You know LeBron, Serena and Messi.

But do you know Pepe, Flame and Jenga?

They’re another kind of superathlete on a one-name basis with fans — sled dogs preparing for the Iditarod race.

Blair Braverman, the team’s musher, will take the dogs out for their first Iditarod when the race starts Saturday, braving some 938 miles of trail across Alaska, from Anchorage to Nome.

It’s a grueling race that took the last winner 9 1/2 days to complete, with unpredictable conditions, mandatory rest breaks and the notorious Happy River Steps, three near-vertical drops early in the course — just one of the many possible pitfalls for mushers trying not to crash.

But this rookie is ready. Braverman has shipped food out ahead of time on bush planes, studied the weather, repaired equipment and made and remade plans.

“How can you not overthink a 900-mile race?” she tells NPR’s Ari Shapiro. “There’s just so many different things that have to fall into place. It’s like chess in the snow.”

Braverman, a dog-sledder, author and correspondent for Outside magazine, is one of 17 women racing in this year’s Iditarod, a record 32.7 percent of the field. ­­­

“Mushing is one of the only sports where men and women compete together at elite level,” she says. “We are taken seriously as athletes because there’s no chance for people to tell themselves we’re not on the same playing field.”

But she doesn’t consider herself just an athlete. She’s also a coach, a nutritionist, a parent, even a veterinary tech for her team. All her dogs, 14 hand-picked racers from a group of 20 that she has been training, have undergone physicals as extensive as the preparations for any professional athlete in the NBA or NFL, from electrocardiograms to vaccinations.

“They were gone over with a fine-tooth comb by this great volunteer team of vets,” Braverman says. “And I’m happy to report that they all have top marks in all their health records, and they’re doing great.”

The dogs are a sharp but motley crew of strong personalities. Pepe is the steady, “mature” head of the pack. Flame is Braverman’s “shadow” and has raced with her in every qualifier. Jenga, Flame’s half sister, “doesn’t suffer fools.”

And there are others, like Boudica, who loves gentle kisses; Colbert, a “big hunk” who is afraid of heights; and Grinch, who didn’t make the Iditarod team because he had some directional trouble. On a recent outing, he stopped in his tracks and refused to run after Braverman turned the sled around to head north instead of south.

“He has the biggest heart,” she says. “The most energy. And he’s incredibly stupid.”

It’s clear from the way she talks about them that Braverman loves her dogs. And that love affair led her to start writing and tweeting. She describes the racers like you’d write about old friends, sharing their quirks, thrills and setbacks with tens of thousands of followers. She calls her followers #UglyDogs, co-opting a phrase lobbed at her online.

“A Twitter troll actually told me, ‘Go back to your ugly dogs, Karen.’ ” (Her name isn’t Karen.) “But I thought it was a beautiful sentence. … Then some fans of the team said, ‘We should be the ugly dogs because you’ll always come back to us.’ So it took off.”

Braverman suspects her account has gained traction because dog-sledding is a rural sport that takes place mostly out of sight — and her dogs give fans a way in. She spares no detail, from how to put booties on a dog that doesn’t like her feet touched to her crew’s bowel movements.

“People are getting to know these dogs as pets, as friends, and they’re also seeing them as elite athletes,” she says. “It’s like rooting for your favorite sports team, but they all happen to be dogs.”

One of the biggest misconceptions that she’s trying to disperse? That the dogs are disposable. These are animals she has been with for years, she says, and she knows each of them as individuals.

“I think rather than telling people how much we love these dogs,” she says, “they can just feel how much we love these dogs and how much we’re with them every step of the way.”

Braverman’s long days of preparation are winding down quickly. The Iditarod kicks in the Alaskan midmorning on Saturday, and she admits it’s terrifying to think about the race ahead.

But, she adds, “if I think about being out there with my dogs, who are my best friends and my family, I just get so much strength from that.” The long days, the sleep deprivation, the subzero temperatures — she’s tackling all of that with Pepe, Flame and the rest of her dogs. And that’s all the courage she needs.

