Every year, the Indy 500 champion drinks milk. The moment is arguably milk’s biggest of the year. Every year, the story is told of how 1936 champion Louis Meyer drank buttermilk after the race to rehydrate. The moment is definitely buttermilk’s biggest of the year. For one week in May, buttermilk isn’t overshadowed by its pancake offspring. For one week in May, buttermilk is cursorily mentioned on its own.
But while buttermilk always gets the historical nod, winners never drink buttermilk anymore. In fact, when drivers ask for it (every driver has to select the milk they want before the race begins), they’re told it’s not an option, with the explanation a simple, “Buttermilk’s not what it used to be.”
What does this mean?
We investigated.
Back in the day, buttermilk used to be the byproduct of the process which created butter. After churning, a liquid was left over. The liquid didn’t have any fat—that all ended up in the butter—but it had some bacterial cultures in it, like yogurt does, and it tasted good, basically being skim milk but with a tiny bit of flavor.
Now, buttermilk is produced independently of butter, in a process very similar to how yogurt is made: Bacterial cultures are added to milk. It can have some fat in it, but it’s basically plain yogurt, just made with different bacteria. It’s got a stronger flavor than the butter byproduct, and it’s thicker. Some people still drink it, but more as a mistaken emulation of the past or as a health move (like how people drink kefir) than out of personal preference.
Why can’t the Indy 500 winner drink the old stuff? It’s not readily available, and the drinking of the milk is about marketing, being a big sponsored event. Why can’t the Indy 500 winner drink the new stuff, when they ask for it? The sponsors are probably worried about someone visibly reacting to drinking thick, tangy milk when they’re expecting either normal milk or some old delicacy. Whether this is the right move or the wrong move by the sponsors is a debate which could last us all weekend, but for now, we’re going to move on to another traditional American beverage…
How Far Is 600 Miles?
The Coke 600! A few hours after the Indy 500 (Indiana weather permitting—Charlotte’s weather is supposed to be fine), NASCAR will run its annual 600-mile race on Sunday in Charlotte. Who will win? You idiot. That’s the point of the race! This isn’t Formula 1, where you know who’s going to win ahead of time!
A better question to ask, since you’re in a question-asking mood: How far is 600 miles?
Let’s find out.
Things that are roughly 600 miles apart:
- Washington D.C. and Chicago (straight-line)
- Washington D.C. and Augusta, Maine (driving)
- Kansas City and Denver (driving)
- New Orleans and Louisville (straight-line)
- Los Angeles and the Oregon State Line (straight-line)
- San Francisco and Portland (driving)
- Paris and Madrid (straight-line)
- Moscow and Kyiv (driving)
Things that are exactly 600 miles apart:
- The Staten Island Chuck E. Cheese and Charlotte Motor Speedway (driving)
Are we going to track the race by tracking how far along the drive from the Staten Island Chuck E. Cheese to Charlotte Motor Speedway the drivers would be?
Yes.
An Offer to Formula 1
F1’s at Monaco this weekend, and it’s the best event on the F1 calendar. To some extent, this is a paradox. F1 can be annoying, and Monaco’s the most “F1” of all the F1 weekends. Monaco is not annoying. This is a classic example of how things are their best when they’re just being themselves. To be fair, Monaco is very “F1” in a lot of F1’s good ways (beheading a dissident every lap while racing in Tehran would also be very “F1,” but in the bad ways). But mostly, it’s just nice to see F1 be itself. Monaco is outrageously opulent. Monaco is beautiful and historic. F1 cars have gotten bigger and Monaco’s streets haven’t, so there’s almost no real racing involved once qualifying has set the field. The Grand Prix’s outcome is only a question of whether or not a car will break and whether or not the leader will make a mistake/get unlucky with their one pit stop.
The nice thing about this last part—the terrible racing—is that nobody’s pretending the racing’s good at Monaco. Would it be cool to have a great race? Yes. But that almost never happens in F1. F1 races only hit an average IndyCar or NASCAR level of racing excitement once or twice a year. The problem F1 faces is that it doesn’t embrace this enough. At Monaco, the absence of active competition is so undeniable that F1 stops denying it, leaving us to enjoy the show for what it is.
We’ve grown more conciliatory towards F1 in recent months. Most of this is because others have stopped hyping it so breathlessly. Viewership continues to grow in the United States, but the “fad” stage of that process is over. There was a time when F1 was growing fast and it was a story that it was growing fast. The first part of that’s still mostly true, but the growth is no longer news. F1 is never going to fill a large space in the American sports consciousness. But it’s found its niche, and that niche is healthy and growing healthily, and general sports media has moved on, leaving one’s F1 experience up to the individual once again. You can tune in or tune out. No one’s going to hit you over the head with it anymore.
Still, there are ways F1 could improve, most of which revolve around getting rid of the bad bullshit while leaving the good bullshit in place. (Note: Bad bullshit is different from the actual bad stuff. Bad bullshit is the silly stuff that we don’t like. We decide what’s good bullshit and bad bullshit. Humanity’s natural morality determines what the actual bad stuff is.)
