sport

Hearing the news made me feel like I'd accidentally walked into a wind tunnel. For as long as I had written about this issue and as many times as I had said in recent years that this will happen in a matter of months if not weeks, it still hit me like a triple shot of espresso cut with a teaspoon of Adderall.

Thanks to the courage of 34-year-old NBA veteran Jason Collins, we can no longer repeat endlessly that no active male athlete in North America has ever come out of the closet.

The dead. The injured. The anguish. All the result of bombs that were set to explode at the finish line just over four hours after the start of the Boston Marathon.

There will be time to mourn. We will mourn the dead and injured. I also mourn the Boston Marathon, and how it's now been brutally disfigured.

The Boston Marathon matters in a way other sporting events simply do not. It started in 1897, inspired by the first modern marathon, which took place at the inaugural 1896 Olympics. It attracts 500,000 spectators and over 20,000 participants from 96 countries.

English Premier League team Sunderland FC has sparked outrage by appointing Paolo Di Canio, who has publicly identified as a fascist, as its coach. The local Durham Miners' Association, with longstanding links to the club, has condemned the move.

“We’re from the streets of western Sydney,” chanted thousands of Western Sydney Wanderers' supporters as they marched onto Newcastle’s Hunter Stadium on March 29. About 8000 Wanderer fans had travelled to watch their soccer team beat the Newcastle Jets 3-0 to secure top place on the ladder and win the A-League Premier’s Plate.

The death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on March 5 will mean unseemly celebration on the right and unending debate on the left. Both reflect the towering legacy of Chavismo and how it challenged the global free market orthodoxy of the Washington consensus.

Less discussed will be that the passing of Chavez will also provoke unbridled joy in the corridors of power of Major League Baseball (MLB).

Football Rebels
Presented by Eric Cantona
Al Jazeera
Started screening March 11
http://aje.me/YaPbYC

Al Jazeera is screening a five-part documentary on the stories of five football heroes whose social conscience led them to challenge unjust regimes, join opposition movements and lead the fight for democracy and human rights.

For those who believed in the “sanctity of sport” or see it as a way to escape from the harsh realities of the “real world”, it hasn't been a good month.

On February 4, Europol revealed that 380 soccer matches across Europe had been fixed, with 425 officials and players suspected of being involved.

That Richard Hinds needs a few lessons in sports journalism.

“Such has been the atmosphere created by the Western Sydney Wanderers' fans, usually dispassionate critics have left Parramatta Stadium raving the experience makes the Camp Nou [in Barcelona] seem like a winter night at the Wentworth Park dogs,” the chief sports columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald had the sheer gall to write on February 18.

According to a report by Europol, hundreds of football matches across Europe have been fixed by betting syndicates, which must surely leave all genuine supporters of the game delighted.

Because this is so much fairer than the current method of fixing matches, in which three clubs owned by trillionaires buy all the top players, making it impossible for anyone else to finish even close to them.

Bribing a referee and a goalkeeper is much more democratic, as it can be done for a few grand, a fraction of the sum Manchester City spent on buying the Premier League.