The broadcast version of this story was produced by Dave Blanchard and edited by Matt Ozug.

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With just a little more than three months to go until the Women’s World Cup in France, the U.S. squad is looking for proof it has all the right ingredients to affirm its ranking as number one in the world. But as the team left the pitch Wednesday night after a 2-2 tie with Japan, they acknowledged there’s still some tinkering to do – and that if they’re to defend their World Cup title, they can’t afford to make many mistakes.

It was the first day of the SheBelieves Cup, a tournament hosted by the U.S. in the run-up to the World Cup, which kicks off June 7. The game offered a rematch of the 2015 World Cup final, when the U.S. beat Japan 5-2. But both squads have changed significantly since then, and this four-team tournament provides a chance for each team’s coach to try new lineups — and see who will be making the trip to France.

But summer felt far away on this cold night outside Philadelphia, as a biting wind rolled off the Delaware River. Many players wore gloves, and spectators hesitated to take off their hats for the singing of the national anthem.

There were many young fans in the stands to catch the doubleheader — an earlier game saw England defeat Brazil 2-1 — and a high pitched chorus rose in excitement every time Megan Rapinoe, Tobin Heath, or Alex Morgan started on a breakaway run in the game’s early minutes.

Things started to go the Americans’ way in the 23^rd minute, when Heath made a low cross that found Rapinoe, who slid it past Japan’s goalkeeper.

The U.S. followed with numerous shots by Rapinoe and Morgan, but none found their way into the net.

In the 67^th minute, Japan finally got its chance. Emi Nakajima bent a left-footer up and over U.S. goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher to tie the score.

The momentum shifted to Japan, until the U.S. brought Christen Press off the bench midway through the second half. Almost immediately she found the ball and sent it to Morgan, who knocked it into the goal with her chest.

The U.S. seemed to have the game in the bag … until stoppage time, when Japan’s Yuka Momiki made a goal off the crossbar to tie it up in the 91^st minute.

This was the U.S. team’s third match of 2019. The first was a 3-1 loss to France last month at Le Havre, the port city where the U.S. will play Sweden in the group stage of the World Cup. A few days later, the USWNT beat Spain, 1-0.

After the game, Rapinoe said the result showed that the team needs to work on closing games — and controlling them. “I think we still take too many risks when we don’t need to,” said the veteran forward. “And we should probably be more patient and wait for a great opportunity, instead of a half chance.”

She noted that it was the team’s third very different lineup as many matches. “We’re obviously still nailing that down.”

U.S. coach Jill Ellis said she was disappointed in the result, but not in the players or their performance.

“I thought there were some really good things” in both halves, she said. “I felt like we played as a team. We made two mistakes in the back that cost us. For sure we left things on the table. But in terms of our team play – what I asked the team to do defensively, the work ethic, the attacking — we got into their goal zone 34 times.”

She said she was going to take the positives from the game — and the team’s job is simply to keep getting better if it’s going to win another World Cup: “We have to play seven games to win this thing.”

The U.S. will face England on Saturday in Nashville, Tenn.

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Nearly six months after a cartoon mocking Serena Williams unleashed immediate international rebuke, with critics calling it a racist Jim-Crow-era-like rendering of the sports star, the Australian Press Council weighed in on Monday, defending the image.

The cartoon, published last September in Australia’s The Herald Sun following Serena Williams’ stinging U.S. Open loss to Naomi Osaka of Japan, shows Williams in mid-tantrum and stamping on her tennis racket. The umpire is shown asking Osaka, “Can you just let her win?”

The Council said the cartoon “uses exaggeration and absurdity to make its point but accepts the publisher’s claim that it does not depict Ms Williams as an ape, rather showing her as ‘spitting the dummy’, a non-racist caricature familiar to most Australian readers.” (A “dummy” is an Australian term for a pacifier, which was drawn lying alongside Williams’ racket on the ground.)

