Archive Category: Sports
Cutest Soccer Own Goal Ever
“Own goals” (kicking a ball into one’s own net) are uncommon in soccer (”football”) and ice hockey. Because this one occurs in a youth sporting event, it is just indescribably cute.
Via BuzzFeed.
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Olympic Sport Suggestion: Parkour
Photo: geishaboy500 [Flickr]
Neatorama’s own Johnny Cat has got the best idea concerning the Olympics that I’ve heard in a long time. Here it is, in his own words:
After some dull moments in beach volleyball, I realized the Games could use a little perk in athleticism, namely the greatest new sport/subversive activity: Parkour
Sure beats skateboarding. IOC, are you listening? And if you don’t know what Parkour is, here’s the founder performing a Super Mario Parkour [Google Video]
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Bull Leaping
For some reason, the good people of Spain really like horned, charging mammals involved in their sports. From the classic (yet controversial) bullfighting matches to the Running of the Bulls, and now an old tradition revived- Bull Leaping! At Oddity Central, Spooky writes:
Teams of 5 to 7 bull leapers gather each year in cities like Valencia or Barcelona, to take part in a performance that many compare to the Russian roulette. Each team may face up to three bulls in the ring, at once, taunting and jumping over them just when the beasts prepare to impale them.
And, as he points out, no animals needlessly die during the events.
Video of the action. Link to story/more pics. | Photos by Ojodigital.
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Robot Baseball
A couple of weeks ago I posted about the robot that plays volleyball. Add this to the growing list of sporting droids: a robot that can pitch a fastball to another machine that can hit (although that looks like an easy play by the short stop… I bet the mad scientists are working on that one now). Will the Singularity take place in a sports arena?
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Oli Lemieux Cirque du Soleil Practice
Montreal acrobat and Cirque du Soleil performer Oli Lemieux amazes in this practice video. This makes me want to see another show of theirs, and soon! From Asylum~
While most of us are content to bounce up and down (and occasionally fall off and break a leg), when you put Oli on a trampoline he leaves physics behind him. The man runs up walls and bends gravity in whichever direction is appropriate to make backflipping off ledges look effortless.
YouTube Link (Note: some NSFW lyrics in the song)
The routines practiced are for the current show, Dralion.
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Is Sammy Sosa Pulling A Michael Jackson?
Is Sammy Sosa pulling a Michael Jackson? The baseball star has noticeably lighter skin color, which he attributed to a "rejuvenation process":
Sosa was photographed recently during an appearance at Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas.
"He is going through a rejuvenation process for his skin," Polihronis said. "Women have it all of the time. He was surprised he came out looking so white. I thought it was a body double. Part of (the photo appearance) is just the lighting.
"He is in the middle of doing a cleansing process to his skin. The picture is deceiving. He said, ‘If you saw me in person, you would be surprised. When you see me in person, it is not going to seem like the picture.’
Link (Photo: AP/Tribune/Getty)
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Seven Strange Golf Courses Around the world
Photo: flickr user Prince Roy
Deck Chair has compiled pictures and videos of seven unique golf courses, including one that floats, one that sits astride a motor speedway, and another that is 1,365 km long. Pictured above is a scene from the golf course at Coober Pedy, a small mining town in Australia. The land is so desolate that golfers must carry around a piece of turf from which to tee off.
Link via The Presurfer | More about the Coober Pedy golf course
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Remote-control Bowling Ball
At one time or another, everyone wishes they could control a bowling ball after it leaves his/her hand. The RC900 remote-control bowling ball makes that dream come true! A weight in a threaded shaft inside the ball determines its direction, and the user controls the weight. The purpose of the ball is to give young children a bit of success as they learn to bowl, and to help disabled people paticipate in the sport. Don’t even think of sneaking the RC900 into a competition! Link (with video) -via Gizmodo
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A Good Clean Fight
How about we celebrate Friday with a good old fashioned cat fight? Now I wanna see a good clean fight, no hitting below the tail, shake paws and good luck!
via AcidCow.
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TRAX STI Snow Car
Just in time for snow season! DC co-founder Ken Block teamed up with Subaru to design and produce the world’s fastest cat-track snow car. Primarily for reaching alpine backwoods to engage in some fresh boarding, the vehicle is also built for fun as a standalone toy.
