Sex at the Olympics. "I am often asked if the Olympic village . . . is the sex-fest it is cracked up to be. My answer is always the same: too right it is." Table tennis Olympian Matthew Syed dishes the dirt. (possibly NSFW, TimesOnline).
posted by fourcheesemac on Aug 23, 2008 - 113 comments

Sports Dignity (Or, rather, the lack thereof.) Alas, sometimes our athletes are just too caught up in the moment to realize what they're doing. Sometimes unfortunate things happen. Sometimes they suffer great pain. (Ugh.) ~NSFW~
posted by jdroth on Apr 13, 2006 - 39 comments

HotOlympians.com has been shut down by the U.S. Olympic Committee.

The domain name hotolympians.com is infringing on federal trademarks. When I registered the domain name, I did some research on olympic trademarks and came to understand... that "olympic" was trademarked and "olympians" was not. I was wrong. And thus we will continue publishing under a new domain name which will be up shortly...

When asked why a local newspaper could publish a feature of an athlete right next to an advertisement, I was told that we weren't a news operation. I was told that hotolympians.com jeapordized American athlete's right to participate in the games.
posted by Tin Man on Feb 17, 2006 - 35 comments

Athletes and their tattoos. If you've got it, flaunt it.
posted by mono blanco on Jan 5, 2006 - 21 comments

How are the San Francisco 49ers trained to handle the media? Apparently with a film involving naked lesbians, jokes about gay marriage, and offensive asian stereotypes (complete with buck teeth). The San Francisco Chronicle has the whole video online. The owners have apologized for the video (even though they could have put a stop to it when they saw it 5 months ago) , but the players are comparing it to Chapelle's Show.
posted by emptybowl on Jun 2, 2005 - 104 comments

Sure, you could defend the country, but Houston needs a good defense even more! Say, do you want to shirk your commitment to the armed forces but flat-out desertion is too controversial? Become a pro athlete instead! West Point is revising its rules to stipulate that student athletes who join professional sports teams can avoid active duty. The taxpayer-funded military academy will now allow student athletes to reduce their active duty time if faced with the unbearable burden of being offered multi-million dollar pro contracts.
posted by XQUZYPHYR on May 1, 2005 - 33 comments

Few would disparage the benefits of sport and recreation except, perhaps, those elected and charged with the responsibility for funding them. In a day when even the IOC is charged with catering to professional sports it's easy to see the roots of the coming epidemic. After all, only the elite have reason enough to train, eh?. One hopes that, while the fallout after the loss was considerable, we might be able to refocus and do these things for the right reasons.
posted by mce on Feb 10, 2005 - 12 comments

Athletes... Steroids... blah blah blah.. Only this time it's the pigeons. Poor birds.
posted by Lizc on Nov 11, 2004 - 7 comments

Carl Lewis' present to pop culture. (Quicktime Video) Ladies and Gentlemen, all you kids out there who want to know what the 1980's were like: I present you the ultimate document. Just in case you were wondering, ( It has been twenty years after all) the star of this video is considered one of the best track & field athletes of all time. (Via jasonzada.com)
posted by jeremias on Oct 5, 2004 - 32 comments

Bush Will Win Because He's A Jock
(warning National Review filter)
Sorry, I had to post this because its about the dumbest article on why Bush will win the election that I have ever seen.

via Bush Must Go
posted by fenriq on May 25, 2004 - 104 comments

False Start
How important is sportsmanship in the modern era? On Sunday afternoon at the IAAF World Championships, Jon Drummond false started in the 100m sprint and was disqualified. He refused to leave the track (initially prostrating himself in the middle of his lane) and ended up delaying the race by more than 50 minutes. In 1996, Linford Christie did something similar in the Olympic games 100m final.
Is it just 100m sprinters, or is sportsmanship going out of fashion?
posted by daveg on Aug 24, 2003 - 19 comments

By now, you might already have heard about Mark Walker, the 3 year old hoops prodigy that Reebok is featuring on their website; while the video of him hitting 18 straight shots from various spots on the floor is cute/impressive, the "interview" movie is horrendously creepy. The closing tagline "I'm the future of basketball; I am Reebok" done in the voice of such a small child just conjures up visions of in vitro logo tattooing. (Warning: Movies are in Quicktime)
posted by jonson on May 30, 2003 - 29 comments

