Word: championed
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...politics. He opposed Henry Kissinger's nomination as Secretary of State by Richard Nixon because he thought Kissinger was too soft on communism. He attacked foreign aid as wasteful and ill-considered and he was a central player in the culture wars of the '80s and '90s as the champion of cutting funding to what he considered to be obscene art. Perhaps his most controversial position was as the vocal and stubborn point man against the creation of Martin Luther King Day. "The legacy of Dr. King was really division, not love," he said at the time, and he labeled...
...Like more established sports, competitive eating has its own body of myth (skinny competitors do better, supposedly because their stomachs have more room to expand), strategy (dunking food into juice or lemonade helps it dissolve) and controversy: when world champion Takeru Kobayashi was unseated last year by American Joey Chestnut, who ate 66 dogs to Kobayashi's 63, the Japanese nosher was allegedly hobbled by a jaw injury. ("I believed he was fully recovered," Chestnut said.) Top eaters train for months before a big event, and for good reason - this year, some 40,000 fans are expected to come watch...
...Spain is everything you want in a champion. From goalkeeper Iker Casillas to strikers Torres and David Villa, Spain was superb in every area of the pitch, a paragon of possession, of knife-edge passing, and, for once, capable of imposing its style on everyone. The notable exception was the quarterfinal match with Italy, but that, too, marked this Spanish team as special - locked into a defensive mud-wrestling match, Spain resisted its historical urge to attack at any cost, even at the risk of committing the cardinal sin for a Spanish footballer: being boring. In its semifinal against Russia...
...Zindane is still like a bottle of champagne without the cork - there was no fizz in this lineup, and a damaged Thierry Henry didn't help. And, like France, Italy was far too old in the legs for a month-long tournament, and clearly out of ideas. The defending champion Greece stepped off the podium without a peep; perhaps they thought showing up was good enough...
...military operations, sending thousands of troops to the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1998 for a costly anti-rebel campaign. In 2000 he encouraged the seizure of land from white farmers--a move which, combined with a drought, caused drastic food shortages. Meanwhile, Mugabe painted himself as Africa's champion, calling Western nations "neocolonialists" striving to "keep us as slaves in our own country." Even as the U.N. condemned the political violence and the U.K. revoked his knighthood, Mugabe remained aloof. "He's not unaware of the fact that Zimbabwe's in chaos," says Robert Rotberg, director of the Program...