Given sport’s bad reputational year, it is fine that the BBC is preparing to get Chris Froome to defend himself on what is normally a controversy-free programmeFor more than 60 years the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year has served up a mildly diverting few hours of saccharine and froth. The formula is long established: laud Britain’s sporting heroes, relive their glories through stirring montages, and throw a threw softball questions for them to answer.Usually it makes for an easily digestible, if unchallenging, three hours of viewing. On Sunday night, however, the BBC is expected to break with tradition by firmly questioning Chris Froome about his failed test at the Vuelta a España when he appears via video link from...
For the first time the massive newspaper, website and TV conspiracy against whichever club you happen to support can finally be exposedThere’s a hugely culturally important scene in the movie So I Married An Axe Murderer, where Mike Myers (playing his own dad) explains How Stuff Works to his son’s friend. “Well,” he barks, “it’s a well-known fact, sonny Jim, that there’s a secret society of the five wealthiest people in the world known as The Pentaverate, who run everything in the world, including the newspapers, and who meet triannually at a secret country mansion in Colorado known as … The Meadows.” The friend humours him by asking who’s in this Pentaverate. “The Queen, the Vatican, the Gettys, the Rothschilds,”...
Matt Smith and co had a solid opening despite a late wobble, while there’s an Ashes bromance in the air for Graeme Swann and Damien Fleming, but the adverts did jar a littleFade in. Interior, an extraordinarily messy room with a massage bed in the middle. Clothing and footwear are strewn across all visible surfaces and large bags are scattered haphazardly across the remaining floor space. Pads and bats are piled up, leaning against benches and walls. Exposed pipes meander around the ceiling, not in a trendy architect‑inspired Pompidou‑Centre way but just in a couldn’t-really-be-bothered-to-hide-them way. In the corner a television is attached tightly to the wall, so that instead of facing into the room it points straight ahead, allowing...
Joe Root is light years away from the visibility David Gower enjoyed and, away from terrestrial TV, some team-mates in Australia might as well be in a witness protection programmeAt the risk of making myself a hostage to fortune, it is very possible that Australia has already delivered its most withering put-down of England before an Ashes ball has even been bowled. I may come to regret this rash statement when this year’s exquisite causal link between someone’s girth, someone else’s wife, and some form of baked goods is made. But given how much of modern journalism seems to be about “calling” things in the comical belief that functioning as Earth’s wrongest bookmaker makes one relevant, let’s give it a whirl:...
ESPN asked Jemele Hill to ‘discuss sports topics, news, culture, and social issues’ and to tweet on ‘a current issue impacting sports’ – then suspended her for doing exactly thatMore than a week into her suspension for some highly anodyne tweets related to the Take the Knee protest, it feels long overdue to devote space to the ESPN anchor Jemele Hill. Still, I vaguely heard we were listening to women for a minute, and wondered if a black woman could catch a little of that entitlement to be heard. The traditional answer to that has been “No, I’m afraid she can’t” – which accounts for the nagging sense among many women of colour that sisterliness only stretches so far. Its...