The Council, a watchdog group responsible for promoting good media practice standards in Australia, said it “accepts that the cartoon was illustrated in response to the events that occurred at the US Open final.”

On Sept. 8, 2018, Williams was playing the Grand Slam final against an opponent 16 years her junior, when in the second set, the chair umpire determined Williams’ coach was directing her from the sidelines and called a code violation.

Williams protested. “I don’t cheat to win,” she told the ump, Carlos Ramos. “I’d rather lose.”

As the game continued and Williams grew more frustrated, she slammed her racket onto the court, bending it. It was her second violation, and Osaka automatically got a point.

Visibly upset, Williams went on to confront Ramos and demand an apology, calling him a “liar” and a “thief.”

“You will never, ever, ever be on another court of mine as long as you live,” she told him. Williams was given a third code violation.

Osaka ultimately won — becoming the first Japanese player to win a Grand Slam title — but there was little joy evinced at a game that saw both players in tears at points and the crowd jeering the trophy ceremony. Williams was fined $17,000.

Williams, a winner of nearly two dozen Grand Slam titles, and her defenders have pointed to what they say is a double standard, whereby male players can get away with on-court outbursts for which female players are likelier to be called out. Williams’ coach later said he was trying to guide her from the sidelines, but said it is a common practice that is rarely penalized.

London-based writer Tobi Oredein told NPR’s Rachel Martin that what happened was not only about sexism but also racism.

“At the heart of ‘misogynoir’ — because it only affects black women — is a caricature of the angry, black woman,” she said. “And it dehumanizes us, and it stops us showing emotion.”

Mark Knight, who penned the cartoon, told the Herald Sun, he was inspired to draw the cartoon when he saw “the world’s best tennis player have a tantrum and thought that was interesting.”

The Herald Sun has stood by Knight, even as critics have said there is no getting around the stereotypical depictions in the drawing.

The National Association of Black Journalists called the cartoon “repugnant on many levels. The Sept. 10 cartoon not only exudes racist, sexist caricatures of both women, but Williams’ depiction is unnecessarily sambo-like,” a reference to the racist Jim Crow caricatures popularized in the 19th century.

Knight defended his rendering of Williams. “I drew her as an African American woman,” he said in a video published on the Herald Sun’s web site. “She’s powerfully built. She wears these outrageous costumes when she plays tennis. She is interesting to draw.”

“This whole business that I’m some sort of racist calling on racial cartoons from the past — it’s just made up,” Knight said. “The cartoon was about her behavior on the day.”

Knight said he had to suspend his Twitter account because of the onslaught he faced after the cartoon was published.

He was also criticized for his rendering of Osaka. Oredein said he “whitewashed” the player, who is of Japanese and Haitian descent. Osaka “was seen as heroic and good and within her place,” Oredein said. “And she had blonde hair, and it was straight.”

In its ruling, the Australian Press Council said it had considered complaints about how the women were depicted and “that the cartoon should be considered in the context of the history of caricatures based on race and historical racist depictions of African Americans. “

Nevertheless, the Council said it found the publication did not fail “to take reasonable steps to avoid causing substantial offence, distress or prejudice, without sufficient justification in the public interest,” and so it did not breach the Council’s standards of practice.

Oredein said the cartoon embodies a wider problem in the industry, “that black women and their talents, especially in sports, are treated with suspicion.”

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They play soccer in a disputed Himalayan valley prone to car bombs, strikes and heavy snow. Soldiers with machine guns patrol their home stadium. Players sometimes have to arrive at practice three hours early to avoid police curfews. Their team is less than three years old, with a budget that’s one-tenth that of some of their competitors.

Now, against all odds, Real Kashmir Football Club, from Indian-controlled Kashmir, is tantalizingly close to winning India’s top professional soccer title. They’ve been flitting back and forth between first, second and third place, and the season ends in early March.

“We’re the only club in India that has sold-out stadiums at almost every game,” says the team’s co-founder Shamim Mehraj. “What we have done is give people some hope in a place that has actually been taken down by conflict and violence for the past 60 years. It’s helping this place heal.”

