I wanted to see if I could tell a longform story that worked, structurally, the way actual sports work - not the way sports fiction works, I've enjoyed several things in that genre but they tend not to work like actual sports. Basically I've watched a lot of sports documentaries (Jon Bois/Secret Base stuff but also more conventional stuff like Rain City Redemption as well as a whole BUNCH of actual Formula 1 (a terrible sport for terrible people but I just can't hate a race where the cars look like spaceships), much of which is built around 'You couldn't make it up!' moments that only work because we know that, however corrupt a sport is, it's extremely difficult to actually fix results - I looked at the 'you couldn't make it up!' stories and thought 'well what if I did, huh?'
And here's the result, which unfortunately has to be very long because it turns out sports are very complex and tend to run for a year at a time and that takes a lot of words. This could easily have been 2-3x longer if I'd really wanted to cover everything that happened in the sports stories that inspired it.
