Does Alex Ovechkin's Love of Beer Make Him an Outlier?

There are plenty of conceptions around what athletes do and don’t consume as part of their routine when their sport is in session. There’s a reason why Lionel Messi has lent his name to an energy drink — and why one of the all-time great SNL sketches features John Belushi as an Olympic athlete fueled by doughnuts. It’s surprising, then, to read about a record-breaking athlete who’s very open about his fondness for a less heralded athletic beverage: beer.

The athlete in question is Alex Ovechkin, now the National Hockey League’s all-time leading goal scorer. Turns out Ovechkin’s gameday routine also involves a beer — something The Washington Post‘s Barry Svrluga chronicled in a recent column. Specifically, he’ll have a postgame beer, a tradition that’s endured throughout his career. He did admit that beer takes more of a toll on him at the age of 40 than it once did.

“In the summer, you have to do a little extra workout for conditioning-wise, health-wise,” he told The Post.

As Svrluga points out, this makes him something of an outlier. When viewed across more sports, Ovechkin’s taste for beer looks even more rare. Earlier this month, The Athletic’s Stuart James reported on controversial statements made by the manager of English soccer team Bracknell Town F.C. Specifically, the manager in question — Matt Saunders — criticized the players on his team who “can’t run, can’t look after their body, want to go and drink after games.” Complicating matters here, James noted, is the fact that Bracknell Town play in the seventh tier of English soccer, meaning that some of the team’s players are semi-pros as opposed to athletes with a nutritionist on call.

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On the other side of the Atlantic, Kendall Baker and Jeff Tracy of Yahoo! Sports focused on Major League Baseball and observed a sport where athletes are imbibing less and less. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re embracing sobriety. “I don’t think guys drink as much because now they smoke and play video games,” one pitcher told Baker and Tracy. Decades from now, will sportswriters be looking back on elite athletes’ vanishing traditions around weed? Stranger things have happened.