Crowds roared, church bells rang and streams of paper rained down on Broadway as the New York Yankees celebrated their 27th World Series championship on Friday in a way only the Big Apple can, with a parade up the Canyon of Heroes.
The players, joined by celebrity fans and Yankees of the past, drank it all in as they rode on floats and double-decker buses through Lower Manhattan.
It has been years since the city used actual ticker-tape to celebrate its World Series wins, but the experience was still authentic to the many thousands who crammed the sidewalks along the parade route near Wall Street.
PHOTO: AFP
“I love it!” said city sanitation worker John Freeman, as he raked up confetti and toilet paper rolls thrown from skyscrapers.
Whole families skipped work and school to be there. Players recorded the crowd with their cameras as they rode to a second celebration at City Hall, where the mayor presented the team with keys to the city.
Shortstop Derek Jeter carried the trophy, hoisting it high above his head while the crowd screamed and We are the Champions blasted on loudspeakers.
“It’s been too long, hasn’t it?” he told the crowd, a reference to the team’s eight-year absence from the top of Major League Baseball. “It feels good to be back.”
Fans and players brimming with classic New York confidence let it be known that they didn’t plan to relinquish their title anytime soon.
The crowd at City Hall chanted “28.” Manager Joe Girardi said he had already talked on the phone with team owner George Steinbrenner about not letting up.
“He told me this morning ... the only thing greater than this celebration is doing it two years in a row,” Girardi said. “So he asked me to remind everyone, pitchers and catchers report in 96 days. Be ready to defend it.”
Jay-Z capped the celebration with a performance of his song Empire State of Mind.
The Yankees beat the defending champion Philadelphia Phillies to win the best-of-seven series in six games. The title was the team’s first since 2000, and came during the first season of the new US$1.5 billion Yankee Stadium.
“There’s no better way to inaugurate a new stadium,” said Michael Rheubottom, a city jail guard, who attended with his 13-year-old son, Jason. “This is the house that Jeter built. We don’t even remember the house that [former Yankees slugger Babe] Ruth built.”
Pitcher Mariano Rivera, who waved a Panamanian flag as he rode in the parade, called the outpouring of support “beautiful.”
“The city of New York, the fans ... you can’t put it into words. It’s magnificent,” he said.
Alex Rodriguez, finally free of all the criticism that had been heaped upon him for failing to win a championship, wore a black hat and a wide smile.
“We waited a long time for this,” he said. “I’ve never seen so many people collected in one place. Excitement. It just seems like they were as hungry as we were. The fans really wanted this. They were hungry.”
Yankee greats of the past, including Yogi Berra and Reggie Jackson, were on hand for the celebration. Jackson urged the players to enjoy the experience, saying: “You never know if it’ll happen again.”
Some fans were more confident the trophy would be back soon enough on lower Broadway — the narrow Canyon of Heroes that has seen some 200 ticker-tape parades for astronauts, foreign leaders, sports champions and five-star generals.
“We’re going for 28, baby,” said Ulysses Coleman, of Manhattan. “Next year it’s ours, it’s in the bag.”
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier