2 Page 335 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Meet The Rio De Janeiro Olympic Mascots: Cat And Tree
Today Rio de Janeiro organizers officially debuted the mascots for the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The Olympic athletes get a cat! The disabled athletes get a plant....
Can Hosting Sports Events Change Qatar's Culture?
Oil-rich Doha, Qatar, was awarded the 2019 Track and Field World Championships by the IAAF, winning out over Barcelona, Spain, and Eugene, Ore. The 10-day event draws the third-largest TV audience of any sports event, behind the summer Olympics and World Cup soccer. ...
French Club Suspected Of Bribing Opponents With Cases Of Wine Mid-Match
French officials have arrested the club presidents of newly promoted Ligue 1 side Caen and Ligue 2 club Nîmes for their suspected involvement in fixing a match at the end of last year's Ligue 2 season. What did the Caen players receive for their services? According to one report, cases of wine deliv...
Italy-Croatia Euro Qualifier Suspended After Burning Flares And Rioting
Riot police fought with soccer fans as a flood of flares landed upon the field and forced a temporary suspension of play in Milan at today's Euro 2016 qualifier between Italy and Croatia....
You Can Still See The Jaguars Logo At Wembley For Today's Soccer Match
England is playing Slovenia at Wembley today in a crucial Euro 2016 qualifier, and it appears they weren't able to entirely remove the Jaguars logo from last week's Jacksonville-Dallas game there. Expect England to lose by 40....
I Finally Watched <em>Dumb And Dumber</em>, And I'm Smarter For It
We all have one or two movies we haven't quite gotten around to yet, even though practically everyone else in the world has; mine include Forrest Gump, Saving Private Ryan, Braveheart, and, until this week, Dumb and Dumber. Wednesday night, I stumbled across that one on Netflix and decided to fina...
FIFA Investigator Blasts Report Based On His Own Investigation
As expected, the report based on FIFA's probe has largely cleared Russia, Qatar, and all active FIFA officials of claims of corruption in the World Cup bidding process. But here's one no one saw coming: the man who actually conducted the investigation says the report is "incomplete and erroneous,"...
Spoiler Alert: After FIFA Probe, Qatar Gets To Keep Its World Cup
The summary of a year-long investigation into the bidding process for the next two World Cups will not be released until tomorrow, but the gist has already leaked via the English press. Basically: everyone involved was corrupt, but the 2018 and 2022 tournaments will not be taken away from Russia or ...
Martin Jacobson Wins 2014 WSOP Main Event By Flopping A Set
Swede Martin Jacobson took poker's biggest prize with his first World Series of Poker bracelet in this year's Main Event, dispatching Norway's Felix Stephensen on the final table's 328th hand with trips 10s, a fitting hand to match his $10,000,000 prize....
<em>Inconceivable</em>: How Ball-Bustin' Norman Chad Became The Voice Of Poker
The funniest man working for ESPN is most famous for a line that wasn't funny at all. Is that the punchline here? Nobody in newspapering over the past few decades has delivered as many morning-coffee-through-the-nose laugh lines as Norman Chad has in his media and football-betting columns. An unse...
Qatar Sports Minister Says He <em>Probably</em> Won't Imprison Gay Soccer Fans
It's hard to keep track of all the reasons it's so fucked up that FIFA decided to award the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, so here's one you might not have been aware of: It is illegal to be gay in Qatar, and the country's sports minister isn't willing to give anyone a straight answer on whether gay peopl...
The Foosball Champ Who Almost Won The World Series Of Poker
Billy Pappas, the last true amateur of the 2014 World Series of Poker Main Event and one of the best foosball players in the world, was eliminated early this morning in fifth place, taking home $2,143,794. It's a damn shame, because Billy was living the dream. ...
Report: Qatar Using North Korean Slave Labor To Build For World Cup
It seemed like we had reached a point where the organizers of the 2022 World Cup couldn't possibly get more cartoonishly evil, what with the ITUC estimating that migrant worker-fueled construction would kill more people than 9/11, and then another report estimating that 1,000 migrant workers had alr...
FIFA's Corruption Report Is Being Kept Secret For Very Dumb Reasons
Former U.S. attorney Michael J. Garcia finished his investigation into allegations of bribery in the bidding process for both the 2018 and 2022 World Cups earlier this year, and he has made it known that he would like the report to be made public. The report is currently being kept secret by Hans-Jo...
The Radio Host Who Wouldn't Stick To Sports
Matt Jones, host of Kentucky's highest-rated radio program and co-founder of the scrappily independent Kentucky Sports Radio blog, describes himself as a "somewhat liberal, mountain, Eastern Kentuckian white guy." He adds, "There aren't a lot of those." This puts him at odds with his listeners, whos...
The SEC Really Does Benefit From Media Bias In Polls
This past week, four of the top five teams in the Associated Press College Football Poll hailed from the SEC West Division. Nebraska coach Bo Pelini, among others, wondered aloud whether ESPN's ownership of the brand-new SEC network, which launched this year, might be responsible for such a coinci...
All Of Madison Bumgarner's Game 5 Strikeout Pitches, At The Same Time
Giants ace Madison Bumgarner's line last night was filthy, and in the course of earning the complete game he picked up eight strikeouts while walking zero. Here is a video featuring a composite of all eight of those strikeout pitches, similar to what we did with Clayton Kershaw's no-hitter....
2015 Oscar Watch: Yes, It's Time To Start Arguing About This Already
As of this second, we are 122 days away from the 2015 Academy Awards, hosted by Neil Patrick Harris as Billy Crystal growls angrily in the corner and everyone tries real hard not to make a Renee Zellweger joke. That's a ludicrously long time from now, but there won't be a single moment between now...
Old Man In Sweater Knocks Virile Young Man Right On His Ass
That dude's confidence is now toast, because an old man in street clothes just handled him without breaking a sweat....
Not One Single MLB Expert Predicted A Royals-Giants World Series
It's deja vu for the Major League Baseball pundits: For the second consecutive year, not one of the 64 pundits we tracked pegged the World Series correctly before the season began....