Sports development is a key component of national development agenda in Nigeria. Hence, Government has enacted policy instruments to provide systematic guidelines to actualize its developmental goals or benchmarks in sports. The essence or significance of sports development is due to the capacity of sports to contribute to the overall good and happiness of the Nigerian society. It is thus as important as development desire in other sectors.  It is worrisome however, that whereas wholehearted efforts are made by Government and stakeholders of the Nigerian project to achieve development objectives in key sectors, when it comes to sports, developmental efforts seem to pale out. Education is the veritable means of achieving development objectives. The purpose of this paper is to briefly x-ray the goodness or fit of the educational system for sports development in Nigeria.

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• Mindset, Motivation, and Metaphor in School and Sport: Bifurcated Beliefs and Behavior in Two Different Achievement Domains by Jason R. Atwood.
• Demographic Profiling of Elite Dressage Riders by Lucy Dumbell, Jenni-Louise Johnson and Donna de Haan.
• From Human Motor to Human Monster: The “Festina Affair” and the Crisis of the Tour de France Hero by Keiran Dunne.
• Organisational Perspectives on Anti-Doping Work in Sport by Alanah Kazlauskas and Helen Hasan.
• A Comparison of Two Instructional Methods for Teaching the Racquetball Forehand to Novices by Jeffrey McClung and Kelly Ambrose.
• Approaching the Summit: Understanding Motivations of Recreational Risky Behavior by Christopher L. Newman, Steven W. Kopp and Kenneth Bates.
• The Effects of Music on Health Related Fitness and General: Health of University Female Physical Education Students by Parivash Nourbakhsh and Hossein Sepasi.
• ‘Taking the next step’: Social Capital and the Development of Elite Women’s Football Players in South Australia by Edoardo G.F. Rosso.
• Sport Events as a Tourist Attraction: A Study of the Champions Youth Cup in Malaysia by Aminuddin Yusof, Parilah M. Shah and Soh Kim Geok.

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Abstract: As a sport fan, it is easy to get caught up in the mood of the crowd leading to various forms of unexpected behavior. Being a part of the crowd can also lead to judicial decisions and civil action. Epideictic rhetoric, the rhetoric of praise and blame, is traditionally connected to official settings and formal situations as a means of unifying a community. However, drawing on the behavior of hockey fans demonstrates that fan behavior is actually a form of epideictic rhetoric. Not only are fans taught the favored virtues of the sport and community, but these virtues then become tools for official decision processes beyond the sporting arena, particularly through the metaphor of sports in conjunction with the rhetoric of inclusion and exclusion. The implications of this classification of fan behavior lies not only in an emphasized importance of fans, but also in the relevance of the common fan to judicial and deliberative acts. Specifically, the actions of fans once thought to be momentary and situated can now take their place as social movement.

Dear FIFA,

You have been called many unpleasant things in recent days. You’ve been accused of being corrupt, incompetent, a litany of things not fit for print, and everything in between.

Now it’s my turn: You’re hypocritical.

Believe it or not, none of my feelings have anything to do with awarding the World Cup to Russia and Qatar, no matter how superior other candidates were. What set me off was a remark by your secretary general, Jerome Valcke. Just days after you awarded the next two World Cups, he told the Agence France-Presse news agency that it had been “a political decision to open up onto the world.” And that, in fact, bringing the tournament to South Africa was a decision based on political considerations, too.

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There hasn’t been a time in professional sports where the roles of many athletes have been so diverse and often confusing regarding the image they are to portray to the public. This past Sunday’s games were a great example of those roles and the blurred definitions they’ve taken on as a result. Our sports figures are required to wear many hats but each hat is to be worn at staunchly different times. On the field, their role is often defined as gladiators or warriors with the heart of lions that take to the field eliminating everything in their path for 60 minutes. Before and after the games they are to conduct and carry themselves as business men with the elegance and poise of well mannered gentlemen groomed for success. And then there’s the element of side show act which comes into play sometimes before, during and after games as they attempt to entertain their fans and the world that has placed a magnifying glass over them. All of these roles have their place in the lives of those with their level of success, but what happens when these roles don’t appeal to the public and conflict with the will of the people at the wrong time?

