Month: November 2024

I submit: one has never really gone out for a proper run, unless one has shuffled through a cornfield in Amish country, dodging a donkey who’s trying to kick you with its hind legs while passing gas in your face. That’s where I’ve found myself on this bright late-September morning in Peach Bottom, Pennsylvania, on a trot with author Christopher McDougall, his wife Mika, and a trio of asses. McDougall is the author of this century’s seminal book on running, the 2009 best-seller Born To Run, which tracked an indigenous group of ultramarathoners from the remote canyons of northern Mexico; their minimalist style helped spark a barefoot running craze. Born To Run has sold over 3 million copies, popped up in episodes of Orange Is The New Black and Big Little Lies, and made McDougall a star on the lecture circuit.

His newest book, Running with Sherman, touts the benefits of burro racing. Yes, burro racing; runners hold onto a rope attached to a donkey’s halter, and sprint alongside the animal. Sometimes the donkey cooperates. Other times, it kicks and farts. McDougall insists this flatulent burro attempting …

With a single swing of a baseball bat through a misty Atlanta evening in 1974, a fast, gracious stroke that sent a ball soaring over the fence in left center field and knocked Babe Ruth right out of the record books, Hank Aaron—who died in his sleep on Jan. 22 at the age of 86—offered America nothing less than a remedy for its ills. He offered dignity and commitment over putrid cynicism, courage in the face of hatred.

The venom that Aaron faced in the early 1970s was strong as a he closed in on Babe Ruth’s then all-time career record of 714 home runs. Aaron received so much mail—much of it hate mail, filled with death threats—that the U.S. Postal Service gave him a plaque for the flood of correspondence, according to CNN.

“I hope you don’t break the Babe’s record,” read one note. “How do I tell me kids that a [slur] did it.” This note was signed: “KKK (Forever).” “You are not going to break his record established by the great Babe Ruth if I can help it,” read another. “Whites are far more superior than [slur] . . . My gun is watching your every black move.”

In …

Julio Carrasco, general manager of a sports bar near the train station in Hoboken, New Jersey, has welcomed a new sort of clientele in the past few months.

Some are reps for sports-betting websites, like DraftKings or PointsBet, there to promote online wagering via events in the bar. The others are New York gamblers, typically single men, who come in by train just to bet.

“You notice the guys, everyone else is a regular, meeting friends, then you have one guy, specifically here to gamble,” said Carrasco, who runs the bar, called Texas Arizona.

New Jersey has seen a surge in sports bets since the state convinced the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a ban on such wagers last year. More than $4 billion in bets were placed there in 2019. But rather than going to casinos or racetracks, gamblers are making more than 80% of their bets online, often using smartphones near train stations just outside New York City. They’ve made the state the early leader.

888 Holdings Plc, a Gibraltar-based operator with an office in New Jersey, said its biggest markets for betting in the state include Jersey City, Hoboken and Newark, three gateways for people work…

In the Euro 2000 championship, England and Germany clashed in the town of Charleroi, Belgium. And I do mean clash. Egged on by jingoistic tabloids making insipid World War II allusions, English knuckleheads gathered outside the stadium and tried their best to rumble with German fans, but the constabulary largely kept order. Inside the stadium, order, at least the usual kind, did not prevail: England beat Germany 1-0.

Oh, the glory. England was rising again. Four years later, England reached the quarterfinals of Euro 2004 and Germany reached rock bottom. The Germans promptly went to work on Das Reboot, overhauling their development system and turgid style of play. That produced a Euro 2008 finalist, a Euro 2012 semifinalist and then a World Cup champion in 2014.

England went—nowhere. In the lead up to Euro 2012, I wrote a cover story for TIME called The Tragedy of English Football, attempting to explain the national team’s half-century-long record of underachievement on the world stage.

Supporters of the Three Lions were less than thrilled. I was invited on a sport chat show and treated like… an American. Did I even watch the games, o…

In the midst of everything else going on throughout the world, Boston sports fans now also have to deal with Tom Brady leaving the New England Patriots.

