fl Page 34 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Once Again, It's Yuna Kim Vs. The World
After weeks of hype surrounding 15-year-old Yulia Lipnitskaya's gold medal Sochi prospects, the Russian rising star crumbled under the pressure Wednesday, eating the ice on an uncharacteristic fall during her short program–and opening the door wide for a slew of competitors to challenge reigning Oly...
Ted Ligety Is Skidding His Way To A Skiing Revolution
Ted Ligety is all about technique. He's precise. Controlled. Clean. He's also a complete risk-taker. Each of those so-called precise, controlled, clean turns? They're perpetually a razor's-edge (or a millisecond) from disaster. ...
The Coach Who Doesn't Care: How One Man Turns Skaters Into Champions
Gracie Gold was having a bad night. The 18-year-old figure skater was about a minute and a half into her free skate at the U.S. International Classic in September when she singled a double axel. It was a significant mistake—a loss of a couple of points—but for a disciplined skater, that kind of erro...
Three Reasons 15-Year-Old Yulia Lipnitskaya Could Shock The World
If you'd asked the figure skating hivemind before the Olympics to bet on the results of the ladies competition, 90 percent of the money would have gone on defending Olympic champion Yuna Kim. Kim, the South Korean superstar who cleaned up in Vancouver with a record-high score, has long been consider...
Why Does Every Olympian Skate To <em>Les Misérables</em>?
There are still two days left of Olympic figure skating, and I have officially maxed out my lifetime tolerance for the Les Misérables soundtrack, something not even Russell Crowe could do to me. Same goes for the score from the 1968 movie adaptation of Romeo and Juliet: I have never seen this film, ...
Fixed Or Not, The World's Best Ice Dancers Won Gold
After four years of buildup, and at least a week of talk about possibly corrupt judges, U.S. ice dancing stars Meryl Davis and Charlie White–America's only real hope for a figure skating gold in Sochi–delivered the goods on Monday, beating Canadian rivals Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir by a healthy spr...
Iowa AD: Paying Players Is Too Complicated For Me And My $450K Salary
From a piece on the Iowa and Iowa State ADs' opposition to athlete unionization comes this doozy from Iowa's Gary Barta:...
Men's Figure Skating Was A Disaster
From start to finish, from Evgeny Plushenko bowing out moments before his short program to the eventual gold medalist falling twice in his free skate, the entire men's individual competition seemed more than a little cursed. ...
Do Dominica's Adorable Skiers Deserve A Gold Medal In Tax Dodging?
There's plenty about the Winter Olympics to make a guy root for global warming: the so-called "Olympic tourists," for example. That's a tag applied to folks who have enough money and leisure time to make up for whatever talent deficiency kept them from competing for their real home country in the Ga...
Can Women's Pro Soccer Work In America? An Investigation, In Sweden
Originally published in Howler Magazine, which you can purchase here. Follow the magazine on Twitter, @whatahowler. Photo by Ryu Voelkel....
Olympic Figure Skating Pairs: Are They Humping?
The pairs figure skaters performed their final Olympic programs today in Sochi and, as pretty much everyone expected, Russian superstars Tatiana Volosozhar and Maxim Trankov took home the gold. Their teammates, Russia's Ksenia Stolbova and Fedor Klimov, won silver in a surprise upset over Germany's ...
How <em>Sports Illustrated</em> Botched The Michael Sam Story
Journalism isn't hard. You watch something and describe it. You read something and paraphrase it. You have a conversation with someone and transcribe it....
Sister Lift: Confessions Of A Former Pairs Skater
Every four years, Chris Schleicher experiences PTSD. His trigger? The Winter Olympics....
Why Are Canadians So Bonkers About Curling?
A white-haired man in a kilt is hustling around the tunnels of Maurice Richard Arena, right next door to Olympic Stadium in Montreal, trying to get organized. "Come on, ladies!" he shouts, at nobody in particular. "We've got four minutes and we're on!"...
Why It Took 90 Years For Women's Ski Jumping To Make The Olympics
The first measured ski jump was explicitly a show of manhood. In 1809, the story goes, a lieutenant in the Norwegian military launched himself 9.5 meters through the air "to show his soldiers what a courageous fellow he was." The sport that grew out of that jump was likewise a test of manliness—far ...
Russia Is Dominant On The Ice; Can Team USA Get It Together?
After weeks of almost exclusively embarrassing reports out of Sochi, Russia finally got some good news today, when its star-studded figure skating team handily took home the gold medal in the brand new "mixed team" figure skating event, beating out Canada and the U.S. But what does this mean for the...
The Non-Skier's Guide To Ski Racing (And Ski Crashing)
Olympic skiing began this morning—men's downhill, airing on tape delay at 11 a.m.—and if you're like most viewers, you either watch the sport with quadrennial befuddlement or you change the channel entirely. As a former ski racer, and someone who started scooting around on skis at about the same tim...
What The Hell Is Team Figure Skating?
For the first time since 1976, there's a new figure skating event at the Olympics. Let's learn about the "Mixed Team" competition before NBC has to condescendingly explain it to you....
Meet The Underdogs Of The U.S. Figure Skating Team
The figure skating competition is already underway in Sochi, and I have to break the bad news to you: For the first time in years, no American man or woman is expected to seriously vie for an individual gold medal. Which doesn't mean this won't still be the most fascinating, nerve-wracking competiti...
Terrence Ross Posterizing Kenneth Faried Is Now An Awesome Animation
Terrence Ross' destruction of Kenneth Faried was one of the most stunning dunks of the year, so we had our pal Patrick Truby work his magic once again and turn the dunk into a work of art. This dunk should be enjoyed in every possible way....