Tag: sports

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10821 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-08-05 17:41:07 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-08-05 17:41:07 [post_content] =>

How a shared love of soccer transformed my long-distance friendship.

On a rainy and unseasonably cold summer night last March, my friend Mendes and I walked the long way around the stadium of a fourth division soccer team in São Paulo, Brazil. Neither of us had ever been there before and we’d gotten out of the taxi on the wrong side of the grounds. But even though we were cold and a little lost, we were determined to make it to this game.

Mendes and I have been friends for more than 15 years, although going to soccer games has only recently become a staple of our friendship. We met when he switched schools in the fifth grade, bonding over our shared love of Batman, Black Sabbath, and Scorsese films. As kids, we’d go to the movies and the bookstore together, and at the time, it felt like we were the only two people in our class who liked doing either. We’d talk about girls, study for tests together, and go looking for good burgers after late-night movie screenings.

After I went to college in New York and he stayed to attend film school in São Paulo, we remained friends. Back then, we’d find time every other week to catch up via the old video call app, Skype. But there was still physical distance, and as the years passed, there rose a feeling of a wall between us, keeping us apart.

I felt as if I was leading two lives that didn’t quite get to meet. There was the life in São Paulo I shared with my family and my old friends, filled with all the experiences that had made me who I was up until that point. Then there was my new life in New York, which I could only tell people back home about—a new school, new friends, and new experiences in a new language—that felt completely my own. Whenever Mendes and I would talk about it, I felt like I was translating a movie for him that only I got to see.

Maybe it felt the same for him. Back in São Paulo, he ran around shooting films and became a regular at old-school bars that I’d never even heard of. He fell in love with Carnaval and the hidden charms of a city we hadn’t gotten to explore fully as teenagers. But in some ways, I think it was easier for me to feel tethered to his life in a way he couldn’t be to mine. Every summer break, when it was winter in Brazil, I’d fly back home and we’d go back to our old ways. I’d meet his new friends and go to parties or ride in their cars listening to Liniker, Guilherme Held, or Baco Exu do Blues, the music that was bopping in São Paulo at the time. For about three months each year, the wall between Mendes and I became porous, and we would pass through it together. Then the summer would end, and I’d hop on a plane and go back to my other life, and the wall would turn solid again.

Soccer entered our friendship during the pandemic, which I spent back in Brazil. Though I’ve long been almost unhealthily addicted to the sport—I’ve woken up at 5 a.m. to watch random league games in different time zones, and more than once cancelled plans after my team lost a big game—Mendes had a more off-and-on relationship to it. We became fans of the same club in 2005, a few years before we’d met, when our dads introduced us to the soon-to-be champions of South America: São Paulo FC. Neither remembers much—we were eight years old at the time—but our dads have told us different versions of a similar story. Whenever São Paulo won, they’d show off the cover of the next day’s newspaper at breakfast, reading the recap of the match out loud. As São Paulo advanced in the knockouts, our dads would let us watch more and more of the games during the week, even though they came on late at night after our bedtimes. At the end of that year, São Paulo beat Liverpool FC to become world champions. I remember putting on my little uniform—shirt, shorts, and socks—and going out with my family to eat a burger and celebrate. São Paulo fans filled the streets of the city that day, dressed in their own uniforms, waving flags, wearing crazy hats, blowing horns and lighting red, black, and white smoke flares.

After those glory days, São Paulo went through a dire cold streak in the 2010s. Mendes and I would catch the occasional game together, but even then, it would be a European champions league game, or a World Cup match on TV. Then, when professional sports came back at the end of 2020, São Paulo made an improbable run at the Brazilian title. Though it ended in abject failure in the last weeks of the season (let’s not talk about that), it was enough to get Mendes and I talking about the team for the first time since I can remember.

After the end of lockdown, Mendes spent weeks at my house with me and my brother Thomas, who also lives in New York and had come home during the pandemic. If we weren’t watching a movie, the TV would be tuned to a game, or the sports channel, or old São Paulo highlights on YouTube, often on mute so we could talk over them. And it’s probably because of us specifically, but at the beginning of 2021, São Paulo won the state championship for the first time since we started supporting them.

