World Sports

WASHINGTON — Concussions and football have become synonymous. But as it turns out, athletes who play the perceived most-violent sport may not have the most danger for concussions. At the Knight Commission forum on Intercollegiate Athletics, former United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan asked panelists who were discussing the health, safety and well-being of college athletes to rank their level of concern for concussions in specific sports. Football was…

Whether young or old, rich or poor, Canadians are less active these days. In fact, according to a new study, our participation in sports is at an all-time low. But why? Are Canadians getting lazier? More complacent? More distracted?  In the first of two parts, we examine some of the problems with our approach to youth athletics. Part 2 will look at why adults are dropping out of sports. At…

On paper, a description of LawBreakers—the next game from ex-Epic and Gears of War developer Cliff Bleszinski—sounds niche at best, stale at worst. “An exhilarating role-based first-person shooter where the laws of physics can be shattered, creating unprecedented gravity-based combat in an ever-evolving bloody arena,” reads LawBreakers’ Steam page, sounding like something aimed at teenage boys with a penchant for the SyFy channel and a simple understanding of base adjectives….

There’s a lot of money in sports. Usually, that adage is associated with negativity — high player salaries, ticket prices, concessions — but on another level, it’s true on a small business level. Sports present a lot of small business opportunities to entrepreneurs and there are plenty of sports business ideas that don’t require any athletic ability whatsoever. In fact, there are a number of businesses that are…

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Gender politics and science have never gotten along very well. The patriarchal system was—and in some cultures still is—based on the premise that women are more mercurial, less deliberative and physically less sturdy than men. Those are perfectly easy beliefs to hold—at least until you subject them to the least bit of intellectual scrutiny or real-world testing, at which point they fall apart completely. In the 1970s, the script flipped,…

Screenshot via YouTube Last April, the New York Times’s Richard Sandomir wrote a soft-focus puff piece on Jason Whitlock and his then-role as head of ESPN’s The Undefeated. A month later ESPN president John Skipper told Sandomir exclusively that Bill Simmons wasn’t returning to ESPN, news Simmons himself found out from Twitter. A month later ESPN fired Whitlock. These things are all related. Today’s Times has another profile from Sandomir,…

Baseball has only about 27 possible base-out states (combinations of base-runners and outs) that it needs to deal with. Football, in contrast, has billions of possible combinations of down, distance, yardline, score, time, etc.) Baseball is an orderly serial sequence of pitcher-batter matchups, and defense is only marginally involved. Football is parallel, involving 22 players simultaneously colliding in apparent chaos.

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Michel Platini played 72 times for France, scoring 41 goals, and was regarded as one of the best players in the world at the time Uefa president Michel Platini will resign from European football’s governing body after failing to have a six-year ban from football overturned. A Court of Arbitration for Sport (Cas) panel reduced the ban to four years on Monday. Following the judgement, the 60-year-old said he would…

It is no overstatement to say that sport’s integrity is being questioned as it has never been before. It is not just doping issues that confront us – but governance failures and match-fixing claims at the highest level. We face challenges on a number of fronts, but with doping adversely affecting the athletes themselves, it without doubt remains the greatest threat to modern-day sport. In combatting doping, we can be…

The stadium deal recently added the vocal public support of casino billionaire Steve Wynn, who helped craft the idea with Adelson more than three yeas ago. Wynn fell short of admitting he’s willing to invest in the deal, but enthused to entertainment columnist Norm Clarke, “Well, Sheldon and I are both very strong supporters of it, and how it plays out is something we’ve got to see… the one thing…

It is no overstatement to say that sport’s integrity is being questioned as it has never been before. It is not just doping issues that confront us – but governance failures and match-fixing claims at the highest level. We face challenges on a number of fronts, but with doping adversely affecting the athletes themselves, it without doubt remains the greatest threat to modern-day sport. In combatting doping, we can be…

It is no overstatement to say that sport’s integrity is being questioned as it has never been before. It is not just doping issues that confront us – but governance failures and match-fixing claims at the highest level. We face challenges on a number of fronts, but with doping adversely affecting the athletes themselves, it without doubt remains the greatest threat to modern-day sport. In combatting doping, we can be…

For decades, most sports movies were little more than variations of the same story: An athlete or team that’s never gotten a shot captures both victory and the respect of the masses, usually with the help of a wise old coach tormented by personal demons and past failures. Think Seabiscuit, Hoosiers, Major League, The Mighty Ducks, A League of Their Own, 42, Remember the Titans, Rocky, Slap Shot, and countless…

Cage fighters are risking their lives by taking extreme weight-loss measures before fights, according to academics. Mixed martial arts (MMA) is one of the fastest-growing and most controversial sports in the world. A UK-based study has found some competitors are dehydrating themselves to dangerous levels. The International Mixed Martial Arts Federation said work is being done to educate fighters on how to manage their weight safely. The sport, which combines…

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Cage fighters are risking their lives by taking extreme weight-loss measures before fights, according to academics. Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) is one of the fastest-growing and most controversial sports in the world. A UK-based study has found some competitors are dehydrating themselves to dangerous levels. The International Mixed Martial Arts Federation said work is being done to educate fighters on how to manage their weight safely. The sport, which combines…