usa Page 48 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

So, About Those Witnesses Against Lance Armstrong
The revived case against Lance Armstrong hinges on more than just blood samples from 2009 and 2010 that reportedly show evidence of doping. USADA, still humping this case years after most of us stopped caring about it, allege "a massive doping conspiracy from 1998 to 2007," involving Armstrong, his ...

British Mayor Scandalizes Tiny Town By Showing Up To Olympic Torch Parade Dressed As "Sausage"
61-year-old Jill Makinson-Sanders is mayor of Louth, Lincolnshire, England, a cozy town of 15,000 in the English countryside. (Jim Broadbent lives nearby.) Small-town politicians, as a matter of habit, do what they can to put their towns and their towns' industries on the national map. Makinson-Sand...

Jeneba Tarmoh Withdraws From Olympic 100m Runoff, USA Track & Field Has Giant Mess On Its Hands
Last week, Allyson Felix and Jeneba Tarmoh finished in a dead heat for third place in the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic Team Trials. The physically improbable feat exposed a USA Track & Field woefully unprepared for the possibility—there was no plan in place, and after days of dithering, USATF offe...

Is <em>USA Today</em>'s Veteran Gambling Guy Buying Twitter Followers?
Remember our old friend Sarah Phillips, the internet huckster and former ESPN columnist? One of her many tricks, we learned, was to buy followers on Twitter—a new scheme for a new era. The more followers you have, the more influence you can claim to have. In a monetized social-media landscape, the T...

Olympics Field Guide: Ryan Lochte, The Bro Who Beat Michael Phelps
Name: Ryan Lochte...

Usain Bolt Crashes BMW Into Guard Rail, Jamaica Responds With Shitstorm Of Disapproval
Usain Bolt is "the most naturally gifted athlete the world has ever seen," according to Usain Bolt. But while the Jamaican sprinter has certainly been blessed by the gods of speed and victory, it seems he missed the lottery for skills typically associated with mere mortals. Like humility, for starte...

Professional Athlete Used Drug, Says Someone
Lance Armstrong, who you might remember as that guy who won a bunch of bike races while everyone said he was doping, is accused of winning a bunch of bike races while doping. The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency formally charged Armstrong over blood samples collected in 2009 and 2010 that are "fully consiste...

The Thunder Are A Matchup Nightmare For Copy Editors. So Is The Heat.
Tonight's tipoff between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Miami Heat is a milestone for American pro sports. For the first time, a major championship is pitting two teams whose names are mass nouns rather than ordinary plurals. The naming fad that gave us the Heat and the Orlando Magic at the end o...

The Dream Team Even Practiced Better Than Anybody Else Did
Michael. Magic. Bird. Barkley. Mullin. Drexler. Malone. Robinson. Pippen. Ewing. Stockton. (Oh, yeah, Laettner, too.) Lang Whitaker has put together a terrific oral history of the 1992 Dream Team over at GQ, and if you haven't already, you really ought to read it....

Usain Bolt Gets Post-Race Perks Other Runners Usually Don't
Despite having more problems with blocks than a kid missing a piece to his Millennium Falcon Lego set, Usain Bolt cruised to a 100m victory in Oslo yesterday—then took out a flower girl who didn't quite realize that human legs don't have disc brakes....

"Athletic" Shawn Johnson Retires: How Gymnastics Talks About Bodies In Code
On Sunday, former world and Olympic champion gymnast Shawn Johnson, 20, retired from gymnastics. Citing a bum knee, she withdrew from this coming weekend's national championships, the first competitive step towards the 2012 Olympic team....

LaMarcus Aldridge Rushed To Hospital With "Deadly" Blood Virus, Writes LaMarcus Aldridge
While he has been rehabbing from hip surgery in May, LaMarcus Aldridge has been posting on his blog called LA's Rehab Central, part of the Trail Blazers Bloggers Network. The other two posts on the blog are quick updates about how his rehab is progressing. They are pretty innocuous posts along the ...

U.S. Gymnastics Turns Its Back On Chellsie Memmel, Genuine Badass
At the 2006 world championships, Chellsie Memmel botched a release during her uneven-bars routine and tore her labrum. This was more or less the beginning of a prolonged shoulder nightmare that would culminate this weekend in the cold-eyed rejection of her bid to compete in the national championship...

Saturday's United States-Scotland Friendly Featured A Clash Of Terribly-Performed National Anthems
The U.S. Men's National Team thrashed Scotland 5-1 in Jacksonville Saturday on the strength of a Landon Donovan hat trick, but the festival atmosphere at EverBank Field (where the attendance of 44,438 set a record for national friendlies in the state) was nearly snuffed out before the match ever be...

John Cusack In A Goatee? Quoth The Raven: Meh.
John Cusack is one of those actors whom everybody likes. He was a consistently enjoyable presence in '80s films like Better Off Dead and Sixteen Candles, and he won the hearts of a generation of young women by being the most sensitive man ever in Say Anything. Since then, he's been an indie staple (...

This Is The 911 Call Of Joba Chamberlain's Trampoline Injury
The New York Daily News got this the other day, but it just came to our attention. As you can hear in the audio above, Joba Chamberlain's injury was reported as a "compound fracture" of the ankle. The bone had come all the way through the skin, and there was blood, though the caller can be heard to...

Trampoline Wars: Rebounderz And AirHeads Battle Over Where Joba Chamberlain Was Injured
We didn't ask for this, to get caught up in Florida's trampoline arena turf war. We just wanted to point out the incongruity of a major league ballplayer suffering a horrific injury at a child's playplace. But there's no going back....

Memphis Is Going Dancing
Congratulations to the Memphis Tigers, who in beating Marshall 83-57 won the Conference USA tournament and punched their ticket to the dance. [CBS]...

The Eddie Murphy You Love Is Dead
While suffering through this year's Oscars—ha ha, Billy Crystal kissed George Clooney, ha ha—it was hard not to think, "Geez, if Brett Ratner had kept his mouth shut, none of this would have happened and Eddie Murphy could have been the host." Indeed, the news last year that Murphy had agreed to hos...

Usain Bolt Vs. Prince Harry In The 25-Meter: Who Ya Got?
If you picked the one wearing the Jamaica shirt—you'd be right, actually, despite his gingerness. It's just good form to let royalty win. Even Princess Diana's riding instructor used to let her be on top every once in a while....