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World Cup & Summer Olympics

FIFA World  Cup

The World Cup was first held in 1930 in Uruguay, which won it.
Only 8 countries have ever won the Cup.
Brazil has won the World Cup 5 times, Italy 4, Germany 4, Argentina & Uruguay 2 each, England, France & Spain 1 each.
The only player so far to have scored a hat-trick in the final match is Sir Geoff Hurst, for England, in 1966.


The Summer Olympics

The United States has hosted four Summer Olympic Games, more than any other nation. The United Kingdom hosted the 2012 Olympic games, its third Summer Olympic Games, in its capital London, making London the first city to host the Summer Olympic Games three times. Australia, France, Germany and Greece have all hosted the Summer Olympic Games twice. Other countries that have hosted the Summer Olympics are Belgium, China, Canada, Finland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, the Soviet Union and Sweden. In 2016, Rio de Janeiro will host the first Summer Games in South America. Three cities have hosted two Summer Olympic Games: Los Angeles, Paris and Athens. Stockholm, Sweden, has hosted events at two Summer Olympic Games, having hosted the games in 1912 and the equestrian events at the 1956 Summer Olympics—which they are usually listed as jointly hosting. Events at the summer Olympics have also been held in Hong Kong and the Netherlands, with the equestrian events at the 2008 Summer Olympics being held in Sha Tin and Kwu Tung, Hong Kong and two sailing races at the 1920 Summer Olympics being held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Codification of Rules

The Sporting Hero Who Thought Outside the Box

One hundred and fifty years ago next month a bunch of blokes went down the pub and invented football. The 1860s marked the high Victorian summer of British sporting inventiveness. It seemed that whenever two or three men gathered together they created, or systematized, another great sport.Inventing a sport requires three essentials: power, self-confidence and leisure. Victorian Britain had all three in abundance. Sport was the hobby of Empire, and most of the world’s most popular games emerged from Britain: cricket, golf, boxing, tennis, rugby, snooker and more.

If one man embodied the Victorian spirit of sporting creativity, it was Ebenezer Cobb Morley, a solicitor from Hull, whose legacy has brought sporting pleasure to millions across the world, but whose name is all but unknown. As we prepare for football’s 150^th birthday, it is surely time to remember Morley and celebrate a spirit of sporting ingenuity that has all but vanished.

On October 26, 1863, Morley gathered a dozen former English public school men at the Freemasons Tavern in Lincoln’s Inn Fields to try and make sense of football. The result was the Football Association, the first formal rules of the game and the birth of what would eventually become soccer – the word probably comes from the abbreviation of ‘association’ into ‘soc’, and thus ‘soccer’.

Football dates back to the Middle Ages, but until Morley called his meeting, it was closer to chaotic brawling than organized sport. Different teams played by different rules, and sometimes by none at all, some wearing pointy hats that made them look like garden gnomes. Rival public schools clung to their own versions: one set of rules could be played in the first half, and another in the second. In some schools, younger boys served as goal posts.

 Violence was integral. Traditional Shrove Tuesday games might range over open countryside and involve hundreds of players. A Frenchman, observing one such game in Derby in the early 19^th century, remarked: ‘If the Englishmen call this playing, it would be impossible to say what they call fighting.’

The first 13 rules drawn up by Morley and his chums described a game far closer to rugby: handling was allowed, and there was no forward passing, no crossbar and no goalkeeper. Players were forbidden to wear boots with projecting nails or iron plates, or to attach gutta percha, a hard rubber substance ideal for stomping on opponents, to their heels.

The modern game might benefit, however, from some of Morley’s laws: under the original rules there were no penalties, no shoving or pushing, and pitches could be up to 100 yards wide and 200 yards long, which might make for a more fluid game.

The association’s rules were revised almost as soon as they were written down. A new offside rule allowed the ball to be kicked forward to another player, so long as there were at least three (later two) opponents between the kicker and the goal. Queen’s Park Club in Glasgow then came up with the truly game-changing tactic of ‘combination play’ – passing the ball rapidly from one player to another, a technique that utterly flummoxed English public schoolboys trained to charge wildly at the opposition. Partly as a result, Scotland lost only  two of the first sixteen matches against England.

