Tightgrid | Geoff Edwards

Sports


An etymology of hurdling

There are very few sports from which the language of the everyday almost always borrows and to which it seldom lends.
Usually the vocabularies of sport and the everyday are cooperative. Baseball, for instance, names the plate towards which all offensive action is oriented “home”. And I don’t think I need to mention even one of [...]

Blood in the Water

During NBC’s coverage of the Olympics tonight, they paid tribute to the moments during The Games when warring nations’ athletes have come together in peaceful competition. The host reminded us that the “Blood in the Water” polo match between Hungary and the Soviet Union during the 1956 Melbourne Olympics—not a month since the end of [...]

White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army now a European soccer anthem

Five years since its 2003 release, The White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army has found a place among those big, blaring European soccer anthems.
Like tiny scooters and the renaissance, this trend began in Italy. Despite Seven Nation Army not being particularly well-known (some called it simply the “po po po po po pooo pooo song”) it [...]

Handheld urinals relieve truckers, German soccer fans

For well-hydrated fans at next year’s European Championship in soccer: the roadbag. Der Spiegel Online says:
A Cologne-based company has developed a urinal-in-a-bag and is negotiating with a merchandising firm to distribute it at next year’s European football championship in Austria and Switzerland.
The bag contains absorbent polymers which soak up the urine and turn it into [...]