First Athlete to Wear Hijab, Ibtihaj Muhammad, Wins Fencing Bronze Medal

Ibtihaj Muhammad of the United States celebrates her bronze medal at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games on Saturday, August 13

A moment she’ll never forget. Ibtihaj Muhammad won her first Olympic medal at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Saturday, August 13 — but that wasn’t her only first!

The 30-year-old athlete became the first U.S. athlete to compete at the Olympic Games wearing a hijab, a veil commonly worn by Muslim women.

Muhammad took home the bronze medal with Team USA during the women’s team saber fencing event on Saturday. She competed with fellow fencers Dagmara Wozniak, Mariel Zagunis and Monica Aksamit to defeat the Italian team 45-30. (The last time the U.S. women’s fencing team won a medal was at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.)

Prior to joining the national fencing team in 2010, Muhammad was a three-time All-American and 2005 Junior Olympic Champion at Duke University. She graduated from the school in 2007 with a double major in international relations and African American studies.

Earlier this week, the New Jersey native spoke to USA Today about becoming the first American to compete at the Olympics in a hijab.

“A lot of people don’t believe that Muslim women have voices or that we participate in sport,” she said on Monday, August 8. “And it’s not just to challenge misconceptions outside the Muslim community, but within the Muslim community. I want to break cultural norms.”

Muhammad added, “It’s a blessing to represent so many people who don’t have voices, who don’t speak up, and it’s been a really remarkable experience for me.”

courtesy of:  http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/… 

Why Are Jim Thorpe’s Olympic Records Still Not Recognized?

Jim Thorpe’s epic performance in the 15 events that made up the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Summer Games remains the most solid reflection we have of him. (Bettmann / Corbis)

100 years ago, Jim Thorpe became the greatest American Olympian of all time, but not if you ask the IOC

It’s been 100 years since Jim Thorpe dashed through the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, and we’re still chasing him.  Greatest-evers are always hard to quantify, but Thorpe is especially so, a laconic, evasive passerby who defies Olympic idealizing. A breakfast of champions for Thorpe was no bowl of cereal. It was fried squirrel with creamed gravy after running all night in the woods at the heels of his dogs. Try catching up with that.

He was a reticent Sac and Fox Indian from the Oklahoma frontier, orphaned as a teenager and raised as a ward of government schools, uncomfortable in the public eye.

When King Gustaf V of Sweden placed two gold medals around Thorpe’s neck for winning the Olympic pentathlon and decathlon and pronounced him the greatest athlete in the world, he famously muttered, “Thanks,” and ducked more illustrious social invitations to celebrate at a succession of hotel bars. “I didn’t wish to be gazed upon as a curiosity,” he said.

Thorpe’s epic performance in the 15 events that made up the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Summer Games remains the most solid reflection we have of him. Yet even that has a somewhat shadowy aspect. The International Olympic Committee stripped his medals and struck his marks from the official record after learning that he had violated the rules of amateurism by playing minor-league baseball in 1909-10.

“Those Olympic records are the best proof that he was superb, and they aren’t official,” says Kate Buford, author of a new biography of Thorpe, Native American Son. “He’s like the phantom contender.”

Phantomness has left him open to stigma and errors. For instance, it was popularly believed that Thorpe was careless of his feats, a “lazy Indian” whose gifts were entirely bestowed by nature. But he was nonchalant only about celebrity, which he distrusted. “He was offhand, modest, casual about everything in the way of fame or eminence achieved,” recalled one of his teachers, the poet Marianne Moore.

In fact, Thorpe was a dedicated and highly trained athlete. “I may have had an aversion for work,” he said, “but I also had an aversion for getting beat.” He went to Stockholm with a motive: He wanted to marry his sweetheart, Iva Miller. Her family disapproved of the match, and Thorpe was out to prove that a man could make a good enough living at games to support a wife. Point proved: They would be married in 1913. Photographs of him at the time verify his seriousness of purpose, showing a physique he could only have earned with intense training. He was a ripped 185 pounds with a 42-inch chest, 32-inch waist and 24-inch thighs.

“Nobody was in his class,” says Olympic historian Bill Mallon. “If you look at old pictures of him he looks almost modern. He’s cut. He doesn’t look soft like the other guys did back then. He looks great.”