Once the rules were established, they became all but immutable. The fluidity of sport in its early stages gave way to rigidity. Britain invented most sports when it ruled the waves but then, in a reflection of imperial hubris, flatly refused to waive the rules once they had been established.

Religion, politics, literature all evolve over time, but the major sports have hardly changed in the past century and even the most minor tweak is accompanied by vast gusts of controversy. As sport becomes more professional, its adherence to set rules becomes ever more fixed.

It is a measure of Britain’s imperial reach that boxing still sticks to the rules endorsed by the Marquess of Queensbury in 1867. (Queensbury didn’t actually devise the rules: that was done by Welshman John Graham Chambers, another of history’s unsung sporting architects.)

Almost the only substantial change in cricket has been the acceptance of overarm bowling, an innovation initially dismissed as a ‘singular, novel and unfair style’. Adolf Hitler played only once, with British PoWs during the First World War and tried to change the laws of the game by banning pads and making the ball even harder – a crime, in the eyes of some Englishmen, on a par with invading Poland.

Of the major sports, only rugby regularly attempts to improve itself by altering he rules. The others remain immovable. Tennis was invented for a Victorian garden and has hardly changed since, even though the power-hitting of the modern game means that a better sporting spectacle would be created with a slower ball, wider court and higher net.

The football goal remains the same size (8ft high and 8 yards wide) as it was in Victorian times, even though human beings are generally taller, and goalies vastly so.

Next month there will be a flurry of events marking the birth of modern football, but it is also an opportunity to celebrate the heyday of sporting entrepreneurship when people in pubs sat around discussing how to invent, regulate and improve a multiplicity of sports, and proving that sport is an intellectual as well as an athletic pastime. Britain led the way in devising modern sports; it should also take the lead in revising them.

Morley drew up the outlines of what would eventually become the beautiful game; today he lies at the edge of an unlovely and abandoned graveyard on Barnes Common, despite a contribution to world culture that is without equal.

Ebenezer Morley, Britain’s forgotten football star, is my candidate for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square: for what better symbol of Britain could there be than a statue of a man with Victorian whiskers, a pint of beer in one hand and a football in the other?

Adapted from: Sporting hero who thought outside the box, Ben Macintyre, The Times, 27.09.2013.

Diet & Sport

Body weight in sport

Jenson Button has confessed that he effectively starves himself as F1 hurtles into an era of jockey-sized drivers. Eating disorders are rife in the world of horse racing, where jockeys drive down their weight to guarantee rides on the best horses. Frankie Dettori, one of the tiniest sportsmen at just 54.8kg, has admitted taking diuretic drugs in his quest to meet the riding weights demanded by racehorse owners.

Now, in F1, drivers are shaving ounces off already lean frames because teams are deciding not to hire drivers whose extra pounds could be a critical factor in finding speed. The Grand Prix Drivers’ Association, the F1 drivers’ union, is so concerned that it is demanding that regulation minimum weights are raised next season to give themselves some belt room.

Mark Webber, a fraction over 6 feet, or 1.8m, and 75kg, warns that the ideal driver weight is now between 60 and 65kg because every 5 kg of extra weight means a loss of 0.2 seconds a lap – a huge drag in F1 terms, in which lap times are measured in fractions.

In rugby union, the mission is to bulk up, with even the shortest of forwards built like tanks. Tom Youngs, the England hooker, is short enough to be a racing driver but almost twice the weight, 102kg.

Sir Bradley Wiggins, Britain’s Olympic champion cyclist, has to carry his own weight on his bike, though, and is an incredible beanpole of a sportsman at less than 11 stone,  70kg, even though he is over 6 feet, 1.8m.

