Orson Swindle Posts

Antonio Puerta, the Sevilla wingback who suffered two heart attacks yesterday including an on-field cardiac arrest, has died in hospital today at the age of 22. Puerta collapsed on-field yesterday during a match with Getafe, but walked off under his own power before suffering a second heart attack in the locker room that required resuscitation by medical staff.

Sevilla's match against AEK later today has been cancelled due to the tragedy. And that is the right word: tragedy. A 22 year old with all the promise in the world has something completely outside of his control-- arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy--end his life before it's even really started, robbing a wife of her husband, a child of its father, and Sevilla fans of a budding young star in front of their eyes. Tragedy is a word with too much mileage, sure--but with something this random and stunning, it's the only word to use.Sorry, No Photos

Sevilla's Antonio Puerta collapsed during the first half of a match with Getafe on Saturday, suffering what doctors only referred to as "cardiac arrest" caused by "repetitive serious ventricular arrhythmias." In short: his heart's not beating right, they don't know why, and it's way, way serious. Sky Sports is reporting that Sevilla's president is calling them "heart attacks" now.

We warn you that though lacking gore, the video below is still quite disturbing in that it features a perfectly healthy athlete in top condition collapsing unconscious for no discernible reason.

Though he walked off the field with assistance, Puerta suffered a second cardiac arrest in the locker room and had to be revived by medical staff. Puerto remains in critical condition in a hospital in Seville, waiting out the effects of the heart attacks, including what doctors referred to as "brain suffering."

(Sky Sports is reporting that Sevilla's president is calling them "heart attacks" now. )

The Japanese do not half-step when it comes to anything, most especially video games, where hardcore gamer geeks have oohed and ahhed over game systems that come out in Japan years before they hit the American market.

So to those who remain convinced that while you pound away at your XBox 360, there sits a Japanese kid with a chip in his head who's playing Halo 4 in his mind during math class, this should come as no surprise: Japanese arm wrestling machines will break your freakin' arm in half.

A Japanese game maker said Wednesday it would withdraw arm-wrestling machines from arcades after three players -- two of them foreigners -- broke their arms..."We had done careful simulations on the possibility of injuries before putting it on sale, but unexpected accidents can happen with game machines when people are too excited or fail to follow instructions," a company spokeswoman said. "But I'm afraid some foreign nationals couldn't understand the instructions well as it was written only in Japanese," she said.

If we're to learn anything from this, it's that you always need to read the instructions before using anything. This may be standard operating procedure in Japan, but like most Americans we'd be hogtied if we read the instruction manual before using anything: toasters, rocket launchers, cars, that home death ray we've been dying to put together...

So we'll just shorten it to this: if you're using a Japanese Arm Wrestling machine, and you start to lose, just let go. Because it will break your arm in half and not even give you so much as a Hello Kitty doll as an apology.

You can buy a lot of things on discount. Plane tickets. Dodgy produce. An autographed Mike Vick...well, anything, really. It's not always a good idea, of course, but we're not saying it is. We're simply saying you can buy all of those things on the cheap if you're timing's right.

Add one more thing to the list: an Everest Expedition.

Nepal will slash climbing fees for Mount Everest in the off-season to lure mountaineers to the world's tallest peak and boost tourism hit by years of a Maoist conflict, a senior minister said on Wednesday.

Take the offer now, even though most climbers prefer not to go in the fall and winter because of the lack of warm weather and less sunlight than climbers might prefer. But who needs warm weather and sunlight at 29,000 feet? Wimps, that's who. If you can't stand fifty below for a little fun, you need to consider some wimpy peak in the Andes, son.

You won't see him hauling in boatloads of striped bass like competitive bass fishing's Michael Iaconelli--or screaming after hauling one in, either--in fact, you shouldn't see Putin reeling in any fish at all after his performance as an angler last week in the Yenisei River with Prince Albert of Monaco.

Despite the carefully leaked photos of Putin practically glowing with health (pun intended) and fishing shirtless on Siberia's Yenisei River, Russia's most muscular of presidents caught exactly zero of the river's prized taimen, the chief sport fish of the area that allegedly grows to up to 200 lbs in weight.

Keith Elliott of the Independent says the pic screams of shameless photo op, similar to old photos of Mao Tse-Tung swimming in the Yangtze River to demonstrate his virility. First, Putin's holding the fishing rod by the very end of the rod, which no sensible angler would do--you're begging to have it yanked from your hand. Second, going shirtless in Siberia in the summer equals a serious loss of blood thanks to hordes of mosquitoes. Barring a dousing in industrial grade DEET or other insect repellent, Putin's merely showing off for the cameras.

As Keith Elliott notes, pointing this out is just asking for a radioactive sushi lunch. We, too, will avoid taking any free lunches or drinks over the next few days.

