A laboratory of champions

More than 95,000 students have graduated from Cuba’s University of Physical Culture and Sports Science over the last 45 years | YENA SILVA CORREA

Manrique Larduet (gymnastics) | World Gymnastics Championships official website

(April 12) – Boxers Robeisy Ramírez and Lázaro Álvarez, and gymnast Manrique Larduet are not only some of the athletes from whom we expect to see outstanding results in the upcoming Barranquilla 2018 Central American and Caribbean Games, but also students at the Manuel Fajardo University of Physical Culture and Sports Science (UCCFD).

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Are sports organizations playing a role in America’s obesity problem?

by Dr. Francis Collins

Last September, the National Football League struck a deal with Frito-Lay that allowed the company to produce limited-edition bags of Tostitos tortilla chips, with each package bearing the logo of one of 19 featured NFL teams. Several months earlier, Major League Baseball announced that Nathan’s Famous would be its first-ever official hot dog. Now the first-ever comprehensive analysis of such food and beverage sponsorships by major sports organizations shows just how pervasive these deals are. The confusing messages they send about physical fitness and healthy eating habits can’t be helping our national problem with obesity [1].

Basketball: Organized cheating and corruption by US universities

Here is the case in a nutshell. | ABC News

(Feb 23, 2018)  – When Yahoo! Sports published documents from the FBI’s investigation into corruption in college basketball, it showed that players from more than 20 of the nation’s top programs were implicated in possibly breaking NCAA rules. It’s a complicated case with a lot of layers, so here is a breakdown of the key teams, players and others who have been involved since the charges were first unveiled in September:

Basketball: US documents detail high-profile schools in organized cheating

Court docs in the college hoops corruption case spell out who ASM Sports paid and how much | Yahoo Sports

As the 2018 edition of “March Madness,” the premier, billion-dollar US college basketball tournament comes to a close on April 2 in San Antonio, Texas, what’s rarely mentioned in the ballyhoo is the latest US college basketball scandal. The media blackout can be contrasted to the hysteria over Russian Olympic athletes, although both cases allegedly involved organized cheating. Further, one of the targets of the US investigation is the German Adidas sportswear monopoly while not a word is breathed about its competitors such as Nike, etc. It is a typical case in which the real perpetrators, who are the people at the top of the corporate university organized in the NCAA, a sports cartel, are cast as the victims who have been taken advantage of. And the actual victims, who are the young high school and college athletes at the very bottom of the system, are cast as the perpetrators. 

Reporters Pete Thamel and Pat Forde of Yahoo Sports “viewed hundreds of pages of documents” they say detail payments from people at the centre of the scandal.

Cuban long jumper youngest man to win field event at world indoor athletics championships

Juan Miguel Echevarria’s leap of 8.46 metres was a personal best as he won gold in the men’s long jump at the world indoor athletics championships.

Cuba’s Juan Miguel Echevarria celebrates after winning the long jump at the IAAF World Indoor Championships in Birmingham, England | MICHAEL STEELE/ GETTY IMAGES FOR IAAF

Canadian women’s national team: the myth of small town hockey

Is this small town hockey? | discountwallcovering.com

By PRETT PARDY*

A Maclean’s Magazine article by Aaron Hutchins asks “What can our big cities learn from Ste. Anne, Man.?” in regards to producing “a women’s hockey juggernaut, brought to you by small cities and towns.”  Of the 23 players on the national women’s team, none of them hail from any Canada’s five largest cities, which together account for 21 per cent of the Canadian population. Instead, 17 are from hometowns of less than 250,000 people. The article is an ode to the virtues of smaller communities for athlete development, focusing on increased ice time, less structured play on outdoor rinks, and even being safer. While there is some truth to these arguments (but not the safety one, the opposite is actually true; though nowhere in Canada is as dangerous as people often imagine), this romanticization is quite misleading.

Reality check. A strange claim about Indigenous women on the Canadian hockey team

How many Indigenous women have participated in the 20 years of women’s hockey at the Winter Olympics? The sports media, which is expressing concern about parity, has made a sorry record sorrier.

Indigenous athletes Brigette Lacquette and Jocelyne Larocque | Canadian Press

Several times during the Gold Medal match between the USA and Canada at the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics, CBC broadcaster Matt Lee erroneously stated that 25-year-old defenceman Brigette Lacquette, a Cote First Nations woman from Mallard, Manitoba (about 300 km northwest of Winnipeg on the border with Saskatchewan), was the first Indigenous member of the Canadian team.