Morethangoals

21/10/2026

John Lucas was the first pick of the 1976 NBA draft. Most fans know him as a point guard and a coach. Fewer know he grew up with a basketball in one hand and a tennis racket in the other.

It started at Hillside High School in Durham, North Carolina, where his father was principal. The school was right up the street, so after class young John went to the gym instead of going home. The varsity coach taught him a set shot. In spring that same coach ran the tennis team, and he taught him that too. (In his neighborhood, the band practiced on the tennis courts.)

At 17 he made the Junior Davis Cup team. Maryland was the school that let him play both sports. On the tennis court he won the ACC singles title twice. On the basketball court he left as the program’s all-time leading scorer, with 2,015 points. In 1976 he was the only college athlete in the country named All-American in two sports.

A year earlier, the ABA’s Nets had drafted him, and he was ready to go. Then his mother reminded him of a promise he had made her: a degree first. He stayed. In June 1976 the Houston Rockets made him the No. 1 pick, and he made the All-Rookie First Team.

Fourteen NBA seasons followed, with 6,454 assists. Midway through, he stepped away to get well and came back. Don Nelson’s Bucks gave him a ten-day contract in January 1987. That spring he averaged 15.6 points in the playoffs and dropped 30 on Larry Bird’s Celtics in a Game 3 win.

Recovery became his calling. In 1991 he bought the Miami Tropics, built the roster around players rebuilding their lives and won two league titles as their coach. In December 1992 the Spurs handed him their bench in midseason, and they went 39-22 under him.

Today Houston is home. The Rockets brought him back in 2016 to develop their young players, and his gym has trained kids from all over the city. He calls basketball a trade, something you pass on, and in his family it was. His son John Lucas III played point guard in the NBA, starting with the Rockets, and his son Jai Lucas is head coach at Miami. Houston saved his life, he says, and he owes the city.

So he keeps teaching, the way a coach once taught him: after school, in a gym up the street.

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21/10/2026

The Sharp Tongue

The name Stephen A. Smith carries weight across American sports media. Few commentators can turn an opinion into a headline quite like he can.

Fifty-three years. That is how long New York waited. Fifty-three years of hope, frustration and watching the Knicks fall short. Fifty-three years without a championship.

In June, the wait ended. Jalen Brunson and the Knicks defeated the San Antonio Spurs in five games, and Smith was in the building when the final buzzer sounded. The man who never runs out of words was momentarily speechless. He later called it the best feeling he had ever experienced covering sports.

Days after the parade, he took the stage at Madison Square Garden and faced Josh Hart, who came with receipts: Smith had once doubted Villanova’s NBA prospects and said Brunson “isn’t the answer.” With the trophy beside him, Smith apologized to the entire organization. Then, with a grin, he added that if his doubts had helped bring a title, he would do it all again. Only Smith could make an apology sound like a victory lap.

That same fire showed up in July. After LeBron James left Los Angeles and the Lakers added Walker Kessler to a group led by Luka Dončić and Austin Reaves, Smith questioned whether the team had enough star power to contend. He put it bluntly:

“Where the hell the Los Angeles Lakers think they going with a bunch of white dudes? … You ain’t going anywhere being led by three white dudes in today’s generation of basketball.”

Smith praised the players individually, but his argument was about what he saw as the Lakers’ lack of larger-than-life star power. By tying that criticism to the players’ race, he made the point impossible to ignore and impossible to keep off the air. The sports world was talking. That is the power, and the risk, of Stephen A. Smith’s voice.

It is part of why ESPN pays him more than anyone else on its roster: a five-year deal worth more than $100 million, with the freedom to take his voice beyond sports. On opening night, the champions are back in New York, and the city’s loudest son still has one of the biggest microphones in the game.

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21/10/2026

Saroya Tinker began in gymnastics and dance in Oshawa, Ontario, until she outgrew the bars, taller than every boy her age. Her father, a former goalie who once rode the Scarborough city bus with his gear to reach the rink, had a better idea: make her a big defender.