There are no suggestions that eating disorders are rife in F1, although David Coulthard, one of the tallest drivers during his time in the sport, said that he was bulimic as a teenager headed for F1 and the McLaren team, regularly vomiting his food to keep his weight to a minimum.

Button says he struggles to make the weight for his McLaren car. He is a seriously competitive triathlete, weighs in at 70kg and has only 6% body fat. This makes him one of the leanest athletes in sport but he too is 6 feet, 3 inches, 1.9m, taller than Sebastian Vettel, the jockey-sized world champion, who weighs in at just 64kg. Button says he couldn’t be any heavier so he fasts. He eats limited amounts of food and it is always high in protein and no carbohydrates. If he doesn’t do this, he says, it’s the end of his career.

This Sporting Life

Changes in sport & leisure activities

A personal reflection

Fridays in Abu Dhabi 20 years ago were very different to today. There were no shopping malls and most shops, if they opened at all, did so late afternoon or early evening. Sundays in England in the 1950s, when I was a boy, were similarly quiet. Public transport operated much reduced services. Few children played outside. All shops were closed, apart from newsagents in the morning. The only sporting event I can recall on a Sunday was the annual Prix de L’Arc de Triomphe horse race in Paris. Nowadays, Fridays in A.D. & Sundays in the UK are big shopping and sporting days.

History & social conditions play a big part in how much sport & leisure feature in everyday life. I was born in 1949 & postwar austerity & rationing were features of my early childhood. Sports like football, cricket & horse-racing attracted enormous crowds in the postwar years. People longed to return to peacetime activities after the horrors and hardships of the Second World War and sports stadiums were not all-seater, as most are today, so thousands packed into football stadiums in particular. But for most people sport was a spectator rather than a participatory activity in the immediate postwar period. Whereas nowadays millions of people worldwide follow sports on TV, back then in Britain sports coverage on TV was very limited: the FA Cup Final, the annual All-England Tennis Championship at Wimbledon, the Varsity Boat Race, the 5-nation Rugby Union championship, the Rugby League Cup Final, the Open Golf Championship, test cricket matches (in 5-day tests Sunday was a rest day) and major races like the Derby & the Grand National were highlights. In the 1950s if you wanted to watch a lot of sport you had to physically attend sporting events.

Go back 40 years to the birth of the UAE: the new nation lacked infrastructure & there was a dearth of sporting & leisure facilities. Look at the Club as it was in 1962 (see the blog post The Club Abu Dhabi) and as it is now. In 1962 there were virtually no facilities and the Club existed mainly as a meeting place, a watering hole. Now it has an extensive beach, 2 pools, 4 tennis courts, 2 squash courts, a badminton hall, an outdoor general-purpose court, a diving section, a large sailing section and a well-equipped fitness centre, including gym, saunas and steam rooms. There is also a well-stocked library as well as numerous classes for dancing, aerobics, music, basket-weaving, jewelry-making, drama, language learning and so on. It now has over 4,000 members from over 80 countries. The number of food & beverage outlets, indeed the whole range of facilities, has greatly expanded since I first joined in 1992.

150 years ago, the development of railways in Britain, Europe & the USA for the first time provided fast, cheap transport for working people, many of whom could do things like visit the seaside for the first time. Henry Ford’s method of mass production of motor cars, widely copied at home and abroad, greatly cacelerated this process in the early 20^th century. Many people began to take up leisure & sporting activities which were previously very limited. Indeed the concept of leisure was, for working people, born at this time. Better working conditions, brought about by mines & factories acts, and other social legislation, meant people were fitter & better able to enjoy greater leisure time.

Nowadays leisure & sports are big business worldwide with a growing number of people seeking careers in them. Just look at all the sports & social clubs here in A.D. and the number of staff and professional coaches who man them.

On a personal note, I never flew until my mid-20s and my first jet plane journey was at the age of 30. Now I have young students who have travelled extensively in Europe, Asia, the Far East & Australasia. Even 20 years ago, few of my then students would have travelled beyond the Gulf region.

