Word: soccers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...simple as it looks. In New Zealand, where rugby is the national passion, the rise in Polynesian participation appears to be at least one reason for the flight from the game of large numbers of comparatively slight boys, to the point where more New Zealanders now play soccer than the brutal 15-man game. Driving on Saturdays around Hawkes Bay, on New Zealand's North Island, the former New Zealand rugby league international Kevin Tamati notes that New Zealanders of European descent are all but absent from the rugby fields. "It saddens me," says Tamati, a Maori, of the exodus...
...enough to make even weather-obsessed Brits forget the dismal summer. They've stopped talking, too, about the housing crisis. Even the start of another soccer season has come and gone unnoticed. Instead, the plucky people of Britain, traditional home to fair play and the fourth-placed finish, have only one thing on their minds: Gold. Golds for cycling, golds for rowing, golds for sailing, and - quashing the myth that Brits can only win while sitting down - even golds for running. For Britain, beamed an editorial in The Independent on Wednesday, the Beijing games "have offered more than mere diversion...
...that softball, the Teflon team that was set for one last coronation, fell short. The rainy morning started with a win on wet sand, as Kerri Walsh and Misty May-Treanor clinched gold in beach volleyball, keeping their ludicrous 108-game winning streak safe. Later, the U.S. women's soccer team, which played the tournament without its best player, Abby Wambach, shocked Brazil in the gold medal game, a 1-0 overtime thriller. Brazil had spanked the U.S., 4-0, at last year's World Cup, and then the U.S. turned into team turmoil after it, when benched American goalie...
...winners would look a lot more impressive if we also got to see the worst. So I'd give the last three places anti-medals, all made of a decreasing quality of chocolate, starting with Russell Stover and working down from there. Then we would use the European soccer system, in which we'd kick out the country with the most anti-points. Not just out of the Olympics, but out of the international community. The country would lose its seat at the U.N., the little stamp it puts on passports, all its welcome to signs and whatever...
...Jamaicans have invested so much of their national identity in recent decades in sprinting, in much the way Brazilians have become defined by soccer. Talented runners are identified at a young age, and the national youth track-and-field championships, held each year around Easter, draw more than 35,000 people for four days to Kingston's National Stadium, the largest crowd for any youth athletics event anywhere in the world. "The high school competition is fierce," says Beckford, who adds that while Jamaica's training facilities might not be First World - Fraser is part of an elite group that...