Celtics, Early Celebrating Race Walker This Week's Sports Hero, Zero

by Julian Spivey

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​Congratulations to the Boston Celtics on winning the 2023-2024 NBA championship. The team dominated its way through the entire 2024 NBA playoffs after a season in which it was obviously the most dominant team in the league – winning the Eastern Conference by a ridiculous 14 games over the second-place New York Knicks. The Celtics weren’t just the most dominant team of the NBA season but one of the most dominant in the history of the game when it comes to outscoring opponents. Only the 1971 Milwaukee Bucks and 2017 Golden State Warriors had a higher point differential during their championship seasons than the 2024 Celtics, who averaged 10.7 points per game more than their opponents during the season.

The championship was something the Celtics had been building upon for a few seasons now with their dynamic All-Star duo of Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, whose 107 playoff games together were the most of any duo before winning a title.

It wasn’t that long ago that people speculated the Celtics would need to break up the Tatum/Brown duo for the franchise to succeed but the chemistry between the two stars continued to build, the team made some huge front-office moves to acquire important pieces like Kristaps Porzingis and Jrue Holiday and now the team is the best in the league.

The Celtics were an easy choice for this week’s sports hero of the week. 

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​Zero

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​It happens a few times every year. An athlete will start celebrating too soon and then boom they’ve turned themselves into a laughingstock, in addition to being a loser. The most recent example of celebrating too soon biting an athlete in the ass is Laura Garcia-Caro, a Spanish racewalker who lost out on the bronze medal at the European Athletics Championships in Rome on Friday, June 8. Coming to the end of her 20-kilometer event, the 29-year-old grabbed her home country’s flag, draped it across her should, pumped her fists in the air and, not paying any attention to the event whatsoever, was promptly passed by Ukrainian competitor Lyudmila Olyanovsk in the final two meters of the race. It’s bad enough seeing a football player miss out on a touchdown because they showboated a few yards too soon but I can’t imagine anything more embarrassing than losing a racewalking event as the result of doing so. Luckily for Garcia-Caro she still qualified for the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics. She might want to focus on actually crossing the finish line before any celebrating when she competes on the world’s biggest stage.