Later that year, I left Brazil for New York again, this time for grad school. Our video chats now came through Zoom, but it didn’t take long for Mendes and I to fall into the traps of my previous years abroad—weekly conversations that turned monthly, texts that became more infrequent as we got busy with school and work. The only difference this time was our shared befuddlement with São Paulo FC (the good times were few and far between), which brought us together after every game. We’d found a way to share the same experience every week, thousands of miles between us.

By 2023, we started going to games together whenever I was home. Sometimes we’d go to cheer on our team, which desperately needed our help, but often, we just went to hang out and talk about what was going on in our lives while the match played in the background, as if we were back in my living room.

I have told Mendes many times that I have a problem: if I could, I’d go to every game, no matter the weather or the opponent. I have dragged my dad to matchdays when there were storm warnings in effect; I have taken Mendes and my brother to games we were sure to lose. And so it was again, in March of this year, a couple of weeks before I was due to fly back to New York for work. São Paulo was playing a league game in the stadium of a fourth division team because our homegrounds had been rented out for a series of AC/DC concerts. It had been raining for days and the weather was dour. The stadium was on the other side of the city; it had no roof and none of the modern amenities and infrastructure you’d find in the home fields of higher division teams, including ours.

Mendes met me after work, unprepared for the rain, and I lent him my dad’s rain jacket. After we made our way around the walls of this stadium we’d never been to before, we were caught in a wave of fans trying to enter through the small entrance on the side of a highway. Because the stadium didn’t have metal detectors, the military police were patting down every fan, and we only managed to get in halfway through the first half, just as the rain got thicker. The pitch was muddy, the play meager, and we spent most of the match squinting to avoid the water flogging our faces, as the stormy winds teased the smell of barbecue from the restaurant next door, making us half-wish we’d stayed back to watch the game on TV.

When the final whistle blew, we’d won: two-to-zero. Mendes and I went back to my place, drenched, ordered a pizza, and talked about things I don’t even remember. The food, like the match, was an excuse to spend more time together before I left for New York again. The season carried on in unsurprisingly mediocre ways, but every other week we’d connect over watching soccer before opening up about moments with our partners, our friends, and our family that we couldn’t share in person.

Over a decade into this long-distance friendship, we’ve grown used to looking for the openings in the wall. They may not always be there. Sometimes the rain, or the military police, or losing our seven-point lead in the national championship with a handful of games left in the season only to capitulate into agony and a fourth-place finish, slows us down. But we keep looking.

Not long ago, during one of those times when I was back from school, I remember overhearing my mom on the phone with a friend, telling her I was home. “He’s seeing his brother tomorrow,” she said. “He has a brother in New York and a brother in São Paulo.”

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August 5, 2026August 5, 2026

Friends from Far Afield

by Franciso Attié

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8523 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-06-23 21:38:31 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-06-23 21:38:31 [post_content] =>

And it'll make you feel alive, too.

Soapbox is a series where people make the case for the sometimes surprising things they feel strongly about.

A few months ago, I found myself openly crying in the office. I wasn’t crying about something personal, or even something particularly emotionally complex. I also wasn’t crying over the usual slate of workplace drama (bad meetings, good news, big decisions, encroaching deadlines, staffing cuts, etc.), which I’ve admittedly cried about a million times before. No, this time was different: I was crying because I was streaming the Boston Marathon at my desk, and—after 26 miles, all of them occurring hundreds of miles away from the city where I work—the lead women were approaching the finish line.

If the idea of crying over running sounds insane to you, or if the prospect of spending several hours in front of a screen watching strangers run sounds like watching paint dry: I get it. Until a few years ago, the very idea of long-distance running as a professional sport that people followed and spectated was entirely foreign to me. Having grown up in Massachusetts, I was aware that Marathon Monday was a meaningful day for the city; but for me, it mostly meant that work and school would be canceled, lots of roads would be closed, and maybe some friends would be going to cheer their friends on while I enjoyed the day off. I felt no more emotionally invested in the race and its outcome than in a 4th of July parade. Going out of my way to watch a race happening in a different city, then, would never have occurred to me; it would have felt like closely following municipal elections in a city I’d never visit.

