Lawl. Do you typically follow a new sport because there's a guy at the top of the game that's the same nationality as you????
Dude, you have no idea how common that is.
I'm from Sweden. We're usually not insane about sports. But Back in ~78 we had a slalom superstar called Ingmar Stenmark, and it's still infamous how the entire country literally stood still whenever he was skiing in a final. Every school stopped their schedule, every store close, people just left work, if they did not have a TV they just stood outside electronic stores to watch the TVs in the window.
We do not give two shits about slalom in general, but when we have a swedish superstar there's slalom fever.
The same thing has happened many times with other sports.
No one in Sweden barely even knew what curling was 20 years ago, then suddenly we get a team who makes the final multiple times and suddenly everyone is talking optimal sweeping tactics.
Same thing with tennis, it used to be huge when Björn Borg was around, and had a resurgence with Edberg, but now that we don't have any stars barely anyone cares about that sport.
Even fucking ping pong was big when swedish star JO Waldner played the olympics and broke the "Chinese wall".
A more recent example:
I was in NYC during the Football ("soccer") World Cup to visit some friends who'd never watched a game before, and they suddenly caught football fever and wanted to watch all the games at sportsbars. They only got into it because the US team did better than expected.