So, here are our demands:
- Stop letting the big F1 teams have little brothers. We understand that McLaren’s not going to build its own engines, but that’s different from Red Bull having a second team named “RB.” They’re not even hiding it!
- Put a special neon green line on the spoiler of any driver whose family definitely bought their way into this. We know these guys all grew up rich, but create a separate class for the Nikita Mazepin types. The ones who can’t compete.
- Let the Andretti family have a team. This is more a demand of American fans than of F1 itself (how dare you communists not get up in arms about this), but it’s still bullshit that F1’s trying to keep out all fifty United States of America.
- Force the best F1 driver (currently Max Verstappen) to compete head-to-head with the best American driver (currently Kyle Larson) in a variety of cars. Sometimes, the F1 driver would win. Sometimes (like right now), the American driver would win. Let the world know the truth.
- Get that little cloud guy from Mario Kart involved.
- Stop pretending boring things are exciting. You can build the suspense when a team tries an undercut, but penalize your broadcasters for the use of words like “thrilling” in instances where there are no passes or there is only one pass.
WNBA vs. F1 vs. Soccer
Speaking of fads, how about that WNBA? Having a moment! Attendance is up. Ratings are up. The league might soon, for the first time in its nearly 30-year history, turn a profit.
Will it last?
Or is this going the direction of F1 and soccer?
The answer is the latter. This isn’t going to last. Caitlin Clark’s college career was special, but like Jimmer Fredette, her shortcomings are too great for her to be that good at a professional level. Other stars’ star power is real, but it’s finite, and in college it was heavily tied to the attention Clark generated, drafting off of the biggest individual American sports phenomenon since LeBron James. With Clark gone, college women’s basketball is going to stop outdrawing men’s, cutting off the source of women’s basketball awareness in that general consciousness we talked about in the last section. This has already happened on a smaller scale with the NWSL. The NWSL is still doing well, but we aren’t hearing about it as much coming off an embarrassing World Cup by the USWNT.
Will feminism help? Yes, but. But it’s also going to help college softball, and it’s also going to help college volleyball, and it’s going to get redirected to the women’s World Cup again in three years, and through that back to the NWSL. The WNBA might be able to get to a place of profitability, and salaries and all that will continue to rise. But the run of stories we’re about to see regarding the WNBA’s incredible growth is going to stop this year, and next year, the thrill of following a new thing is going to be gone, making the breathless coverage stemming from media overinvestments turn annoying. In two years, the WNBA is going to land in the place soccer landed in 2016, or where F1 is now: We, as Americans, will have a better idea of what’s happening, but we won’t feel the need to talk about it. The true believers will be greater in number, but they’ll have found each other and can talk about it amongst themselves. The fad-chasers, the Everton fans turned McLaren fans turned Chicago Sky fans, will be on to some other new thing.
The nice thing is, this is still a great place to land. Compared to where the WNBA has been, this is going to be a massive breakthrough. It’s very possible that in 2026 the WNBA will land as the fifth-best-known league in America, trailing only the Big Four. For a league with an often tenuous claim to existence, this is tremendous.
Etc.
Chicago:
- ESPN ran a piece on Shōta Imanaga today, and evidently our man was at the Northwestern/Iowa game at Wrigley Field. He experienced Big Ten West football. Guy just loves shutouts. (Also, I don’t think we ever talked about the picture of him with Angel Reese and Kamilla Cardosa. He looks like Baby Gronk with Livvy Dunne.)
- You do have to ask, after the White Sox lost last night on a real reach of an interference call, if Major League Baseball is rigged against them. The worst part is that nobody would notice if it was, because nobody watches the White Sox. What if they’ve been playing great this whole time??
- I’m very sorry, but the Chicago media is not going to get away with a round of “Caleb Williams had a bad practice but the veterans picked him up” coverage without us asking if he cried in their arms. We were pro-crying! We are pro-crying! But we have to ask.
Joe Kelly, Burnley, and the Ottawa Senators:
- No update on Joe Kelly the last few days, but it’s at least possible we’ll see our guy this weekend as the Dodgers play the Reds. Is Joe Kelly in Cincinnati? This is why we need boots on the ground in Cincinnati. We really should have invested in that after the 2022 NIT.
- The latest on Vincent Kompany, as of this morning, is that Burnley and Bayern Munich are still negotiating on whether Bayern Munich will have to pay Kompany’s full buyout or if Burnley for some reason won’t make them. It’s 20 million Euro, so about $21.7M USD right now. There’s been a little speculation that Bayern Munich would walk and leave Burnley with an awkward partnership, but only speculation. Not really rumors, even.
- Ridly Greig leads Canada (might not play) into their hockey worlds semifinal tomorrow against Switzerland. Championship and third place game are Sunday.
Austin FC:
- Austin FC’s in San Jose for the weekend, which sounds like kind of a sad place to spend Memorial Day Weekend. Game tomorrow night. The Earthquakes (great name) are in last place in the Western Conference.
Stu’s Notes will be off on Monday for the Memorial Day holiday. Gonna eat hot dogs to honor those who died in combat.
