Ni fútbol, ni nombre
Por Joseba Arregi, presidente de la asociación cultural Aldaketa (EL PERIÓDICO, 02/01/09):
Si seguimos el consejo de Walter Benjamin de que la verdad de cada cosa aparece en su propia exageración, en el esperpento es donde aparece la verdad de las cosas. En Euskadi siempre es posible superar la realidad y llegar al esperpento. Este año no se ha jugado el tradicional partido entre la selección vasca de fútbol y alguna selección internacional. Ha sido la primera vez en muchos años.
Los aficionados a este partido navideño de la selección vasca de fútbol se quedaron sin fútbol. Pero lo peor es que…
Las novelas también corren tras el gol
Por Eugenio Fuentes, escritor (EL PAÍS, 25/10/08):
Se diría que es difícil encontrar una reciente novela argentina en la que no se hable de fútbol. No creo que sólo sea fruto del azar que en los últimos tres títulos que han caído en mis manos aparezca ese deporte, bien porque lo practiquen algunos personajes, bien mediante referencias a futbolistas, bien por descripciones directas de la competición.
El protagonista de Un chino en bicicleta (III Premio de Novela La otra orilla, 2007), de Ariel Magnus, asiste en Buenos Aires a un partido de fútbol donde aprende no sólo las reglas del fútbol, sino también…
La Liga de los canallas
Por Joan Queralt, catedrático de Derecho Penal de la UB (EL PERIÓDICO, 30/09/08):
No es una novedad decir que el partido del sábado pasado entre el Espanyol y el Barça fue un ejemplo, en la segunda parte, de lo que no debe ser un espectáculo deportivo. Bandas de delincuentes organizados irrumpieron en el estadio vulnerando las normas de seguridad legalmente establecidas, creando graves riesgos para los asistentes e, incluso, para los deportistas. Parecían desterrados los choques entre bandas simpatizantes de equipos rivales, pero la ausencia de una política efectiva de erradicación de esas barras bravas, cuyos nombres producen escalofríos, ha hecho…
Head Games
By Gerald Tramontano, a clinical neuropsychologist (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 13/09/08):
Children aged 5 to 18 suffer at least 96,000 sports-related concussions every year in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. Even more troubling, as many as 20 percent of all high school football players sustain concussions annually, studies show. Because teenage brain tissue is still developing, injuries at this age can be especially damaging. Yet most high schools and colleges fail to provide athletes the kind of neuropsychological testing that’s needed to help them recover.
It’s true that coaches have become better educated about concussions. The…
Is this tennis? The court was blue! And the clothes…
By Giles Coren (THE TIMES, 10/09/08):
I am here this morning to save tennis (or, rather, to save Wimbledon, which is what we Englishmen mean when we say “tennis”) because, thanks to Andy Murray, I have found myself watching the US Open this year for the first time in my life and: Oh. My. God.
The court was blue! And when they bounced the ball before serving it made this horrible “pock, pock, pock” noise like a postman knocking on the door of a Portakabin. That was when you could hear anything at all, what with the courts apparently having been built in…
China’s apologists are wide-eyed and clueless
By Martin Samuel (THE TIMES, 27/08/08):
Poor old Robert Mugabe. Do you know what that guy needs? An Olympics. Harare 2012, he really missed a trick there. A well-run Games and nothing else matters. Put on a show, throw up a couple of impressive buildings and the world is your friend.
The road home from Beijing is lined with wide-eyed converts who’ve seen the light on totalitarianism. “China has set the bar very high,” Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee, said. “There are some things that London will not be able to compare to, or equal - such as the…
Higher, faster, yes. More meritocratic? No
By Matthew Syed. He represented Great Britain at table tennis in two Olympics (THE TIMES, 16/08/08):
The Olympic Games are built on a series of fictions, but one myth towers above all others. It is that the four-yearly festival is a bastion of meritocracy, where success is determined by hard work and talent rather than privilege. This is central to the Games’s global appeal and is particularly powerful because it chimes with common sense. Is not sport about the objective measurement of ability, leaving little room for entrenched privilege? Has not the Olympics been the traditional arena for the underdog?