Born to a Jamaican father and a Ukrainian-Canadian mother, she played eight sports in high school; hockey opened the widest doors. She won gold at the 2011–12 Ontario Winter Games, wore the A for the Durham West Junior Lightning and, in 2016, helped Canada to silver at the IIHF U18 Women’s World Championship.

At Yale she became the first Black player in the history of its hockey program, men’s or women’s. In her final season Kiersten Goode arrived as her first Black teammate, and Saroya became the big sister she had once looked for.

The Metropolitan Riveters drafted her fourth overall in 2020. In her first professional game she knelt for both anthems, then turned that stand into a fundraiser for Black Girl Hockey Club that cleared $30,000. That season she received the Denna Laing Award, the first Black player to earn it. With the Toronto Six she led the league in blocked shots two seasons running and won the 2022 PHF Foundation Award. In 2023 she became an All-Star and lifted the Isobel Cup, with Angela James, the hero of her childhood, as the club’s general manager.

A message to Maverick Carter put her story inside Black Ice, the documentary that won the People’s Choice Documentary Award at TIFF in 2022. In November 2023, at 25, she stepped away on the eve of PWHL Ottawa’s camp, with more barriers to break than games to play. She took her voice to CBC, TSN and Sportsnet and joined the PWHL as Manager of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Initiatives & Community Engagement, guided by her own rule: where there is no seat at the table, bring a folding chair. Forbes named her to its 30 Under 30 in sports.

Saroya Strong, her mentorship program, counts some 250 girls. It led her to co-found Black Girl Hockey Club Canada, today the Women of Colour Hockey Collective. This summer its first clinic abroad brought sticks and skates to Kingston, Jamaica, the island of her father’s roots.

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20/10/2026

Jessica Hyatt was four years old when she first sat down at a chessboard in Brooklyn. Her mother saw a hobby. Jessica saw a passion, and she kept returning to the board until it became something much larger.

She grew up in Brownsville, found the game through Chess in the Schools, a nonprofit that brings chess to underserved neighborhoods, and later studied at Success Academy High School of the Liberal Arts in Manhattan. In 2019 she swept the U/1800 section of the New York State Scholastic Championships with a perfect 6-0. The following year she received the Daniel Feinberg Success in Chess Award, which carried a $40,000 college scholarship.

Then the grandmasters started falling. In a 2021 blitz exhibition she beat GM Michael Rohde. In 2022 she did the same to GM Abhimanyu Mishra, the youngest grandmaster in the history of the game. In 2023 she was crowned KCF All-Girls National Champion, and at the World Youth Chess Championship in Italy that November, rated 1818, she held Liya Kurmangaliyeva, rated 2236, to a draw.

By then Hyatt had represented the United States on its national youth team five times. In June 2024, still a high school senior, she traveled to the Detroit Institute of Arts to speak to young girls and families about the game. Then she sat down in the museum’s Great Hall against 25 opponents at once and won all 25 games.

Two months later came the milestone. In August 2024 Hyatt earned the title of National Master, a level reserved for players who cross 2200 on the US Chess rating scale and one that only a small fraction of rated players ever reach. She became the second African American woman in history to hold it, about a month after Shama Yisrael became the first, and the youngest to do so.

As a teenager, Hyatt noticed how rarely she saw anyone who looked like her at a tournament. The girls walking into those same halls today have a National Master to look up to, and her name is Jessica Hyatt.

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Written by Agbeniga Alimot Ayobami |Sport Storyteller

20/10/2026

The first American woman to compete in three consecutive Olympic taekwondo tournaments. Many people know Paige McPherson as a London 2012 bronze medalist. Fewer know where her story started: in a family the town of Sturgis, South Dakota, called the “rainbow family.”

Paige was born in Abilene, Texas, on October 1, 1990, and adopted when she was only days old. She was one of five children her parents adopted from around the world. Her heritage is Filipino and African American, and in Sturgis she and her sister were the only African American kids in the area.

Taekwondo came through her older brother, who is Korean. Paige was a young dancer at the time, but she followed him everywhere, so she followed him onto the mat too. The gym quickly became a second family, just as mixed as the one at home.

