Gymnast’s joyful routine is a happy alternative to putting on that grim ‘game face’ in a business where smiling is, well, frowned uponBetween Brexit and Blue Monday – the most depressing day of the year, aka this Monday– it’s not always been easy of late to sustain the self-satisfied, privileged-white-male grin that greets you in my byline picture. It is perhaps these ambient feelings of dread that have sent me for solace, again and again, to a video of an American university student doing a gymnastics floor routine. The two-minute clip of 21-year-old Katelyn Ohashi tumbling, flipping and pretzeling to cheesy, nightclub staples has had more than 60 million views this week. It’s a blast of concentrated positivity and good...
From Australia’s sandpaper storm to some impressive popularity contests, via José Mourinho and worm denial5 January: “We have money for sardines and I’m thinking lobster. I will do my best to try and bring in the best players. I will look to the lobsters and sea bass, but if not we must buy sardines. But sometimes the sardines can win games” – Perhaps, Carlos Carvalhal, but they couldn’t keep Swansea in the Premier League. Related: The alternative sport review of 2018, from Kanté’s curry to Salah’s statue Haters gonna say I didn’t mean it https://t.co/HjZg57U6Cx Continue reading...
The International Gymnastics Federation wants to recognise parkour as a new discipline, with a view to Olympic inclusion in 2024. But the parkour community is opposing the FIG’s effortsThe Dame du Lac lives an hour’s ride from Paris, in the suburb of Lisses. She is a 20m tall triangular wall, rutted and pocked with concrete knobs, ledges and gullies. In the late 1980s David Belle and his friends would come here to swing, leap and bound from one of her nooks to the next until they made it all the way to the platform at the top. They were not only playing but training. There was a discipline to it. Because it all grew out of the obstacle course techniques...
The Olympic hero overcame a kidney stone and rare blunders at the world championships and still won a medal in every event. Her only competition is herselfWe observers have long since exhausted the well of superlatives when it comes to Simone Biles. The 4ft 8in, 105lb sprite from suburban Houston had emerged as a once-in-a-lifetime talent even before her star-making coronation at the Rio Olympics, where she fulfilled her long-held promise with four gold medals in seven unforgettable days. Turns of phrase, margins of victory, records broken: these languages are entirely ill-suited for translating her unique physical genius, which, truly, must be seen to be believed. That Biles is the best athlete in America today, which she is, feels like...
The US gymnast, who gave an electrifying victim statement face to face with her abuser in court, is now taking on the US Olympic CommitteeLatest report: Larry Nassar jailed for up to 175 yearsLast Friday, the multiple gold medal‑winning US gymnast Aly Raisman delivered an electrifyingly powerful victim statement at the sentencing hearing of the former US gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. If you haven’t watched it, I recommend you take the time. For any 23-year-old to speak with such intensity, poise and control would be remarkable; to do so directly to her sexual abuser in a packed courtroom under the gaze of the cameras is of a radically different order.I’m glad Raisman was so clear about having only just begun...