Well, no.
Look…
Let the Women Play
By Mona Eltahawy, a New York-based commentator who writes and lectures on Arab and Muslim issues (THE WASHINGTON POST, 14/08/08):
Confession: I’m a total sucker for the Olympic opening ceremonies. Not the pyrotechnics and razzle-dazzle but the athletes’ procession. When the Egyptian team arrives, I choke up and wave at the screen as if they could hear my cheers.
As an Egyptian, Muslim woman, I was proud last week to see 26 women on my country’s Olympic team. I was delighted to see a woman carrying the flag for Bahrain’s team and another doing so for the team from the United Arab…
Olympic Games: now that’s what I call real biodiversity
By Simon Barnes (THE TIMES, 12/08/08):
Billy Connolly doesn’t really like the Olympic Games. “A bit Nuremberg,” he said. Well, it’s true that there tends to be an awful lot of flagwaving going on at both an Olympic Games and a Nuremburg Rally.
But it’s really quite easy to tell the difference. At the Nuremberg Rallies, all the flags were the same.
At the Olympic Games here in Beijing, at the lowest possible count there are 205 flags: those of the 204 nations taking part, and the Olympic flag, which was absurdly goose-stepped to its flag pole with a classic John Cleese silly walk…
The Descent of Men
By Maurice Isserman, a professor of history at Hamilton College and the co-author of the forthcoming Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering From the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 10/08/08):
Wilco Van Rooijen, a Dutch mountain climber, managed to survive the debacle this week that took the lives of 11 others in Pakistan on K2, the world’s second-highest peak. Describing the chaotic events that ensued when a pinnacle of ice collapsed and swept away fixed ropes that climbers from several expeditions high on the mountain had counted on to aid their descent from the…
Creep Show
By Buzz Bissinger (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 09/08/08):
And so the Olympics are upon us ….
May God help us.
Since I have already gone on record with a Times Op-Ed article in April saying the games should be banned entirely because of their incontrovertible history of corruption and politicizing, I know I shouldn’t watch. But given my abiding interest in the bizarre spectacle that I call SportsWorld, I won’t be able to entirely ignore the endless soap operas.
I will pay close attention to the Beijing pollution index, waiting for that inevitable moment when the Chinese, with their very serious paranoia and their obsessive drive…
These two appalling sets of old waxworks utterly deserve each other
By Marina Hyde (THE GUARDIAN, 09/08/08):
By the time you read this, world peace should have broken out. It should have broken out at precisely 8.08pm Beijing time yesterday, because International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge has made his traditional plea for a worldwide military truce for the duration of the games. Yet on the offchance that the Taliban are not laying in supplies of popcorn and preparing for a fortnight on the sofa, and US and British soldiers are not garlanding their tanks with flowers, now might be the time to question the IOC’s preposterously idealised version of itself.
There’s nothing wrong…
Darfur’s Torchbearer
By E. J. Dionne Jr. (THE WASHINGTON POST, 08/08/08):
When you put the Olympics in the hands of a dictatorship, the results are predictable. Yet the Chinese government still found a way to surprise even its critics — not so much by behaving oppressively but by doing so in a foolish and entirely unnecessary way.
By revoking the visa of 2006 Olympian Joey Cheek at the very last moment because he had the nerve to speak out about Darfur and the Chinese government’s support for Sudan’s barbarous regime, Chinese authorities guaranteed that the opening of these Games would focus as much on politics…
China’s Gold Rush
By Matthew Forney, a former Beijing bureau chief for Time. Now, he is writing a book about raising his family in China (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 06/08/08):
Like the Soviet Union at the height of the cold war, China is looking to make a statement by winning more Summer Olympic gold medals than the United States. Both countries will doubtless honor the systems that they say produce victories — Chinese authoritarianism versus American liberty.
