After yet another standout performance, star gymnast Simone Biles can now add two more signature moves that bear her name to her already lengthy list of accomplishments.

In order for a gymnast to have a move named after them, they must submit it for consideration and successfully land it at a major competition, such as the world championships or the Olympics.

On Saturday, Biles began her floor routine at the 2019 gymnastic world championships in Stuttgart, Germany by landing a triple-double, composed of a double backflip with three twists. That move will now be known as the “Biles II.”

The gymnast also nailed her double-double dismount from the balance beam. The move, which consists of a double-twisting double backflip, will now be named the “Biles.”

“I feel like I’m pretty pleased just because that’s how I train beam, and it finally felt good to go out there and hit a beam routine like I train because I feel like every time I go up to compete beam, I just bomb it,” Biles told the Olympic Channel. “So it felt really good to just nail it.”

Biles said she thinks that she can still do better, but was happy with what she accomplished at the tournament.

“My goal going into tonight was to not be great … it wasn’t to do great, but just to do well, and I feel like I accomplished that,” she said.

Biles has two other moves named after her, one on vault and the other on floor.

In addition to her individual success, Team USA came in first place in the qualifying standings with a total score of 174.205, followed by China and Russia.

Biles also came out on top in qualifying for all-around, beam and floor. She was second on vault and seventh on uneven bars.

At 22-years-old, Biles has 20 worlds medals, just three behind the record held by Belarusian Vitaly Scherbo. Her performance at this year’s world championships has the potential to make her the most decorated gymnast in the history of the competition.

More of Biles’ performance at the world competition can be seen here.

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Who doesn’t love big, fat bears? At least from a distance. And who doesn’t love filling out a bracket where winners move on and losers go home?

Combine the two and you’ve got Fat Bear Week — a kind of Ursine March Madness, in October.

There are an estimated 2,000 bears in Katmai National Park & Preserve, a glorious and massive 4 million-acre stretch of wilderness in Southwest Alaska. Each year, the bears spend the summer trying to get as fat as they can to prepare for hibernation.

And in October, bear fans get to vote on who is the fattest of them all.

This year, the bears were whittled down to a bracket of 12 contenders. Four heavyweights had first-round byes. Voters on the park’s Facebook page choose their favorite from each matchup. The winner moves on to the next round.

As the competition began this week, Katmai Conservancy media ranger Naomi Boak had her eye on two of what she calls “favorites.” No. 435. … they assign a number after monitoring the bears for a while … and No. 747. He is “as big as a jumbo jet,” she says.

“He was so big he looked like he was ready to hibernate in July. He’s the size of two bears.”

This isn’t fat shaming, Boak says. It is fat glorifying as the biggest bear has done the best job getting ready.

“They lose a third of their body fat over the winter,” Boak says. “So they need all that fat to survive.”

Skinny To Fat

The Fat Bear Week competitors are coastal brown bears who forage along the Brooks River. They dine voraciously on one of the largest sockeye salmon runs in the world. There’s a fascinating science to this annual gorging, Boak says. A hormone that usually inhibits hunger switches off in the bears this time of year.

Boak and her fellow media ranger, Brooklyn White, chose the 2019 competitors— a variety of bears that includes males, females and so-called sub-adults. Those are emancipated cubs that have grown up and spent a year on their own.

Boak and White wanted good before and after photos of the 12, showing skinny shots from earlier in the year and recent fat ones after feasting. Kind of a reverse infomercial.

White says they also wanted bears that people outside the park had gotten to know after watching them on remote bear cams along the Brooks River.

“Many of those folks who, you know, [who had spent] time watching the cams, would already have a relationship with a bear they were seeing in the contest,” she says.

Don’t Cross A Line

The bear cams and the 5-year-old Fat Bear Week contest are helping people connect with what goes on inside the park and helping extend the park’s conservation mission. According to Boak, last year, there were nearly 56, 000 votes for Fat Bear Week. This year, the park hit that number in the first two days.

Obviously, people like fat bears.

But there’s a line, in the park, staffers don’t like to cross. They try not to anthropomorphize wild animals in a wild place. That’s why they give the bears numbers. Although bear cam followers like to add names. Like Lefty, Chunk and Grazer from this year’s contest. Or last year’s champ, Beadnose, No. 409. Boak says Beadnose is known worldwide, but this year, the bear is not defending her title.

“She was a no-show,” Boak says, but she doesn’t know why.

Beadnose could have been injured, died, or gone to another part of the park to fish.