The superstar quarterback, who won six Super Bowls over the course of his 20-year tenure with the Pats, shared a two-part message on his social media accounts on Tuesday in which he thanked fans and announced that his “football journey will take place elsewhere” from here on out.

“Pats Nation will always be a part of me,” he wrote. “I don’t know what my football future holds but it is time for me to open a new stage for my life and career.”

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A post shared by Tom Brady (@tombrady)

As could be expected, some football fans were heartbroken over the news while others celebrated it as a harbinger of the end of…

A video interview with U.S. soccer player Megan Rapinoe, in which she says she would not go to the White House if the U.S. wins the Women’s World Cup, has generated more tension between the soccer star and President Donald Trump over her protest of the National Anthem during World Cup games in France.

In the video interview, which was shot before the World Cup, Rapinoe told an Eight by Eight magazine reporter who asked if she is excited about going to the White House, “I’m not going to the f-cking White House… We’re not going to be invited.” The soccer star said she was more focused on playing well than on the opinion of her president. “We just expect to win every single game,” she said of the upcoming Women’s World Cup, quickly changing the subject.

The video, which was shot on January 25th in L.A., was taken to supplement the magazine’s Women’s World Cup special issue that came out in May. Despite its official release last week on the magazine’s Instagram, the video only began gaining traction today. Eight by Eight explained in an email that although the video was shot earlier…

It’s raining so hard in New York that the TV sets at a World Cup watch party in an East Village bar stop functioning during the U.S. women’s national team’s group stage match against Sweden. Soccer legend Mia Hamm — a two-time Olympic gold medalist and two-time World Cup champion — has a cocktail in hand as she anxiously awaits the livestream’s return.

“I’m so excited to watch this game today, so when I’m doing my interviews, I’ll have one eye on the game, if not both,” she had told me over the phone that morning. Thankfully, the TV connection returns in time for Hamm to watch the U.S. win.

But the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup — during which the U.S. team has already broken records for the most goals in a Women’s World Cup game and the highest margin of victory with a 13-0 defeat against Thailand — is about more than just the sport itself.

When 28 members of the U.S. women’s team filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation (USSF) in March, citing unequal treatment compared with the men’s team, Hamm felt a huge sense of pride, but …

Less than a week after winning the franchise’s first World Series, the Washington Nationals are headed to the White House on Monday after accepting an invitation from President Trump.

But the team will be without one of its star players: reliever Sean Doolittle, who’s set to become the latest pro athlete to snub the President by refusing an invitation to the White House. Doolittle’s move comes after Trump was booed while attending Game 5 of the World Series in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 27.

“People say you should go because it’s about respecting the office of the President, and I think over the course of his time in office he’s done a lot of things that maybe don’t respect the office,” Doolittle, who is actively involved in refugee and LGBTQ issues, told The Washington Post.

“I feel like there are a lot of issues, a lot of things that have been said, a lot of things that have been said by the President, a lot of things that have been done by the administration that I can’t, no matter what, I can’t reconcile with what I believe in, what I feel very strongly about,” Doolittle told the…

Charlie Martin hurtles around the racetrack, her gloved hands gripping the steering wheel with only blond hair visible from the top of the driver’s seat. She zooms underneath banners emblazoned with the logo of the 24 Hours of Le Mans motorsport race, her focus unbroken. Eventually slowing to a halt after a 30-minute run, Martin unbuckles her seatbelt. It’s not a helmet that she takes off, but a VR headset; not a racing car that she lifts herself out of, but a state-of-the art simulator at Cranfield Simulation, an aerospace facility about two hours north of London.

The simulator is just one of the many ways Martin, 37, is preparing for the biggest race of her career so far — and the chance to make history. She plans to be the first transgender driver to ever compete at the 24 Hours of Le Mans race in France — one of the world’s most prestigious motorsport races. Her journey begins June 15, where she will compete in the Road to Le Mans race as part of the Michelin Le Mans Cup, marking the start of a three-year program setting her on the road toward the 24 Hours race, and towards making LGBT history. Her story is a rare one in a sport not known…

Canadian swimmer Kyle Masse had just completed her semifinal heat in the 100-m breaststroke on Monday, to qualify for tomorrow night’s final in that event, when a journalist asked her about another athlete: Summer McIntosh, the 17-year-old Canadian swimming phenom who earlier in the evening won the gold medal in the 400-m individual medley (IM), clinching her second medal of these Games, and first Olympic gold. Typically, an individual sport athlete isn’t too keen on discussing someone else, in another race, when fretting about her own results. 

Masse, however, started to gush. “She’s an inspiration to everyone,” says Masse. “And I know so many young swimmers in Canada, to be able to see her and see her success here on the international stage, is knowing for them that they can dream big and continue to do whatever they put their mind to.”

McIntosh caught the end of Masse’s observations, and expressed gratitude. Then Masse stepped out of the media scrum to let swimming’s future—not to mention very much its present— take center stage. 

Night three of competition in the Olympic pool in Nanterre, France, just west of Paris, continued t…

The first three-pointer Stephen Curry nailed in the final three minutes of Team USA’s 98-87 victory over France on Saturday night at Bercy Arena was fairly basic, for him, though it might have been the most important of the Curry flurry that clinched gold for the Americans, and the first Olympic title of Curry’s career. 

With France having cut the U.S. lead to three, 82-79 in the fourth quarter, Curry pump-faked, sending French defender Guerschon Yabuselle airborne. He took a dribble to his right, to the top of the key, giving himself a straight line to the bucket. He’s hit this shot on so many  occasions. He did it again, and gave the U.S. much-needed breathing room. 

Three-pointer number two came less than a minute later, with around 1:53 left on the clock and the U.S. up 87-81. This time, Curry went to his left before delivering the fake. Poor Nicholas Batum, the NBA vet who flew by Curry this time. Bang. Curry started pointing at this chest. 90-81, a virtual dagger.

France, however, refused to buckle. Batum hit a three to make it a 90-84, now a two-possession game. But back down the floor, the U.S. called Curry’s name again. This time…

Elaine Thompson-Herah knew she had it won, the 100-m race on Saturday night at the Olympic Stadium in Tokyo, Japan. So the defending 100-m Olympic champion pointed at the scoreboard before the finish, just like fellow Jamaican, Usain Bolt, did at the 2008 Beijing Games. Her final time in the race was 10.61 seconds, a new Olympic record, breaking Florence Griffith-Joyner’s 10.62 mark from the 1988 Olympics.

It was the second-fastest 100-m time in history. If she hadn’t pointed, could Thompson-Herah have broken Flo-Jo’s world record mark, 10.49 seconds, that was also set in 1988?

“Most definitely, if I wasn’t celebrating,” Thompson-Herah said after the race.

Did she regret it at all?

“No. No. No. No.,” said Thompson-Hearh, the Jamaican flag still draped over her shoulder from her victory lap.

A gold medal and Olympic record was good enough; and it was a celebration to remember.

Jamaica swept the 100-m race on Saturday, further cementing the island nation’s sprinting dominance; behind Thompson-Herah, Shelly-Ann Fraser Pryce took second, running 10.74 seconds, while Shericka Jackson took bro…

In the years since Malcolm Jenkins and Maya Moore started fighting for criminal justice reform and an end to racial injustice, public support for Black Lives Matter has grown significantly. But both athletes say that widespread support — evident in recent polling — is just a first step in creating meaningful change.

“Just like any game plan, any task, any movement, anything that has to be transformed, it comes in phases and parts,” said Moore in a joint TIME100 Talks discussion with Jenkins, moderated by ESPN columnist Pablo S. Torre. “So yes, awesome [polling] numbers are turning around. People are aware … The beginning is awareness and acknowledgement of the truth.”