Armstrong Among Best Ever. Mike Celizic at MSNBC states his case for Lance, counteracting an earlier Ron Borges column questioning if Lance was an athlete at all. I'd like to think Mike went into Ron's office and maybe cuffed him once or twice... Score one for the cyclists (earlier discussion here).
posted by jalexei on Jul 29, 2002 - 13 comments

Great feat, but not a great athlete. Let the Cyclist bashing continue.
As a follow up to the pointless Bicycles and cars don't mix column, Ron Borges over at MSNBC wonders if Lance Armstrong is even an athlete.
He says Athletes must do more with their bodies than pump their legs up and down. For his money, being the greatest athlete in the world involves strength, speed, agility, hand-eye coordination, mental toughness and the ability to make your body do things that defy description. Anyone who has ever been in a bike race (Road or MTN) knows it does indeed take all that and more. Anyone who writes about sports, rather than participating, would of course have no clue it takes more than moving your feet up and down.
posted by Blake on Jul 26, 2002 - 48 comments

International Figure Skating Online presents Ice Porn! See the hottest girls on ice bare more skin than you've ever seen before in these raw, uncensored pictorials. Slutskaya, indeed!
posted by Danelope on Apr 5, 2002 - 24 comments

The coming breed of couch potato jocks? "Discoveries made at the University of Dundee are helping in the development of drugs that fool your body into thinking that your are actively exercising even when you are not, and may help in the fight against the current increase in the incidence of obesity and Type 2 diabetes." It might seem that I'm just sitting in front of a computer screen all day, but in reality I'm training for the Olympics.
Story coverage from the BBC
posted by talos on Mar 5, 2002 - 2 comments

'A willing participant'? A woman parties and cavorts with athletes, brags about posing for Playboy. Fast forward a couple of days and she presses rape charges. NFL defensive lineman is one of the guys supposedly holding the camera videotaping the sex, so he's charged. He's got a record of drug use so he's no angel either. Of course, "no means no" but what was she doing there in the first place?
posted by owillis on Feb 8, 2002 - 21 comments

Goodbye Trust (Hello Shyster?) After 60+ years of Yawkey ownership and a year's worth of politicking, the Red Sox have been sold to a group headed by the current Florida Marlins owner and the man who presided over a fire sale as owner of the Padres (and is pals with Satan). The local heroes dropped out of the group today after a spat. The new owners' remaining local talent consists of former senator George Mitchell and Les Otten, a man who had trouble making money in the ski business. And staying out of trouble.
posted by yerfatma on Dec 20, 2001 - 17 comments

Okay, so the tabloids take the eroticization of female tennis players to the extreme, including The Mirror, which has paid Barbara "Babsi" Schett 50,000 pounds to promote her as the next Anna Kournikova. Last fall we talked about women sports players being on beauty, not talent; while the beauty judging goes on, they forget to even mention player records. There's Babsi, Anna, Jelena Dokic, and the supposedly beautiful Krasnoroutskaya who says of Kournikova what everyone keeps saying about good-looking female players in general: "She makes the beauty of tennis. She started it. Now tennis is very popular. People come to watch her. That helps everybody."
posted by Mo Nickels on Jul 6, 2001 - 48 comments

TPD to NFL: Sure, we'll arrest your quarterback for getting a lapdance. Oh, do I wanna see them be dumb enough to try this.
posted by baylink on Jan 9, 2001 - 5 comments

A fine football story for the year... Oklahoma won the National Championship, and Penn State did not do so well, however the local hero walks out of the hospital to get on with the rest of his life. Granted the injury was a bruise and Dr. Wayne Sebastianelli saved his life, but my question is how long before we'll see the successful repair of spinal cord injuries? Will Christopher Reeve walk again?
posted by brent on Jan 5, 2001 - 4 comments

This is the first time I ever heard of people being threatened for blogging. Rule 59 of the IOC code states that an Olympic athlete is not permitted to record his thoughts of his Olympic experience and have it posted on the Internet. Doing so would be tantamount to an athlete acting as a journalist. And that is grounds for being thrown out of the Games.
posted by Steven Den Beste on Sep 2, 2000 - 18 comments