Via AWFUL ANNOUNCING, we are alerted to today’s wonderful accidental headline of the day, the morning after sprinter Tyson Gay runs a wind-aided 9.86 in the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic Trials.
Apparently, a news service called ONE NEWS NOW run by the highly conservative American Family Association has a little filter that changes words automatically. Thus, as OUT SPORTS discovered: Tyson Gay becomes Tyson Homosexual. Read more…
In a war-torn country like Iraq, the re-building of a soccer team was one of the few bright lights for the populace, a rallying point — particularly when the team won the Asian Cup last year by beating Saudi Arabia. Now, that group of players and rallying point for a country is in limbo, as the Iraqi Football Association has disbanded the team and fired its coach Adnan Hamad.
(The Iraqi team is likely in a much less jovial mood than shown in this Asian Cup photo.)
The team missed the final qualification for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa with a loss to Qatar on Sunday, and part of the IFA’s reasoning behind the disbanding is a need for more government cash in order to lure foreign coaching talent.
Read more…
Becky Hammon has played in the WNBA since 1999. Last season, she was second in that league’s MVP voting. But when the United States went to build their team, Hammon wasn’t even invited.
And that’s when Hammon issued her own code red. Read more…
• Reebok is releasing a special edition of Allen Iverson shoes that come with a Microsoft Zune:
I’m left wondering if A.I. has ever heard of Nike or the iPod.
• Anti-Olympic graffiti has started showing up around Beijing.
Read more…
All right, maybe not Indy, but REUTERS reports that some other non-fictional archaeologists uncovered four prehistoric skeletons at the construction site of London’s 2012 Olympic Village. Really, just old bones? C’mon Britain! You know if this were China, it’d have been an uranium dump.
But wait, there’s, uh… more!
“Other finds include Iron Age cooking pots, a Roman coin, Roman river walls, World War II gun emplacements and a complete 19th-century boat used for hunting wild fowl on the River Lea.”
Read more…
YAHOO! SPORTS tells us that the youngest woman ever to win the biathalon World Cup is 21-year-old German Magdalena Neuner. Why do we care?
Oh, we just like biathalon. Now.
Read more…
BLOOMBERG.COM points us to what may be the next big thing in sports performance enhancement: MYO-029.
Producers of a new treatment for patients with muscular dystrophy and ALS already have concerns that Olympic athletes may use it for performance enhancement. And they’re not very happy about the scrutiny that these drugs are getting. Read more…
I’m not sure if this is mostly good news or bad news from the Associated Press. The good, of course, is that a terroristic plot was foiled. The bad? Well, um, how are these Beijing Olympics going to work out?
From the AP:
“Chinese police killed alleged terrorists plotting to attack the Beijing Olympics, while a flight crew managed to prevent an apparent attempt to crash a Chinese jetliner in a separate case just last week, officials said Sunday. Wang Lequan, the top Communist Party official in the western region of Xinjiang, said materials seized in a January raid in the regional capital, Urumqi, had described a plot with a purpose ’specifically to sabotage the staging of the Beijing Olympics.’ ‘Their goal was very clear,’ Wang told reporters in Beijing.”
Read more…
Chris Zelkovich of the TORONTO STAR reports today that NBC is seriously considering “a 10-episode sports reality show that will give the winners a shot at competing in the U.S. championships and even going to the 2010 Olympics.”
Of course, the whole point of the show is to promote the net’s future coverage of the Olympics. But there’s just one small problem: No one will watch.
Enter Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi. Really. Read more…