Of course, increased leisure time does not necessarily mean a more active lifestyle. Previous generations in this region were active as pearl divers, farmers, and so on, and even ordinary travel was more physical for everyone, whether by camel, horse or on foot. Nowadays most Emiratis have sedentary jobs, comfortable cars and engage in many non-physical activities such as watching TV, playing computer games etc. This has led to high rates of obesity, diabetes and other related problems. Increased leisure offers great opportunities for leading a fit & healthy life. Encouraging more people to do so is one of the challenges of modern life.

A Squash Great

Hashim Khan

 

A small, polite, balding man who became an indomitable athlete with a racquet in his hand, Hashim Khan won 7 British Open squash titles and was the patriarch of a family dynasty that dominated the sport for decades.

Khan overcame the disadvantages of an impoverished background in a remote part of what was then colonial India to achieve international success in an elitist sport at an age when most players would be contemplating retirement. In doing so, he became a national icon and an inspiration for future generations of Pakistani squash players, more than a few related to him.

Hashim Khan was born in the small town of Nawakille, near Peshawar, which at the time was part of India. His father, Abdullah, was a steward at a club built for officers guarding the Khyber Pass. After his father died, the 11-year old Khan left school and worked as a ball-boy to earn money for the family, being paid a pittance for collecting squash balls that had sailed out of the outdoor courts.

When it was too hot for the officers to play, Khan found an empty court and taught himself squash using a broken racquet and a damaged ball. One story has it that some officers drunkenly walked past the courts one evening and saw the barefoot youngster hit backhand after backhand impeccably despite pitch-dark conditions.

He progressed to become a coach at the club but remained a virtual unknown during his twenties. His big break came when Abdul Bari, a visiting professional from Bombay, turned up looking for a game and the thirtysomething Khan beat him even after giving him a 50-point head start.

Bari spread the word about Khan and he was invited to take part in the All-of-India tournament in Bombay in 1944. He won that competition 3 times in a row, but was no longer eligible after India won independence from Great Britain in 1947, which led to the foundation of Pakistan. Khan returned to the Royal Air Force club. 4 years later, seeking to burnish the young nation’s pride and international renown through sporting success, the Pakistani government selected him to represent the country at the British Open in London, which was then considered to be the sport’s world championships.

Wearing shoes on court for the first time, the 5ft 5in Khan was an underdog in the final, where he faced an Egyptian who had won the title in each of the past 4 years, Mahmoud el Karim. Yet Khan won easily, 9-5,9-0,9-0, benefiting from the stamina which he had built up during years of playing for hours in the blazing sun. He went on to win the next 5 British Opens. He finished runner-up in 1957 but reclaimed the crown the following year, when he was in his mid-forties. He also won 3 United States and 3 Canadian Open titles.

Khan’s improbable brilliance was eulogized in a New Yorker article in 1973: ‘To an American, he looked nothing at all like an athlete, let alone a super-athlete. A round-headed, baldish man with a high-bridged nose and dark, serious eyes, he was squat in build,’ the writer recalled. ‘Particularly since he was barrel-chested and had the suspicion of a pot-belly, he seemed curiously top-heavy. When he moved, though, the whole picture changed. It was not that he was exceptionally graceful or smooth but that he was beautifully co-ordinated. His strokes were sound, his reflexes were quick, he was indecently fast of foot, and no amount of exertion seemed to bring a bead of sweat to his brow.’

In one of his favourite training exercises, Khan would stand a racquet upside down against the wall at the corner of the court and hit the ball from long-range into the tiny gap between the racquet’s handle and the edge of the side wall. He was known for his idiosyncratic command of English, in which his sentences often missed out words. A 2009 documentary about him alluded to that trait in its title, which was one of his mantras: Keep eye on ball.

Khan moved to the US in the 1960s when he was offered a coaching position in Detroit. He later settled in the Denver suburb of Aurora, where he died of congestive heart failure. Hi precise age is uncertain: his relatives told the AP news agency that he had never had a birth certificate, but they celebrated his birthday on July 1^st. Their best guess was that he was born  in 1914, though some reports suggest 1910.