The physique was partly the product of hard labor in the wilderness of the Oklahoma Territory. By age 6, Thorpe could already shoot, ride, trap and accompany his father, Hiram, a horse breeder and bootlegger who would die of blood poisoning, on 30-mile treks stalking prey. Jim Thorpe was an expert wrangler and breaker of wild horses, which he studied for their beautiful economy of motion and tried to emulate. Clearly the outdoors taught him the famous looseness of movement so often mistaken for lassitude. “He moved like a breeze,” sportswriter Grantland Rice observed …

… On this 100-year anniversary of the Stockholm Games, there are several good reasons for the IOC to relent and fully recognize Thorpe as the sole champion that he was. Countless white athletes abused the amateurism rules and played minor-league ball with impunity. What’s more, the IOC did not follow its own rules for disqualification: Any objection to Thorpe’s status should have been raised within 30 days of the Games, and it was not. It was nice of the IOC to award replica medals to Thorpe’s family, but those are just souvenirs.  After 100 years … Thorpe should enter the record … read more –> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/…

Meet the World’s Refugee Olympic Team

10 athletes were chosen to represent refugees from war-torn nations at the Olympics for the first time. These are their stories.

The Summer Olympics will feature 206 teams of athletes from specific countries. And for the first time ever, this month’s Games in Rio will feature another team of athletes that comes from no nation in particular and with no historical precedent.

For the first time, a Refugee Olympic Team will participate in the Olympics. The R.O.T., as the International Olympic Committee abbreviates it, includes 10 athletes, across four sports, from four countries in the Middle East and Africa.

The R.O.T. arrives at the Olympics at a particularly troubling time. The civil war in Syria has been driving an outright refugee crisis in Europe. The United Nations Refugee Agency says there are 4.8 million Syrian refugees, plus an estimated 8.7 million people displaced inside Syria this year. Its count of refugees and asylum-seekers from South Sudan is 850,000. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it is more than 384,000 refugees and more than a million internally displaced persons. There are more than 700,000 Ethiopian refugees. This is just a sampling.

If there is light at the end of that darkness, the 10 athletes competing for the R.O.T. this month are a beacon. Each has escaped one of the war-torn countries mentioned above, and each now gets a turn on sport’s biggest stage …

From South Sudan

Rose Nathike Lokonyen, a runner supported by Kenya
James Nyang Chiengjiek, a runner supported by Kenya
Angelina Nada Lohalith, a runner supported by Kenya
Paulo Amotun Lokoro, a runner supported by Kenya
Yiech Pur Biel, a runner supported by Kenya

From Syria

Rami Anis, a swimmer supported by Belgium
Yusra Mardini, a swimmer supported by Germany

From the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Popole Misenga, a judoka supported by Brazil
Yolande Bukasa Mabika, a judoka supported by Brazil

From Ethiopia

Yonas Kinde, a marathoner supported by Luxembourg

see videos, read more about each athlete –>  http://www.sbnation.com/2016/8/5/

True Hero, Syrian Refugee Saved 18 lives Pushing Boat 3 Hours Now Wins Olympic Swimming Heat

 

There are dozens of amazing teenage athletes at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, but nobody has a story like swimmer Yusra Mardini, who is competing under the International Olympic Committee flag as part of the refugee team.

Many people have their lives thanks to the efforts of Mardini and her sister just over a year ago. The sisters were fleeing Syria along with 18 other people when the refugees’ dinghy began sinking in the Aegean sea during a trip to Greece. The motor had failed, nobody on the boat could swim except the sisters. It’s a story that often ends in tragedy, but they ensured that didn’t happen. The two women leaped out of the boat, into cold waters and pushed the boat three hours in open water to prevent it from capsizing — eventually making it to land. It was a move that not only saved the lives of the 18 people in the boat, but ensured the sisters lived.

It sounds like a horror story, but instead Mardini used the moment in her life for motivation.

“I remember that without swimming I would never be alive maybe because of the story of this boat. It’s a positive memory for me.”

Now living in Germany, life is much better. Initially she began training, and was being considered as an Olympic hopeful for the 2020 games in Tokyo, but the refugee team allowed for Mardini’s dream to be realized much sooner. She is working tirelessly not only in swimming, but in changing the perception of refugees around the world.

“I want everyone to think refugees are normal people who had their homelands and lost them not because they wanted to run away and be refugees, but because they have dreams in their lives and they had to go,”

Just making it to the Olympics would have been an achievement enough, but the 19-year-old just won the first heat in the women’s 100 meter butterfly.

courtesy of:  http://www.sbnation.com/2016/8/6/

Refugees To Have Their Own Olympic Team

Ten refugee-athletes from Syria, Sudan, Ethiopia and the Republic of Congo will compete at the Rio Olympics

When the parade of nations enters Maracanã Stadium later this summer for the opening ceremonies of the Rio de Janeiro Olympics, there will be one extra flag. Ten refugees from around the world will compete as a team for the first time under the Olympic banner.

