Three-times Olympic gold medallist has progressed from a brilliant point guard to NCAA championship-winning coach with the South Carolina women basketball team and will take charge of the USA Olympic side at Tokyo 2020Among the small handful of warm memories from the Atlanta Olympics, Dawn Staley stands out. Her combination of gnarly competitiveness and glorious skills – a repertoire of feints, no-look passes and behind-the-back smuggles (her “signature play”, she said) – made the little point guard of the USA women’s basketball team a compelling figure as she and her colleagues swept to victory.At the time she was a woman playing what many still saw as a man’s game. In later years I was reminded of her playmaking skills while...
It’s all very well eliminating every speck of dust, but eliminating medical records is less easy to get behind – people will wonder which was the more significantTime for another shot of Team Sky, whose functionaries seemingly will not rest until no human can utter the phrase “marginal gains” without deploying sarcastic air quotes. Many will have found themselves at this point some time ago.The relentless curiosity always said to have underpinned the culture at Team Sky and British Cycling is revealed as more selective by the week. Each new revelation of slapdashery is harder and harder to square with the old fables about painting the floors white and getting a surgeon to speak to riders about how to wash...
The IOC may find fewer cities eager to host the Games with experts agreeing that staging the event is economically damaging despite a larger revenue cakeThese days even the Olympics is going on the 5:2 diet. Less than 18 months ago, the politicians and panjandrums of Hamburg, Rome, Budapest, Paris and Los Angeles all craved the right to host the 2024 Games. Now, following Budapest’s withdrawal last week, only Paris and Los Angeles remain. But it is merely reflective of a bidding process that is getting worryingly slimmer.Twelve cities fought over the 2004 Olympics. Yet only two were in the running for the 2022 Winter Olympics. And now here we are again. Even LA, one of the last pair standing...
With the funding body coming under increasing financial pressure, sports failing its podium test are being made to pay a heavier priceWhen Gail Emms was asked about UK Sport’s decision to reject the desperate pleas of seven sports, including GB Badminton, to be funded for the Tokyo Olympics, she was poetic in her response. “It’s like someone just taking your heart, your emotions, your dreams and basically tearing them up,” said Emms, a badminton silver medallist at the 2004 Olympics, with a sigh.But UK Sport has a tin ear for poetry. Its language is cold, hard, medal-economics. Once it had decided in December that badminton – along with archery, fencing, goal ball, table tennis, weightlifting and wheelchair rugby – had...
After the problems in Rio, there is more negative publicity over the venue for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, where women cannot become full membersIt is happening again. The wave of negative publicity which preceded golf’s return to the Olympic Games may have been offset in part by the thrilling men’s finale in Rio, but another public relations disaster has not taken long to arrive. Bulletins from Tokyo, where the venue for the Games’s tournament, Kasumigaseki Country Club, operates a policy whereby women cannot become full members and cannot play on Sundays, yet again bring golf’s Olympic alliance into question, just as it does the competence of those managing it.At a time when the International Golf Federation should be using all...