Why do we get so embarrassed about dancing? A fleeting thing that happened to me when I was younger haunts me more than I thought it would.
Tag: sports
While the IOC decides whether to let Moscow’s athletes compete in the 2024 Summer Games, Russian film directors will again be fighting for the right to show their films.
Welcome to Worldcrunch’s LGBTQ+ International. We bring you up-to-speed each week on a topic you may follow closely at home, but can now see from different places and perspectives around the world. Discover the latest news on everything LGBTQ+ — from all corners of the planet. All in one smooth scroll! This week featuring: TW: […]
The Qatar World Cup has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons. However, the newly constructed city of Lusail in the country makes one thing clear: the West is not the target audience for this World Cup. Qatar has different, even bigger ambitions.
The picture of the two tennis stars holding hands and crying has already become iconic. Is there a risk that we are glorifying the gesture of two privileged, heterosexual, white men? Or can it also show a way forward for men to show vulnerability?
The Russian invasion of Ukraine forced the sport world to abandon its long-held political neutrality, including the Olympics and FIFA. Is this a one-off event or a sign of a fundamental shift in sport?
Categories
Don’t Anger The Patron Saints Of Calcio
From St. Paul to St. Diego…
Russian pop starts, artists and athletes are speaking out against the war in Ukraine, with some already suffering the consequences.
MEXICO CITY — Huge lamps swing from the ceiling on the sixth floor of a building in downtown Mexico City, illuminating the wrestling ring below. The crowd holds its collective breath as a woman emerges from the shadows. Her bright blue hair whirls behind her sparkling makeup as she kicks out her knee-high black boots. A deep voice booms over the loudspeaker: “From the Mexican jungle comes Ladyyy Amazonaaa!” Responding to the cheers and shouts, she takes her time posing in each of the ring’s four corners at the Furia de Titanes women’s championship. “I have wrestling in my blood,” […]
The Serbian tennis star is neither a victim nor a heavy, writes Serbian journalist Tatjana Đorđević Simić. But back home in Serbia, he is a hero who risks to turn in to a puppet of Serbia’s nationalistic government.
The Omicron variant is again forcing event organizers to weigh whether to cancel, postpone or forge ahead in the face of superspreader risks.
Though every day a new bit of bad COVID-related (and other) news arrives, the already once-delayed Summer Olympic Games must go on.
It’s not just England and not just the reaction against the team’s loss in the European final. Europe’s football culture, and culture in general, reflect deep-seated prejudices that require a real response.
European soccer is inspiring and professional, in sharp contrast with the national histrionics and ‘amateurish’ mediocrity of South American football.
Diving, flopping and faking for the referee’s benefit have become an integral part of modern football. But Guatemalan player Wilfredo Ramos Pérez has taken the craft to the next level of the absurd. During a match in the Central American country’s third division, with one player already on the ground, the referee stopped the match […]
El Pibe de Oro, Barrilete, El Dios, Cósmico, D10S, Dieguito, El 10, El Diez … The quantity of nicknames is just one more sign that fútbol legend Diego Armando Maradona was in a category of his own. His death Wednesday from a heart attack at the age of 60 was a bonafide global event. Here […]
Sports are an important part of the fabric of local communities as well as a multi-billion dollar global industry, and their absence in recent months has been conspicuous. The coronavirus pandemic shut down both professional and amateur athletes around the world, forcing viewers to watch replays of old championship matches and limiting weekend warriors to […]
CAIRO — Trapped in the ordinary life of waking up early to get on with daily housework or visiting with extended family, a group of young upper Egyptian girls had a simple dream: to play soccer. But they were uncertain whether the traditional society in which they live would allow them to realize their goal. […]
PARIS — Twice a year (for the Academy Awards and the Super Bowl), I renounce my 6-hour beauty sleep and fight timezones to tune in to a bit of live transatlantic spectacle. Blame it on three reasons, ranked by order of importance: my americanophile wife; a chance to take the temperature of U.S. cultural hegemony; […]
MUNICH — The past snuck up on Adidas last spring when it issued a retro jersey for the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia that copied the last Soviet Union national team shirt. It included the USSR lettering and breast emblem with the hammer and sickle. Given the millions of victims of the Soviet dictatorship, […]
-Analysis- Many of the Colombian players broke down in tears after coming up just short in last night’s World Cup match against England. Still, they can hold their heads high, and not just because of the valiant effort they put forth. The “truth” of the matter is they got robbed — at least according to […]
The global soccer competition features teams from a fascinating mix of developed and developing nations. Not represented are the world’s two leading economies: the U.S. and China.