As Fark.com so eloquently put it: "Norwegian Cliffs 3, Australia 0." A 28 year-old Aussie base jumper died in Norway this week when his chute failed to open during a BASE jump from the cliffs at Sunndal in western Norway. BASE, for those who did not pay attention during the EXTREME 1990s, stands for Building, Antenna, Span, and Earth, the four types of structures divers leap from in the sport.

While the jumper did puncture our theory of complete and total Australian invincibility by dying during the jump, we can only hope reports surface of him taunting the ground "to hit him with your best shot" just before impact.

The real tragedy: if only the jumper had been wearing the infamous "wingsuit," he could have soared out into the fjords, where he could have at least stood a miniscule chance of surviving a water landing. If you're thinking about ever trying anything you see in the video below...call us. You sound like 100% fortified fun.

The machine that is United States Women's Soccer grinds on, merciless and scoring buckets of goals without the marquee names of Hamm, Foudy, and Chastain. Who needs them when you have Abby Wambach, who has scored 75 goals in 94 games, including 34 on headers, a stat that is testimony to her height, strength, and relentless approach to the beautiful game. Her roommate's best comparison is that Wambach is "like a raging bull."

Wambach was on the rampage on Monday, scoring two of the United States' six goals in the 6-1 World Cup preliminary trouncing of New Zealand in Chicago. The Americans fired 10 shots at goal in the first half alone, springing to a 3-0 lead before the break. Midfielder Carli Lloyd added two goals, as well.

The Americans now make a swing toward Asia for a September 11th match with North Korea in Chengdu. Hopefully the team can acclimatize to the rich, "spicy" Olympic air while they're there.

Proof positive that doping scandals have bent the once-upward trend of cycling's growth as a sport in the US and perhaps abroad: the quiet announcement this past week that Discovery Racing, the dominant team Lance Armstrong rode to seven Tour de France titles, was disbanding and ceasing operations.

The leadership cadre at the team (which included Armstrong) announced they were stepping aside for a number of reasons, and most definitely not because they could not find a sponsor. If you'll pull out your political communications handbook, it will tell you that almost certainly means it's because the group could not find a sponsor for the team, even though Lance Armstrong says they had a deal "90 percent" done before negotiations broke down.

Consider if Man U, the Yankees, or the Dallas Cowboys vanished overnight. That may be exaggerating just a tad for effect, but that's effectively what just happened to cycling: an instant disappearance of what was the most dominant squad in the sport over the past decade. That's the cost of doping scandals made horribly clear on the market, with the most valuable commodity cycling has to offer left sitting on the shelf to expire, potential sponsors too scared of the future of the sport to even consider taking a flyer on the immediate future of the sport.

(Reader Clare T. Pass points out that Lance won his first six with U.S. Postal, not discovery. Sponsors change, but the team remains the same, a clarification that needs to be made. However, the entity owned by Tailwind, Inc that was called U.S. Postal/Discovery is what's been broken up here.--OS)

Unusual Maps has a fascinating illustration of the world filtered by the number of Olympic medals won per million people. The results surprise: among the top countries for number of medal athletes per million you'll find Australia, Norway, Belarus, Cuba, Bulgaria, and Hungary as the leaders in producing Olympians per capita in the world.

There are some logical reasons for this. Cuba boasts a large, state-sponsored Olympic program based on the old Soviet model that cranked out medals during the Cold War as a symbol of national pride and international status. Norway dominates winter sports, perhaps the most Eurocentric of the Olympics in that you need to be from a cold place, and you have to be able to afford expensive equipment and facilities. And as for the Eastern European contingent, we're positing that they're still cruising on the fumes of the old state-sponsored Communist athletic programs. (In Romania's case, gymnastics.)

The Australian contingent, though, may just benefit from being a small but sport-mad population that's spread across a vast territory. Besides our theory of innate Aussie awesomeness, this might be the only explanation for their high ranking.

The other discovery from the map, and an unsurprising one: it takes
money to succeed in the Olympics. Poor countries are all a uniform
blue on the map, indicating a dearth of medal winners per million.

Being a cricket superstar from Trinidad certainly has its perks, but there are distinct disadvantages to being one of the greatest batsmen in the history of the sport and coming from a small island: everyone asks you for autographs, you probably get hit up for personal loans more often than you'd like, and sometimes people hold your relatives for ransom.

That last one's especially troublesome, and it's exactly what happened to legendary cricketer Brian Lara. Lara's niece was abducted during an attempted carjacking in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad when thieves realized she might earn a hefty ransom. She was held for a week until Trinidadian police found the young woman tied up in a house this past Sunday, abandoned by her kidnappers, perhaps because such a high-profile abduction brought even more attention than they'd wanted in the first place.

Lara was out of the country for the whole ordeal. Trinidad, like many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, has a bit of kidnapping problem, with the abduction of Lara's niece being the seventh in the country in 2007.