There will be heroes and new world records when the Beijing Olympics closes in a week. I’ve never watched an Olympics from outside the living room (which is just as well; I may not survive the Games with all the walking and the big crowds), I can only dream of personally watching games that have other [...]

Like ordinary mortals, the world Games too has its share of tribulations.  There’s doping; that is, athletes ingesting performance enhancing drugs to make them faster, higher, and stronger.  Olympic legend even covers tales of trainers who knowingly administered enhancement drugs to unknowing athletes. Olympic doping has its own world records.  The only Olympic death caused by [...]

Call them devotees at the bare end of a live electric wire.  Football fans are the most rabid on the planet they may as well be earthling extremists who brook no opposition for their team, or else. Football fandom gave hooliganism to the English lexicon.  While England doesn’t have sole dominion over this species, it was [...]

The beautiful game is a world game with 11 players to a team, 17 simple laws, and scores from zero to miraculous single-digit ones that engulf nations with pride or humiliation. Its real star is a nondescript ball, usually made in Pakistan as outsourced by big-name sports makers, and is butted and kicked on grass fields [...]

So, Beijing, here comes the world.  The world will bear witness to the opening ceremonies of the XXIX Olympiad in China this August 8. To fly high again with the Olympic flag and flags of all participating nations is the Olympics Latin motto* Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger)* first introduced in the 1924 Games in [...]