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A buzzing comes across the sky. This past weekend, on the northwest side of an island in the New York Harbor, roughly 1,000 people witnessed what some believe to be the first new sport of the 21st century. ESPN was there to broadcast the event to anyone with a computer, and well-known international brands like GoPro, AIG, and Ernst & Young were there to sponsor it. But what the brands,…

Media playback is not supported on this device Great Britain win gold in men’s four Great Britain’s rowers claimed a fifth consecutive Olympic title in the men’s four in Rio. Mohamed Sbihi, George Nash, Constantine Louloudis and London 2012 winner Alex Gregory finished in five minutes 58.61 seconds. Australia pushed their rivals hard but eventually came in 1.83 seconds behind to take silver, as Italy won bronze. Britain’s gold came…

A race is a battle to see who is fastest, but sometimes sports and race mix in ways that can inspire. USA TODAY Sports

Thursday night, Simone Manuel made history when she became the first black woman in the Olympics to ever earn an individual swimming gold medal and the first African-American woman to win an individual medal. The groundbreaking win, which Manuel shared with Canada’s Penny Oleksiak after a tie, would be worth celebrating in the context of any sport. But the particularly racist history of American swimming pools — and resulting…

Because of NBC’s policy against GIFs, we used GIFs from Biles’s and Mustafina’s recent competitions. I’ve linked video (NBC does not allow embedding) of the routines that are available online. American gymnast Simone Biles turned the Rio Olympics’ women’s individual all-around gymnastics competition into a coronation. “Simone is so good that the Olympics have become boring,” Dave Lease, the editor of TSL, a figure skating and gymnastics news website,…

Michael Phelps has won more than twice as many gold medals as any other Olympian—and more than many entire nations. Since the modern Olympics began in 1896, 56 countries have taken home fewer gold medals in all than the 22 golds accrued by Phelps in his past four appearances at the Summer Olympics. And that doesn’t include the 47 countries that have participated without winning any gold medals. Phelps won…

RIO DE JANEIRO — A female Chinese swimmer has tested positive for a banned substance at the Rio Olympics, China’s swimming association said Friday — the first competitor in the sport to fail a test at the games. The Chinese Swimming Association said Chen Xinyi tested positive for the diuretic hydrochlorothiazide after she finished fourth in the women’s 100-meter butterfly Sunday, missing a bronze medal by nine-hundredths of a second….

There is no perfect athlete — no player who exuded nothing but virtue both on and off the field. You can’t find one in this day and age, and if you had a time machine, you wouldn’t be able to go back and find one either. Some imperfect players carry more baggage than others. Some players keep their faults under wraps; some have to wear them like scarlet letters. But…

For those who are unfamiliar with my thought process, I aim to add as many home run hitters as possible to my daily fantasy baseball lineups. One way of doing that is to look at a player’s isolated power numbers (ISO). The ISO statistic removes singles and provides a larger weight for each extra-base hit. I also use the weighted on-base average (wOBA) metric. This stat takes every positive outcome into consideration. Last year,…

“Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball,” wrote Columbia University scholar Jacques Barzun in 1954. In the history of baseball, great attention has been justifiably been paid to the sport’s important role in battling racism. The moment when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier will always be one of baseball’s most memorable. Less noticed in our national  pastime‘s history has been its contribution…

Baseball writer Dan Schlossberg, left, with the former Atlanta Brave and Hall of Fame pitcher John Smoltz. (Courtesy of Dan Schlossberg) (JTA) – For many, summer is all about the three B’s: baseball, beaches and books. With the weather and pennant races sizzling, two journalists and the mayor of baseball’s mythical home village of Cooperstown, New York — all Jewish — have provided their takes about a sport that has…

Ever since the steroid era, baseball fans have been cautious about reading too much into unexpected leaps in player performance. Today’s jaded rooters assume that performance-enhancing drugs are to blame, somehow, whenever a player experiences a breakout or the league undergoes a transformation. So it’s no surprise that, with home runs flying out of parks at nearly an all-time high in 2016, many have reacted by assigning the responsibility to…

“Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball,” wrote Columbia University scholar Jacques Barzun in 1954. In the history of baseball, great attention has been justifiably been paid to the sport’s important role in battling racism. The moment when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier will always be one of baseball’s most memorable. Less noticed in our national  pastime‘s history has been its contribution…

The coverage of Muslim women athletes often emphasizes their traditional roles in an exotic culture, and makes their uniforms and veils into the topic of much fascination and tokenization. According to a 2014 Women’s Media Center report, almost 90 percent of sportswriters are white, straight, able-bodied men. Therein lies much of the problem. When stories on Muhammad emphasize she is *not* an oppressed and subservient woman, it just reinforces the…

<!– FOOTBALL GOSSIP Partick Thistle manager Alan Archibald has said it is “farcical” and “disrespectful” to others teams for the Scottish Professional Football League to have allowed Celtic to cancel a Premiership match in favour of scheduling a friendly against Inter Milan in Ireland this weekend. (Various) Martyn Waghorn hopes to return from his hamstring injury to lead Rangers’ attack against Celtic on 10 September. (Sun) Rangers manager Mark Warburton…

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x Embed x Share USA TODAY Sports’ Rachel Axon tells you the five things to watch for during Day 7 of the Olympics. USA TODAY Sports Michael Phelps celebrates his 22nd career gold medal.(Photo: Rob Schumacher, USA TODAY Sports) RIO DE JANEIRO — It’s not Michael Phelps’ fault, the fact he makes it look so easy. He makes you think that it’s normal, what he’s doing, winning four gold medals in…

On Sunday, NBC gymnastics commentator Al Trautwig wrote on Twitter that dominant American gymnast Simone Biles’s parents are not actually her parents. Later, he deleted the tweet and apologized for it, but the internet, as it always does, remembered. Biles’s parents are her biological grandparents, who adopted her when she was a child. Trautwig’s tweet was seen as offensive to people who are adopted — and as…

The youngest member of the U.S. Olympic swimming team paused in a stuffy hallway this week at the Olympic Aquatics Stadium minutes after winning another gold medal. Katie Ledecky had just gutted out 200 meters of freestyle that hurt her entire body. She considers this fun. The 19-year-old resisted the urge to vomit during the final meters and accelerated to the wall less than a second off the world record…