He competed in the British Open over-60s championship in 2001 when in his mid-eighties. In an exhibition match in 1983, when in his mid-sixties, he beat the best female player in America, Alicia McConnell, who was 19. Even after suffering a broken hip late in life he played squash into his early 90s. Khan raised 12 children with his wife of 65 years, Mehria, who died in 2007. All 7 sons became squash players, most notably Sharif, who won the North American Open 12 times. The ‘Khan Dynasty’ has claimed 23 British Open titles. Khan taught his younger brother, Azam, to play squash. Hashim beat him in 3 finals before Azam won 4 consecutive Opens 1959-62. Hashim’s cousin, Roshan, and nephew,  Mohibullah, each won once and a cousin’s son, Jahangir, took 10 titles between 1982 & 1991. Jansher, another Khan from Peshawar, though no relation, dominated squash in the 1990s.

‘Barely 3 years after Pakistan’s independence in 1947, he became our first-ever sporting hero in 1951 and whatever tribute we can pay will not match his great contribution in inspiring a whole generation,’ Jahangir said.

Dunlop

Michael Dunlop (left) has won 11 TT races since 2009

The Dunlop motorcycling dynasty: Life, death and glory on the roads

By Ben Dirs BBC Sport

"You think it's never going to happen to you - you're always going to be the one who gets away with it." William Dunlop, road racer

Robert Dunlop didn't get away with it. Not this time. So here he is, dying on the side of a road. Just like older brother Joey, eight years earlier. Local heroes - united by blood, glory on two wheels and the violence of their endings.

Robert's sons William and Michael were riding behind their dad when his engine seized and he flew off the front of his bike. "I held his hand and prayed he'd be all right," says Michael. William spent the following night in his garage, tinkering with his machine, to make it go quicker.

Before the 2008 North West 200, one of the world's fastest road race meetings on Northern Ireland's north coast, Robert predicted a Dunlop victory in the race that killed him (Robert's fatal crash happened during 250cc practice). A day later, both his boys were back in the paddock - determined to ride, perhaps make their dad a prophet.

"I didn't go back out in memory of my dad, though, I did it because I wanted to race," William, who was 22 at the time, tells BBC Sport. "It sounds selfish, but that's just the way it is."

Joey Dunlop's fame in Northern Ireland was on a par with George Best and Alex Higgins

On race day proper, William's bike failed on the grid but Michael's grew wings. The day after taking the chequered flag amid wildly emotional scenes in Portstewart, Michael, 19, was shouldering his dad's coffin.

All this suffering, all this ecstasy, it's no wonder they made a film about it. Road,  recently released on DVD and narrated by Liam Neeson, another of County Antrim's favourite sons, is heartbreaking, frightening, mysterious and not by Disney.

"It certainly shows the dark side," says William. "But when I watch it I don't see the sadness, it just makes me proud of what my father and uncle achieved."

Joey is the film's star and one of the least likely leading men in cinematic history. A shy, taciturn man who hated his fame, Joey made his life significantly more complicated than it might have been by winning a record 26 races at the Isle of Man TT and five world championships in a row in the 1980s. In Northern Ireland, he was as big as George Best.

The Dunlop dynasty - Victories in Isle of Man TT, North West 200 & Ulster Grand Prix
Joey Dunlop	Robert Dunlop	William Dunlop	Michael Dunlop
IOM TT: 26	IOM TT: 5	IOM TT: 0	IOM TT: 11
NW 200: 13	NW 200: 15	NW 200: 3	NW 200: 4
Ulster GP: 24	Ulster GP: 9	Ulster GP: 7	Ulster GP: 6

"He looked like a van driver," says Joey's former team-mate and fellow road racing legend John McGuinness. When Joey wasn't racing he was driving his van to Romania or Bosnia and handing out food to orphans, cameras not invited.

That Joey seemed permanently wreathed in the tragedy of others only made him seem more invincible by association.

