culture – The News Desk

Beer, Euro 2024, and all those cups – what’s going on?

29Jun

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Sports

Beer, Euro 2024, and all those cups – what’s going on?

Follow live coverage of Switzerland vs Italy and Germany vs Denmark at Euro 2024 todayThe European Championship has been drenched in beer. In the fan zones and outside the stadiums. On the concourses and in the stands.Everyone has been drenched. Fans, players and, much to the amusement of everyone not wearing a lanyard, journalists, who have been sheltering laptops and walking into press conferences dripping with booze.Get the tiny violins. Possibly a towel.We do need to talk about the plastic cups, which have been cascading down from the stands towards anyone taking a corner or goal kick.The beer first, though.The official sponsor of the tournament is Bitburger, the German brewer, and the concourse bars are exclusively stocked with their products. For matches at the Allianz Arena, for in...

Ryan Giggs and football: A very complicated relationship

13Apr

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Sports

Ryan Giggs and football: A very complicated relationship

The celebration was almost as glorious as the goal itself. The fuzz of chest hair, the twirling shirt, the body swerve to evade the Manchester United fans who had run on the pitch in their euphoria.On Sunday, it is 25 years since Patrick Vieira, a genuine great of Arsenal’s midfield, played a wayward pass amid the high drama of an FA Cup semi-final between the leading two English sides of the time.Ryan Giggs took the ball and then he was off and running, picking up speed from inside his own half, slaloming past opponents, one by one.Vieira tried to get back but Giggs, crossing the halfway line, dipped his shoulder to get away. Lee Dixon was next to come across. He, too, could not get near him.Arsenal had the most famously parsimonious defence in English football — yet Giggs had magic in h...

Louisiana Gov. says athletes should ‘risk their athletic scholarship’ if absent for national anthem after LSU-Iowa

5Apr

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Sports

Louisiana Gov. says athletes should ‘risk their athletic scholarship’ if absent for national anthem after LSU-Iowa

The 2023 championship rematch between Iowa and LSU in this year’s Elite Eight was a scintillating production that stockpiled praise from celebrities, athletes and fans alike, while shattering the record for the most-watched women’s college basketball game ever.But Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry was unimpressed before a basketball even bounced Monday after LSU was not present for the national anthem, calling for a policy to be put in place that risks a student-athlete’s scholarship if the player is absent during “The Star-Spangled Banner.”“My mother coached women’s high school basketball during the height of desegregation, no one has a greater respect for the sport and for Coach Mulkey,” Gov. Landry wrote on X on Tuesday. “However, above respect for that game is a deeper respect for those that...

Gabby Thomas: The U.S. track star with a bigger goal beyond Olympic medals

5Apr

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Sports

Gabby Thomas: The U.S. track star with a bigger goal beyond Olympic medals

AUSTIN, Texas — There was a moment on a recent random Wednesday, as the world champion sprinter and Olympic medalist Gabrielle Thomas juggled emails about a meeting she had to run at a volunteer health clinic and readied for a voiceover for a commercial with a blue-chip sponsor and figured out the logistics of an upcoming weight-training session, when she had something of an epiphany.“I really did not perceive my life being the way it is now,” she said, looking up from her phone as she sipped a coffee at a cafe.She’s not kidding.Pretty much everything Thomas has accomplished in track, the two Olympic medals in Tokyo in 2021, the silver medal in the 200 meters and the gold medal in the 4×100-meter relay at the world championships last year in Budapest, is a little bit of a blur.She has an ...

Do big sporting wins cause an increase in birth rates among fans?

4Apr

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Sports

Do big sporting wins cause an increase in birth rates among fans?

Football arguably doesn’t need anything extra to feed its collective sense of self-importance, but the idea that it can cause new life to be created will certainly do it.You might remember a rather dramatic game in the National League towards the end of last season when Wrexham and Notts County faced each other in what was effectively a ‘winner takes promotion’ clash. In the 97th minute, Wrexham goalkeeper Ben Foster saved a penalty to seal a 3-2 win, putting them three points clear with a game in hand on their rivals.According to Foster, the result of the collective ecstasy of that moment was made clear nine months later: he recently recorded a video in which he claimed the birth rate in the Wrexham Maelor Hospital went up by 24 per cent in January 2024 when compared to a year earlier.Th...

Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi to deliver Tourism Strategy 2030, to attract over 39 million visitors and contribute Dhs90 billion to UAE GDP

3Apr

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Travel

Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi to deliver Tourism Strategy 2030, to attract over 39 million visitors and contribute Dhs90 billion to UAE GDP

The first pillar, Offering and City Activation, looks to further enhance the overall guest experience by unveiling additional cultural sites, theme parks, retails offerings and new hotel chains. Overall boosting the emirate’s events calendar of year-round concerts, festivals, and family events. The dining landscape will diversify significantly, offering expanded options including the introduction of culinary schools and training programmes. DCT Abu Dhabi will also more than double its Promotion and Marketing efforts, expanding its international reach from 11 to 26 markets and enhancing synergy within Abu Dhabi’s tourism ecosystem. It will also establish strategic global partnerships with media outlets and well-known brands for high-profile collaborations, creating compelling, market-spec...

Inside the ‘very predatory’ world of illegal betting that lured Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter

2Apr

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Sports

Inside the ‘very predatory’ world of illegal betting that lured Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter

In the story Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter Ippei Mizuhara initially told to ESPN, the two men logged into Ohtani’s bank account together on eight or nine occasions in 2023 and wired increments of $500,000 to Mathew Bowyer, an alleged illegal bookmaker under federal investigation. In the story Ohtani told the public days after Mizuhara recanted his initial claims and was fired by the Dodgers, the interpreter stole the money to pay off his gambling debts.Both versions of the story generated a question that stumped the general public: Why would a bookie extend a line of credit of at least $4.5 million to someone who said he was drawing an $85,000 salary as an interpreter with the Los Angeles Angels? The scenario was easier to understand for those acquainted with the inner workings of gambling ...

The business of Sarah Nurse: She’s one of the faces of hockey, but her sights are set on more

2Mar

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Sports

The business of Sarah Nurse: She’s one of the faces of hockey, but her sights are set on more

TORONTO — Sarah Nurse was driving home from a recent PWHL Toronto practice when she got a bit of sage advice.It wasn’t from a podcast or a friend on the phone. The advice came courtesy of a billboard on the side of the road in Canada’s most populous city, featuring her own face with the Adidas slogan “You got this.”“I was like, yeah, I do,” Nurse said with a laugh.The billboard she drove past is one of many across the country, including a massive advertisement at Yonge-Dundas Square — Toronto’s closest approximation to Times Square in New York City — that pairs Nurse with Super Bowl MVP Patrick Mahomes and World Cup champion Lionel Messi.Nurse, 29, has had major partnerships in the past. In 2020, Tim Hortons and Mattel collaborated to make a Barbie doll in her likeness. In 2022, she was f...

29Dec

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Sports

The football stadiums that never were

Peter Storrie can remember visiting the London studio of Herzog & de Meuron, the renowned Swiss architects, and being shown a striking vision of Portsmouth’s future.“It was something else,” he tells The Athletic. “They put it up on the screen for us and it certainly had the wow factor.”This was 2007 and the ambitious plans were for a new 36,000-capacity stadium on the city’s docks. Storrie, then chief executive, had accepted that Portsmouth would need to leave Fratton Park, the club’s home since 1899, and a proposed relocation could hardly have been more impressive.Located in between the Spinnaker Tower and the historic naval base, a £600million waterfront project that would include apartments and restaurants promised a transformational impact.“This will be the most spectacular stadiu...

Israeli sisters find strength, support and safe place in college basketball

29Dec

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Sports

Israeli sisters find strength, support and safe place in college basketball

In the days after Oct. 7, in which Hamas militants killed around 1,200 people, Yarden Garzon struggled to eat and sleep. The outbreak of war in Israel and the Gaza Strip was all-consuming to her, as she watched the news from Bloomington, Ind., where she’s a sophomore guard. Yarden, who was born and raised in Israel, worried about her friends, her family, her country. “I think I was more nervous than my mom,” Garzon said. “It was really scary the first week.”Garzon’s parents have been half a world away from her, staying put in their home in Ra’anana, Israel, an affluent suburb north of Tel Aviv about 50 miles from the war’s epicenter. Still, over the last two months as the death toll has risen, her family has spent time in the house’s bomb shelter. Sirens warning of air strikes pierced the...