Results for "sportsmanship"
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Soccer is a passionate game. It’s one of the few sports where players are free to follow the flow as they play, being less constrained by a game plan and more dependent on their ability to communicate and create opportunities.
It’s also a worldwide sport, and fans are often just as impassioned as the players. At the World Cup, it is country against country. Emotions run high. National pride is on the line. And sportsmanship often gets lost amid the victors’ celebration and the disappointment of the not-so-fortunate. The 2022 World Cup was no different.
The Japanese national team has often seemed like outsiders looking in, as the European and South American teams have dominated world soccer for decades. So when Japan stepped on the field in the first round against powerhouse Germany, there wasn’t a lot of hope for the underdog.
Germany scored first on a penalty kick and fired several near-misses that would convince most fans that the Japanese just couldn’t keep pace with the Germans. But they did. Heroic saves and a relentless attack saw the Japanese team knot the score at one goal apiece. Then, late in the match, a pinpoint pass from midfield set up a two-touch strike, and Japan took the lead. They hung on for a historic win that had the whole world cheering.
With such an improbable and gutsy win, you’d think there would be pandemonium in the stands and in the locker room. Certainly, there were celebrations. But when the cheering died down and the stands were nearly empty, the Japanese team was tidying up the locker room. They swept and mopped the floors, folded towels and left thank-you notes to the host country. In the stadium, Japanese fans stayed behind to collect garbage and clean up the stands. While the win was totally unexpected, the show of respect and gratitude was even more so.
In sports, as in life, wins come and go. Triumphs and tragedies will always be part of our journey. But as the Japanese soccer team demonstrated, no matter the outcome, it is how we treat others that will be remembered most.
Respect... PassItOn.com®
The Olympics always produces some of the most memorable images of the year, and the 2024 Paris event was no different. We love come-from-behind stories, we love our heroes, we love sportsmanship gestures between competitors and countries, and we love love stories.
Paris, the city of love, gave us the image of Tara Davis outleaping the world in the long jump, then leaping into her new husband’s arms. The golden couple met while competing, Davis in the Olympic long jump and Hunter Woodhall in the 400 meters in the Paralympics. How did this fairy tale come to be?
Scott Mansch of the Great Falls Tribune interviewed Woodhall and his family back in 2016, when Woodhall was 17 years old, after the youngster strode confidently into the local barbershop on prosthetic legs, the high-tech kind they call “blades.” Watching him run in those days was remarkable. His lithe body strode smoothly, perfectly balanced, the upper body in fluid cadence, hip flexors and thigh muscles pumping in rhythm. Achieving the kind of technique to get around the track so quickly would take much more practice than with natural legs. But Woodhall was confident he could do it. There was no pity in his family, only a bunch of rowdy, athletic siblings and cousins to try to keep up with.
“Nobody ever treated him different, from day one,” says Woodhall’s uncle Wyatt. “He’s the most determined kid I’ve ever seen.”
Woodhall was born with a condition that prevented the bones in his lower legs from forming. His parents had to make a difficult decision: Amputate the legs below the knee and give their son a chance to walk, or accept what was and keep Woodhall in a wheelchair his whole life. The emotional decision to have the surgery turned out to be the best thing for Woodhall.
“He’s exactly the way he’s supposed to be and has the talent he’s supposed to have,” says his father, Steve.
Woodhall went on to compete in youth football, basketball and wrestling. He rollerblades and skateboards. As he got older, it was on the track where he found himself, that lonely oval that pushes back the same way every day: relentless, unyielding, no matter how many times you attack it. Woodhall competed locally, in the Western states and internationally. He won the Utah state high school championship in the 400 with an astonishing 47.64 seconds. He went on to compete in college against able-bodied athletes, and then the Paralympics.
The motivation to continually get better has had to come from within. “Coaches treat you differently,” Steve says. “They don’t necessarily get mad at you, they kind of put you in a glass box. So the motivation and work ethic, that’s all his. Nobody pushed him. He’s pushed himself.”
As the miles on the track have added up, so have the medals. Woodhall has competed in the World Championships and the Paralympics since 2015, and dozens of competitions along the way. Track is where he belongs, and it is where he met the love of his life, Olympic Gold Medalist Davis. The embrace that melted a million hearts also delivered the most profound line from one champion to another: “I knew you could do it,” Woodhall said to Davis, to himself and to all of us.
Confidence… PassItOn.com®
Marshall “Major” Taylor was the son of a Black Civil War veteran who fought for the emancipation of enslaved people. As a young boy, he was befriended by the son of his father’s employer and the two spent time reading and studying together and riding bicycles.
To Taylor, as an 8-year-old boy, the freedom, speed and risk of crashing provided a great rush of excitement. His love of the human-powered machine led him to work at a bicycle shop as a young man. Upon seeing his skill on the two-wheeler, his employer hired Taylor to perform stunts in front of the shop to draw customers in. At age 14, he began racing, and at 15, he was beating the world’s best riders.
With the loss of the Civil War still fresh in the minds of many Southern sympathizers, seeing a Black man dominate opened the wounds of their failed ideology. Competitors, race organizers and bicycle clubs taunted him during races, excluded him from competitions and teamed up to box him in during races to prohibit him from bursting out from the pack to take the lead.
But Taylor had a fortitude and a fight handed down to him from his father. He pushed through, never retaliating, yet always looking for a way to win. And win he did. Taylor earned seven world records. He competed around the world and coast to coast in both the United States and Canada. He traveled to Europe, where he became a sensation as the only Black professional cyclist. And although racial prejudice was still very much a part of his life, Taylor coped with it by winning. He earned the nickname “The Black Cyclone” and earned a fan in President Theodore Roosevelt, who followed the career of the boy who was determined to pedal past any barrier to gain a victory.
Encouraging young fans wherever he went, and adhering to a high moral code, made Taylor a major influence in sports – from Brooklyn to Paris, from Worcester, Massachusetts, to Montreal, Quebec, the muscular rider was breaking all kinds of barriers. Newspapers of the time reported of his European tour: “Everywhere he went he was mobbed, talked about or written up.”
However, the grueling schedule took its toll, and Taylor returned home to take a hiatus. In 1902, he had won 42 races out of 50, an extraordinary amount of output in a single year. He was understandably physically and emotionally spent. After more than two years recuperating, he returned to France and set two new world records. Then, at age 32, he retired, saying that “age was creeping up on him.”
Retirement years were not good to Taylor. He invested the money he earned in a stock market that would bottom out in the Great Depression. Bad investments, unscrupulous investors, a waning sport and a world economy in reset left him with nothing more than good memories.
But through the prejudice, the world’s worst financial meltdown and an aging body, Taylor was still winning smiles. He counseled young people to “practice clean living, fair play and good sportsmanship.”
After losing so much, he refused to be bitter. As one of the most dominant athletes of his era, and among the most persecuted, he maintained his dignity. When he died suddenly of a heart attack at age 53, his body was claimed by a group of former professional cyclists and buried in a prominent cemetery, with funds donated by Frank W. Schwinn.
Taylor’s headstone reads: “World’s champion bicycle racer who came up the hard way without hatred in his heart; an honest, courageous and God-fearing, clean-living gentlemanly athlete. A credit to his race who always gave out his best. Gone but not forgotten.”
Determination… PassItOn.com®