This is a video of Africa’s Amputee Soccer Championships, set to music a family in an early-90s comedy might hear while enjoying the first part of their vacation. These guys are amazingly skilled and deserve a ton of your respect, and if you’ve been looking for a competition to simultaneously symbolize the indomitable nature of the human spirit and “trying not to think about why these people are missing legs”, the Amputee Soccer Championships are for you.

If you don’t want to be inspired, you can always go to Reddit, where commenters have already made a bunch of Skyrim jokes, suggested the team be sponsored by a company that makes landmines and pointed out that since able-bodied soccer players only get two legs, it’s unfair for the amputees to have more than one crutch. Also, more than one reference to Yakety Sax. It’s good to know that no matter how inspiring a video is, you can just scroll down to the comments and remember how awful everybody is.

p.s. I have two functioning legs and these guys would f**king destroy me.

[h/t Buzzfeed Sports]

He looks photoshopped in, doesn’t he?

Metta World Peace née Ron Artest took off to Nevada over the weekend to host a night at the Chateau Nightclub & Gardens at the Paris Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, and like a lot of Vegas tourists he decided to take in a show. That show happened to be Celine, Celine Dion’s residency performance at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace. Most people who go to that will tweet “went to see Celina Dion in Vegas, liked the show” or “went to see Celina Dion in Vegas, did not like the show” (that one would be me), but not Artest. Here’s the Spark Notes version of what went down:

1. Ron Artest is Ron Artest
2. Ron Artest decides to go see Celine Dion in concert
3. Celine Dion changes Ron Artest’s life
4. Ron Artest gets frustrated that his Twitter followers don’t know who Celine Dion is and think he’s joking
5. Ron Artest has an existential crisis, considers the idea that he might be dumb and is driven to improve himself
6. Ron Artest gets in over his head

The last two days of @RonArtest are succinctly chronicled here for your observation and amusement, and because somebody needed to make a permanent record of this. Please click through to enjoy.

Read the rest of this entry »

More silliness from that Africa Cup Of Nations soccer tournament: this is Mozambique’s goalie, Joao Rafael Kapango, playing a routine roller into his little goalie area and then falling right on his head. I don’t know if impromptu tumbling is part of the Mozambique sportsman’s ritual, but it should be. Vasco da Gama would approve. Right now, Dennis Miller is laughing his ass off at that joke. –Bare Knucks.

This post is for the kids out there, because I don’t want to hear about how this site is a bad influence on our youth. We’re pushing the envelope over here, and so was this student who bet 4400 British pounds (about $7100 US) on the last ten minutes of an African Cup of Nations Match. Specifically, he bet on Angola.

At the time of the bet Angola were cruising at 4-0 up with just 10 minutes to go, but the unthinkable happened and Mali scored 4 goals at the death to grab a remarkable 4-4 draw.

The odds on offer on Betfair were so ridiculous that the student only stood to make £44 back from the wager.–Heaven Sports.

So dude dropped over seven large on a ten-minute bet for hopes of a 1% return. Not so jolly good, old chap. And I don’t know why we used the ice cream kid from the Confederations Cup for this post. I guess I was just hoping that blackface and whiteface today would cancel each other out. Thanks, Alan, for the heads-up.

South Africa is supposed to host next year’s World Cup, and without getting too deep into metaphors, it’s gonna be the Africa of World Cups.

Recently missed deadlines underscore the tight schedule the country faces in getting 10 venues prepared for the start of the tournament on June 11, 2010. [Ed. note: Four of the unfinished stadiums were supposed to be done last month, and the other six have "unrealistic" deadlines of next December.]…

When South Africa first bid for the World Cup finals, it was estimated the tournament would attract about 900,000 visitors to the country. Now the predicted number is less than half that number…

Oh, and the price tag for South Africa to build everything is six times what they predicted.  And anyone who blows the whistle on corruption gets murdered.  Wait, where are you going?  I haven’t gotten to the AIDS pandemic yet!!!

[Unprofessional Foul]

I have long searched for an African sports story that had nothing to do with AIDS or violent deaths, and it seems we’ve finally got a nice European-style soccer sex scandal in Zimbabwe, where the nation’s head of soccer, Henrietta Rushwaya (right), allegedly overruled a standing team policy of a pre-match curfew for the players so that she could bed star striker Benjani Mwaruwaru (left).  Zimbabwe was bounced from World Cup qualifying in the first round.

Rushwaya is reportedly in the habit of cowing the number one coach Jose Claudinei Valinhos into sanctioning the departure of some players from camp to moonlight in secluded night spots and even to have a brief encounter off the blankets with her.

“When [Mwaruwaru] comes home especially on a siesta from his overseas club, he camps at Rushwaya’s residence where they live literary [sic] like husband and wife… Rushwaya herself is known for being generous with her body and numerous scribes have had a go. She is a very kind boss whose generosity has won her friends especially in the media as most of her scandals are deliberately swept under the carpet,” said the source on condition of anonymity.

This is great.  I’m already a fan of women sleeping their way to the top, then continuing to sleep with people to stay on top, but this story especially warms my heart.  I love the way no one was killed by rampaging lions or flesh-eating bacteria.

[Unprofessional Foul]