China’s treatment of Uighurs has been deemed by Canada as genocide. Are we about to legitimise the regime responsible?History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. I am staring at two bundles of newspaper clippings – one present day, one past – and feeling a deepening chill. The first pile details China’s treatment of the Uighur Muslim population in Xinjiang, where more than a million people have been “re-educated” in camps, as well as the calls for the 2022 Winter Olympics to be stripped from Beijing. The second is from the Manchester Guardian in 1935, recording the abuse of Jews in Germany and demanding a boycott of the Berlin Games. The echoes are eerie. The looming question, then as now,...
The ski-jumper, who won five Olympic medals, had an otherworldly talent but not the sense, or support, he needed to cope with the fame it won himMatti Nykänen used to fly so far, so fast that it felt as if he would never come down. When the Finn broke the world ski jump record for the fifth, and final, time at Planica in 1985 he was moving so quickly that the cameraman struggled to track him through the air.Watching the footage you wonder if he might disappear into the yonder off the far side of the screen. In those days, the mid-1980s, Nykänen was the best ski jumper in the world and almost unbeatable. The records were the least of...
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...