International Olympic Committee chairman Thomas Bach announced the formation of the refugee team last Friday. “It is a signal to the international community that refugees are our fellow human beings and are an enrichment to society,” he said in a statement. “These refugee athletes will show the world that despite the unimaginable tragedies that they have faced, anyone can contribute to society through their talent, skills and strength of the human spirit.”

But the athletes aren’t just symbolic; they have the athletic chops to compete with the best of the best. Five of the athletes, all track and field competitors, come from South Sudan. Two are Syrian swimmers living in Europe, two are judo competitors from the Democratic Republic of Congo residing in Brazil and one is an Ethiopian marathoner from a refugee camp in Kenya.

According to Barbie Latza Nadeau at the Daily Beast, the team members were chosen from a short list of 43 refugee-athletes. All ten had to qualify under the standards set for all Olympic athletes. “There were no shortcuts,” an IOC spokesperson tells Nadeau. “Each Refugee Olympic Team member earned the position.”

For most of the athletes, just getting to the Olympics is a gold medal performance. As Lulu Garcia-Navarro writes at NPR, Popole Misenga and Yolande Mabika were members of the Republic of Congo’s judo team when they traveled to Brazil for the Judo World Championships in 2013. Their coach stole the team’s money and documents and left his team stranded.

The two decided to stay in Brazil instead of going back to the violence and instability of their home country, where many of their friends and family members had been killed. But with no money—not to mention no understanding of Portuguese—it has been difficult making a living and continuing on with the sport they love.

Nadeau tells the story of Syrian swimmer named Yusra Mardini, who paid a trafficker to help her and 20 other passengers reach the Greek island of Lesbos in 2015 to flee the violence in her home country. An hour into the trip, the rubber raft they were on began sinking. Yusra and her sister Sarah, another swimming champ, jumped in the water and pulled the raft for four hours until the group safely reached land.

“I thought it would be a real shame if I drowned at sea because I am a swimmer,” Mardini said at a press conference. She eventually made it to Germany where she was granted asylum.

Once in Berlin, Philip Oltermann at the Guardian reports Mardini was quickly accepted to an elite training club and trains twice a day at a special sports school. Because of her refugee status, she did not qualify for Germany’s Olympic team and Syria will likely not field a national team this year, and probably wouldn’t accept refugees even if it did. The new team gives Mardini a chance to show her stuff despite her circumstances.

“I want to make all the refugees proud of me,” she tells Oltermann. “It would show that even if we had a tough journey, we can achieve something.”

The refugee team will march into the stadium ahead of the Brazil delegation along with 15 coaches and trainers.

Read more:  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/…

The Quietest Square Inch

Olympic National Park, Hoh Rainforest, WA

Gordon Hempton has spent three decades traveling around the U.S. looking for its quietest corners. The acoustic ecologist thinks he’s finally found it, in a far-flung corner of Washington State.

According to Crosscut, Hempton has dubbed the spot in the Hoh Rainforest in Olympic National Park the “quietest square inch in the United States,” with less noise pollution than any other spot in the American wilderness.

While the effects of light pollution are increasingly recognized and in response so-called dark sky reserves are popping up all over the world, from Jasper National Park to Scotland’s Galloway Forest to New Zealand’s Aoraki Mackenzie, so far, few people are talking about quiet reserves, though by some estimates, noise pollution affects more than 88 percent of the contiguous U.S.

That’s where Hempton’s writing, research, and activism comes in. He hopes to protect the nation’s quiet starting with that “One Square Inch of Silence” he found in the Hoh Rainforest. He is hoping to create a law that would protect the quiet by prohibiting air traffic overhead.
Courtesy of:  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/

Cyborg Olympics!

A man with a mind-controlled prosthetic competes in a test run of October’s Cybathlon in Switzerland.

For decades, Paralympians have performed athletic feats with the help of things like wheelchairs, prosthetic limbs and assistive devices. But where does the athlete end and the technology begin? That question will take center stage at a new competition that celebrates the collision of man and machine, reports Mike Murphy reports for Quartz.

Switzerland will hold the world’s first cyborg Olympic-style games this October. The competition, known as the Cybathlon, is the brainchild of Robert Riener, a professor of motor-sensory systems at ETH Zürich, a university known for its technical programs. A few years ago, Riener got the idea for the games when he read a newspaper article about an amputee who used a motorized prosthetic leg to climb Chicago’s Sears Tower. “It inspired me to think about a similar event that could be held here in Switzerland,” says Riener in an interview on the event’s website. “[A]n event that would extend beyond a single race to include many other disciplines.”

