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Comment by lloeki | Hacker News Reader

Another outlier: Sébastien Loeb (paired with Daniel Elena) has been in a league above every one in rally. His abilities extend way beyond rally: you could throw him anything with four wheels and he'll pull something great out of it (see his team's 2nd place at Le Mans in 2006)

The unfathomable thing is that in France, basically no one cares about his (and others) success, while everyone raves about the national men's† football team.

† women's team apparently performs significantly better on the same period but it's a blackout too. I know why I'm not into football, the whole thing is pervasively biased in so many ways...

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I watched rally for a few years, but lost interest after Loeb won his third straight WC. There was absolutely no suspense, everyone knew Loeb would win most of the rallies barring the winter courses.

As for Women's football, there's a reason it's not really appreciated and that is the fact that the skill level is significantly lower. Far fewer women play, which results in less competition and less highly talented individuals. Another problem is that the goals are sized for men, while the women keepers statistically speaking are smaller and can cover a smaller area, which means it's far easier to score with cheap shots. It all makes for rather dull spectating, sadly.

Not sure why that's unfathomable.

Canada is nuts about hockey. Americans as a whole are indifferent at best, yet we share a border. Mexicans are crazy for soccer.

If the US had the world's greatest soccer player, the majority of the country wouldn't care. Soccer is a sport that is played by about 30 million Americans a year, but it's a blip on the map at the collegiate and pro level here. People simply enjoy different sports, and the local culture reinforces it. Jim Brown was probably the greatest lacrosse player who ever lived, but his career was a footnote because the sport he played professionally was football, and he was an outlier at it.

Not true that no one cares about the success, but football is just much more popular than rally. Motor sports are incredibly expensive to practice and you can't expect them to have the popularity of cheap "universal" sports like football.

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