The US president’s racism is so blatant he may be an unwitting catalyst for overdue cultural change all over the worldDear President Trump, I realise this is an extremely busy time for you between games of golf and tweeting but I hope you may be boosted by a rare and welcome thank you letter from a black man at such an inconvenient moment in the history of the United States of America. Related: Brees sorry after LeBron James leads backlash to QB's criticism of anthem protests Related: George Floyd's killing matters too much for corporate sport's on-brand insincerity | Jonathan Liew Continue reading...
Plan announced this week to host race in Florida city faces opposition from some local people due to its impact and noise“A vacuum humping a goat”. Well, try and banish the picture, if that is possible, but consider instead the sound. An unholy conjugation of machine and animal from which Formula One would surely like to keep its distance.This description of the sound of F1 cars is not the aural sculpture the sport wants associated with its expansion in North America. Yet said development, in the form of this week’s announcement of an agreement in principle to host a race in Miami, may yet see the delightfully colourful phrase bandied around for a while longer. Related: Mercedes flex muscles in...
Master statistician Nate Silver has crunched football’s numbers and found managers are paying price for supporters’ blind faithHow well do you know your football team? And how do you think they will get on next weekend? Because my bet would be that however well you think you know your team, no matter how dispassionately you feel you can assess their chances after season upon season of occasional highs and abundant lows, there is a database in the United States that knows a great deal more about your club’s performance than you do.In fact, there are quite a few databases which contain more wisdom about the nitty-gritty of how and why football teams succeed or fail than any human could ever...
The Flyers’ new googly-eyed mascot embodies everything that’s good and bad about the author’s hometown. But mostly the badPhiladelphia is home to the undisputed king of professional sports mascots: the Phillie Phanatic. No less esteemed a source than Wikipedia reveals he is “widely acknowledged as one of the best ballpark mascots” and “arguably the most recognizable mascot in all of North American sports”.You can imagine the horror, then, when he got a new sibling this week: Gritty, the Philadelphia Flyers’ new mascot, is a horrifying bearded man-Muppet hybrid whose eyes are permanently rolling in their sockets, presumably from years of drug use. He is a nightmarish frat boy who communicates only in bro-friendly gestures – the guy who was loudly...
For years larger-than-life coaches like Meyer could operate without oversight or interference, but society has evolved and sports have caught upFor years, the two most powerful coaches in college football have been Alabama’s Nick Saban and Ohio State’s Urban Meyer. Combined, their teams have won nine of the last 15 national championships. They are giants in a sport where coaches are already exalted to mythical proportions, the highest-paid public employees in their states, their word greater and more important than even the presidents of their schools.So the fact that Ohio State put Meyer on administrative leave this week, pending an investigation into what Meyer knew about an assistant coach’s history of domestic abuse, shocked many. Meyer, it always seemed, was...