Liverpool upset Barcelona to advance to the Champions League final. NPR’s Noel King talks to Wright Thompson of ESPN The Magazine who says the soccer team “perfectly reflects” the city of Liverpool.

NOEL KING, HOST:

Last night, Liverpool’s soccer team did what it was not supposed to be able to do.

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UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #1: Go on and take it quickly – Origi.

(CHEERING)

UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #1: Yeah. We got it.

UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #2: Yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #1: Over (unintelligible). We got it.

UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #2: Yes, you did.

KING: Liverpool beat Barcelona to advance to the Champions League finals – and not just beat them. Liverpool crushed Barcelona 4-0. Barcelona is widely considered to be the best club in the world. This is a very big deal for the city of Liverpool, and Wright Thompson is here to tell us why. He’s a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. He’s joining us from his home in Oxford, Miss. Good morning, Wright.

WRIGHT THOMPSON: Good morning.

KING: All right. That tape was delightful. For the uninitiated, what are the Champions League finals? Why was this such a big deal?

THOMPSON: Well, you know, this was to get them into the Champions League finals, which is a league made up of the best teams from the leagues all over the world. And so it’s an honor for teams just to be asked to compete in it. And it really is the best of the best playing each other. And it’s, you know – as you could hear the sound of their voices, it’s a very big deal.

KING: Yeah, it was – that was terrific. It wasn’t just a win, right? It was a comeback against Barcelona.

THOMPSON: Correct. They play home and away. And so they lost 3-0 in Barcelona, which means that they had to win 4-0 at home. So I mean, even if they’d won 3-0 last night, it wouldn’t have been enough. And so it really was a miraculous comeback.

KING: They had to crush them. You were recently in Liverpool. You wrote a long story – a long piece called “Liverpool Rising.” Will you explain why this team is so important to the city? Tell us about Liverpool and what this team means to them.

THOMPSON: You know, Liverpool is a dock city. It is an industrial city that was in decline for a very long time. I mean, I have a book out that’s a – right now called “The Cost Of These Dreams.” It’s a collection of stories very much like this Liverpool story.

And there’s a line in the intro I’ve been thinking about for the last 24 hours. And I wrote an essay as a preface, and it talked about, you know – the line was these tribal ideas of home and family and sporting events played by strangers. And that absolutely is what’s happening because if you start in the ’80s with the decline of the docks and Toxteth riots and the city’s, you know, really left-wing reaction to Margaret Thatcher and on and on and on, so many of these things that Liverpudlians – which is a delightful word to say – feel about themselves are represented in this team that takes the field at their stadium called Anfield. And it is very, very tribal, which is interesting because Liverpool is one of the few places I’ve ever been that manages to be a modern, multicultural, global city, and yet retain enough of its tribal soul to still feel like itself.

KING: So people in this city really hang their hopes on this team.

THOMPSON: They hang many things on them. They hang hopes. They find a great deal of joy that they are poised to finish first or second in the English League, which they haven’t won in 29 years. And that will happen or not happen this Sunday. And I think that if you ask fans around Liverpool – that, yes, they desperately want this long-awaited title. They desperately want to win the Champions League final that’s coming up on June 1.

KING: Well, I’ll be rooting for them. Wright Thompson’s new book is called “The Cost Of These Dreams: Sports Stories And Other Serious Business.”

Thanks so much.

THOMPSON: Thank you.

[POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: In this story, Wright Thompson incorrectly says the Champions League is made up of the best teams from leagues all over the world. The Champions League is a tournament involving only the top European clubs.]

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

The U.S. women’s national soccer team begins its defense of the 2015 World Cup title in June. The U.S. women’s team is ranked first in the world while the U.S. men’s team struggles internationally.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

The one-month countdown starts today for soccer fans. On June 7, the Women’s World Cup opens in France. The U.S. is favored to defend its title from the last tournament in 2015. If the women do win, it would be their fourth World Cup championship. They have never finished lower than third since the women’s tournament began in 1991. As NPR’s Tom Goldman reports, that success is in sharp contrast to the U.S. men’s team, which struggles internationally.

TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: The last time the U.S. women’s national team played – a month ago, in Los Angeles – the Americans thumped Belgium 6-0. The lopsided win thrilled the nearly 21,000 fans who packed the stadium almost as much as the halftime show did.

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UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #1: Please stand up, get loud and welcome to the field the 1999 women’s World Cup champions.

GOLDMAN: That seminal championship clinched 20 years ago turned Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastain, Briana Scurry and the rest of the ’99ers into soccer folk heroes and women’s sports icons. Their halftime appearance also was a reminder of the current group’s pedigree. Then, now – soccer greatness everywhere. Standing on the stadium concourse wearing an American flag onesie, Chelsea Holmes drank it all in with her nephew Mason.

CHELSEA HOLMES: And so I was telling him – he’s 10 – that when I was 10, they won the 1999 one and wanted to show him that, you know, girls can do it just as much, if not better.