Kashmir’s recent history has been chaotic. It has seen three wars between India and Pakistan and is the site of a decades-long separatist insurgency that Indian forces have often dealt with violently. The valley is part of Hindu-majority India’s only Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir.

A natural disaster helped give birth to this soccer team. In 2014, the Kashmir Valley suffered devastating floods. Hundreds of people were killed. Schools were closed, and young people spilled out onto the streets of Mehraj’s hometown Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir and one of the largest cities in the valley.

One evening, Mehraj and a friend had an idea.

“We used to go for evening walks. We would see a lot of kids hanging around doing nothing, and I had been a footballer myself. That’s when I thought, ‘Why don’t I get some balls and at least give these kids something to do?'” recalls Mehraj, 38. He had played for his college team in New Delhi, and for his state in amateur soccer tournaments.

Mehraj, who is Muslim, and his Hindu friend Sandeep Chattoo, 52, got friends and neighbors to pitch in and buy 1,000 soccer balls, which they handed out to flood victims. But why stop there? In March 2016, they started a team.

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Mahak Farooq (center), 24, watches her brother Danish Farooq, who plays midfield for Real Kashmir, alongside 12-year-old Urooj Ayyub Bhat (left), a local boy who’s one of the team’s most loyal fans and a fixture at home games.

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They applied for the team to compete in India’s I-League 2nd Division — the pro soccer equivalent of baseball’s minor leagues. Mehraj and Chattoo invested their own money to pay players’ salaries. They also hired a Scottish former player, David Robertson, who had been coaching a professional soccer team in Phoenix, Arizona, to coach Real Kashmir, a.k.a. the “Snow Leopards.”

Robertson had never been to India, and admits he probably couldn’t have placed Kashmir on a map.

“All I ever saw was TV shows that showed it’s 90 degrees — it’s hot in India! But I arrived here and the next day, it was snowing,” says Robertson, 50, now in his third season as Real Kashmir’s coach. “There was no Internet, the electricity was out, and I just thought, ‘I want to go home.'”

Mehraj invited Robertson over to his family’s house, gave him a hot water bottle and some home-cooked Kashmiri food — and convinced him to stay. Since then, Robertson has recruited his own son, Mason Robertson, 24, to play for Real Kashmir. By the end of the 2017-2018 season, several Robertson relatives were in the stands at the team’s home stadium in Srinagar, to watch Real Kashmir win the 2nd Division title.

This season, the team was promoted to the I-League’s top division, the first soccer team from Kashmir ever to qualify. (There is one other Kashmiri pro soccer team, Lone Star Kashmir FC, which plays in the I-League’s 2nd Division). In October, Real Kashmir signed a lucrative sponsorship deal with the sports giant Adidas. The brand features prominently on team uniforms and advertisements, and helps pay the salaries Mehraj and Chattoo had initially paid from their own pockets.

Now the team is neck-and-neck with Chennai City FC and East Bengal FC for the top title in Indian professional soccer. (Besides the I-League, India also has another pro soccer league called the Indian Super League, or ISL, but the I-League’s top division is considered the most competitive.)

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Fans braved sleet and snow to watch Real Kashmir play a home game on Feb. 6 in Srinagar.

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“I never did think we would go this far,” Mehraj tells NPR, as he looks out over the turf at Real Kashmir’s home stadium.

There are constant reminders of the violence. On Feb. 14, a suicide car bomber killed dozens of Indian security forces on a main highway on the outskirts of Srinagar, where Real Kashmir plays home games. Curfews were imposed in the aftermath. The I-League Division 1 reigning champions Minerva Punjab FC, who were supposed to travel to Srinagar for a match four days later, refused to show up, citing safety concerns.

In Srinagar’s old quarter, the Muslim call to prayer reverberates through a warren of lanes sprayed with militant graffiti saying “India Go Home” and “Free Kashmir,” with the names of Kashmiri militants who have been killed in fighting. Kashmir’s 21 percent unemployment rate is triple that of the rest of India and militant groups recruit from the ranks of young, idle Kashmiri men.

