By: Skye Slatcher
While Instagram stories are filled with messages of love for people’s significant others, Valentine’s Day’s romance has not traditionally extended to sports. 14 February has instead long been associated with significant thrashings.
Way back in 1961, Sugar Ray Robinson destroyed Jake LaMotta. It was the sixth time that Sugar Ray and the Raging Bull went head-to-head. “I fought Sugar Ray so often I almost got diabetes,” LaMotta often joked. He was a brawler while Robinson had a slicker style. When they met to sign the fight contracts, Robinson tried to psych out his rival by drinking a glass of blood drained from a steak, though LaMotta claimed not to have been spooked by this.
Robinson’s strategy was to make Jake work in the early rounds and then take advantage of his fatigue. It began to work as Sugar Ray’s blows dominated the match, with his classical boxing skills proving effective from all angles in the 11th round. By this point, he was in command of the fight.
LaMotta kept taking the beatings in the 12th and finished the round in agony after a series of unforgiving punches to his ribs. He could ultimately offer no reply in the 13th. But between being hit he told Robinson, “You can’t put me down.” And he was still on his feet when the referee stopped the fight in the 13th, after an insane series of uppercuts tossing his head in every direction.
Robinson finished LaMotta off in the 13th. Years later, he would say, “ He’s the toughest guy I ever fought, I never knew anyone who was more aggressive and rough as he.”
This fight became the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, named after the 1929 shootout involving Al Capone. The bloody beating in the ring recalled those same bloody images from over 30 years prior. It was the last time the two would come face-to-face in a match and while Robinson carried on for a while longer, this was LaMotta’s last major fight as he retired just three years later.
Since then, Valentine’s Day has continued to host major defeats.
In 1975, on the one-mile dirt oval of the Bowie Race Track in Maryland the 12 horses and riders broke from the stalls. At the end of the race, it did not go unnoticed that the whole field dashed to the finish in the exact same order they fell into at the start. There was not one overtake. The winner was Mr Ransom, ahead of Choice Rib and Sealand. None of them had been particularly well-supported by the bookies. But before the race, one man placed a bet on the first three in any order for $684. His bet became $35,237.
Most of that sum was never collected. It was revealed that six of the jockeys had pooled money to place those bets. While the podium-finishers were not suspected, the six soon found themselves in trouble. Walsh, Feliciano, Davidson, and Luigi Gino were indicted, convicted, and sentenced to six months in federal prison for conspiring to fix a sporting event. Between them, they had won over 4,000 races and $8 million in prize money. Only three served their time, as Walsh committed suicide before being taken to prison. The whole event marked a dark day for horse racing.
In 2014, Lizzie Yarnold took gold in Sochi. 0.97 seconds is not a very long time to most people, but it was the gap that separated Yarnold from her closest rival. After four near-perfect performances, she obliterated the field to take the win in the Women’s Skeleton. This all happened just four years after she first encountered the sport.
After being recruited through a talent search, she proved to be an exceptionally quick learner and fiercely resilient. She relied on a grant from the Talented Athlete Scholarship Scheme to fund her journey in the hugely expensive sport. Her sled cost £10,000 and, with no tracks in the UK, the constant practice runs abroad, support team, and day-to-day living costs amounted to some huge expenses. All that while trying to focus on learning how to hurtle downhill around 17 corners of a 1500 metre chute with only a helmet for protection.
The headlines in her story pretty much wrote themselves.
In 2016, Aston Villa were devastated by Liverpool. Villa only won three Premier League matches that season, but their embarrassing Valentine’s Day loss to Liverpool signalled the start of an 11-match spiral in which they conceded 30 goals and did not score a single point. It confirmed their relegation to the second tier of English football for the first time in 29 years.
It was a solid embarrassment for the team, during a season when many of them shamed themselves regularly. Some characterised their performance as a surrender, with manager Garde looking on helplessly as they suffered their heaviest home defeat since 1935. Villa fans left the stands en masse before the final.
Yet another massacre in the history books.
Some Valentine’s Day sporting stories are tales of love and joy rather than massacres. Most notably, British skating icons Torvill and Dean won gold at the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics, after performing their famous Bolero. Though not a romantic couple, the pair are an iconic duo whose impact has been lasting.
Sports does not escape the significance of 14 February. Valentine’s Day. But it is an industry which seems to have historically flipped the theme of the day on its head, filled with defeats and massacres rather than bouquets of roses and love hearts. Perhaps the sports version makes for a more interesting story.
