The Critérium du Dauphiné started yesterday, and it’s the first time most Tour de France contenders will get to gauge each other’s forms after a long spring spent either training in secret Canary Islands training camps or scattered about lesser early-season stage races. Sunday’s prologue was a time trial, so it was…
Nike is steamed that 800-meter star Boris Berian has had the temerity to both reject their contract offer and continue to run very well, all the while wearing New Balance gear. In fact, they’re so riled up over losing Berian—who only two years ago was flipping burgers—they’ve filed for a federal court order to stop…
In an IOC first, a Refugee Olympic Team, consisting of 10 athletes who fled their native countries due to war and persecution, will compete at the summer games in Rio. So, now you’ve got 10 more people to root for.
The 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo will probably not be a comprehensive shitstorm like these 2016 Games are shaping up to be, but there is a decent chance they will be much more rad, thanks to the new sports that could get added to the program. Five sports have made it through to the final round of whatever…
The run up to the Rio Olympics has been marred by concerns over Zika virus, a political meltdown, a massive doping crisis, crumbling infrastructure, and a bay filled with human shit. The list of problems is so long and populated with strange issues that it’s easy to overlook another, far more typical fuck up: the Rio…
All season long, professional cyclists have been run getting over by motorcycles during races. 25-year-old Belgian Antoine Demoitié died after getting run over during Gent Wevelgem, a stalled out motorbike caused a harrowing pile-up in Brooklyn last month, and Stig Broeckx was hospitalized after a medical moto ran…
South African sports scientist Ross Tucker and transgender medical physicist Joanna Harper have written a fascinating piece on women’s sports, and the current lack of any limits on testosterone levels in female track and field athletes. This issue is likely to be one of the most controversial and important discussions…
Steven Kruijswijk took a three minute lead into the the final weekend of the Giro d’Italia—the second-biggest stage race in the world after the Tour de France—which looked like a fairly safe lead over Colombian sparkplug Esteban Chaves and mopey Sicilian Vincenzo Nibali (another minute and a half behind Chaves). Both…
The tiny island kingdom of Bahrain is something like a smaller Qatar: extremely rich, friendly with the United States, and run by a single family. While Qatar (allegedly) purchased the World Cup—bringing with it thousands of dead slaves—Bahrain, being smaller, appears to have set its sporting ambitions a notch lower.…
Last night at the Hoka One One Classic,800-meter runner Boris Berian tweeted that he was being sued by Nike:
Mourad Laachraoui is one of the best young taekwondo fighters in the world; the 21-year-old won the 54kg weight class at the European Championships yesterday, and will represent Belgium at the Summer Olympics in August—six months after his brother blew himself up in the Brussels terror attacks that killed 32 people.
It’s the final climb of Stage 15 of the 2005 Tour de France, the queen stage of the last Tour Lance Armstrong will win before retiring. A small group featuring the General Classification contenders and a few hangers on is grinding up the Pla d’Adet, when Oscar Sevilla makes the first attack five kilometers from the…
Yes, I get it, everyone’s doping and no one cares. About doping. But there’s a huge disconnect between what is happening at the top level of the sport and what is happening in my hometown, and I would guess, other people’s hometowns too. Which is running. Competition. Running races is fun and people care about it;…
The run-up to this summer’s Olympics in Rio have been a disaster, between the prevalence of the Zika virus, Brazil’s political upheaval, and deadly problems with Rio’s Olympic infrastructure. It doesn’t help matters that the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) is in the midst of a meltdown, with all manner of shoddy…
Cycling’s three-week Grand Tours are a sort of long, slowly unfolding lesson in the truth of Mike Tyson’s prophecy about how everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Every nine-man team charts out how they want their race to go, but 21-stage races are so chaotic that most get dashed to bits rather…
Writing in the Harvard Public Health Review, University of Ottawa professor of population health Amir Attaran makes a persuasive argument that the outbreak of the Zika virus in Brazil is so dangerous that the upcoming Rio de Janeiro Olympics—scheduled to kick off in 84 days—should be postponed, moved, or cancelled:
For all the very real problems with sports’ war on drugs and the self-serving PED scolds, I can only read this latest report about Russia’s state-run doping efforts at the Sochi Olympic Games with something resembling awe. According to a whistleblower, officials, including those from Russia’s intelligence agency,…
The 4 x 100 meter race is about pure, raw speed, but it also takes a good deal of coordination to time your handoffs right. This is much easier if you have a dang high jump bar to hand off instead of a tiny, near-weightless baton.
Notice anything strange about Letsrun’s listing of the world-leading performances from last weekend?
The Tour of the Gila is one of the hardest bike races in North America. Riders have to contend with heat, mountains, thoroughly unglamorous sleeping conditions, and, apparently, kamikaze dogs. Yesterday afternoon during stage 1, Zack Allison of Elevate Cycling crashed into a pile of riders who had fallen because a dog…