But China has added an interesting twist to an old cold war story. Unlike in the Soviet Union, capitalism has infiltrated nearly all aspects of Chinese life —…
The XY Games
By Jennifer Finney Boylan, a professor of English at Colby College and the author of She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders and I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 03/08/08):
In the 1936 Olympic Games, the sprinter Stella Walsh — running for Poland and known as the fastest woman in the world — was beaten by Helen Stephens of St. Louis, who set a world record by running 100 meters in 11.4 seconds. After the race, a Polish journalist protested that Stephens must be a man. After all, no woman in the world could run that fast.
Olympic…
El lado oscuro del fútbol
Por Francesc de Carreras, catedrático de Derecho Constitucional de la UAB (LA VANGUARDIA, 10/07/08):
Cuando era niño, y hasta entrada la adolescencia, iba al fútbol, al campo del Barça. Era lo que se suele llamar un hincha, un apasionado culé. Tengo de aquella época muchos recuerdos, buenos y malos, de equipos, jugadores, goles, estilos. También de aspectos no propiamente deportivos, más bien sociales y psicológicos: impresiones que me han quedado en la memoria y que me han servido para conocer el comportamiento de las personas y, con permiso de Ortega y Gasset, de las masas, de los individuos como adocenados miembros…
Que gane el mejor
Por Santiago de Pablo, catedrático de Historia Contemporánea de la UPV-EHU (EL CORREO DIGITAL, 08/07/08):
Que gane el mejor. Con estas palabras, pronunciadas poco antes del éxito de España en la final de la Eurocopa, rectificaba de alguna manera el presidente del PNV su anterior deseo de que la selección española fuera derrotada por Rusia en las semifinales del torneo. Este cambio de actitud, todo lo matizado que se quiera, es significativo, pues forma parte de la difícil relación que el nacionalismo vasco ha mantenido a lo largo de su historia con la selección española de fútbol y con el deporte…
Xavi Hernández, ‘resa per nosaltres’
Por Inocencio Arias, cónsul de España en Los Ángeles (EL PERIÓDICO, 06/07/08):
Algún osado tendría que escribir la aportación trascendental del Barça a la historia de la selección española de fútbol. Debería dedicarle un largo capítulo a este europeo y en concreto a la contribución de la pletórica pareja, es decir, a Xavi e Iniesta.
Los creadores de juego no tienen suerte plástica. No crean carteles. Las imágenes las acaparan goleadores y porteros. La prensa mundial ha publicado fotos (vivo en Estados Unidos, país no futbolero, y doy fe ) del gol de Torres y algunas otras de Casillas levantando la copa…
Memoria íntima del fútbol
Por Gregorio Morán (LA VANGUARDIA, 05/07/08):
Resulta desconsolador decirlo, pero ninguna actividad humana es inocente; ni la jardinería. Usted puede estar viendo un partido de fútbol y pasándoselo en grande, porque si se juega bien es un deporte hermoso, y resulta gratificante para la vista ese ejercicio sobre un césped verde en el que unos caballeros se coordinan y se enfrentan, con una dignidad que no impide la dureza. Pero siempre aparece, al principio o al final, la mota que chafa la visual. Lo normal es que los partidos de fútbol aburran a las ovejas y no sean otra cosa que una…
Nationalism Gets Its Kicks
By Anne Applebaum (THE WASHINGTON POST, 01/07/08):
Myself, I was rooting for Spain in the finals: The Spanish economy is in the doldrums at the moment, and I thought a win might cheer up the Spaniards — which it did, judging by Sunday’s post-victory all-night street party. My son, however, was rooting for Germany: This, paradoxically, is because he is half-Polish, and two of the German players are actually Poles, born in Poland, who speak Polish to one another on the field. One of them — Lukas Podolski — scored both of the goals during the Poland-Germany game three weeks ago. Germany won…
