Scout’s Overview
📡 🚨 Weekly Sports Radar: Kemari

Kemari is a traditional Japanese ball game that dates back over a thousand years. Played in a small, square court called a kikō, it involves a group of players working together to keep a deerskin ball (mari) in the air using only their feet, knees, and other parts of the body. It’s kind of like the informal backyard game of keepie-up.

Kemari originated in Japan around the 7th century during the Asuka Period, influenced by the Chinese game cuju. Technically, there’s no winner or loser in Kemari. The goal is simply for all players to keep the ball from touching the ground for as long as possible.

🏋 Athlete of the week: Ali Truwit

Two years ago, Ali Truwit crossed a marathon finish line with her mom, just ten days before a shark attack took her leg. Many would’ve stopped running forever, but not her.

Last year, she returned from the Paralympics with a running blade and a renewed mindset. Now, she’s preparing to take on the 2025 New York City Marathon, running 26.2 miles through NYC with “one leg and a lot of purpose.”

🏟️ Venue of the week: Cerro Negro, Nicaragua

Yes. A literal volcano. Cerro Negro is an active volcano in South America, and it’s home to the sport of Volcano Boarding. Yep. Riders hike up the 700-meter black mountain wearing orange jumpsuits, goggles, and makeshift boards, then launch themselves downhill at speeds that can top 95 km/h. Insane.

🧤 Fit Check: EE Hope United 2022

EE Hope United is a super team formed by a coalition of some prominent professional footballers to call out and squash the sexist hate that women footballers face online.

The brains behind this campaign devised a generative art technology that uses data from players’ social media accounts to create jerseys. This jersey design articulated the amount of online hate and hope an individual player was receiving.

Also, the jersey entails a visual pattern that represents hope, accompanied by another that represents hate, with each disrupting the other based on the data from their software.

This is probably the best design thought process we’ve covered here. Read more here.

From the bench
🗞️ In case you were injured:

• Did y’all know that Muhammad Ali was also a hostage negotiator?!

• In Copenhagen, traffic lights are synchronised so that a cyclist riding at 20 km/h will never hit a red light! What a win for cyclists.

• Cape Verde, a tiny cluster of islands near Africa, with a population of just 500,000, have qualified for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. What’s even more crazy is that one of their key players, Roberto Pico Lopes, received his call-up for the country through LinkedIn. Initially, he thought it was spam, but they sent him another message in English, and the rest is history.

• At the Shanghai Masters, a tournament featuring the world’s best tennis players, 2 players ranked World #204 and World #54 ended up reaching the finals. The wild part is that they’re both cousins and went to college together.

🎯 In overtime:

• I’ll be betting on the World Tramdriver Championship next year for sure. Among the 7 challenges, one of them is to stop precisely at a certain point while the tram is going 25 mph.

• The President of Uganda started questioning his national team football players over their errors after their match against South Africa

• The pope has some serious ball knowledge

🏆 Sports Calendar

We’ve got 12 events across 10 different sports for you this edition: