Posts tagged sports
Scaling Mt. Everest
Twenty-five-year-old Raha Moharrak is the first Saudi Arabian woman, and youngest Arab ever, to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. She accomplished the feat with the first Qatari and Palestinian men to ever reach the peak, and an Iranian man.
The group calls itself Arabs with Altitude and the expedition was made in an attempt to raise $1 million for education projects in Nepal.
Image: Raha Moharrak on being “first”. Mt. Everest aerial view via Wikimedia Commons. Select to embiggen.
All Lebron Shots: Last 5 Seasons
FJP: Crazy balance.
Image: Kirk Goldsberry, Grantland. The Evolution of King James. Select to embiggen.
No Sleep ‘Til Fairbanks
A few weeks ago EJ Fox wrote a piece for us exploring longform storytelling and adopting magazine experiences for the Web.
In it, he discusses how JavaScript and CSS techniques can introduce full screen images and video, parallax effects and responsive design to amplify and support storytelling.
Importantly, he also writes about how producers of these longform pieces must break out from the templates and general style guides that control the rest of their sites.
SBNation’s coverage of the Yukon Quest Race is a great, new example of harnessing these techniques. Created with Vox Media, it’s an elegant display of wrapping a 5,500-word longread in a delightful presentation package.
Check it: SBNation, No Sleep ‘Til Fairbanks.
Journalism ethics is nothing more than a measure of the scurrilousness your brand will bear. That’s it. Ethics has nothing to do with the truth of things, only with the proper etiquette for obtaining it, so as to piss off the fewest number of people possible.
Athletes Recreating Iconic Album Covers
As ESPN The Magazine’s music issue hits the stands they’ve recreated old album covers with current day athletes.
Here we have:
- Motorcross’ James Stewart as Rick James.
- Nascar’s Jimmie Johnson as Bob Dylan.
- MLB baseball players as Devo.
- NFL football players as Run DMC.
Click through for slideshows of each photo shoot. Select to embiggen.
Garrett McNamara Road a Large Wave Yesterday
Surfer Today is speculating that it’s a hundred foot wave.
Photograph by Tó Mané.
Happy Birthday, Muhammad Ali
How Did Sports Media Whiff on Manti Te'o's Fake Girlfriend?
Over at Slate, Josh Levin tries to suss out how and why the Sports Illustrated’s and ESPN’s of the world bought into the hoax that Manti Te’o had a girlfriend who died of leukemia at the beginning of the 2012 college football season.
Confirmation bias plays a role, he writes. This is the notion that people are prone to believe that which reinforces what they already believe, whether true or not. In this case, a national, fact-checked (most of the time?) magazine — Sports Illustrated — published a glowing feature on Te’o, complete with his religious, Boy Scout upbringing and personal triumph over tragedy. As his on field reputation grew, future reporters referenced biographical features found in the original SI feature without much thought.
Which leads Levin to explore the basic hagiography we use to report on celebrities. We apply well-worn, paint by numbers, templates — in this case, the heroic athlete overcoming adversity — that do both subjects and readers a disservice.
No matter what we learn about Te’o in the coming days, this black-and-white narrative—good man fixes bad things—enlightens no one and does the athlete no favors…
…Sports Illustrated looked at the linebacker and saw a classic template, not a human being who demanded the scantest thought or scrutiny. In the end, they got back the exact amount of effort they put in. This was journalism as fill-in-the-blank exercise, the creation of a simple story that tells you what you already know. In this case, what we already knew happened not to be the truth. If only Manti Te’o hadn’t been such a boy scout. Then we might have known how interesting he was all along.
Josh Levin, Slate. The Fake Girlfriend Experience.
There was no Lennay Kekua.
Lennay Kekua did not meet Manti Te’o after the Stanford game in 2009. Lennay Kekua did not attend Stanford. Lennay Kekua never visited Manti Te’o in Hawaii. Lennay Kekua was not in a car accident. Lennay Kekua did not talk to Manti Te’o every night on the telephone. She was not diagnosed with cancer, did not spend time in the hospital, did not engage in a lengthy battle with leukemia. She never had a bone marrow transplant. She was not released from the hospital on Sept. 10, nor did Brian Te’o congratulate her for this over the telephone. She did not insist that Manti Te’o play in the Michigan State or Michigan games, and did not request he send white flowers to her funeral. Her favorite color was not white. Her brother, Koa, did not inform Manti Te’o that she was dead.
Koa did not exist. Her funeral did not take place in Carson, Calif., and her casket was not closed at 9 a.m. exactly. She was not laid to rest.
In a bizarre investigative report, Deadspin discovers that the dead girlfriend of Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o was a fabrication.
As (mis)reported by ESPN, Sports Illustrated, Fox Sports, CBS, The New York Post, The Los Angeles Times and The South Bend Tribune among others, the Notre Dame football star carried a heavy heart throughout the 2012 football season when both his grandmother and Lennay Kekua, his girlfriend, died hours apart on the same September day.
