Lance Armstrong is getting back on his bike and he’s riding after his 8th win at the Tour de France.
After returning from cancer to win the Tour seven consecutive times has made him a legend worldwide. He has popularized bicycling in America, but no one looks up to him like cancer patients do. To them he’s more than just fast, he’s a hero.
“I am happy to announce that after talking with my children, my family and my closest friends, I have decided to return to professional cycling in order to raise awareness of the global cancer burden,” the 36-year-old Armstrong said in a statement released to The Associated Press. “This year alone, nearly eight million people will die of cancer worldwide. … It’s now time to address cancer on a global level.”
Continue here to read more about Armstrong according to Sports Illustrated.
Time Warner takes a page from the book of “give people what they want”
Enter SI Vault. If you are wondering what SI Vault is, as the name would imply, it’s 54 years of Sports Illustraded’s covers, images, stories and much more. If an image is worth a thousand words, what would 54 years’ worth of images be worth?
Here’s a story dating back to 1992, for example, on Christian Laettner and Duke. Hmm… Laettner? Duke? Pardon the shameless plug, but enjoy WatchMojo.com’s classic college programming:
Duke in Top College Programs:
And Laettner in Top College Careers:
All right, enough shameless promotion, now go and enjoy 54 years of SI at SI Vault.
Sports Illustrated looks at the 20 past Heisman Trophy races and identifies 10 hidden gems of the 2007 draft.
Via Washington Post’s Slate.com:
An avid sports fan can now read Sports Illustrated without learning anything new. In 1997’s The Franchise, Michael MacCambridge’s history of SI, Bill Colson (the top editor from 1996 to 2002) admits that the magazine’s increasing focus on the major sports helped “contribut[e] to the narrowing of interest of the American sports fan.” Sports Illustrated had always, for better or worse, featured stories on chess, bullfighting, darts, and sailing. Even if you didn’t read all those stories on chess and sailing, SI’s implicit message still got through—that sports isn’t just the stuff you see on TV, that a great story is a great story no matter whether it’s about playing quarterback or handling snakes.
The magazine no longer has this sort of peripheral vision. Coverage of soccer, hockey, and track is restricted to short, perfunctory superstar profiles. The magazine’s last 16 covers have featured baseball, football, football, baseball, football, football, football, football, football, football, baseball, baseball, baseball, football, basketball, and baseball. Last year, rather than choosing the best athlete alive, Roger Federer, as the mag’s Sportsman of the Year, SI Editor Terry McDonell anointed highly marketable domestic basketball demistar Dwyane Wade. The implicit message: Sports is everything you already know about and nothing that gets low ratings.
Read the rest.
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