Canadian Olympian, Kaylyn Kyle was one of the C
­ anadian babes brought to tears
by Abby Morgan’s header late in the second period of extra time.
Since Kaylyn is far too hot to go down in flames like the rest of her
Canadian teammates, we have ­decided to showcase her one last
time in these 2012 ­Olympics . . . with her 29 sexiest Twitpics.”
Classy, I know. But Busted Coverage is not far off from how the
traditional sports media, including earnest liberal newspapers,
tends to deal with female athletes who are not the ­Williams
­sisters. Hotness ups the profile, although as someone who has
seen Céline Dion up close I can attest to the fact that image is
controllable. It helps to have the raw material — that is, blandly
inoffensive Caucasian features — but for white folks in general?
Almost anything is workable.
Sinclair chooses not to play the image game. This is a vastly
­admirable decision, one that earns her the nervous befuddlement of those who understand that sports careers are febrile,
snappy beasts, intent on mauling their mistresses into penury
by fixing on a hamstring, or an Achilles tendon. A lifetime’s work
undone in a moment, with no backup plan and no safety net.
­Female athletes, especially female soccer players, earn nothing close to that of their male counterparts, even the most average of whom will likely end their careers as millionaires — and
going by the spotty quality of women’s club football, they don’t
­deserve to. Sinclair, however, plays in an alternate galaxy, where
female football is just as exciting as the men’s game. Sadly, she
gets paid in this solar system. While she is by no means broke,
“is the best ­female soccer player in the world a millionaire? ” asks
someone close to the team. “I doubt it.”
When we applaud her for not wearing a push-up bra and fake
lashes, we need to understand what we are applauding her for.
These decisions will cost her millions over her lifetime. And
the very ambiguity of her sexuality (she is neither out nor in)
poses its own dangers. FIFA counts among its members a
­ ajority with no interest in safeguarding the sexually ambigum
ous. ­Eucharia Uche, coach of the Nigerian team that played Canada in the third game of the disastrous 2011 World Cup, is said
to ­employ P
­ entecostal ministers to exorcise lesbian tendencies from her players. In 2008, South African player and ­lesbian
Eudy Simelane was gang raped and stabbed to death in a case
that had all of the hallmarks of a hate crime. As Maeve Glass
puts it, “Oh, there are people out there who will turn sexuality
into something really sinister.”
Unwilling to be sexy, and unwilling to be sexualized. An agent’s
worst nightmare. To make matters worse (or better, depending
on how you look at these things), Sinclair is not, in my estimation,
someone who will find herself comfortable bleating “I’m lovin’ it”
or “Finger lickin’ good” as a matter of routine. I cannot see her,
like the great American player Mia Hamm, endorsing a soccer
Barbie. Her seam of introversion runs uncomfortably close to the
surface, which is fine when vying for the Sarah ­Polley role in an
Atom Egoyan film, but less salutary when shilling for Nair. The
terrible truth is that if she were male, none of this would matter
(except, of course, for the implied ­homosexuality). Her future
­financial health would be all but secured. You have to be a drunken
fool of the George Best or Paul Gascoigne v­ ariety to blow men’s
football money. You have to be naked as a ­Playboy bunny, sober
as a nun, and doubly in God’s favour to cash in as a woman.
hen the Canadian Women’s National Team arrived at Old Trafford
in Manchester, UK, on August 6,
2012, they found that the Americans
had stolen their dressing room. It
was the afternoon of a semifinal match. Canada was Team A,
which meant they belonged in the home dressing room. What
to do? Kick up a stink, or behave like Canadians and let it go?
The second option was deemed the lesser of two evils.
It had been an odd few days. For one thing, both teams were
put up at the same hotel in Manchester. Not just at the same ­hotel,
but on the same floor. When the team walked the grounds of Old
Trafford, the ghosts of the greats haunted them with every step.
Soon the stands would fill with 76,000 people.
In Canada, 10.7 million souls would watch Herdman’s
­diptych almost fulfill its implied promise. The particulars of the
game have been endlessly parsed: Sinclair’s three markers, the
­American Megan Rapinoe’s two equalizers, Wambach’s ­penalty
shot to send it to overtime, Abby Morgan’s winning header in
the 123rd minute.