He’s back! Check out our OneShot celebrating the King of Clay. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/embed/F9QajPhHzvQ expand=1] The King of Clay, June 2 (© Chen Yichen/Xinhua/ZUMA) OneShot is a new digital format to tell the story of a single photograph in an immersive one-minute video. Follow OneShot:
CAIRO — In the year of Mohamed Salah’s rise to fame as one of the world’s best soccer players, his every move and success has been well documented across the globe, no more so than in his native Egypt. Here, the cult of personality around him runs much deeper, hitting at the heart of struggles […]
-Analysis- The PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games finally kicked off Thursday with the riveting-if-baffling sport of curling and a first victory for hosts South Korea. But all eyes will be on the official opening ceremony tomorrow, especially since a disproportionate dose of the attention for this edition will be focused off the ice and snow. Coming […]
BAGHDAD — Her hands, covered in magnesium carbonate for a better grip, are white. Her face is flush. Her gaze fixed. Huda Salem, 20, exhales loudly — twice — into the already sweat-saturated air. Her face contorts. Then, a shout as she lifts 70 kilos of cast iron. Behind the young woman’s massive, muscular figure, […]
-Analysis- PARIS — Compete, don’t kill. The idea that peace might be achieved through sporting is an old paradox. Pitting athletes and countries against each other in a non-lethal — and cathartic — demonstration of skills, is at the very core of the Olympic ideal, going all the way back to ancient Greece. The timing […]
NEW DELHI — Farooque was a Kashmiri. He hated India. His cousin was killed by security forces at a demonstration in Srinagar. This was 1990. We were classmates, and I always took him head on for his anti-India rhetoric. Back then, no one minded his bombast, nor our arguments — and life went on. Then came March 1992 and the cricket World Cup. The determined Imran Khan and Pakistan came from behind and won the title. I skipped college the day Pakistan won because I did not have the courage to face Farooque, who was of course ecstatic beyond words […]
KABUL — You see the images everywhere in the streets of Kabul: bare-chested men posing with their protruding and pulsating muscles. Scattered across the Afghan capital, the posters are eye-catching in there own right, but stand out even more in a place where men typically sport the traditional long trousers and puffy shirts known as […]
High ticket prices and fancy stadiums are making the games of the national pastime off-limits for most of Brazil’s population.
SpongeBOZZ’s new album quickly shot up the German hip-hop charts, but his irreverence is telling, part of a growing trend to treat World War II as distant history.
JERUSALEM — In front of Zion Gate in the heart of the Old City of Jerusalem, just a short walk from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, lies a soccer pitch. Standing on the field, nestled beside an Armenian church, you can see the city walls and the rising minarets of mosques. This pitch and […]
A decades-old argument might just have been settled: Modern “mixed martial arts’ fighter vs. Tai Chi master — who wins?” In a recently filmed fight, Xu Xiaodong, a Beijing-based mixed martial arts freestyle coach, duked it out with Wei Lei, a famous Tai Chi master from Sichuan. It took less than 20 seconds for Xu […]
SÃO PAULO — In the nearly two years since it was formed, Unicorns FC, an amateur soccer team in São Paulo made up exclusively of LGBT players, only recorded one crisis: when a player, disappointed with a teammate’s performance, said “soccer is a man’s sport.” For the club, it isn’t — it’s a sport for […]
Like the jousting events of the Middle Ages, modern-day tennis tournaments combine skill and courage with unparalleled excitement and drama.
It took them 108 years, but the Chicago Cubs finally won the World Series after what reporters are describing as “the greatest World Series Game 7 ever.” This is how the Chicago Tribune described the decisive game against the Cleveland Indians that lasted into the early hours Thursday: It “lasted almost five hours, featuring some […]
-Analysis- BEIJING — As the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro come to an end, the Chinese delegation’s “failure” seems to be a foregone conclusion. Even in gymnastics, where it had excelled in the past, China won only two bronze medals, making it the worst performance of the past decade. The first reaction of the […]
The first of a three-part series of oral histories from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, so close and yet so far away from the Olympic spotlight.
With the Olympic Games finally upon us, many spectators are focused on living legends like Brazilian soccer superstar Neymar, Jamaica’s record-holding sprinter Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps, the American swimmer who’s won more Olympic hardware than any athlete in history. And that’s just to name a few. The mega-event certainly doesn’t lack star power. But […]
Categories
Stubborn Surfer
On the northern tip of the island nation of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, this man was determined to try his hand at surfing. I took a picture of him just before he fell into the water — the first of many tumbles.