Word: sports
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...activists used them to protest the legally mandated but voluminous "swimming costumes" - one woman stripped down to her bloomers to swim because it was impossible, she said, to swim in the required skirt. A judge ruled that her attire was not indecent. (Check out a story about the new sport of stand-up paddle surfing...
Surfing, for its part, is not an alien sport to Chicagoans. At Ryan Gerard's Third Coast Surf Shop in New Buffalo, Mich., many of his growing base of customers make the 90-minute drive from Chicago to purchase their gear. "There's no reason we shouldn't be allowed to surf," Gerard says. "We see ourselves as an asset to local communities." But given the risk of being ticketed and fined $500, Chicago surfers have typically gone elsewhere in the Great Lakes, the world's largest body of fresh water. Still, aficionados continued to sneak into the water...
...Crosstown rivals United, meanwhile, flush with the proceeds of Ronaldo's sale, are unlikely to squirrel the cash in the bank. The result? "It may well be the total level of expenditure this summer will break records," says Simon Chadwick, a professor of sport business strategy and marketing at Coventry Business School, but he adds that spending could be "heavily, heavily skewed toward a small number of clubs...
...Locking in long-term revenue is typical in the sports business and crucial to spending during a downturn. Besides the broadcast deal, by far the world's biggest with a single sports club, Madrid has another season left in its three-year shirt-sponsorship contract with online betting company bwin, and kit sponsor Adidas is signed up until 2012. Although commercial revenue dipped as a share of Madrid's takings in 2007-08 - the departure of Englishman David Beckham, who helped increase merchandise profits 137% during his four years with the club, had a lot to do with that...
Traditional surfers, meanwhile, aren't always so stoked about the newcomer sport and its practitioners. They see SUPpers as more competition on already overcrowded swells. And many of the the newbies never learned wave-riding etiquette, which involves waiting for your turn and not cutting other surfers off. But Brewer, who grew up surfing and appreciates the concern, says such generalizing is foolish. "We have this saying, 'A kook is a kook,'" he explains. "If he's out there being an idiot on a paddleboard, he's also an idiot on a surfboard...