Kekua, supposedly, due to complications from leukemia.
Turns out, Lennay Kekua is a fiction. Te’o, who says he met Kekua online, claims he is the victim of an Internet scam.
For the news organizations reporting on — and building up — the sad tale, let’s bring you back to newsroom 101 and the importance of fact checking: Just because one outlet reports it doesn’t make it true.
Read the piece though. A bizarre tale.
For more, ESPN does a follow-up.
Visualizing Voting for the 2012 Ballon d’Or
Lionel Messi won the Ballon d’Or earlier this week as the world’s best soccer (nay, fútbol) player, the fourth year in a row he’s been awarded such.
As ESPN’s Soccernet explains, voting is divided among national coaches, national team captains and media throughout the world.
Ramiro Gómez took the voting data to show how the voting network looks and works:
Messi received 41.60% of the voters’ points followed by Cristiano Ronaldo (23.68%), who did not seem to enjoy the ceremony that much, being 2nd for the 2nd time in a row and Andrés Iniesta (10.91%), who came in 3rd.
The above visualization shows the network of votes of the Ballon d’Or 2012. Voters and voted for players make up the 524 nodes of the graph. Node size is based on indegree. The 1513 edges are based on the given votes, with each of the voters having three votes: 1st place 5 points (thickest line), 2nd place 3 points, and 3rd place 1 point (thinnest line). Node color indicates either being a captain (red), coach (violet), journalist (blue), or player who did not vote (green).
The voting data is retrieved from this PDF document — I can hardly imagine a worse format to publish data. The graph file was created with a Python script and preprocessed using the Gephi visualization platform to apply a Fruchterman-Reingold layout with some manual adjustments as well as node sizing and coloring. The interactive version is rendered with the JavaScript library sigma.js.
Bonus, Part 01: Adidas’ lovely animated tribute to Messi’s accomplishments.
Bonus, Part 02: A 10-minute tribute to Messi’s record-breaking 91-goal season.
Images: Screenshots, Ballon d’Or 2012 Votes Network, by Ramiro Gómez. Select to embiggen.
The Times’ Sports Page is Blank and Filled with Irony
In case you haven’t heard, there will be no inductees to the baseball hall of fame this year (the organization wants to distance itself from the steroid era players.) To reflect this, the New York Times’ sports department published a largely empty cover today.
But it wasn’t completely empty. From a few feet away, a passerby might notice a single line at the bottom.
Sports Art Director Wayne Kamidoi told Poynter what it says:
Ultimately, some of the marquee names of The Steroids Era were rendered in agate-size type, a mere footnote in baseball history, at the bottom of the package.
FJP: Powerful.
2012: What Brought Us Together
News, politics, sports, science and culture from around the world. By Jean-Louis Nguyen.
Stunning.
No Hockey? No Worries. We Got Video Games
With the NHL canceling games through mid-December what’s a sports desk in hockey-starved Montreal to do?
How about play EA Sports NHL 13 and report on the outcome of those games? That’s what the Montreal Gazette is toying with in its “Season That Isn’t.”
So, for example, earlier this week: “Carey Price made 27 saves for a shutout, but the goaltender said one stop was the difference in the Canadiens’ 2-0 win over the Colorado Avalanche on Saturday at the Pepsi Centre.”
Or, on Tuesday, when in the real world the Canadiens would have played the Devils, but in the Gazette’s EA world people are getting sick:
Canadiens coach Michel Therrien said he felt ill when he saw goaltender Carey Price Tuesday afternoon.
But not as ill as Price.
“We had an optional morning skate, but Carey was there because he didn’t play last night,” Therrien said. “He was fine, but he said that when he woke up from a nap after lunch his sheets were all wet. He was running a fever and our first thought was to keep him away from the other players.”
Somewhat Related: Canada sees bump in sex toy sales during NHL lockout.
Image: The NHL cancels games through December 14 as well as the All Star Game.
Skating China’s Ghost City
Ordos, China has been a fascination the last few years. In particular, a nine-year-old district within it called the Kangbashi New Area.
Located in Inner Mongolia, Time had an article and photo essay about it back in 2010. So too the New York Times. Reuters chimed in in 2011. The BBC followed suit in 2012.
Created to house upwards of a million residents, almost no one lives there. Apartment, office and government buildings stand mostly empty. Convention centers are unused. Global economists fret this indicates a property boom ready to go bust.
But you can, evidently, skate.
Charles Lanceplaine, a French videographer based in Shanghai, recently visited with a group of riders to take advantage of the empty plazas and streets.
Bonus: Like people doing things in unexpected places? Check out four-time Irish women’s surf champ Easkey Britton riding waves in Iran near the Pakistan border.
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