GOLDMAN: At the highest level of national team competition, the women have done it better. Three World Cup and four Olympic titles – none for the men. The current separation is stark. The U.S. women won the World Cup four years ago and are the betting favorites to repeat. The U.S. failed to qualify for last year’s men’s tournament. Why is this? If success inspires success, the women have a distinct advantage. For soccer-playing boys rising through the ranks, the closest thing to a rallying cry is the 2002 men’s team run to the World Cup quarterfinals. When U.S. midfielder Allie Long was coming up, she had a choice of champions – the 1991 U.S. team that won the first women’s World Cup and the ’99ers.

ALLIE LONG: What they achieved – I think that feeling that you got watching that World Cup is like what we all dream of feeling – that moment of the ball going in. And you’re a champion of the world and seeing how the world just, like, lit up.

GOLDMAN: Internal team workings may be another plus for the women, says Long’s teammate Crystal Dunn.

CRYSTAL DUNN: The key to our success is our culture. So maybe for them, it’s just establishing and repeatedly going out every single day with that chip on the shoulder and just knowing who you are as a unit.

GOLDMAN: Taylor Twellman was part of the men’s national team culture from 2002 to 2008. Twellman is ESPN’s lead soccer analyst. He says the U.S. men are as passionate and committed as the women when it comes to the ultimate goal.

TAYLOR TWELLMAN: I would have given anything to win a World Cup.

GOLDMAN: But the women and men, he says, have played in different soccer worlds. Spurred by Title IX, U.S. women found their footing in footy while women in traditional soccer countries couldn’t play.

TWELLMAN: The women are light-years ahead of men because they were the leaders of the world while the men have been trying to catch up with the rest of the world.

GOLDMAN: The U.S. women still are leaders of their world. They’re ranked No. 1. But challengers are closing the gap.

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UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #2: Staniforth scores for England.

GOLDMAN: In March, England won the SheBelieves Cup, finishing ahead of the U.S., as well as highly ranked Japan and Brazil. The world is catching up to the U.S. women, and head coach Jill Ellis likes it. Iron sharpens iron, she was quoted recently as saying. She picked a World Cup roster heavy on experience, knowing that will be important in tough, tight matches. The Americans begin their World Cup defense in France on June 11.

Tom Goldman, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF NEW ORDER SONG, “WORLD IN MOTION (THE B-SIDE)”)

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro talks to Madeleine Pape, who once competed against Caster Semenya, about the issue of female runners with unusually high levels of testosterone.

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

Caster Semenya won what may be her last 800-meter race this past Friday in Doha. Her dominance in the event may be at an end because of new regulations that come into effect Wednesday. The new rules ban women like Semenya, with naturally occurring high levels of testosterone, from running certain events in the women’s competition unless they take medicine to reduce those levels. When asked whether she would submit to the new regulations, Semenya replied, hell no.

Madeleine Pape was an Olympic runner for Australia who once competed against Semenya. She’s now a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And she told us about when she competed against Semenya in 2009 at the IAAF World Championships in Berlin.

MADELEINE PAPE: I lost to Semenya, amongst other people in the heats. And I was, after that, very quick to join the chorus of voices around me that were beginning to accuse Semenya of having an unfair advantage. And that really reached fever points on the evening of the final, when the IAAF, who’s our governing body in track and field, announced publicly that they were going to be conducting investigations into Semenya’s biological sex. So that really set the tone for how people then proceeded to talk about her.

And for me, you know, I guess I wasn’t really encountering any alternative points of view. That was the single point of view that was being voiced around me at the time. So I certainly fell in the camp of jumping on the bandwagon and repeating the things that were being said around me.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: And how did you come to change your mind?

PAPE: Yeah, that was a – it was quite a long journey, actually. About a year after those World Championships, I sustained a career-ending injury, and I decided to move to the United States to start a Ph.D. in sociology.

And I happened to chance upon this topic and the very vast literature that’s been written about it from the point of view of women’s sports advocates who have examined at length the very many scientific and ethical dilemmas that surround the exclusion of women who have high testosterone.

Initially, I was very confronted by this discovery. And it really was over time that my own view shifted. And I would say that something that was really critical in that process was meeting women who had high testosterone, becoming friends with women with high testosterone and thinking about how they were personally impacted by these kinds of practices in sport.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: This is a story, of course, about regulating women with naturally high testosterone levels. But it’s also important to remember that this is also a story about one particular athlete and one particular woman, Caster Semenya. There is the issue of her sex in this, but there’s also the issue of her race in this. Do you think that plays a factor in your view?

PAPE: To be honest, I think those concerns are fair. I mean, I think there are questions to be answered about why Caster Semenya, in particular, has attracted this level of scrutiny and this level of determination on the part of the IAAF to exclude her from competing because when we compare her margin over her competitors to other successful athletes of this era, they enjoyed greater margins over their competitors. And yet, for some reason, we fixated on Caster Semenya as the athlete whose margin of victory has become problematic for us.

So I think it’s a complicated issue, but I think it is very fair to be asking why women of color from the global south and from sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, are overrepresented amongst the women who’ve been accused of having an unfair advantage.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: And there is, of course, the issue of her sexuality. Semenya is a lesbian.