Prepared by Vermont SportsCar, performance modifications include 400-hp and features Group N competition rally dampers made by EXE-TC and a KAPS 5-speed close-ratio dog-engagement gearbox. Under the hood sits a 2.5 liter, 4-cylinder, turbocharged and intercooled STI engine tuned with a MOTEC M800 ECU.
Not seen is a trailer that will haul up to four boarders and equipment. More info here.
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The 25 Best Costumes At The 2009 NYC Marathon
Meb Keflezighi won the New York City Marathon on Sunday. He is the first American to win the title since 1982! But around 42,000 runners took part in the marathon, some wearing elaborate costumes. Buzzfeed collected photographs of the most outrageous marathon costumes for your viewing pleasure. Link
(image credit: Flickr user monicamüller)
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Robot Plays Volleyball
With the aid of onboard, fast-moving cameras, “Mr. Tomorrow” will most likely beat me in a game of volleyball. Created by the mad scientists at Toshiba.
via UniqueDaily
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Agassi's Wild Hair in the 1990s? Yep, a Wig!
Remember the wild hair of Andre Agassi in the 1990s? Yep, you guessed it: a wig!
"I asked myself: you want to wear a toupee? On the tennis court? I answered myself; what else could I do?"
But the wig began to disintegrate as he took a shower the night before the Paris final — "probably I used the wrong hair rinse," Agassi writes.
He panicked and called his brother Philly into the room. Together, they managed to clamp the wig together using clips and pins.
Agassi, 39, writes: "Of course I could have played without my hairpiece, but what would all the journalists have written if they knew that all the time I was really wearing a wig?
"During the warming-up training before play I prayed. Not for victory, but that my hairpiece would not fall off.
"With each leap, I imagine it falling into the sand. I imagine millions of spectators move closer to their TV sets, their eyes widening and, in dozens of dialects and languages, ask how Andre Agassi’s hair has fallen from his head."
(Photo: AFP/EPA)
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Inside the Vicious World of Competitive Yoga
The 7th Annual Asana Yoga Competition was recently held in New York. New York Magazine has a glimpse at the extreme poses competitors used to impress the judges. Link -via Buzzfeed
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Mass Games in North Korea
“Mass games” are group athletic events in which the performance of the individual is deemphasized in favor of the performance of the group as a whole. They are thus well suited to the philosophy embodied by socialist/communist states, but the components of such games are also employed for other major events such as Olympic opening and closing shows.
The video above includes the closing moments from the movie “A State of Mind,” documenting mass games in North Korea.
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Parahawking: Skydiving With Hawks
(YouTube Link)
Parahawking involves skydiving while specially-trained birds of prey swarm around you, including vultures, eagles, and falcons. It’s available in Nepal courtesy of a bird rescue group called Himalayan Raptor Rescue. Hypothetically, it should lead to a superior paragliding experience:
Birds of prey have a natural instinct to conserve energy wherever and whenever possible. During a flight, a bird will burn more energy than it would if it was just sitting in a tree, this means it has to eat to replace the used energy. Sometimes birds will travel long distances to find food. To conserve energy whilst flying, birds of prey use thermals. Thermals are rising currents of warm air that are created by the sun heating the ground. Birds can gain height and travel long distances without flapping their wings by using thermals. Paragliders also use thermals when they are flying and will often use wild birds to guide them to where the thermals are. Our trained birds are no different, they will find the thermals in order to stay aloft and conserve energy whilst flying. We as paragliders harness their ability to conserve energy by following them as we fly.
Our birds need to be rewarded for guiding us into the thermals. During the flight the passenger will place small morsels of meat onto his gloved hand, the birds will come and gently land on the hand to take the food, and then gracefully fly away to find the next thermal. A perfect symbiotic relationship.
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A Visual History of Football Helmets
For the past ten years The Helmet Project has been assembling images of football helmets. The current array includes professional teams (American, Canadian, Arena, and others) and NCAA divisions I, II, and III, and even NAIA and some junior colleges. The time period covered goes back to 1960.