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Volume 1 of The International Journal of Sport and Society is now complete.

The entire contents of the Journal can be accessed or individual issues may be browsed:

• The International Journal of Sport and Society Volume 1, Issue 1
• The International Journal of Sport and Society Volume 1, Issue 2
• The International Journal of Sport and Society Volume 1, Issue 3
• The International Journal of Sport and Society Volume 1, Issue 4

Zurich, Switzerland — How convoluted are the politics surrounding this Thursday’s FIFA vote to award the hosts for World Cups 2018 and ’22? Well, the first person I saw upon leaving airport customs here was Bora Milutinovic, the peripatetic Serbian-born, Mexican-based coach who managed the U.S. at World Cup ’94.

“My friend! My friend!” Bora squawked, and it’s true. Bora is everybody’s friend. He remains tight with the U.S. Soccer Federation, which is bidding to host World Cup ’22 (to be awarded with World Cup ’18 on Thursday). But Bora is publicly supporting the competing bid of Qatar — for a nice fee — joining other celebrity endorsers for the wealthy Arab emirate that include Zinédine Zidane, Sir Alex Ferguson and Pep Guardiola.

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The latest issue of  The International Journal of Sport and Society includes:

• Exploring the Effects of a 12 Weeks Physical Activity Program on Emotional Intelligence and Mental Health among Visually Impaired Children in India by N. K. Rathee and Anil Sharma.
• Accelerating Training Using Interactive Neuro-Educational Technologies: Applications to Archery, Golf and Rifle Marksmanship by Chris Berka, Adrienne Behneman, Natalie Kintz, Robin Johnson and Giby Raphael.
• Sociology of Sports Mega Events: Sports Diplomacy and FIFA World Cup; ‘Global Peace Building Initiative’ by Bheki Hlabane.
• The Senior Woman Administrator Designation in the NCAA by Jennifer Lee Hoffman.
• The Changing Attitudes, Expectations and Traits of Parents of Intercollegiate Athletes by Brad Sago.
• Stakeholders’ Views on Sport Education and Peace in a Serbian Village School by Katherine Mikic.

Conservative commentators have been bemoaning the decline of the American man almost as long as the American man has been in existence. As it turns out, they are right: Men these days are a mere shadow of what we once were. We’ve become physically weaker than our ancestors. We’re slower runners. We can’t jump as high as we once did. As Peter McAllister, an archaeologist with the University of Western Australia and the author of the new book “Manthropology: The Science of Why the Modern Male Is Not the Man He Used to Be,” puts it, we might be the “sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet.” I, for one, blame guyliner.

“Manthropology,” a tongue-in-cheek look at the science of maleness, examines what recent discoveries in the fields of archaeology and anthropology can teach us about the state of modern masculinity. Ice Age aboriginal tribesmen, he discovers, were able to run long distances at approximately the same speed as modern-day Olympic sprinters. Classic Grecian rowers could attain speeds of 7.5 miles an hour, which today’s rowers can only attain for short bursts of time. Our culture may be obsessed with muscles: He notes that, since 1982, G.I. Joe’s Sgt. Savage has gotten three times more muscular and Barbie’s Ken now has a chest circumference attainable by only one in 50 men, but the luxuries of our contemporary lifestyle have caused a steady decline in genuine physical power. The book may be a light, breezy work, but it puts our current debate around masculinity into fascinating context.

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New Delhi – The stories come in from all over India. In the northeastern state of Manipur, Mary Kom’s boxing academy gets queries every week from young girls in the insurgency-torn region who hope to train with Ms. Kom and emulate her achievements as World Boxing Champion.

“People thought I was crazy when I began training,” Ms. Kom said at a news conference after she won her fifth consecutive championship title in September in Bridgetown, Barbados. “But I never let their criticism affect me.

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