Breakdancing is not the only random sport that has made it to an Olympic stage. Check out ski ballet which was a demonstration sport in the 1988 and 1992 Winter Olympics:
Definitely gives me the same vibes as freestyle canoeing. Your day will definitely get better after watching this magnificent performance by Marc Ornstein:
Sure, Jomboy videos are really funny—but they can also be incredibly insightful.
Love this breakdown on how a catcher frames (or doesn’t frame) a pitch and where they position themselves can impact how umpires perceive strikes vs. balls.
When watching international football I’ve always wondered why Italy wears blue, the Netherlands wears orange, and Australia wears green/gold since none of these colors are part of their national flag.
Both Italy and the Netherlands use these non-flag colors because of the ruling houses of their monarchy:
Savoy blue represents the House of Savoy that unified and ruled the Kingdom of Italy from 1861 to 1946. Blue remains as a national color for Italy—as seen not only in sport applications but also in their presidential standard.
Orange is the color of the House of the Orange-Nassau, the current reigning house of the Netherlands (which is a parliamentary monarchy).
As for Australia, green and gold were officially declared as their national colors in 1984. According to the Australian government: “Gold conjures images of Australia’s beaches, mineral wealth, grain harvests and the fleece of Australian wool. Green evokes the forests, eucalyptus trees and pastures of the Australian landscape. Green and gold are also the colours of Australia’s national floral emblem – the golden wattle.”
Now that I think about it there are many other examples of non-flag based national team colors like black for New Zealand, white for Germany, blue for Japan…
Here’s a Wikipedia page listing national colors for each country. Also interesting is that there are also semi-standardized colors for international auto racing.
The United States’ international auto racing color is “white with lengthwise blue stripes” as seen in this 1965 Mustang GT350, the first road car to feature racing stripes. Stripes do make your car go faster.
Bull-Doser, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Team USA Olympic Swimming Trials for Paris 2024 are starting this weekend through 6/23.
For the first time ever, the meet will be held at Lucas Oil Stadium, home of the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts. Watch how they transformed the football stadium into the largest natatorium in the country (temporarily); I would recommend 2x playback speed:
This type of floor change is familiar to those of us from LA where the Kings, Lakers and Clippers all play in the same venue. Here’s a look at "Sports-ageddon" on May of 2012 when the arena hosted six playoff games in four days (!!).
Multi-colored sweat makes a comeback. Is it in you?
Hyped to see Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone in the Gatorade ad. It will be really exciting to see her perform at the 2024 Paris Olympics after an awesome Tokyo 2020.
Here she is in one of those classic “This is SportsCenter” ads:
One of the OG Gatorade ads:
I’ve been getting into professional sumo these past few months!
The overall sumo wrestler ranking system and the promotion/demotion process is really interesting. Every two months there is an official tournament, and each wrestler is given a rank. The rankings for each tournament is published in a meticulously hand-brushed listing called the banzuke.
Each banzuke includes each wrestler's full ring name, hometown, and rank is also listed. The highest ranked wrestlers are at the top of the page printed with the largest characters. This is followed by wrestlers in lower divisions, with accompanying smaller characters.
The characters are part of the set of Japanese calligraphy typefaces used towards the end of 18th century of the Edo era. The typeface for the banzuke is Sumomoji (相撲文ĺ—) and it was specifically designed for sumo advertisement. According to this video, the bold strokes in sumomoji are meant to represent the physical strength and power of the sumo wrestlers.
Here’s another example of a really striking Edo-era typeface—Kakuji (角ĺ—) which was used for making seals:
