From the Andes to the Alps, the football world woke up this week to the gentle sound of schadenfreude tinkling like wind-chimes in Davos. América de Cali, the scarlet-clad bogotano powerhouse that once trafficked in South American silverware the way Swiss bankers traffic in, well, everything else, has been unceremoniously dumped out of the Copa…
Arthur Cazaux, the 22-year-old Frenchman who just rocketed from Montpellier obscurity to the Australian Open’s fourth round, is the latest living proof that the universe occasionally hands out lottery tickets to people who’ve already practiced their signature. On paper, he’s merely a kid who beat two top-40 players in straight sets, collected a career-high 180…
**The Accidental Australian: How Rinky Hijikata Became the World’s Most Unlikely Tennis Diplomat** In the grand theater of professional tennis, where Russian oligarchs’ yachts jostle for dock space at Monte Carlo and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund whispers promises of unlimited prize money, Rinky Hijikata represents something refreshingly absurd: a 22-year-old Sydney-sider who still looks…
The Ballad of Jamie Vardy, Global Folk Hero for the Age of Diminishing Returns By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, somewhere between the duty-free Toblerone and existential dread There are two kinds of fairy tales left in the twenty-first century: the ones Disney franchises into lunchboxes, and the ones that leak out of a…
Union Saint-Gilloise and the Beautifully Stupid Hope of the Underdog By Our Man in Brussels, nursing his third lambic and counting the ways the world disappoints Brussels, the city that perfected both chocolate and bureaucratic torpor, woke up last Thursday to discover its most successful institution this decade isn’t the European Commission, NATO, or even…
On paper, 1. FC Heidenheim versus Borussia Dortmund is the footballing equivalent of a hedge-fund gala accidentally booking the same venue as a local Rotary-club bake sale. One club’s marketing deck features Champions-League pedigree, global shirt sales and a Spotify playlist curated by Jadon Sancho’s barber; the other’s highlight reel is a grainy YouTube clip…
From the High Desert to the Pacific Palisades: How a College Basketball Scorecard Became the UN Security Council of 2023 By the time the final buzzer mercifully sounded in Las Vegas, diplomats in Geneva were already arguing whether the 68-63 upset by New Mexico over UCLA constituted a soft-power shift on par with Brexit or…
The Curious Case of Tommy DeVito: How a Fourth-String Quarterback Became a Global Metaphor for the Year 2023 In a world where nuclear powers trade playground insults on social media and cryptocurrency exchanges evaporate faster than a Moscow winter, the international significance of Tommy DeVito might seem, at first glance, roughly equivalent to the geopolitical…
