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...
We should not be obsessed with winning sporting medals, we should be obsessed with playing sport and getting as many people as possible to do itIt’s been a month of incredible success at the Winter Olympics. It was a month, right? It certainly felt like it, though others will know better. As for the success, that was indisputable. Five medals, one of which was not bronze, made it Team GB’s greatest medal haul at the Winter Games, aka the international sporting event we have little aptitude for given our preponderant meteorological conditions hover somewhere between “dreich” and “probably fine without a coat”. Related: Team GB pitch for more funding to join elite of Winter Olympics Related: The first rule of Celebrity...
The fetishising of Team GB feeds into the notion of medal hunting, of glossy PR at the expense of sport for allIn medical practice the phrase “the dose is the poison” is sometimes used to describe the principle that an excess of anything can be deadly. Take enough of it and it will kill you, from kitten tears to unicorn laughter to everyday ingestion of diesel residue from your own family car.At times during the BBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics it has been tempting to wonder if this rule also applies to extreme, nauseating doses of public niceness; if it is possible, given sufficient exposure, to die of niceness. Related: How much will Team GB's 'medal moments' in Pyeongchang really...
Athletes are becoming more susceptible to being spiked and more prone to outlandish explanations if the recent case of a couple of Japanese kayakers is anything to go byThere are all manner of reasons why an athlete might fail a drug test and it seems the rarest, the most exotic of the lot, may just be they were actually cheating. Because it’s an offence very few athletes ever confess to.There was the cyclist who argued his positive test was down to a vanishing twin he had absorbed in utero. The high jumper who suggested he had been set up by the Cuban-American mafia and the sprinter who explained his testosterone levels were high because he had had a lot of...
Dutch fans take great pleasure in attempts to make sense of their dominance, particularly the frozen-canals theoryNicholas Tomalin reckoned that the three qualities a journalist needs to succeed are rat-like cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability, none of which are much use when you’re trying to tell a salchow from a toe-loop on a tight deadline. During the Winter Olympics it pays to be a quick study, too. Particularly in Britain, where the usual recreational activities in winter are football, baking potatoes and having a national freak-out about each smattering of snow. Because the first week of the Games always provokes perplexing questions, like why are the Dutch so damn good at speed skating?As of Monday, the...