Please note that my interest lies only in the “helmet design”, by which I basically mean the shell and faceguard colors, the logo decals (if any), and the stripes running over the top of the helmet (if any). No attempt is being made here to illustrate the physical variations of helmets produced by different manufacturers, or the many different styles of faceguards, nor do I intend to show changes in the physical structure of helmets over the decades (at least not in the near future); partially for these reasons, 1960 has been somewhat arbitrarily chosen as the cut-off date for all the historic helmets for now. I am also not attempting to display fine details like “award decals” that would not show up well in the image size I am using here, or those details that would not be visible from this perspective (such as numerals on the back of the helmet). It is not my intention to illustrate every variation worn by every individual football player on any of these teams, just whatever was “the” design for each team at a particular time.
Link, via Archaeoblog (!)
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Seats of Gold
Sportswriter Wright Thompson tried out the “Legends” section at the new Yankee Stadium. The seats originally went for $2,500. Now they are mostly empty, even though the price has dropped to $1,250. In telling the story of how such an exclusive luxury section came to be, Thompson relates the changes in baseball with the state of the economy.
A recent poll discovered an unsettling trend emerging for the first time. American families whose household income is $75,000 or less now have zero dollars of discretionary income. According to Luker, that means about 75 percent of the country can never responsibly afford to go to a live professional sporting event. Franchises want them to be fans, to buy the gear and pull for their teams and watch the telecasts the leagues are paid billions for. But they don’t need them to come to their stadiums. There are, right now, plenty of rich people who love games. The prices reflect that. The reason sporting events cost so much now, Luker’s research shows, is because they are designed to be affordable only to those making $150,000 or more a year.
This wasn’t always true. Ten years ago, it was cheaper to go to a baseball game than to a movie in half of the big league markets (take away parking at the game, and it was cheaper in every market). Today, there isn’t a single city in America where it costs less to go to a major league game than to a movie. Everywhere we turn, we see examples of the collapsing middle class. This is where that issue lives in the world of sports, and it has predictable consequences.
You don’t have to be a baseball fan to relate to this story of a business choosing short-term profits over long-term growth. Link -via Metafilter
(image credit: Julie Jacobson)
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How Many Rings Did They Win?
Hey baseball fans! As we head into post-season play, test your memory of past World Series with today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. Do you know how many World Series titles each of twelve players earned? Keep in mind that some went all the way with more than one team. I scored 7 of 12, so any real baseball fan should beat that! Link
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Summer Olympic Cities
The 2016 Olympic summer games will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The 2012 games will be in London, England. Since the first modern Olympics in 1896, 22 cities have hosted the summer games, some more than once. Can you name all those cities in five minutes? That’s the challenge of this Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. Good luck -I could only name 16. Link
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Team Names: An Etymological Venn Diagram
This diagram (actually an Euler diagram {wiki}) sorts out professional baseball team names. Even more interesting is the accompanying list of links and explanations for every team name included. Link -via Jason Kottke
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The Longest Point in the History of Professional Tennis - 29 minutes, 643 shots
This week marks the 25th anniversary of an historic tennis match. At a Virginia Slims tournament in 1984, Vicki Nelson and Jean Hepner exchanged 643 shots; it remains the longest single rally in the history of professional tennis.
The 6-hour-31-minute marathon was itself the longest match in tennis history for nearly 20 years and remains the longest match completed on a single day.
The rally that put Nelson-Dunbar and Hepner in the record books came at set point for Hepner, who was ahead, 11-10, in the second-set tie breaker, which lasted 1:47 on its own…
Hugh Waters, a former tennis coach and the owner of the Raintree club, remembered: “I had a lot of people coming up to me at the tournament saying the match was ridiculous, but I always jumped on them. It takes guts to do what they did. “People don’t understand the mental aspect of the game: this was a battle of wills and real tennis fans like me could appreciate it.”
Among the astonishing elements to the match was this: If Hepner had won the epic rally, she would have forced a third set, and who knows how long the match might have lasted.
Link, via Metafilter.
Photo: Jean Hepner (L) in 1985 and Vicki Nelson Dunbar (R) in 1987.
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Sumo Suit Athletics World Championships
The track and field events of 100 m dash, long jump, high jump, and shot put can get kind of boring after a while. But how should they be improved?
