Game theory

“THE story of how all the pieces fit together seems like fiction,” admitted Richard McLaren, a Canadian lawyer, on December 9th as he unveiled the findings of a second investigation commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency into state-sponsored doping in Russia. But he found the evidence of an “institutionalised and disciplined medal-winning strategy and conspiracy” to be ultimately “immutable and conclusive.

MIKE TROUT has been the world’s best baseball player ever since his first day as a major-league regular, as a 20-year-old in April 2012. The announcement last month that he had won his second annual Most Valuable Player award in the American League was a fait accompli; the real question is what the voters were thinking in the three seasons that he finished second, given that he should have been number one in every single year of his career.

ON THE afternoon of April 15th 1989, 96 fans of Liverpool football club were killed in a human crush at the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield. Their deaths were the result of a series of mistakes made in the run-up to a game by police, who directed too many supporters into the Leppings Lane end, one of the ground’s heavily-packed standing areas. This vast loss of life, the worst such incident in British sporting history, proved to be a tipping point as concerns about spectator safety escalated during the 1980s.

ON NOVEMBER 13th the New York Cosmos won the North American Soccer League (NASL) title, beating the Indy Eleven on penalty kicks in the final. In every other football-playing country in the world, their triumph would have been cause for outright jubilation: the champions of the second division invariably rise up to the top tier the following season, where they benefit both from the challenge of facing the toughest competition and from the windfall profits associated with higher gate, broadcast and merchandise income.

“IT’S my life. I love MMA. MMA is what the world should be,” said Alex Santana, a huge fan of mixed martial arts (MMA)—a fast-growing combat sport that uses techniques from boxing, wrestling, judo, kickboxing and Brazilian jiu-jitsu. He admires its honour code. He coaches it to children and goes to as many bouts run by Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), the world’s largest MMA promotion company, as possible. On November 12th he had flown to New York from Los Angeles, without buying a ticket, in the hopes of witnessing UFC 205—the first MMA event ever held in New York state, which legalised the sport earlier this year.

SAMAR KHAN grew up playing cricket in Afghanistan with his brother. When his family fled from Kabul to Germany four years ago, after his father was targeted by the Taliban, one of his priorities was to carry on playing. He found a club in Cologne and in early July made his debut for the Germany under-19 team against Denmark in Copenhagen. “Cricket gives me a feeling of home,” he says, “and is the reason I am integrated into life in Germany.”

Of the 1m immigrants who registered in Germany last year, 154,000 were from Afghanistan. As a result, the number of cricket teams and players in Germany has trebled.

AT 6PM on a sweltering weekday evening, a street junction in Ahmedabad in western India is abuzz. On a footpath outside a big stadium, a hawker peddles colourful jerseys and wrist bands as young men line up to have the country’s flag painted on their faces. Selfies abound. A long queue snakes around the stadium’s corner, waiting for its gates to be opened. Tilak Patel, an engineering student, has driven six hours with his friends to reach the venue. “It’s worth it,” he says on a day when India is set to take on England—not in a game of cricket, but in the 12-nation World Cup tournament of Kabaddi, an ancient Indian contact sport that has gripped the country.