4 Real Underdog Victories Hollywood Definitely Will Turn Into Movies
The following stories all share something in common. In each of them, the underdog in the story is America.
“America?” you might ask. “How is that possible. Americans are the strong ones. They’re the ones with the guns.” But these stories are all about snooty European contests, frequently hosted by the French. We have no doubt that the Americans in these contests carried guns somewhere on their bodies, but that offered them no advantage. Instead, they had to prove their skill at ancient arts that it turned out you don’t need to be old and French to master.
Beerfest
Some places are better at producing alcoholic beverages than others, due a series of factors known as terroir. Terroir covers stuff like what sort of soil a place has, how much heat the land holds and what kind of microbes live there. French terroir is the best, according to the French, who invented the concept.
Don't Miss
In 1976, a year of great significance and celebration for America, the owner of a famous wine shop decided to put these French wines to the test against competing wines from California. The organizer of the competition wasn’t himself American: He was Steven Spurrier, an Englishman. And the judges of the contest weren’t going to be American either: They were all French.
The judges had to judge the wines blind, which led to much confusion, with several judges dismissing inferior wines as American when they were actually French. In the end, the red wine that they selected as the best came not from Château de Whatever but from Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, as it was Californian. The white wine they selected as the best did come from a winery named Chateau Montelena, but it turned out that this was Californian as well.
Once they learned the wines they’d selected were American, many judges became angry. Odette Kahn, pictured above, demanded she get her scorecard back so she could change her picks. This upset was famous enough that it actually did get its own movie, Bottle Shock. But there was no putting the genie back in that bottle, and the doors had been opened for America’s alcohol to come on top again.
In 2006’s Beerfest, a team of American drinkers beat competitors from around the world at a drinking contest in Munich. The exact competition from the movie doesn’t really exist, but countries do compete internationally to see who can make the best beer, much as they compete on who makes the best wine.
If you believe that American beers are all just aerated donkey piss, you may be surprised to learn that at last November’s Brussels Beer Challenge, American companies won gold and silver in the German-Style Märzen category.
On the other hand, the competition also had an American-Style Pilsner category, and America didn’t win there. Italian companies won that gold and silver. Hey, it looks like beer festivals hand out so many medals that everyone gets to win something, which makes everyone happy and in the mood to drink beer.
The World Cheese Awards
Terroir applies not just to winemaking but also to such products as coffee, whiskey and tea. It also applies to cheese, which is why some parts of the world are known for centuries of gourmet cheesemaking while others are known for Kraft Singles.
But let’s not be so sure about that. Because in 2019, at the World Cheese Awards, top honors went to an American cheese named Rogue River Blue.
This contest held in Bergamo, Italy, saw the American cheese face off against an Italian Parmigiano Reggiano, along with nearly 4,000 other competitors from dozens of different countries. Judges decided that the Oregon cheese was the best. Rogue River Blue is aged for 11 months in a cave and is released on the Autumnal Equinox, so it’s possible that America used witchcraft to win this competition, which is technically not forbidden by the rules.
The Battle of Versailles
Paris in the 1970s was again the setting for this next contest, a fashion battle, pitting a series of famous French designers against American ones. You might recognize some of the American names now — Oscar de la Renta, Anne Klein and some assistant named Donna Karan. But to the organizers, the American ones were just makers of sportswear and deserved nothing but mockery.
Also, out of all the models the American designers brought along, a quarter of them were Black, which struck the French organizers as altogether too many. Despite that, or because of that, America was declared the winner of the face-off. Also declared a winner: ready-to-wear clothing, which is different from French clothing designed for each individual buyer.
Besides giving everyone a chance to duke it out on the runway, this fashion show aimed to raise money to pay for the restoration of Paris’ Palace of Versailles. It utterly failed at this. Everyone spent so much money making the clothes that they didn’t really end up with much leftover for the restoration effort at all.
The Tour de
From the Tour de ’s creation in 1903 right up until 1985, every single winner was European, with the bulk of them being French or Belgian. Then Greg LeMond from the United States won. That 1986 race easily deserves a movie covering it, but what we find more interesting is what came next.
In 1987, coming off a victorious year, LeMond took some time off to recover from a wrist injury and went turkey hunting with his family. Apparently, his time cycling left him less than human in the eyes of other Americans because his uncle fired a shotgun at him, blasting him with 60 pellets. He lost more than half his blood and came within 20 minutes of bleeding to death.
Taking part in the next Tour de was impossible. But LeMond did take part in 1988, without much hope of winning. For starters, he still had 30 shotgun pellets embedded in his body. Finishing even in the top 20 would be a major accomplishment. A few days into the race, experts looked at how much time he’d taken and realized that it was mathematically impossible for him to come from behind and win.
But Americans aren’t too keen on math, so LeMond went and won anyway. He finished with an eight-second margin of victory, the lowest ever recorded in this race. The competitor who came in second was Frenchman Laurent Fignon, who’d won the race twice before. On ing the finish line eight seconds after LeMond, Fignon fell over and started crying.
LeMond went on to win a third title as well and remains the only American to ever win the Tour de . This may surprise you, if you have clear memories of Lance Armstrong winning the race seven times, but we took a close look at the list of winners, and Armstrong isn’t there, so you must be ing wrong. In fact, the Tour de doesn’t list any winner from 1999 to 2005, so we have to assume they canceled the event during those years because they were too busy watching The West Wing.
Anyway, in the alternate timeline where Lance Armstrong did win, that guy was famous for cycling with only one ball. It turns out that cycling with 30 balls is even harder.
Follow Ryan Menezes on Twitter for more stuff no one should see.