Soccer “keeps him away from that,” says Ishfaq Hussain, 52, a former professional cricket player whose son Muhammad Hammad plays center-back for Real Kashmir. “He thinks always about when to play, when to practice. He’s got no time to join politics or go shouting or pelleting stones.”

Hammad, 21, often has to circumvent police curfews to make it to morning soccer practice.

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Muhammad Hammad, 21, kicks a soccer ball outside his family home in Srinagar. Hammad plays center-back for Real Kashmir as it vies for the top title in Indian professional soccer.

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“If the practice is at 11 o’clock, I have to leave home at 8 or 7 a.m. because there will be curfew around the city and you are not able to move around,” says Hammad. “The conditions here, you get much more motivation to achieve something. I have struggled a lot. These things also motivate you.”

When NPR visited Hammad at his parents’ home, his mother Mahjabeen, 46, got choked up describing how proud she is to watch her son play professional soccer. She has a giant flat-screen TV mounted on the wall of her living room to watch all of her son’s games. She describes how neighborhood children constantly ring their doorbell, hoping for a chance to kick around a soccer ball with Hammad.

His teammates include fellow Kashmiris and recruits from Africa, Europe and across India — including Muslims, Hindus, Christians and atheists.

Mehraj says he can’t manufacture T-shirts, stickers and banners fast enough to keep up with fans’ demand.

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Muhammad Hammad (right), 21, who plays center-back for Real Kashmir, sits at home with his mother Mahjabeen.

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At a Feb. 6 home game, fat snowflakes began accumulating on the turf at a scoreless halftime. Drenched fans huddled in the bleachers under long plastic tarps, screaming. Schoolgirls in headscarves swooned.

Real Kashmir scored the winning goal against Gokulam Kerala FC, from southern India, in the 51st minute. As the referee’s whistle sounded and the home team moved one match closer to India’s top soccer title, the crowd of shivering, ecstatic Kashmiris erupted in cheers.

“You’re always rooting for the underdog, and I think Kashmir are that,” observes Sumedh Bilgi, an Indian sports journalist who’s watched the team’s improbable rise. “Ultimately, money rules the world. But you always want your fairy tale, don’t you?”

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Team photo after Real Kashmir won India’s I-League 2nd Division title in May 2018.

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NPR Producer Furkan Latif Khan contributed to this report.

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The world’s best breakdancers could compete for Olympic gold medals at the 2024 Summer Games in Paris, if the event’s organizers succeed in getting the hip-hop dance style recognized as an Olympic sport.

As Paris organizers proposed adding breakdancing to the roster, the International Olympic Committee said the idea fits with its goal of making the Olympics “gender-balanced, more youth-focused and more urban.”

Breakdancing was part of the Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires 2018, with participants competing as b-girls, b-boys and on mixed teams. At the Olympics, the discipline would be known simply as “breaking.”

In Buenos Aires, the b-girls competition was won by Ram (Japan’s Ramu Kawai), and the b-boy’s medal was won by Bumblebee (Russia’s Sergei Chernyshev).

“The Paris organizing committee also wants to include climbing, surfing and skateboarding, which are already on the roster for the 2020 Tokyo Games,” Jake Cigainero reports for NPR’s Newsdesk. “Karate will also make its Olympic debut in Tokyo, but Paris snubbed the sport for its lineup.”

In breaking battle competitions, judges vote to decide the winner of multiple rounds of dancing, in which two dancers take turns on the floor — with rivals often doing their best not to look impressed with their opponent.

Discussing “le breakdance” at a news conference on Thursday, Paris organizers said that it speaks to young people worldwide and that it has more than 1 million practitioners in France — second only to the U.S.

Praising the dancers’ acrobatic ability and innovation and the dramatic suspense of battles, organizers said it would offer a completely new type of competition at the Olympics.

