THE NBA FACED financial ruin heading into the 1980s.
Drug issues among players drove away both fans and corporate sponsors. TV ratings plummeted. Arenas were half-empty. By 1981, 16 of the league’s 23 franchises were operating at a loss, kept alive only by a puny $800,000-per-year TV deal with CBS.
There would be solutions found in the 1983 introduction of a salary cap, the first of its kind in professional sport. Players relinquished their right to infinite pay raises but would share a guaranteed 53% share of league revenues, also gaining enhanced free-agency rights.
Mandatory drug-testing was introduced and rehabilitation programs were established to cleanse the league’s image of its perceived association with America’s cocaine epidemic.
But the real game-changer was that the NBA began to market itself around its stars. The 1979 NCAA Championship game had become the most-watched college basketball game in history for two reasons: Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, whose eventual decade-long rivalry in the pro game is widely credited with steering the NBA from the brink of collapse towards becoming the multi-billion dollar industry it is today.
The popularity of any sport can only really be driven by the catalytic characters whose sheer brilliance removes us from our seats and provokes from us involuntary, guttural noises; the athletes who make us feel alive in arenas or in our living rooms.
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Louis Bielle-Biarrey is capable of stirring this even in the football fan who considers disliking rugby to be a personality trait. Like French teammate Antoine Dupont, Bielle-Biarrey has begun to transcend the game at which he excels. He will soon become a walking billboard such is his marketability — but just wait until you see him run.
The Bordeaux wing has scored 65 tries in his last 59 games in all competitions. To frame it another way, he has scored over 30 tries in each of his last two seasons (33 in 2024/2025 and 32 in 2025/2026 so far). Among those scores were a record nine tries during this year’s Six Nations title success with France.
Still only 22, Bielle-Biarrey has the rugby world at what we believe to be his feet, albeit we can see only a blur beneath the increasingly iconic red scrum-cap.
There is far greater scope to his skillset than merely his finishing ability but it is Bielle-Biarrey’s raw speed which distinguishes him even from his most gifted peers.
You might morally disagree with the use of horses for our entertainment and yet it’s difficult to deny that the Grand National is an exhilarating spectacle. You might watch athletics only once in a blue moon and yet a sprint final can be the most hair-raising 10-second viewing experience of the sporting year. You might tune into rowing only when Paul O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy are in medal contention and yet, to invoke a famous quote from the former, watching a human being trying to go from A to B as fast as they can, whatever their means, satisfies some kind of primal desire within us.
Bielle-Biarrey’s second try against Ireland during this year’s Six Nations — France’s fourth — was nominated for try of the tournament in large part due to Thomas Ramos’ innovative left-footed chip from the ground which landed in the winger’s bread basket. Less memorable, perhaps, but more illustrative of Bielle-Biarrey’s own capacity to devastate defenders, was France’s opening try against Italy. Once Antoine Dupont caught a bobbling ball from an aerial contest on the left-hand side of his own half, he scarcely needed to think: the scrum-half prodded the ball into the Italian backfield where Bielle-Biarrey, from about a 10-metre deficit, raced in to score with an acre of space to spare. The extent to which he rinsed retreating Italian fullback Ange Capuozzo — who more typically does that to defenders in his own right — was head-spinning.
A month or so earlier, Bielle-Biarrey raced France’s former two-time Olympic sprint medallist Christophe Lemaitre, who won bronze at both the 4x100m relay at London 2012 and in the 200m individual race at Rio 2016. That Bielle-Biarrey won the race was hardly remarkable (Lemaitre, 35, had been retired for 18 months, and joked afterwards “I haven’t sprinted for a year, I don’t remember how to do it”), but the rugby star’s top speed of 38.4 kilometres per hour hugely impressed the French athletics great.
“For a contact sport like rugby… it’s impressive that he’s able to generate speed in a very short space of time,” said Lemaitre, who also advised Bielle-Biarrey that he “swings his legs too much” early in a sprint.
“Especially as he has roughly an identical build: we’re a bit lanky, a bit tall,” Lemaitre continued. “We may be able to generate explosiveness and speed without being a bodybuilder like in the 80s and 90s.”
Bielle-Biarrey, who stressed that the result might have been different had Lemaitre prepared properly for their race, added: “The coaches didn’t want me to go at 100%, they were afraid I’d get injured. But it was out of the question that I’d do less than 100%.”
Bordeaux fitness coach Thibault Giroud, meanwhile, said last year that Bielle-Biarrey could “easily” run 100 metres in 10.8 seconds if he was permitted, this after he was clocked at 37.8 km/h during a Top 14 meeting with La Rochelle.
Leinster will hope to do in Bilbao on Saturday what Ireland couldn’t do in Paris four months ago and shackle the world’s most electrifying winger, at least in so far as is possible. The task awaiting Tommy O’Brien, most likely, is among the least enviable in the whole sport.
While such an approach could only prove successful for a side brimful of fast-twitch athletes, Bordeaux’s attacking philosophy under Noel McNamara is such that they don’t place a particular emphasis on creating numerical advantages. The reigning European champions are instead perfectly content in a five-on-five, a three-on-three, a one-on-one attacking scenario: ‘our guy will get around yours.’
When Louis Bielle-Biarrey receives the ball in any context at the San Mamés Stadium, there will be a cacophony of involuntary sounds as anticipation meets dread.
He’s Bird. He’s Magic. He’s the present and future of the game.