At this October’s Cybathlon, researchers will come together to discuss technological advances in machine-assisted human activities, like brain-computer interfaces and powered exoskeletons. Then the games will begin: People with physical disabilities will compete in one of six events, assisted by robotic aids and a team of experts. Events will include a brain-computer interface race, functional electrical stimulation bike race, and races using powered arm and leg prosthesis, powered exoskeletons and powered wheelchairs.

The Cybathlon won’t just showcase what humans can do together with machines—it’s also designed to raise awareness of the needs and obstacles of people with physical disabilities. Murphy notes that each contestant will be called a “pilot” and will show their prowess in real-life events like climbing stairs or opening jars. Since they’ll use their minds or remote controls to perform the tasks and be assisted by advanced tech teams and cutting-edge technology, the competition will be like nothing else in the world.

A competition that embraces human-robot collaborations in everyday tasks is a far cry from the actual Olympics, which discourages athlete assistance (remember the kerfuffle about Speedo’s record-breaking swimsuit?). That tradition goes back millennia. The Olympic Games in the ancient world had a particularly humiliating punishment for cheaters—people who didn’t play by the rules or tried to bribe officials were commemorated with statues that lined the path athletes took to get to the Olympic stadium. At the Cybathlon, though, help in the form of technology is not just welcomed, but required.

The Cybathlon has one eye on the actual Olympics, too: Riener tells IEEE Spectrum’s Eliza Strickland that he wants the next event to take place in conjunction with the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Don’t want to wait? Head to Switzerland this October to witness some impressive human-robot feats. Tickets are now on sale.

Courtesy of:  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/

Top 10 Most Visited National Parks

1. Great Smoky Mountains

The number of people who visit America’s national parks is staggering—in 2014 it was nearly 70 million. Wonder which parks are the most popular? Here are the top ten.

Ensconced at number one is Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which draws more than ten million visitors annually—more than twice the number of the second most popular park. Most visitors see the park from a mountain-skimming scenic highway; many take to the more than 800 miles of hiking trails across North Carolina and Tennessee.

2. Grand Canyon

In 2014, 4.8 million people witnessed the wonders of one of the largest canyons on Earth. A mile deep and up to 18 miles wide at spots, the Grand Canyon is so vast that even from the best vantage point only a fraction of its 277 miles can be seen.

3. Yosemite

“No temple made with human hands can compete with Yosemite,” wrote John Muir, whose crusading led to the creation of the California park in 1890. Nearly four million visitors come to this temple annually, most of them spending time in the Yosemite Valley. This mile-wide, 7-mile-long canyon was cut by a river and then widened and deepened by glacial action.

4. Yellowstone

The world’s very first national park remains the showpiece of the National Park Service, visited by more than 3.5 million people a year. The vast reserve—covering 2.2 million acres in Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana—has craggy peaks, explosive geysers, alpine lakes, deep forests, and a wealth of wild animals. The stars are bison, bears, sheep, moose, and wolves.

5. Rocky Mountain

Sweeping vistas are a main attraction at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. The park contains 150 lakes and 450 miles of streams, plus ecosystems ranging from wetlands to pine forests to montane areas to alpine tundra.

6. Olympic

More than three million people a year explore the unspoiled terrain of Olympic National Park in Washington State. No roads cross through the park, which contains three distinct ecosystems: temperate rain forest (seen here), subalpine forest and wildflower meadow, and rugged Pacific shore.

7. Zion

Rising in Utah’s high plateau country, the Virgin River carves its way through Zion Canyon to the desert below. The park’s striking vertical topography—rock towers, sandstone canyons, and sharp cliffs—attracts 3.5 million visitors a year.

8. Grand Teton

The peaks of the Teton Range, regal and imposing as they stand nearly 7,000 feet above the Wyoming valley floor, make one of the boldest geological statements in the Rockies. The park’s jewel-like lakes, blue and white glaciers, and naked granite pinnacles draw 2.8 million visitors a year.

9. Acadia

Sea and mountain meet at Acadia National Park in Maine. Most of the park is on Mount Desert Island, a patchwork of parkland, private property, and seaside villages.

10. Glacier

Rounding out the top ten most popular parks is Glacier National Park, which covers over a million acres in Montana and draws 2.3 million people a year. The park’s Going-to-the-Sun Road is considered by many to be one of the world’s most spectacular drives.

courtesy of:  http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/national-parks/