How about with a sumo suit? The people behind the Sumo Suit Athletics World Championships (motto: "slower, lower, weaker!") aim to liberate these events from elitist pro athletes so the (flabby) masses can join in on the fun!
Can’t compete with Usain Bolt over 100m? Not able to leap tall buildings in a single bound? Well have no fear, in a Sumo Suit no one can!
Indeed! TYWKIWDBI has the video clip: Link
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The Foxy Golfball Thief
Tom Houk of Steamboat Springs, Colorado built a putting green in his yard, and got into the habit of leaving his golf balls where they landed until he returned. A few months ago, he woke to find all his golf balls gone! Houk produced more balls, but the next day, they would be gone, too. This continued until Houk finally spotted the thief.
A hairless fox was standing there with one of his golf balls in his mouth.
“We just couldn’t believe it and we thought he just snatched one,” Houk said.
The fox had more than one golf ball in mind.
“He doesn’t just take one ball,” Sally Houk said. “He came back and forth and back and forth until he took all of them.”
Tom Houk thinks the fox has taken nearly 100 of his golf balls.
What does a fox do with a hundred golf balls? Jerry Neal of the Colorado Division of Wildlife thinks he probably plays with them. No word on what size clubs the fox uses. Link -via Arbroath
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Best Pool Table EVAR!
All right. So John Farrier has posted a couple of really cool pool tables. The first one is Deep Green, a pool-playing robot created by the robotics lab of Queen’s University in Canada. The second one is the $200,000 Obscura CueLight Pool Table that creates an interactive image using an overhead projector.
Well, fie! The first two rounds belong to you, John. But in this game of Neatorama one upmanship, I’m compelled regain top dog status and post a pool table to beat ‘em all.
Behold, the Snooker Sofa, created by Accrington upholsterer and UK pool table maker Riley in the 1970s.
Can your pool table transform into a sofa, John? Just look at that beauty and weep: Link
Note: And yes, you may have seen this one round the Net back a couple of months ago, and was on eBay (since then it’s been out of eBay).
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48-Pound Trout: World Record or Genetic Cheat?
Sean Konrad caught a 48-pound rainbow trout. That’s a world record. But should it be? The trout he caught was a genetically-modified fish that escaped from a fish farm. It has three sets of chromosomes, which makes it sterile but able to grow unnaturally big. Konrad’s brother Adam caught the previous world record trout in 2007, which was also genetically modified. Whether this counts as cheating depends on how you see the sport of fishing. No matter where the fish came from, the fisherman still landed it, which involves a certain set of skills. However, fisherman elsewhere don’t have the opportunity to even try to catch a trout that big, because they don’t exist in nature. What do you think? Link
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Boxers Before and After Fights
This series of photographs by Howard Schatz won a second place prize in the Sports Stories category of the World Press Photo Contest. He took pictures of boxers before and after fights. It hurts just to look! Also be sure to check out other contest winners. Link -via J-Walk Blog
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Game Called Due to Hole
Alcoa High was leading Fulton High in last night’s football game in Knoxville, Tennessee when the game had to called due to the ground opening up and trying to swallow the players.
With Alcoa leading 20-7, a sinkhole opened up near the stands-side sideline at the 41-yard line on the west side of the still-drenched field with 6:33 left to play in the fourth quarter. The field was declared unplayable and play was suspended for the night. The remaining minutes of the game will be played at Alcoa High School’s Goddard Field at 5 p.m. today. Admission is free.
(image credit: Mark A. Large/The Daily Times)
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One Fast Cat
Sarah, a cheetah at the Cincinnati Zoo, set a world record for the 100 meter dash today by covering the distance in 6.13 seconds. The event was held at Mast Farm, the zoo’s cheetah breeding facility. The race is a remote contest between Sarah and Zaza, a cheetah at Cheetah Outreach in South Africa. Zaza is expected to run her race later this month. To compare, the human world record is 9.58 seconds, held by Usain Bolt. Link to story. Link to Sarah’s blog. -via Metafilter
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Llama Caddies
Sherwood Forest Golf Course in Transylvania County, North Carolina offers a memorable golf experience every Tuesday. You can rent a llama to be your caddy! A llama from Fairway Friends Llama Farm will carry two sets of clubs for $40. This is a sure way to get kids interested in playing golf. Link -via the Presurfer
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