At the 1979 North West, Joey lost his childhood friend Frank Kennedy. The following year, at the same event, Joey lost Mervyn Robinson, his brother-in-law and another member of the so-called 'Armoy Armada'. 

In 2008, Robert Dunlop was killed during practice for the 250cc race at the North West 200

At the 1994 Isle of Man TT, a wheel came off Robert's bike and he collided with a stone wall. It might have been a tree, a telegraph pole or any other humdrum piece of 'furniture', as riders euphemistically call it, that you wouldn't want to collide with at 150mph.

Robert was lucky to survive but was left with a mangled arm and a shortened leg. "You get hurt, you think about quitting and then you get better," he said, having announced his shock comeback only two years later.

"It's a drug," says William, "which is why my dad just couldn't walk away, even when he'd had these bad injuries and he wasn't the rider he used to be. At the time I thought 'why are you doing this?' But now I understand."

Joey couldn't walk away either, not even after securing a glorious third Isle of Man TT hat-trick of wins in 2000,  at the age of 48. Less than a month later, Joey died after crashing into trees at a minor race meeting in Estonia.

"All those thousands of times he'd thrown his leg over a bike," says Joey's long-time mechanic Sam Graham. "But all it takes is one split second."

Graham tells how Joey, who always rode in a yellow helmet and favoured the number three, would talk to fairies and wave to magpies while driving across the Isle of Man in his van. But stone walls and trees don't care much for superstitions.

Robert was devastated by his older brother and hero's death but managed to make sense of it. "Better being killed on a motorbike than lying for six months unwell and dying at the end of it," he said.

Fifty-thousand mourners attended the funeral of this intensely private and humble man, who spent his final night on earth sleeping across the front two seats of his van, despite being booked into a hotel suite that bore his name.

Play media

Watch the Dunlop brothers riding the NW 200 race in Northern Ireland

There are those who view road racers in a less flattering light. After French rider Franck Petricola was badly injured  on the opening day of this year's North West, a writer on the Belfast Telegraph said he was a "glorified sensation-seeker" rather than a "brave hero". A day after the article was published, Englishman Simon Andrews was killed after colliding with a kerbstone.

But the response to the article was unanimous in its condemnation. One reader suggested the journalist in question should visit the grave of David Jefferies,  who died at the Isle of Man TT in 2003. On the Yorkshireman's headstone is written: "Those who risk nothing do nothing, achieve nothing, become nothing."

But even the riders themselves recognise the inherent selfishness of their sport. If road racing is part of the fabric of Northern Irish life, as Neeson proclaims in the film, then it is a torn and tattered tapestry, however vibrant its colours.

"Most definitely we're selfish," says William, who broke his left leg in a crash at this year's Isle of Man TT. "I got away with it last time and as soon as I was well again I jumped straight back on a bike.

"It's a great life being on the edge all the time. I don't care, I guess that's what it is. Maybe if I had a kid, that might change me. But I can't see it."

Michael and William Dunlop are brothers off the road and fierce competitors on it

In the film, Michael cries when describing the look in his granny's eyes at Robert's funeral. "It will haunt me for the rest of my life," he says. "I've never felt for somebody as much in my life."

But Michael, road racing's undisputed current king and a man McGuinness once told me "likes to kill dead things" on a bike, is every bit as ferocious when defending his beloved sport from those he perceives to be ignorant outsiders.

"I don't expect them to judge my life, because I don't judge their lives," says Michael, who has won 11 races at the Isle of Man TT, including eight at the last two meetings. "So I don't care what people think. The media want to write stuff but they have no idea of what road racing means to riders deep down."

Michael, who has no time for any spiritual mumbo-jumbo, is unable or unwilling - probably both - to let us in on road racing's deep secrets: "Unless you've experienced it, it's not possible to describe what it's like."

Instead, Michael will tell you he just throws his leg over a bike and rips it - and that he'll be the one who gets away with it. That's all we need to know.