But over the last few years, I’ve come to believe that spectating marathons is one of the most beautiful, life-affirming ways we can spend our time. Before I got into watching races, I’d never been a serious fan of any sport. I’ve long been a casual runner, who initially got into the sport out of a vague, begrudging sense of obligation to “fitness.” But then, I made friends who competed in—and sometimes even won!—local races, and who truly adored running on its own merits. Their enthusiasm got me hooked: When they sent me a pro runner’s Instagram post, I’d hit “follow”; when they wanted to watch a race, I’d stream it, too. Whenever we spectated together, they’d point out how everyone racing was quite literally on equal footing—what other sport, they’d ask, has total newbies and elite lifers competing in the same place, at the same time? Not to mention that races aren’t hard to follow. Unlike, say, baseball or football, whose fandoms seem to mandate memorizing reams of stats and plays, marathons have precious few rules to remember: Generally speaking, the first person to the finish line wins, making it incredibly accessible for both the casual and serious viewer alike. By the time the 2021 women’s Olympic marathon rolled around, I was the one texting my friends about whether they’d seen Molly Seidel’s groundbreaking bronze medal performance.

Running asks very little of a viewer, but feels communal, and cathartic, and inspiring—feelings that are increasingly hard to come by in these particularly bleak and fractured times. It’s also just a joy to witness; and as I’ve become a more dedicated fan, I’ve come to appreciate its particular drama and intrigue. Watching as a mass of competitors thins out into a small pack of frontrunners; seeing the determination in runners’ faces as they decide when to make a break for the lead, only to sometimes get subsumed by the pack again; witnessing the absolute bliss of a first-time winner breaking the tape—all of it is, genuinely, thrilling.

I mostly follow the women’s division, in part because we’re living through an incredible moment for American women’s distance running. For decades, the sport was deemed unsafe for our supposedly fragile physiology, and women were barred from participating. The Boston Marathon has been run annually since 1897; women, though, weren’t officially allowed to compete until 1972. (This year, more than 12,000 of the approximately 30,000 runners were women.) Women’s participation in marathon running has increased steadily since the ’70s, but as the New York Times has reported, there’s been “a sea change in women’s running” in the last decade. Simply put: Way more women are running way faster than ever. Consider the U.S. Olympic Trials, which are open to any American woman who can complete a marathon within its wildly fast cut-off time (right now, that’s just under two and a half hours). In 2016, fewer than 200 women met that qualifying mark, as the Times reported; just four years later, that number jumped to over 500. (Meanwhile, the number of qualifying men during that time increased by fewer than 50.) There has never been a time where there’s more enthusiasm, community, or resources for women who want to push themselves to be the best runners they can be—and watching that magic take place at the highest levels of the sport has successfully turned me into a lifelong fan.

Unfortunately, like all sports, it isn’t without its less uplifting aspects. The ever-higher ceiling for women runners has also attracted backlash from anti-trans campaigners, who have fought to keep trans women out of professional running, casting doubt on the biology of women they deem “too masculine” and making it near-impossible for non-binary runners to compete on their own terms. So much of what inspires me about watching women’s running—and being a runner myself—is about pushing past the assumed limits of our genders and our bodies, which makes the bigotry inherent in marginalizing trans runners feel, to me, particularly painful and incongruous. When I look to runners like Nikki Hiltz—a nonbinary middle-distance runner who represented the United States at the Olympics—and the scores of queer run clubs popping up all over the country: That’s where I, as a fan, see the true future of the sport.

Running is an individual activity, but watching (and, of course, participating in) a marathon feels like a community endeavor. Each fall, when the New York City Marathon takes over the streets of the city where I now live, I watch as the roads fill up with people across a wide range of ages, races, sizes, and abilities—all united by their participation in attempting a time-honored and miraculous feat. The sidewalks, meanwhile, are populated with ardent fans, casual viewers, young kids being hoisted on their parents’ shoulders, well-behaved dogs providing moral support; homemade signs that range from tried-and-true to weirdly topical; strangers offering racers water or Gatorade or high-fives—together, watching the sheer speed of the pros as they zoom past, making it all look elegant and easy. Even people who don’t care about running, or would never engage in the sport on their own time, quietly admit that it’s the best day of the year—and who am I to disagree? Just don’t come complaining to me when you suddenly find yourself glued to a stream of a race in a far-off city, crying over a total stranger as she crosses the finish line.

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June 23, 2025August 3, 2026

Watching People Run Makes Me Feel Alive

by Marissa Lorusso

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