The relationship between sports and storytelling is not a popular topic of conversation, but its presence has always been strongly felt. Without storytelling, there is no recorded history to uplift legacies, celebrate breakthrough moments, or intensify rivalries. The recorded history of competitive sports fuels the excitement that fans have for whichever team or individual athletes they support. It builds a connection and culture that transcends language and borders.
Some of the most beloved stories in sports are Cinderella runs, in which the underdogs defy expectations set upon them. Although not every Cinderella run ends with an underdog victor, here are a few stories that did end with a happily ever after.
Becky Hammon
When it comes to breaking boundaries, Becky Hammon is unmatched in competition. Before she was a six-time all-star, Hammon went undrafted by the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) in 1999. Upon learning that she would not represent Team USA at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Hammon made the decision to become a naturalized citizen of the Russian Federation in order to secure her ticket to the Olympic Games. Although Team USA would take home the gold, Hammon made sure she did not leave the games empty-handed, taking Russia to a third-place finish.
Beyond her career as a player, Hammon made several breakthroughs during her time as an assistant coach for the San Antonio Spurs under the mentorship of head coach Gregg Popovich. She was the first-ever female head coach in the NBA’s Summer League and led the Spurs to win the Summer League title. Hammon also became the first woman to take the position as an acting head coach in NBA history on Dec. 30, 2020, after Gregg Popovich was ejected in the second quarter. Despite her experience as a player and her time as an assistant head coach for seven years, Hammon was not selected for any of the open head coach positions she interviewed for in the NBA. She returned to the WNBA as a head coach for the Las Vegas Aces and proceeded to make history as the first rookie coach to win a WNBA title in 2023. In 2023, Hammon was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame alongside Gregg Popovich and former Spurs point guard Tony Parker.
Emma Raducanu
Although there have been several upsets against some of tennis’s most dominant figures, the Women’s Singles Final at the 2021 US Open consisted of a battle between underdogs. It was the first all-teenager final at a major since 1999, and it featured England’s Emma Raducanu and Canada’s Leylah Fernandez. Both players entered the tournament as unseeded players, meaning they were required to win three qualifying matches in order to proceed to the main draw and compete against the rest of the higher-ranked competition. Starting at the main draw, it takes seven straight wins to become a grand slam champion; 10 for those beginning at qualifying. At age 18, Emma Raducanu became the first player (male or female) in tennis history to win a Grand Slam title from qualifying and did so without playing a single tiebreaker or losing a single set in all of her 10 matches.
Leicester City
After miraculously escaping the threat of relegation in the 2014-15 season, newly promoted Leicester City stunned the world by winning the Premier League title in the following 2015-16 season. Oddsmakers who were unimpressed with the Foxes’ escape from relegation gave the club a 5000-to-1 chance of winning the title at the beginning of the season, while others speculated that the team would be relegated back to the Championship. To compare the odds, the Lake Placid Miracle on Ice in the 1980 Winter Olympics — another great underdog victory that witnessed the defeat of the Soviet Union’s hockey team by a bunch of amateur collegiate-aged Americans — had odds of 1000-to-1.
The comparison between odds is still flawed because the Premier League title is not won through a postseason knockout tournament. The Premier League operates on a double round-robin tournament, with each team facing all other competitors twice in one season, totaling 38 Premier League games. This means that every team theoretically begins the season behind the same starting line, making the Premier League title a trophy of consistency and cumulative dominance within a season. In the spring of 2023, Leicester City was relegated to the English Football League Championship.
Luka Modric
Despite losing the 2018 World Cup Final to France, Luka Modric made history when he was awarded the Ballon d’Or by French news magazine France Football. Becoming the first Croatian to win the award, Modric ended Lionel Messi’s and Cristiano Ronaldo’s decade-long duopoly of receiving the most prestigious individual award in football. In that same year, Modric won a third consecutive Champions League title with Real Madrid, was awarded the Federation Internationale de Football Association’s (FIFA) The Best award, and the Union of European Football Association’s (UEFA) Men’s Player of the Year.
While rules of play and sports jargon can intimidate beginner sports fans, it is the storytelling within sports that binds the interests of all sports fanatics together, amateur or elite.Â
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