Abby Wambach, A Class Act
For someone who covers women’s soccer, I don’t write a lot about Abby Wambach. It’s not that I’m not a fan, but Abby gets her fair share of media coverage and I’m always on the look out for a story that isn’t being told. Since the old timers retired, chances are if there’s a story in the mainstream media about the team, it has something to do with Abby. I don’t always feel compelled to pile on.
Everyone is writing about Wambach’s Olympic ending injury that occurred in the first half of the match against Brazil and I have been so impressed with how she has handled the injury I do feel the need to get my two cents in.
At least publicly, she has not taken one second to whine about the circumstances that stole her Olympic hopes, including the seconds immediately after her leg snapped in two and she knew her Olympic dream was history. She didn’t take a well-deserved moment to wallow in the pain of the injury or her reality. Instead she put on a brave face for her teammates who still had a match to win.
“The most important thing at that moment was winning the game and showing my teammates by example that they have to lean on each other a little bit more to get that gold medal that we’ve been desperately training for over the months,” Wambach said on a conference call with the media today.
She’s taken what could be a “poor me” moment and used it as an opportunity to encourage her team to the gold medal podium in Beijing. She was thrilled that Natasha Kai “did what she told her to do” and scored the winning goal to beat Brazil while she was at the hospital. And, she made a point to call Lauren Cheney, her replacement on the Olympic roster, to make sure she was comfortable with how she made the team.
“I want you to go there and not feel bad about being selected in this type of way,” Wambach told Cheney. “It won’t do you any good or this team any good. Ultimately, it will not make the team perform better. What’s important is that the team going into this tournament is feeling that they can win this. At the end of the day, that’s what makes you stand at the top podium.”
I’m not sure Wambach could have handled this situation any more professionally or selflessly than she has. She’s been working hard to convince us that the team can win without her. I’m jumping on her bandwagon and still looking for U.S. to compete for gold.
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