2026-02-19 05:17:29
Just over midway through Tuesday's Champions League playoff between Benfica and Real Madrid, Vinícius struck one of the most beautiful goals of his career. In response to the strike, and to Vinícius's totally normal celebration of it, the incensed Lisbon crowd sent boos, water bottles, and other projectiles raining down on the Brazilian forward and his teammates. Ginned up by the atmosphere, Benfica's Argentine winger Gianluca Prestianni ran over to confront the goalscorer and exchanged some heated words, most all of them obscured by the jersey Prestianni hiked up over his nose and mouth. Vinícius said Prestianni called him a "mono," "monkey" in Spanish. Prestianni denied this, claiming Vinícius misunderstood him.
The general scenario presented above is depressingly common in soccer, and has been for as far back as you'd like to look. Instances like this are surely less frequent today than in prior times, which to me only calls to mind Malcolm X's bit about knives. To hear certain people tell it, the word "monkey" must possess some downright mystical attributes—always being heard, but somehow never actually being said. Prestianni is only the latest victim of those devilishly deceptive sounds, though Vinícius himself is no stranger to this particular rodeo. Maybe the most direct path to proving once and for all that racism actually has already been eradicated from the sport is to fit all black players with hearing aids.
2026-02-19 03:31:47
Anything less than dominance would have been an upset, no matter the opponent. With NHLers at the Olympics, Team Canada had won 13 straight. They hadn't trailed in more than 800 consecutive minutes of game time. Czechia in the quarterfinals shouldn't have forced them to break a real sweat. There's top-end talent, but also it's mostly some guys; the lion's share of the Czech roster isn't in the NHL. It was 5-0 Canada when these two met in group play. Marty Necas had a joke for that one. They let the Canadians win that one, he said, because "we knew we were not going to win two in a row." The pressure, one could argue, was all on Canada. They played like that. They also played like a team with the horses to survive it.
Canada beat Czechia 4-3 in overtime, in the best and tensest men's Olympic hockey match in a generation. Mitch Marner (famously clutch) singlehandedly carved up the defense for the overtime winner, which might hit a little more if not for the awful 3-on-3 overtime format, but counts all the same. Canada's skill and speed was on display throughout; Celebrini-McDavid-MacKinnon ("Mach 3") made its debut as a line; McDavid setting up Celebrini for the game's first goal was an almost unfair connection. No one's going to outskate or outshoot Canada.
They can be outworked, however, and for long stretches. For much of the first period and significant parts of the second and third, the Czechs looked like the stronger team. They played a bruising game, relying on the so-far-correct assumption that NHL refs are not likely to call things too far outside of NHL norms, no matter what the IIHF Rulebook says. They finished their checks and were liberal with their elbows. That physicality took its toll: Radko Gudas sent Sidney Crosby to the locker room early in the second period with what looked like a right leg injury. They relied heavily on counterattacks for their offense. Gudas jumped a pass in the neutral zone to set up their first goal, and Tomas Hertl gave up the body to block a shot that led to the rush the other way for their third. (Also the Czechs had six men on the ice, but that's just good hustle.) Playing hard and tireless and maybe slightly dirty is an obvious blueprint for giving yourself a chance against a more skilled team; it's basically the entire philosophy underpinning the U.S. roster.
2026-02-19 02:27:25
UCLA men's basketball coach Mick Cronin had a lot of big feelings Tuesday night, during and after his team's 82-59 blowout loss to Michigan State.
As the Bruins trailed by 27 points with just under five minutes left in the game, Michigan State's Carson Cooper caught an outlet pass and rose up to dunk, only to be fouled by UCLA's Steven Jamerson II. It was a hard foul, and ruled a flagrant, but nothing beyond the pale. An enraged Cronin must have read it differently, because he immediately sent Jamerson to the locker room. (A lot of the coverage of this incident has emphasized that Cronin ejected his "own player," as if it were possible for a coach to eject an opposing player, but I digress.)
2026-02-19 01:40:19
Since returning to figure skating, Alysa Liu has displayed an indifference toward earthly happenings that a bodhisattva would envy. That is not to say that she doesn't express joy upon completing a stellar performance. But she is never particularly moved by wins or losses, which has earned her internet descriptors of "totally unbothered," "nonchalant queen," and so on. Improbably, through the pressure cooker of the Winter Olympics, she has maintained this attitude. "I'm really confident in myself, and even if I mess up and fall, that's totally OK, too," Liu said after placing third in the short program on Tuesday. "I don't know! I'm fine with any outcome, as long as I'm out there, and I am. There's nothing to lose."
It is not difficult, watching Liu in the past couple of years, to believe those words to be more than generic athletespeak—that the point for her is the performance, and external validations like medals and scores are unnecessary. Control is the long-running theme of Liu's no-longer-so-new comeback. She picks her own music, dictates what she eats, and gets more involved with her choreography. When she skates, even on the ice of the biggest competition in figure skating, this is the sense the viewer gets: that she is in total control of what is happening.
Liu's short program, set to "Promise" by Laufey, is the same program she skated to upon her return from retirement in 2024. While it is often easy to be wowed by a big, bright short program, Liu is incredible at pulling off a wistful presentation, filling the space despite such pared-back music. The unique triple Lutz–triple loop combination she jumps in the back half of her program does the technical heavy lifting for her score, and is perhaps the most eye-catching sequence—she whips from the first jump to the second with so little time in between it feels like one continuous motion—but her spins are what I return to. The final spin in particular is stunning and worth watching thrice: once to take in the full picture, once more to see how little she moves on the ice, and one last time to watch her arms.
2026-02-19 01:19:39
Gather 'round, friends, for it is time to play my favorite newly invented game of the Winter Olympics. The game is called "Are The Fellas In Sync," and the way you play this game is by scrolling through Getty Images photos from Team Pursuit Speedskating and asking yourself a simple question: Are these three fellas (gender-neutral) before me truly, honestly, and existentially in sync? We'll start off with an easy round.
Round 1: Patrick Beckert, Fridtjof Petzold, and Felix Maly of Germany
2026-02-19 00:06:48
By the end of a cross-country skiing team sprint competition, the athletes are on the brink of collapse. The best teams complete their six-mile sprint in about 20 minutes. Their legs burn, and their lungs are exhausted. With the finish line in sight, almost out of breath, you can imagine how strange it would feel to see suddenly in front of you what looks like a big beautiful wolf.
"I was like, 'Am I hallucinating?" Tena Hadzic, a 21-year-old Croatian skier, told NPR. There on the course was a real, live, beautiful wolfdog. He appeared on the final stretch of the qualifying event Wednesday morning and raced along, pursuing the sliding track camera like a superstar before turning to follow a couple of athletes across the finish line. Look at him:
