A FAMILIAR MEME. A NEW CONTEXT.

I Had Some Kind of Tactic

What this meme means

A line from a 2015 interview with master jockey Alexander Nesyaev at the Moscow Hippodrome, which went viral in 2016. People use it ironically to brush off a question when they don't want to go into details about how they did something.

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What it shows

The shot shows a man in a bright jockey's racing outfit and a red-and-yellow helmet with "Windsor" written on the front. The outfit is green and yellow, and a microphone is held in front of him. Behind him is a banner with a horse's head in silhouette, the words "Days of France" and "Les jours de France," and the year, 2015.

The clip is short and mundane, the way a sports interview right after a race usually looks. It's exactly this ordinariness that creates the comic effect, since the calm tone and serious expression don't match the brevity of the answer to the reporter's question.

How it came about

According to press reports, the interview was recorded in June 2015 at the Moscow Hippodrome as part of the "Days of France" festival. Alexander Nesyaev, one of the well-known masters of Moscow horse racing, had won the race that day and answered a reporter's question about whether he'd had a tactic from the very start and whether he'd stuck to it.

His answer went: "From the very start I had some sort of tactic, and I stuck to it." In effect, the jockey had just repeated the reporter's question back in his own words, and that became the main source of the comedy. The clip stayed largely unnoticed for a long time and only gained popularity in 2016: on March 23 of that year it was posted on the microblog of Grisha Urgant, the comic alter ego of TV host Ivan Urgant, who called it the best sports interview he'd ever seen.

How it's used

The phrase has become a universal excuse. People say it when asked about details they'd rather not reveal: how a date went, what happened at work, why a particular route was chosen. The answer sounds weighty and mysterious, but actually says nothing, and that's where the irony lies.

A typical scenario in chat messages: someone asks "so, how did it go?", and the reply is that very phrase, with a nod to the sports interview. Sometimes it's used as a caption on pictures of athletes, and also in a joking context when talking about a plan of action that, in reality, never existed.

Why the phrase is funny

The main reason is the exaggerated seriousness of the delivery. The jockey answers calmly and politely, using the bookish construction "I had some sort of tactic." What's funny is precisely the vagueness: "some sort of" tactic sounds like an admission of having no plan at all, delivered with dignity.

The rephrasing is also important. The answer almost word-for-word repeats the reporter's question, and that polite phrasing reads as a textbook example of evasiveness. The meme fits neatly into the long tradition of ironically quoting sports interviews and the speeches of public figures.

Legacy

Today the phrase remains one of the most recognizable quotes of the Russian-language internet associated with sports interviews. It's used as a self-contained template, requiring no knowledge of the context: the phrasing alone is enough for the listener to get the hint.

The story shows how an ordinary clip from a broadcast can get a second life. A video that nobody cared about for several years turned, thanks to a single post and a short phrase, into a meme, and then into a universal answer to questions one doesn't want to answer honestly.