If breaking does become an Olympic sport, the dance style that has its roots in New York City’s streets will achieve a status that ballroom dancing aficionados have been pursuing for years. That effort has been led by the World DanceSport Federation — which now finds itself celebrating the inclusion of a different discipline.

“It is an incredible honor and privilege that, for the first time, a dance discipline is being considered for inclusion in the Olympic Games,” said WDSF President Shawn Tay, adding that breaking would be “an outstanding success” in Paris.

The Paris committee’s decision to back the four new arrivals means that baseball and softball will be left out of the Paris Olympics, after a brief return for the Tokyo Games. Squash is also shut out; so are chess and snooker, which were seen as facing long odds to become Olympic sports in 2024.

While a gritty sport that started in the U.S. has a shot at being in the Olympics, a gritty and acrobatic French sport — parkour — was left out of the Paris proposals. As NPR’s Laurel Wamsley has reported, the International Gymnastics Federation has increasingly sought to bring parkour under its purview and reportedly lobbied to make it part of the 2024 Games.

Paris organizers predict the new sports will boost the Olympics’ appeal to a younger generation that might not be transfixed by more traditional sports. While they sketched out how the competitions would be held in 2024, final details about the proposed sports aren’t likely to emerge until after the Tokyo Summer Olympics in 2020.

The International Olympic Committee will review the Paris group’s proposals, with an initial decision possible in March, when the Olympic Program Commission is slated to make its recommendation to the IOC Executive Board. Final approval could come in June, when the IOC will meet in Lausanne, Switzerland.

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It was the most highly anticipated college basketball game of the season: Duke was facing archrival North Carolina, with the spectacular talents of Duke’s freshman sensation Zion Williamson on display.

Former President Barack Obama was there. Tickets for the game were reselling for more than $3,000 — Super Bowl prices. Duke’s exuberant student section, known as the Cameron Crazies, was extra hyped.

And then a mere 33 seconds into the game, on a routine play, Williamson dribbled near the foul line when his left leg buckled, his left blue-and-white Nike sneaker ripped apart at the seams and he tumbled to the floor, grabbing his right knee in pain.

Williamson limped off the court. Hearts sank everywhere. Obama visibly mouthed “his shoe broke.” And in mere seconds, Nike was facing a marketing nightmare. The offending shoes were stashed away by a trainer. But the images of the young star being felled by his footwear couldn’t be erased.

On social media, messages of concern and sympathy for Williamson were mixed with dishy remarks about the shoes. A Nike rival tweeted, “Wouldn’t have happened in the pumas.” The tweet was later deleted.

In a statement, Nike said it was “obviously concerned” and wished Williamson a speedy recovery. “The quality and performance of our products are of utmost importance. While this is an isolated occurrence, we are working to identify the issue.”

Thankfully Williamson’s injury does not appear to be serious. Though the freshman didn’t return to the game, Duke’s coach Mike Krzyzewski described it as a mild right knee sprain.

But Williamson’s shoe implosion is an embarrassment for Nike, which also had a problem in 2017 with NBA jerseys that were tearing. But whether it will have any long-term impact on the world’s largest sports apparel brand is another matter. Nike’s shares were down about 1.7 percent in late morning trading — not good news, but not a major selloff.

Nike’s markets are so global and its products are so diversified that it’s unlikely the sad fate of one shoe will have a meaningful impact on sales.

But then there’s the young man who was wearing those shoes — Zion Williamson. Possessing a unique combination of leaping ability, power, speed and basketball IQ, he is widely expected to be the No. 1 pick in June’s NBA draft.

At a mere 18 years old, his skills, athletic ability and court demeanor are already being compared to LeBron James’. Companies will be vying fiercely to sign him to a multimillion-dollar shoe deal. And when he plays his first NBA game, likely later this year, millions of people will be watching; many will be looking at the brand of sneakers he’s wearing.

Nike had better hope the memories of what happened 33 seconds into the North Carolina game don’t stay top of mind for Williamson.

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