Moore has taken a two-season hiatus as a WNBA forward to work on freeing Jonathan Irons, a man who was wrongfully convicted of burglary and assault. (Irons’ conviction was overturned in April and is now facing an appeal.) Jenkins, a New Orleans Saints safety, has long lobbied national and state lawmakers for criminal justice reform and works on social justice causes through his production company, Listen Up Media. He’s most recently produced a powerf…

Before this week, many people knew Katie Ledecky as one of the most dominant names in swimming for the last decade. So they might have been surprised by the success of Australia’s 20-year-old Ariarne Titmus during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, who has now bested Ledecky twice to snatch gold medals.

In Tokyo, Titmus’ rivalry with Ledecky has been one of the most captivating parts of the Tokyo swimming program. The rivalry between the two star swimmers dates back to the 2019 world championship, when Titmus became the first woman to beat Ledecky at the international level. They’ll have one more chance to race in Tokyo, this time in the 800-m freestyle on July 31. She isn’t the favorite this time, however. Ledecky is undefeated in the 800 m, holding the fastest 24 times in the event’s history as well as the world and Olympic records, which she set during her winning race at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics.

Titmus, who grew up in the small island territory of Tasmania, is at her first Olympics, but she has already snagged two golds for her country. First, she won the women’s 400-m freestyle against Ledecky on Sunday, marking the American&#8…

As COVID-19 cases continue to rise around the country, especially in states like Florida—home to two NBA franchises, and most crucially the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex that is slated to host the restart of the 2019-2020 NBA season—NBA commissioner Adam Silver said in a TIME100 Talks discussion that there’s no guarantee the 22 NBA teams who qualified for the relaunched season will even travel to Central Florida. Teams are tentatively scheduled to arrive in Orlando between July 7-9.

“[It’s] never ‘full steam no matter what,’” says Silver in a Talk that aired Tuesday. “One thing we’re learning about this virus is that much is unpredictable.”

Even if the teams make it to Orlando, Silver recently said that a “significant spread” of COVID-19 at the Disney World complex could cause a cancellation of the 2019-2020 campaign, even if it relaunches as expected in late July. The season initially came to a halt on March 11 after Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert tested positive for the novel coronavirus.

But what would constitute a “significant spread?”

“Honestly … I&rsquo…

University of Texas football players are saying that they won’t aid in recruiting future players, or participate in alumni events, until buildings named after supporters of the Confederacy or segregation are renamed, and a school song with connection to minstrel shows is ditched. Oklahoma State running back Chuba Hubbard called out his coach, Mike Gundy, on Twitter for wearing an OAN t-shirt: One America News is a media outlet that has called the Black Lives Matter movement a “farce.” Gundy eventually apologized. After Florida State head coach Mike Norvell told an interviewer that he “went back and forth with every player” during individual conversations about the death of George Floyd, Marvin Wilson, the team’s star defensive tackle and captain, publicly noted that never happened: Norvell issued a mea culpa. Football players at Clemson University helped organize a protest, attended by some 3,000 people, against racial injustice.

For years, the power dynamic in college sports was clear. In the case of major college football teams, for example, highly-compensated coaches—who in most cases are white—would call the shots, and un…

Joseph Schooling, Singapore’s first and only Olympic gold medalist, is slightly embarrassed by a cardboard cutout of himself perched near the door of his parents’ office. The standee, designed for a meet-and-greet session in 2015, shows a young Schooling, then a rising swimming star, grinning ear to ear, frozen in time.

He keeps pestering his mum to get rid of it, he says, but she won’t budge. Can you really blame her for wanting to keep around this life-sized memento of a time when her son seemed on top of the world?