PAPE: You know, when we think about why Semenya, and why have her performances, in particular, raised the ire of a number of people, you have to wonder whether sexuality plays into it. I mean, she’s openly a lesbian. She is – I would describe her as nonconforming in terms of her gender presentation.

And I think the sport of track and field, as much as I love this sport, and, you know, it’s the No. 1 love in my life, I think we have a little way to go still when it comes to accepting both diverse gender identities, and also abandoning our ideas about heterosexuality.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: The words fair and unfair get thrown around a lot in this conversation. What do people actually mean when they call something fair?

PAPE: I think really what underlies a lot of people’s motivations in this, you know, no matter which point of view you adhere to, people really want to see women’s sport get stronger and be valued.

And so what I look to for inspiration, really, on this topic is the leadership that we’ve seen from women’s sports organizations, like the Women’s Sports Foundation here in the U.S., also the International Working Group on Women and Sport, activists like Billie Jean King, who have spoken out in support of Caster Semenya and who see Semenya’s presence as a good thing for women’s sport.

So I follow their lead in saying that, you know, women’s sport will benefit from Semenya being a part of it, and we have room to include her here.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: That was Madeleine Pape. She was an Olympic runner for Australia who once competed against Caster Semenya. Thank you so very much.

PAPE: Thanks so much for having me

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Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

The Kentucky Derby is fast. Really fast. The famed horse race is often won by fractions of a second. This has owners, trainers and jockeys looking for any way they can cut time.

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

Tomorrow marks the 145th Run for the Roses, better known as the Kentucky Derby and often referred to as the fastest two minutes in sports. In past years, the race has been won by less than a second. While there’s plenty of debate over the impact of performance-enhancing drugs, Ashlie Stevens of member station WFPL in Louisville wondered – what are some other ways jockeys, owners and trainers shave seconds off race time?

ASHLIE STEVENS, BYLINE: In the days leading up to the Kentucky Derby, horses and their trainers parade through the paddock on their way to and from the track for practice runs.

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A. STEVENS: For now, the horses are moving at a pretty slow pace.

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A. STEVENS: But on Saturday, that won’t be the case. These horses are 1,000-pound elite athletes. And this race is just as competitive as any marathon or Olympic swim. Since its start in 1875, there are numerous examples of the derby being won by a fraction of a second. Which made me wonder – has anyone ever shaved their racehorse to get a better time, like how some human endurance athletes shave excess body hair to eliminate drag?

CHRIS GOODLETT: To my knowledge, there’s never been hair shaved off a horse to save seconds.

A. STEVENS: That’s Chris Goodlett, the chief curator at the Kentucky Derby Museum.

GOODLETT: I don’t know if it’s written rule – maybe because of the absurdity – but my guess would be it would be frowned upon.

A. STEVENS: Goodlett says, ultimately, the Jockey Club, the governing body of professional horse racing, probably wouldn’t approve of a bald horse. They can get sunburns, and owners are prevented from making any major alterations to a horse’s appearance – though there are plenty of other modifications trainers and jockeys have made for faster runs, such as using lighter horseshoes. Gary Stevens is a retired three-time Kentucky Derby-winning jockey.

GARY STEVENS: They’re not steel shoes. They are aluminum. And they are very, very lightweight. And they have toe grips on the front and grips on the rear end as well.

A. STEVENS: Stevens also says jockeys’ colorful shirts have undergone some aerodynamic updates since the 1980s. The silks now fit much tighter, like what bicyclists wear.

TERESA ESTES: The aero fits tighter to the body, so you don’t have it flapping in the wind when the horse is running.

A. STEVENS: That’s Teresa Estes. She and her business partner run Triple Crown Silks in Winchester, Ky. They are designing silks for three Derby hopefuls this year. Estes says many racehorse owners now want something more tailored to the jockeys’ bodies to reduce drag.

ESTES: In the satins, you can’t do that because there’s no stretch to it.

A. STEVENS: More of their clients are shifting away from those traditional race day materials to more aerodynamic fabrics.

Even with all the improvements, jockey Gary Stevens says a large part of the Kentucky Derby is still the luck of the draw, specifically the draw for post positions, or which gate the horses get to start out of. The worst one is closest to the inside rail.

G. STEVENS: And the one hole is dreaded in the Kentucky Derby because if you don’t break well – if you don’t get a good start, it’s like a giant wave of 19 other horses trying to get over close to the rail to safe ground going into that first turn.

A. STEVENS: And even with a good post position, sleeker clothing and lighter gear, Chris Goodlett of the Kentucky Derby Museum says there’s one more thing to try.

GOODLETT: Trainers will all joke with us that if you want more seconds – you want to do a little bit better in the race, you need to buy a faster horse.

A. STEVENS: While having the fastest horse is really the only sure bet for winning the Derby, that won’t keep trainers and jockeys from trotting out new tricks to increase speed.

For NPR News, I’m Ashlie Stevens in Louisville.

(SOUNDBITE OF PARQUET COURTS’ “WIDE AWAKE”)

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.