Whatever happened, Boak acknowledges that Beadnose went out on top.

“She went out in a big way,” Boak says, unable to resist one more fat bear pun.

This week, on Fat Bear Tuesday, a new champion is crowned. The first prize, says Brooklyn White, is, she hopes, a successful hibernation.

And, a lot of new fans.

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“I was like, ‘Wow, I can actually do this!’ ” Malat Lueth Wei says, remembering his first time trying wheelchair basketball.

That was over 10 years ago. Since then, the sport has taken him all over the world. Wei has shot hoops at basketball arenas across the U.S., where he is one of the country’s best players, and in France, where he played professionally. This summer, he came to Washington, D.C., to speak at a screening of No Limits, a short documentary that featured him.

And in 2018, he returned to his homeland of South Sudan, where he helped introduce the game to its disabled population.

Wei was born in what is now South Sudan and diagnosed with polio at age 3. His father went missing during the civil wars leading to the country’s eventual independence in 2011. During those volatile times, their family ended up at a refugee camp in Ethiopia, where Wei remembers crawling around on his arms on dirt roads before getting a wheelchair. When he was 12, his family moved to Houston.

He had a tough time adjusting in the United States. It was quite late in his childhood to make such a huge move, and he was enrolled in sixth grade despite knowing very little English. Some kids made fun of him, but a more accepting group introduced him to the sport that would change the trajectory of his life.

“I used to go to the park with the with the community kids, with all the children in the neighborhood … to go play basketball with them,” Wei says. He was the only one shooting from a wheelchair. “The fact that they actually treated me as equal and not somebody less, you know, that’s where everything started.”

Eventually, a friend began looking into local wheelchair basketball facilities. Wei got in, trained hard and started traveling with a local team to competitions, and things took off from there.

Wei, 25, loves being in the gym, flying across the court in a specialized wheelchair designed to move fast and turn easily. The games are incredibly intense, with screeching tires, crashing metal and the impressive coordination and grit of the athletes on display. As someone who loved sports so much that he played soccer with his hands at the refugee camp, Wei treasures this opportunity to compete.

“It means the world to me just to share my message with the world, of what I have accomplished in life, from where I came from, with nothing, not knowing how to read or write English,” Wei says.

His return to South Sudan was inspired by the work of another wheelchair basketball star — Jess Markt, who leads international wheelchair basketball programs for the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Markt was a Division 1 track athlete at the University of Oregon before he was paralyzed from the chest down after a car accident over 20 years ago. He completed physical rehab, earned his degree and started working in communications but felt something was missing.

Before his injury, basketball was his favorite sport. It would be a few years before he gave the wheelchair version a shot.

“I heard about it,” Markt says, “but I didn’t know much, and I just kind of thought, ‘Is that really going to be as much fun as the basketball I grew up with?’ “

It turned out to be just as much fun — and far more meaningful than he could have imagined.

“I’ve always talked about it as kind of the culmination of my rehabilitation process,” Markt says.

After nine years playing in the National Wheelchair Basketball Association, he heard that a team in Afghanistan was reaching out to U.S.-based leagues looking for a coach. Markt answered the call, leaving his office job in 2009 to be the volunteer coach of a wheelchair basketball team thousands of miles away.

In 2012, the ICRC hired him to run wheelchair basketball camps in areas where either violence or lack of proper medical care means that a disproportionate number of people are living with a disability.

“War has has utterly crippled the medical system,” Markt says of the conditions in South Sudan and other conflict-stricken countries he has worked in. “So really, almost everyone that we work with is, in some way, either a direct or tangential result of conflict.”

“I think the initial powerful benefit of doing this is really getting people out of their homes, out of the situation of being truly marginalized,” he adds.

“What I have learned from adaptive sports is that it allows individuals to test their boundaries in ways that a lot of the world or society or community doesn’t allow us to explore,” says Mia Ives-Rublee, who consults businesses and nonprofits on disability issues and was herself a wheelchair athlete. She attended the State Department screening of the film about Wei and Markt.

Markt went to Juba, South Sudan, to run a camp in 2017, which caught the attention of Wei. He reached out to Markt, hoping to be involved.

“I saw him on a video,” Wei said. “I’m like, ‘Wow, this is this is actually cool … and there’s already somebody that is doing it in my country?’ “

He said he thought, “If I can connect with him, we can make a difference. We can change people’s lives by playing wheelchair basketball.”