A year after his mother brought the cardboard Jo home, Schooling would make history at age 21 at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, besting American swimming legend Michael Phelps at the 100-m butterfly. Phelps, who was competing in the last Olympic individual event of his career, shared silver with South Africa’s Chad le Clos and Hungary’s Laszlo Cseh in a three-way tie three-fourths of a second behind Schooling, who set an Olympic record. Cseh described it as “the craziest race maybe in swimming history.”

Schooling was already famous in his Southeast Asian homeland of 6 million people, but now he was a national hero.

“Dad…

Toronto was full of people celebrating the Raptors’ first NBA title late into the night on Thursday, but there was one fan whose unique championship style stood out from all the rest.

Following the Raptors’ defeat of the Golden State Warriors, a new Internet hero sprouted up in the form of “Plant Guy,” a fan who was carrying around a large housewarming plant with the intent of gifting it to Finals MVP Kawhi Leonard.

In a video that has since gone viral, Plant Guy chatted with Global News about his vegetal offering. “It’s a plant for Kawhi. It’s a Kawhi plant,” he replied when asked what type of plant it was. “It’s a Kawhi cactus, a ‘Kawhactus.’”

Plant Guy then went on to riff on the popular Toronto cheer, “We the North,” by starting a chant of, “We the forest,” sparking a wave of love on social media. “THIS IS THE GREATEST VIDEO OF ALL TIME!!!,” tweeted one Plant Guy enthusiast. “Plant Guy should be protected at all costs!”

See some of the best responses to Plant Guy below.

…

Going up against an American player in a late-stage match at the U.S. Open is always a challenge. It’s one Aryna Sabalenka, the world No. 2 tennis player from Belarus, knows all too well. 

A year ago, against Coco Gauff in the U.S. Open final, the raucous pro-Gauff crowd in New York City got in Sabalenka’s head. The noise, she said before today’s final against another American, No. 6 ranked-Jessica Pegula, “was blocking my ears. So that was, like, so much pressure.”  

This time around, rather than let the support for Pegula irk her, she tried embracing her status as a spoiler. With a tight-tense first set, for example, tied at 5-5, Sabalenka turned the tables, pumping her arms in the air after winning a point, as if to say, “Hey, all you supposed tennis fans, what about a little love for me?” 

Sabalenka got brief roars of respect. Then the fans went back to pulling for Pegula. 

In the end, that wasn’t enough. Sabalenka defeated Pegula in straight sets, 7-5, 7-5, to win her first U.S. Open title and the third major championship of her career (she’s the reigning back-to-back Australian Open champ). Stars l…

Perhaps Dikembe Mutombo’s finger-wagging went a bit too far? The beloved NBA big-man—who died on Monday, of brain cancer, at 58—started his signature move sometime in the mid-1990s, as he was an emerging presence in the game. He’d wave his finger at an opponent, as if to say “no, no, no,” after blocking a shot. An immeasurable number of cocky children—not to mention the grown-ups—across the globe have followed suit, flashing obnoxious Muotombos at their smaller peers during all manner of basketball games. And in one 1997 matchup between Mutombo’s Atlanta Hawks and the Philadelphia 76ers, Mutombo blocked the shot of Philadelphia 76ers forward Clarence Weatherspoon three straight times in one possession, and gave him three straight finger-wags. On the first two blocks, you could argue that the Hawks would be better served by Mutombo chasing down the loose ball, rather than standing flat-footed under the basket doing his “no, no, no” act.

But if Mutombo did so, we might not have been gifted the third block, in which Mutombo sends back Weatherspoon’s offering with such ferocity, that the ball falls right into the hands of a Hawks teammate who starts …

Unless you’re a huge supporter of the Pittsburgh Steelers, or among the hardest of hardcore football fans, the name Antonio Brown likely didn’t mean all that much to you before this summer. Sure, even a casual sports fan would know that Brown has been one of the best wide receivers in the NFL over the past decade; since entering the league in 2010, Brown has made seven Pro Bowls, and been an All-Pro selection on four different occasions.

