#champions

#champions

Barcelona Femení emerged from the courageous initiative of 18-year-old Immaculada 'Imma' Cabecerán in 1970, who convinced the then Barça president to establish a women's team despite the ban on women's football in Spain at the time.

After you've had a swim, you get out and you just feel, 'oh, I can go anywhere'. My mother was English and her mother taught her to swim in the sea. It's sort of part of the family history.

The night of 6 September was one that will be remembered. When the attendance figure was announced at the Allianz Arena, a rapturous cheer erupted, the likes of which women's football in Germany had rarely experienced before: 57,762 fans had turned up to watch the Bundesliga opener between FC Bayern Women and Bayer 04 Leverkusen - a new record in German women's club football.

Inge Simonsen, a 27-year-old Norwegian, officially won the first London marathon in 2 hours 11 minutes 48 seconds yesterday, the fastest time recorded in Britain for 11 years, watched by an estimated 100,000 people.

I might not be my best, but I will have the will to not give up and to keep fighting—for my village, for little Oksana—and do what I can do. Because that's what I've been doing my whole entire life. Masters demonstrated resilience despite acknowledging her diminished physical condition, emphasizing her lifelong commitment to perseverance and fighting through adversity.

Jack Wallace scored a hat trick to help the U.S. beat Canada 6-2 in Sunday's Para ice hockey final and become the first nation to sweep the hockey tournaments at the Olympics and Paralympics.

If you're watching the Olympics this year, or have watched in the past, you've probably wondered how the top athletes in the world bolster themselves emotionally for high- stress situations, being exposed and visible to millions of viewers in difficult moments, and how they deal with failure and defeat and become resilient. Dr. Cindra Kamphoff, whose MD-level background in sports psychology, two decades of work with professional and Olympic athletics, and The High Performance Mindset podcast, has developed techniques that are helpful to people inside or outside of the sports arena.

"We have a golden retriever, and so I walk her three or four miles a day, and I do a weight training class twice a week," says Brown, 62, of Arlington, Va. She knows muscle mass will decline without regular strength training. "We have a fun group with a personal trainer and we call ourselves the Beastie Girls," she says, describing how her group helps her stick with it. She also plays tennis and golf.

It could be the last Olympics for a sport that mixes the grace of ski jumping with the grind of cross-country skiing. Nordic combined events at the Milan Cortina Games ended Thursday. And the International Olympic Committee is considering scrapping it from future Games because of a small TV audience and podium positions dominated by a tiny group of nations.

Wright said he trusts his fitness and training as he heads to the Games, where the pressure will be on him to perform. I think having success in the past just gives me confidence because I've already done more than I thought I could do in this sport, so the way I see it anything extra is just cream, he told The Associated Press.

The older I get, the more profoundly I appreciate that, when I'm writing about sport, I'm also writing about love. This makes perfect sense given these are mankind's two greatest inventions and the stuff we can least do without, but there's more to it than that: sport and love are both expressions of identity, creativity and devotion, pursued because they are right but also because it's impossible not to.

The most humbling thing is being at the top of the run with the Paralympic team, who are mostly visually impaired, and they just disappear into the distance while I'm still putting my boots on. As performance director of GB Snowsport, nevertheless, Myall's job is to give the nation's talented crop of snowboarders, freestyle, alpine and mogul skiers a decisive edge when the Games commence in Milan next week.

Dual moguls is new to the Olympics this year. It's head-to-head heats, with skiers facing moguls, gates, and jumps-and being judged, head-to-head, on each element for a combined score. In the men's medal rounds today, Japan's Ikuma Horishima (pictured above, sort of) had a disastrous run in his round-of-16 showdown, and somehow ended up facing the wrong way. That's an odd and very specific sort of adversity to overcome, but he did it.

One of the great joys of being an Olympian is arriving at the athletes' village and, with it, the shift in your identity from just being a skeleton athlete to being a part of Team GB. There is a real belonging in putting on the T-shirt or jacket with your country's flag on, and of course with the Olympic rings a symbol of hope and peace and togetherness.