After high school she moved to Miami, where she didn’t know anyone, to train at Peak Performance under Juan Moreno, a three-time Olympian. Her first sessions were in a small warehouse with no air conditioning, only fans and thirty people sweating it out. Smaller than many of her rivals, she won on speed and nerve, which is how she earned the nickname McFierce. Moreno asked her for four years. In return, he would take her to her first Olympics.

Moreno kept his word. In London she beat British favorite Sarah Stevenson in her opening bout and fought her way to the podium through the repechage. On August 10, 2012, she won bronze, and Sturgis welcomed home the first woman from South Dakota to win a Summer Olympic medal.

More medals followed: Pan American gold and world bronze in 2015, world silver in 2017 and Grand Prix gold in 2018. After Rio she changed her approach, focusing on the day in front of her, and found her love for the sport again. She qualified for Tokyo the hard way, through the world rankings.

In June 2021, just weeks before Tokyo, she met her Filipino birth mother for the first time. In Tokyo she reached the semifinals, beating London silver medalist Nur Tatar along the way, and finished fifth at her third consecutive Olympic Games.

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Written by Agbeniga Alimot Ayobami |Sport Storyteller

20/10/2026

Azaria Hill grew up at the track. Her mother coached sprinters at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, and Azaria tagged along. What many people don’t know is how deep the Olympic roots in that family run. Her mother, Denean Howard-Hill, ran in the heats of the American 4x400m relay that won gold at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, then added silvers in Seoul and Barcelona. Her father, Virgil Hill, won boxing silver at those same 1984 Games. That’s where the two of them met. Her aunt, Sherri Howard, has two relay medals of her own. So every school project about what she wanted to be when she grew up had the same answer: Olympian. She just assumed it would happen on a track.

First came Long Beach State, where her 4x100m relay set the school record.Then UNLV, where the last scholarship was already gone, so she messaged the coach on Instagram and walked on. One of her new teammates, Kaysha Love-Powell , was getting into bobsled. Two years after her final race, Hill posted that she missed the track. Love-Powell replied with one question would she consider the sled?

She almost skipped rookie camp in 2023. She went at the last minute, placed fifth at the push championships and made the World Cup team. Her first World Cup race came in La Plagne, France, which was also Love’s first as a World Cup pilot. By the end of that season, Hill was the top brakewoman in the U.S. That changed the math. If she could get this far with almost no bobsled training, what could full time look like? In 2024 she enlisted in the U.S. Army and joined its World Class Athlete Program to find out. That same year, she and Love finished fourth at the World Championships.

In January 2026, both made the Olympic team. Four of the six women on the U.S. bobsled squad were of African descent, and Hill knew what that could mean to the kids watching at home. In Cortina d’Ampezzo, she and Love finished fifth. One thing about her you won’t see on TV in the back of the sled, at close to 80 miles an hour, she slides with her eyes closed. Next up is 2030, with a medal in mind and pilot training underway. She still carries the line her Long Beach State coach gave her make them say your name.

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20/10/2026

Salomé Kora, Switzerland’s first woman to compete at both the Summer and Winter Olympics. Born in St. Gallen to a father from Benin and a Swiss mother, Kora grew into one of the fastest women her country has ever produced. In 2024 she ran the 100 metres in 10.95 seconds, making her one of only three Swiss women to break eleven seconds. Rio 2016, Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024 made her a three-time Olympian. In Tokyo she was part of the Swiss relay team that finished fourth, narrowly missing a medal.

Bobsleigh had been calling for years, but Kora kept saying no. It was her training partner Alexandra Burghardt, the German sprinter who won Olympic medals in both summer and winter, who finally convinced her. In November 2025, just 75 days before the opening ceremony, she raced down the Olympic track in Cortina for the first time as a push athlete and admitted it was a bit traumatic. She stayed anyway. Three months later she returned to that same track at the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, the most gender-balanced Winter Games in history. On 20 February, pushing for pilot Debora Annen, she made history. Six Swiss men had competed at both Games before her, and Kora became the first woman to join them. The duo finished seventh, an Olympic diploma in her very first season on ice.