But Antonio Brown, who spent the first nine years of his career in Pittsburgh, probably hasn’t been ingrained in your brain for weeks, as he almost certainly has since NFL training camps started in July.

In fact, it’s hard to summon someone who’s overshadowed America’s most popular sporting institution quite like Brown has in 2019.

Just in case you’ve spent your summer doing more productive things than paying mind to the NFL, or lingering around the Twitter freakout-sphere, here’s a quick rundown of the surreal Antonio Brown story. After the Steelers traded Brown, who clashed with Ben Roethlisberger and was benched in the 2018 season finale, to the Oakland Raiders for a third and …

Many of the best sprinters seem to channel the pre-game smack talk of boxers, shouting to high heavens that their opponents are going down. Noah Lyles, the defending 200-m world champion who at the 2021 U.S. Track and Field Trails ran the fastest time—19.74 seconds—in the world this year, is cut from that cloth. Are you going to win in Tokyo, I ask him in a recent telephone interview. (The 200-m final is on Aug. 4). “Oh of course,” Lyles replies. Does he want to formally guarantee it? “Oh, I’m going to win in Tokyo,” Lyles says. “I just know. There are some people who just know they’re going to win. And I’m one of those people.”

Lyles’ Usain Boltian-swagger, however, masks a mental health struggle more common to elite athletes than what once was thought. As a kid, he struggled with self-esteem, while have difficulties in school and coping with asthma. More recently, the combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and murder of George Floyd left Lyles, 24, in a dark place: last August he shared, on social media, that he was taking an anti-depressant, calling it “one of the best decisions I’ve made …

ตัวอย่างเปิดตัวเกม Assassin’s Creed Shadows ที่เต็มไปด้วยฉากแอ็กชั่นสุดมันส์ การนำเสนอตัวละครหลัก และภาพบรรยากาศญี่ปุ่นยุคโบราณก็ได้สร้างความตื่นตาตื่นใจให้กับแฟนเกมไม่น้อย โดยเราจะได้เห็นการผจญภัยของ Naoe ผู้ที่เป็นชิโนบิ และ Yasuke ซามูไรชาวแอฟริกันคำพูดจาก สล็อตเว็บตรง

อย่างไรก็ตามทุกคนคงทราบแล้วว่าในตอนนี้เกมดังกล่าวก็เผชิญดราม่าหนักกับการนำคนแอฟริกันมาเป็นตัวละครเอก แม้ว่าจะตรงตามประวัติศาสตร์ (ท…

ต้องบอกเลยว่าเป็นเกมที่น่าจับตามองสุดๆ สำหรับ Assassin’s Creed Shadows ภาคใหม่ล่าสุดของภาคีนักฆ่าที่มีความพิเศษยิ่งขึ้นด้วยการนำประวัติศาสตร์ของฝั่งเอเชียมาอยู่ในเกมภาคหลักเป็นครั้งแรก และยังมีการนำตัวละครที่มีตัวตนจริงมาเป็นทางเลือกสำหรับการเล่นควบคู่ไปกับตัวเอกประจำภาคอย่าง นาโอเอะ ชิโนบิหญิงด้วย ซึ่งล่าสุดทาง Ubisoft ก็มีโอกาสส่งตัวแทนอย่างโปรดิวเซอร์ของเกมภาคนี้ คุณ Karl Onnée พูดคุยกับ Games Industry ด้วย

เขากล่าวว่าเกมนี้เป็น�…

ล่าสุดค่ายเกม HONG HA ได้ประกาศเปิดทดสอบ Beta Test สำหรับ Dragon Raja L: The Classic เกมมือถือ Dragon Raja ตัวใหม่ พร้อมไซส์เกมที่เล็กลง แต่ยังคงความสนุกเหมือนเดิม ตั้งแต่วันนี้ไปจนถึงวันที่ 27 ก.ย.เวลา 7.00 น.ตามเวลาประเทศไทย ผ่าน Google Play Store ไทยแล้ว

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