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Transcendent Louis Bielle-Biarrey appeals to our primal desire as fans of sport
THE NBA FACED financial ruin heading into the 1980s.
Drug issues among players drove away both fans and corporate sponsors. TV ratings plummeted. Arenas were half-empty. By 1981, 16 of the league’s 23 franchises were operating at a loss, kept alive only by a puny $800,000-per-year TV deal with CBS.
There would be solutions found in the 1983 introduction of a salary cap, the first of its kind in professional sport. Players relinquished their right to infinite pay raises but would share a guaranteed 53% share of league revenues, also gaining enhanced free-agency rights.
Mandatory drug-testing was introduced and rehabilitation programs were established to cleanse the league’s image of its perceived association with America’s cocaine epidemic.
But the real game-changer was that the NBA began to market itself around its stars. The 1979 NCAA Championship game had become the most-watched college basketball game in history for two reasons: Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, whose eventual decade-long rivalry in the pro game is widely credited with steering the NBA from the brink of collapse towards becoming the multi-billion dollar industry it is today.
The popularity of any sport can only really be driven by the catalytic characters whose sheer brilliance removes us from our seats and provokes from us involuntary, guttural noises; the athletes who make us feel alive in arenas or in our living rooms.
Louis Bielle-Biarrey is capable of stirring this even in the football fan who considers disliking rugby to be a personality trait. Like French teammate Antoine Dupont, Bielle-Biarrey has begun to transcend the game at which he excels. He will soon become a walking billboard such is his marketability — but just wait until you see him run.
The Bordeaux wing has scored 65 tries in his last 59 games in all competitions. To frame it another way, he has scored over 30 tries in each of his last two seasons (33 in 2024/2025 and 32 in 2025/2026 so far). Among those scores were a record nine tries during this year’s Six Nations title success with France.
Still only 22, Bielle-Biarrey has the rugby world at what we believe to be his feet, albeit we can see only a blur beneath the increasingly iconic red scrum-cap.
There is far greater scope to his skillset than merely his finishing ability but it is Bielle-Biarrey’s raw speed which distinguishes him even from his most gifted peers.
You might morally disagree with the use of horses for our entertainment and yet it’s difficult to deny that the Grand National is an exhilarating spectacle. You might watch athletics only once in a blue moon and yet a sprint final can be the most hair-raising 10-second viewing experience of the sporting year. You might tune into rowing only when Paul O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy are in medal contention and yet, to invoke a famous quote from the former, watching a human being trying to go from A to B as fast as they can, whatever their means, satisfies some kind of primal desire within us.
Bielle-Biarrey’s second try against Ireland during this year’s Six Nations — France’s fourth — was nominated for try of the tournament in large part due to Thomas Ramos’ innovative left-footed chip from the ground which landed in the winger’s bread basket. Less memorable, perhaps, but more illustrative of Bielle-Biarrey’s own capacity to devastate defenders, was France’s opening try against Italy. Once Antoine Dupont caught a bobbling ball from an aerial contest on the left-hand side of his own half, he scarcely needed to think: the scrum-half prodded the ball into the Italian backfield where Bielle-Biarrey, from about a 10-metre deficit, raced in to score with an acre of space to spare. The extent to which he rinsed retreating Italian fullback Ange Capuozzo — who more typically does that to defenders in his own right — was head-spinning.
A month or so earlier, Bielle-Biarrey raced France’s former two-time Olympic sprint medallist Christophe Lemaitre, who won bronze at both the 4x100m relay at London 2012 and in the 200m individual race at Rio 2016. That Bielle-Biarrey won the race was hardly remarkable (Lemaitre, 35, had been retired for 18 months, and joked afterwards “I haven’t sprinted for a year, I don’t remember how to do it”), but the rugby star’s top speed of 38.4 kilometres per hour hugely impressed the French athletics great.
“For a contact sport like rugby… it’s impressive that he’s able to generate speed in a very short space of time,” said Lemaitre, who also advised Bielle-Biarrey that he “swings his legs too much” early in a sprint.
“Especially as he has roughly an identical build: we’re a bit lanky, a bit tall,” Lemaitre continued. “We may be able to generate explosiveness and speed without being a bodybuilder like in the 80s and 90s.”
Bielle-Biarrey, who stressed that the result might have been different had Lemaitre prepared properly for their race, added: “The coaches didn’t want me to go at 100%, they were afraid I’d get injured. But it was out of the question that I’d do less than 100%.”
Bordeaux fitness coach Thibault Giroud, meanwhile, said last year that Bielle-Biarrey could “easily” run 100 metres in 10.8 seconds if he was permitted, this after he was clocked at 37.8 km/h during a Top 14 meeting with La Rochelle.
Leinster will hope to do in Bilbao on Saturday what Ireland couldn’t do in Paris four months ago and shackle the world’s most electrifying winger, at least in so far as is possible. The task awaiting Tommy O’Brien, most likely, is among the least enviable in the whole sport.
While such an approach could only prove successful for a side brimful of fast-twitch athletes, Bordeaux’s attacking philosophy under Noel McNamara is such that they don’t place a particular emphasis on creating numerical advantages. The reigning European champions are instead perfectly content in a five-on-five, a three-on-three, a one-on-one attacking scenario: ‘our guy will get around yours.’
When Louis Bielle-Biarrey receives the ball in any context at the San Mamés Stadium, there will be a cacophony of involuntary sounds as anticipation meets dread.
He’s Bird. He’s Magic. He’s the present and future of the game.
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