Have you ever been to a baseball game and seen your favorite player warming up a few feet in front of you, but when you call out his name or try to ask him for an autograph he waves at you and moves or just ignores you completely? It’s not because he’s a dick, it’s because in today’s sports media world literally any interaction between an athlete and another human being will be reported, analyzed, misinterpreted and manipulated to suit the needs of a writer.

Such is the case of Josefine Öqvist, a Swedish soccer player who traded her jersey for a fan’s t-shirt following Sweden’s 1-0 victory over North Korea in group play of the Women’s World Cup on Saturday. I haven’t read anything explaining why she did it; she was probably just being cool and affable, because hey, she’d just won a World Cup game. 35 years ago they would’ve turned it into a Coke commercial. But today isn’t 35 years ago, it’s 35 minutes ago, so German News reported the incident and put a gigantic black bar across her torso to “censor” it.

So either the German news wanted us to think she’d been playing a World Cup soccer game without a bra and decided to flash everyone in the crowd, or the image of a woman in a sports bra was so potentially damaging to German children that it had to be halted. The best part of the video (besides NEIN! across her chest) is the higest rated YouTube comment, which reads like it was written by Kyle Farnsworth:

What the f**k in the world is that f**ken black box doing there she was f**ken dressed
jnmexico1997 19 hours ago

The uncensored version is now available, which you can watch after the cut.

Read the rest of this entry »

(artist's rendering)

Pure energy has a name: the North Korean women’s soccer team.

Most of the time when a sports team loses an important game, you’ll hear them talk about how they “went out there and played [their] game” and just lost focus or didn’t play hard enough on defense. Sometimes they’ll say the other team did a good job. Following his team’s 2-0 loss to the U.S. in the women’s World Cup on Tuesday, North Korean Kim Kwang-min redefined hilarious post-game excuses by claiming his team lost because they were struck by lightning. By lightning.

“When we stayed in Pyongyang during training there was an unexpected accident so our team was not capable of playing. Our players were hit by lightning during a training match. More than five were hospitalized. The match was on 8 June.”

The United States team were clearly taken aback by the claim. “It’s the first we have heard about it,” said the striker Abby Wambach. The USA coach, Pia Sundhage, was also unaware of any such problems affecting their opponents.

I think “the dog ate my soccer team” would’ve been an equally good excuse. I feel like if an entire team had been struck by some crazy Nemesis Rage lightning during training, they probably should’ve (and would’ve) sat out the game completely. If I got struck by lightning I would sit out of everything for the rest of my life. The best post-match quote of all wasn’t even about the lighting.

Kim: “They will play with high spirits and strong will, a strong will you cannot expect from human kind.”

… and then he shoved them into a big mud puddle.

[h/t Sports Grid]

I’m not going to complain about how sorry my life is for like three days after reading this story. After the North Korean national team qualified for the 2010 World Cup for the first time since 1966, you’d think things were looking all peachy keen (Besides the fact that they have to reside in North Korea, of course) for them, right? WRONG. Their trip to South Africa resulted in a miserable flop of an appearance that resulted in three straight losses, including a nationally televised debacle of a game against Portugal when they surrendered 7 goals in a mortifying loss that ended with a walk to the locker room that probably felt like the Bataan death march.

Now a loss like this would ordinarily have sent a bout of white hot rage searing through the veins of almighty leader Kim Jong-il if he still had the ability to stay conscious for more than 5 minutes, but now that he spends most of his time trying to find his glasses the punishment responsibilities were handed down to his son Kim Jong un, who came down upon his mangy bunch of soccer playing failures with the full force of the hammer of Thor, which Kim Jong-il coincidently claims he owns.

The entire squad was forced onto a stage at the People’s Palace of Culture and subjected to criticism from Pak Myong-chol, the sports minister, as 400 government officials, students and journalists watched. The players were subjected to a “grand debate” on July 2 because they failed in their “ideological struggle” to succeed in South Africa, Radio Free Asia and South Korean media reported.

The team’s coach, Kim Jong-hun, was reportedly forced to become a builder and has been expelled from the Workers’ Party of Korea. The coach was punished for “betraying” Kim Jong-un – one of Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il’s sons and heir apparent.

Following ideological criticism, the players were then allegedly forced to blame the coach for their defeats. -Telegraph

Remember all of those people who joke that the North Korea soccer team was about to be sent down to the coal mines in a runaway mine cart to work in a spooky cave filled with flesh-eating mega-bats? Well you guys must feel like a bunch of jerks now, don’t you? Read the rest of this entry »