One year later, the two were on a plane together as Wei returned to South Sudan for the first time since he was a kid. His ability to speak local languages was invaluable, says Markt. And the two of them set up games where groups from opposite sides of the civil conflict played together on the court — in their wheelchairs.

“It was amazing to have these groups playing alongside one another when such interaction is so rare these days,” Markt says.

Back in his American home, Wei is attending community college and hopes to play on the University of Arizona’s varsity wheelchair basketball team while completing his bachelor’s degree — the school is a leader in adaptive sports. After that, he plans on championing human rights and social stability in South Sudan, where he hopes to start a business and continue to work to help its people.

“I want peace in South Sudan,” he says, “for everybody to come together as one and treat each other equally, and build a nation.”

Reflecting on his visit to his homeland, he recalls, “They see me as somebody who went through what they went through,” Wei says. “Now that they have discovered something new, something that they can achieve. It was not just playing basketball all the time. It gave them confidence, to go out and reach for other things.”

And that’s what wheelchair basketball has done for him, he adds: “It just took off and took me to places I thought I was definitely not going to.”

Aman Kidwai (@AmanfromCT) is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C., who covers sports, business and community news for media outlets like Washington City Paper and SB Nation.

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Updated at 6:30 p.m. ET

The revered 65-year old Sports Illustrated magazine is in a state of bedlam.

In meetings Thursday afternoon, managers told staff members of the 65-year-old magazine that about half the newsroom would be laid off, according to two people present at the meetings.

NPR obtained a petition signed by approximately three-quarters of Sports Illustrated’s journalists asking its new owners not to deliver control of the publication to a digital publisher named the Maven network.

“The Maven wants to replace top journalists in the industry with a network of Maven freelancers and bloggers, while reducing or eliminating departments that have ensured that the stories we publish and produce meet the highest standards,” the petition reads. “These plans significantly undermine our journalistic integrity, damage the reputation of this long-standing brand and negatively [affect] the economic stability of the publication.”

The new controlling executives include Ross Levinsohn, the controversial former Los Angeles Times CEO. The plan as described in the journalists’ petition appears to echo an earlier strategy by Levinsohn. As publisher of the Los Angeles Times and an investor in a digital outfit called True/Slant, Levinsohn embraced a strategy he termed “gravitas with scale” — a model that was based in part on unpaid contributors and meant job losses for the traditional newsroom journalists in the Tribune publishing chain.

Levinsohn and his frequent business partner James Heckman, the founder of Maven, were the subject of earlier investigative report by NPR over their business practices. Levinsohn, Heckman and several associates met with the newsroom Thursday afternoon.

The uncertainty surrounding the magazine’s status had caused chaos for the newsroom over the previous 24 hours. Meetings that had been scheduled for midday Thursday were called off minutes before they were due to begin. On recordings heard by NPR, the magazine’s editors apologized for the uncertainty.

“We’re pushing to find out as much information as we can,” Steve Cannella, promoted just this week to be co-editor in chief, said in brief remarks to the newsroom, according to audio tapes reviewed by NPR and verified by two people present. “We know exactly how hard this is for you guys. We know the strain this is on the entire newsroom. We know that lives are at stake.”

“That’s all we can say right now. We’re really, really sorry. And you have as much information as we do,” Cannella says, on the recording. “The anger, I understand it. I’d also be angry. We just ask for a little bit of patience as we try to find out what’s going on.”

Until the meeting with Maven executives, the question of who controls the magazine had not been clear, as it has been subject to a series of major transactions in a short period of time: Meredith Corp. bought SI last year along with other Time Inc. titles and then sold the magazine in late May 2019 to a brand and marketing firm called Authentic Brands Group. Meredith, a major newspaper publisher, was set to operate Sports Illustrated for two years. Several weeks later, in June, Authentic Brands struck a licensing deal cutting Meredith’s involvement short and giving Maven the right to operate the publication for up to 100 years. But that deal was only finalized on Thursday.

Meredith confirmed to NPR that Authentic Brands finished the transfer of editorial control of Sports Illustrated to Maven from Meredith, its formal owner. And according to Meredith, the layoffs it announced were conducted at Maven’s behest.

“As the new licensor of … Sports Illustrated, Maven made the Sports Illustrated personnel decisions that Meredith communicated to the SI employees today,” Meredith said in a statement. “Going forward, the remaining SI employees will work at the direction and at the pleasure of Maven.”

NPR is seeking comment from Authentic Brands and Maven.

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