The American players are renowned for their resolve. They
are, in all things, a team. Herdman knew this, which is why eight
months after taking charge he identified the six women on the
Canadian team he considered leaders. They, in turn, were asked
to name leaders with whom they identified: Harriet ­Tubman,
Mother ­Teresa, Nelson Mandela, and (God help us) Margaret
Thatcher. Sinclair was paired with Lady Di, which I found disquieting when I first learned of it. She is the furthest thing from
the fragile mannequin who died in a car crash alongside one of
her billionaire beaux. Until I realized that the choices Sinclair
has made, the recusal of the trappings of sexualized c­ elebrity
35
The Walrus � j u n e 2 0 1 3
Seasons in the Abyss
by Michael Robbins
Du Fu, you doofus, that’s not
a goose. You’re drunk.
Please allow me to introduce . . .
no, that’s not your horse.
(No, nor woman neither.)
Into every life a little
Freud must fall. I’m a fraud.
I stole that pun. Like I said:
I’m afraid. Into every light
a little moth must blunder . . .
Cue power ballad.
I don’t know what to call a spade.
The sky will lately swish stuff.
I open my barbaric yap.
Du Fu joins me on the veranda.
We are old and full of crap.
The millionaires across the way,
their homes are all ablaze.
We like it when those homes collapse
like moths before clichés.
­culture among them, is reminiscent of the saintliness that a­ ccrued
to Lady Di following her death. There are few similarities between them; we will, for instance, never see Sinclair’s haute couture wardrobe in a travelling exhibition. But she is perceived as
­breakable, as wounded, for not cashing in.
The culmination of Herdman’s leadership training occurred
at a retreat in Salt Lake City, shortly before the team decamped
for the United Kingdom. The idea was for each woman to stand
up and speak to the team, to open up, to take responsibility — to d
­ efine what the coach describes as “podium behaviours.”
­Sinclair spoke for over half an hour.
“There are players who have played with Sincy for fifteen
years who don’t know some of the things about her,” Glass
tells me. “It was about stripping things down to their bare soul.
She exposed her vulnerabilities to people she had known for a
long time. It was extremely emotional. She has overcome a lot
of ­adversity in her life. Her mom’s health, issues in the family,
some of them pretty significant.”
I can’t think of anyone less suited to this sort of Oprahfied
soul cleansing, but anything to forge a winning team. No one
I spoke with was willing to divulge the specifics of Sinclair’s
­remarks. Did she come out? Did she reveal some terrible secret?
Did she simply recount the plot of a novel by Nicholas Sparks?
Regardless, she left her teammates weeping. The moment was
no less critical to the team’s resurgence than her goal-scoring
prowess. As Herdman tells me, the process no doubt helped
them win a medal.
That said, Lady Di would perhaps have been more princesslike regarding the officiating. “We feel like we didn’t lose,” said
Sinclair after the game. “We feel like it was taken from us.”
­Contrary to most media reports, it is not what was said about
referee Christina Pedersen that resulted in censure, but what
was said to her. As she walked through the Old ­Trafford breezeway, she heard Sinclair say, “Fucking whore.” S
­ inclair claims
she said, “Fucking horrible.” As with everything that day, Pedersen’s perception was the law.
That night, in the visitors’ dressing room, it was quiet ­except
for the deep, heaving sobs you hear at funerals for the very young.
The despair recalled the sense of shame following the game
against France in the World Cup. “Then Sincy gets up,” Maeve
Glass tells me. The team captain was resplendent in her red
­Hudson’s Bay team wear. “And she says, ‘Can I just say something?’ Everybody stopped. The tech team in the room next door.
All of the girls dressing. Everybody.”
“I just want to say that I have never played on a team like this
in my life,” she said quietly. “I am so proud of you guys.” And
then, “I don’t regret what’s happened out there. We’ve got a
fucking bronze medal to win, so let’s go and do it.”
“The whole room just went, whew !” says Glass, her eyes filling with tears. “Tension gone. It was so profound coming from
a player who had just scored three goals against the top team
in the world. It was true leadership. I still get choked up when
I think back to it.”
When I try to ask Sinclair about this speech, I don’t get very far.
“Oh yeah, hey, I gotta go,” she says, escaping our regular buffet
booth before I have had a chance to process her non-answer.
It’s 6:30 p.m. Time to grow. i
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