New England has the Boston Tea Party, while Seattle has Starbucks, but only one will be crowned Super Bowl champions after an East Coast versus West Cost clash of teams as different as the cities they represent.
It will be Beantown versus the Emerald City in the Arizona desert on Feb. 1, when the resilient Seattle Seahawks will try to defend their Super Bowl crown against a New England Patriots team making their sixth trip to the title game in 13 seasons.
Although New England represents six different states, the heartbeat of the team is still Boston. The team was originally called the Boston Patriots and only changed their name when they moved to Foxborough in 1971.
Much more than roughly 4,020km and three time zones separates the two Super Bowl combatants.
Seattle, home of Microsoft and Amazon.com, has given the world Starbucks, grunge rock and Jimi Hendrix.
Boston is the home of Harvard University, Cheers, the Kennedys, Paul Revere and the Boston Pops.
While Seattleites embrace recycling and environmental causes, Bostonians love the big event, staging the world’s most famous marathon annually, while the city was recently selected as the US candidate in a bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympics.
Seahawks fans, famously known as the “12th man,” are among the National Football League’s most boisterous.
And if the Seahawks lose the championship game, fans can always drown their sorrows with a beer from one of 100 locally crafted brews.
“Whatever it is, it’s something in the water here,” said Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll. “I think [our fans are] the loudest and we’ll put them up against anybody and that’s because they care so much.”
In part, the Seahawks’ success means so much to Seattle because the city has had precious little to celebrate on the sporting field.
Major League Baseball’s Seattle Mariners have yet to reach a World Series since their inception in 1997, while the SuperSonics captured the National Basketball Association title in 1979, but fled Seattle in 2008 to become the Oklahoma City Thunder.
Boston on the other hand has spent a good part of the past 15 years planning championship parades.
The Patriots have hoisted the Vince Lombardi Trophy three times, while National Hockey League’s Bruins brought the Stanley Cup back to Boston in 2011, and Red Sox fans, after an 86-year title drought, celebrated World Series wins in 2004, 2007 and 2013.
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