Then she went straight back to the track. The winter had drained her body and mind, and the return wasn’t easy, but she found her speed again faster than even she expected. Six months after Cortina she reached the 100 metres final at the European Championships in Birmingham, finishing eighth, and won silver with the Swiss 4x100 metres relay. Ice in February, a European medal in August. Her next stop is Los Angeles 2028.

20/10/2026

Francine Niyonsaba’s silver medal in Rio made her a national hero in Burundi, the first woman from her country ever to stand on an Olympic podium. But many people don’t know that her greatest record came five years later, at a distance she was never supposed to run.

The 800 metres was always her race. It took her from Ruyigi Province in eastern Burundi to African gold at 19, and that same summer to the Olympic final in London, where she is now officially fourth. In 2016 she won the world indoor title in Portland before her silver in Rio, and a second world indoor crown followed in Birmingham in 2018.

In 2019, she spoke publicly about having hyperandrogenism, a natural condition that raises testosterone. World Athletics’ rules made her ineligible for women’s events from 400 metres to the mile at international level unless she lowered her testosterone levels with medication. Francine refused to change who she was. “I didn’t choose to be born like this. I love myself. I will still be Francine. I will not change.”

Instead, she changed distances and continents. She left her training base in Eugene, Oregon, for Kenya, home of the world’s great distance runners. “Meeting Kipchoge in the morning, it gives you motivation!” The move paid off quickly. She qualified for the Tokyo 5,000 metres in only her second race over the distance and finished fifth in the 10,000 metres, an event she had barely raced. A few weeks later she ran the fifth-fastest outdoor 3,000 metres in history, and that September she was crowned Diamond League 5,000 metres champion in Zurich.

Six days later in Zagreb, she broke the 2,000 metres world record in 5:21.56, becoming the first athlete with a difference in s*x development to set a world record. The mark stood until 2024 and remains the African record. “I am feeling seriously wonderful,” she said afterwards. “I came here to do what I have to do. I did it.”

When she landed in Bujumbura, drummers and crowds were waiting at the airport, and people lined the road into the city as she held the Diamond League trophy up through the open roof of her car. “This world record belongs to the whole of Burundi.”

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Written by Agbeniga Alimot Ayobami |Sport Storyteller

18/10/2026

16/10/2026

58 years ago today, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists on the Olympic podium in Mexico City, with Australian Peter Norman standing beside them. To understand that moment, you have to go back one year.

In 1967, Dr. Harry Edwards, a young sociologist at San José State, founded the Olympic Project for Human Rights. His question to athletes of African descent: why win medals for a country that denies you equal rights at home? Edwards called for a boycott of the 1968 Olympics, demanding among other things that Muhammad Ali get his title back and apartheid South Africa be banned.

America was on edge. Vietnam divided the nation, and within two months both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. The boycott never came together, but the idea travelled with Edwards’ students to Mexico City. Two of them were Smith and Carlos.

On October 16, 1968, Smith won the 200 meters in a world record 19.83 seconds, with Norman second and Carlos third. Smith and Carlos had prepared their statement: black socks for poverty, a black scarf for Black pride, beads in memory of those who had been lynched. But Carlos had forgotten his gloves. It was Norman who suggested they share Smith’s pair. That is why, as the anthem played, Smith raised his right fist for Black Power and Carlos his left for Black unity. Norman stood with them, wearing the badge of Edwards’ movement on his chest.

Under pressure from the IOC, the US Olympic Committee removed Smith and Carlos from the team and sent them out of the Olympic Village. At home, they received death threats and found doors closed to them.

Norman faced his own backlash in an Australia still shaped by the White Australia policy. He never competed at the Olympics again. When he passed away in 2006, Smith and Carlos flew to Australia to carry his coffin.

Today, a statue of Smith and Carlos stands at San José State. The silver medal spot is empty. Norman asked for it that way, so visitors can stand where he stood.

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Written by Lotus Marpessa