The stands shake as fans break into song. Hundreds jump up and down, setting a much faster tempo than the play on the field.

This soccer stadium is in the heart of political opposition territory in Ethiopia. On a recent Sunday, thousands of supporters are sitting shoulder to shoulder. And surrounding the pitch, dozens of paramilitary police look out at the crowd, some with their guns in hand, others at the ready with tear gas canisters.

“I came here to see the play,” says one spectator, Solomon, an older man who asked only to use his first name because talking to a journalist in Ethiopia can land you in trouble. “Most of the people came to see the play. But some people are here to see the disruption.”

For the past three years, this region of Ethiopia has been engulfed by protests. What began as demonstrations against the expansion of the capital Addis Ababa have widened to include protests about ethnic equality, corruption and democracy. Thousands have been arrested and hundreds have been killed. In February, Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn announced his resignation and the government placed the country under a state of emergency. The unrelenting protests have presented the most serious threat to the country’s ruling coalition since it came to power in 1991.

The popular uprising has affected seemingly all aspects of life — including soccer, the country’s favorite sport. Soccer stadiums have become battlefieldsand teams have become a proxy for the political divisions in the country. The 16 premier-league teams represent provinces largely drawn along ethnic lines.

In this match the home team, Adama City, is from an opposition stronghold and Welwalo Adigrat University comes from an area dominated by Tigrayans, an ethnic minority group that controls much of the government.

Solomon shakes his head at the prospect of a confrontation here, especially if Adama loses. Across the country, soccer games have been disrupted by fans fighting each other and clashing with police. The country’s soccer federation has had to relocate matches from restive areas because of the potential for violence.

“It’s the low-minded people who bring protests to stadiums,” Solomon says. “It’s the young guys who don’t know that soccer is about peace.”

And just as he says that, Adama scores a goal and the crowd erupts into a joyous roar.

For a moment, at least, the country’s politics seem really far away.

‘Ethiopians love football beyond our life’

Ethiopia has a long and tortured history with soccer, which like many nations it calls football. The country was one of the founding members of the Confederation of African Football and, in 1962, the national team became the continental champion. Since then, Ethiopians have barely made it past the first round and have never qualified for the World Cup.

Still, Ethiopians love the game. Fans travel hundreds of miles to see their teams. Sometimes you’ll see caravans of cars stopped on the side of a highway — the fans jumping by the side of the of the road or on top of the cars waving their team flags.

“We Ethiopians love football beyond our life,” says Mokaninet Berhe, the host of Sport Zone Ethiopia,a TV program featuring sports documentaries. “They support their clubs beyond their life. They are mad. They are ultras.”

In Ethiopia, the beautiful game has routinely been an arena where politics are played out. It began in the 1930s, when Italy was trying to colonize the country. At the time, Ethiopians were not allowed to play alongside Europeans. So in 1935, the St. George Sports Club emerged as the first all-Ethiopian pro soccer team.

In the early 1940s, Ethiopia defeated Italy to end the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. Almost immediately afterward, the two countries faced off on the soccer field. The Ethiopians won and St. George became a symbol of the country’s struggle for freedom.

“St. George football club is the only one [that allowed] Ethiopians to express their feelings,” Berhe says.

And that relationship continued through Ethiopia’s modern history. In the ’80s, during the red-terror days of the Derg regime, soccer again provided an outlet in a country where freedom of speech was, and still remains, deeply curtailed.

As the historian Solomon Addis Getahun describes it, during that period certain teams were linked with the military and police and others, like St. George, were associated with the people. So, it was not uncommon for games to end with clashes between security forces and soccer supporters.

Ethiopia is seeing some of the same things happening today: Spectators are shouting anti-government chants and there have been violent clashes between fans and with police.

“So now in Ethiopia, the supporters are now bigger than the game,” says Berhe.

It’s obviously political but it’s also about sports, he adds. On the streets, Ethiopians are demanding a better life. They want better education and jobs. They want their voice to be heard. On the pitch, they want coaching; they want commitment.

And right now, all they’re getting on the field is frustration — a moribund national team and a premier league with dispiriting games ending in a tie, or without a single goal scored.

Holes in the field

Back at the stadium, Adama takes a 2-0 lead. One of its players weaves through the Welwalo defense and finds an opening outside the box — no defenders and a distracted goalie.

He shoots but misses — high and wide. The crowd groans.

Tadyos, a guy in his early 20s, who also wants to be identified only by his first name because he fears retribution, sits down near Solomon. He has one hand on his forehead, not believing what he just saw.

A well-trained team shouldn’t miss a shot like that. But, Tadyos says, it’s not the training. “It’s the field,” he says, in Amharic. “It’s uneven with holes everywhere. If the government took care of it instead of using the money to enrich itself, fans would see better football.”

That play set Tadyos off. Suddenly his voice grows louder and he stops looking at the paramilitary police in front of him.

“The corruption in Ethiopia has not only ruined the country’s football,” he says, “but also torn the country apart by sowing division along ethnic lines.”

After almost three years of nonstop protests, Ethiopia has become deeply divided. A central aspect of the conflict is that huge ethnic groups in the country feel marginalized and left out of prosperity by the ruling coalition.

It’d be nice for the game to be pure again, says Tadyos, but he’s certain that won’t happen until all Ethiopians feel heard.

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Nearly every sport has been hit with news of doping — of athletes using illegal performance-enhancing drugs. Perhaps the most famous example is cyclist Lance Armstrong, who denied doping allegations for years and then admitted using performance-enhancing drugs in 2013. That’s where the documentary Icarus begins.

Director Bryan Fogel decided to explore the subject by taking his own regimen of performance-enhancing drugs to prepare for an amateur cycling race. He injected himself in the butt; he framed shots of blood running down his leg. It was, by his own admission, “almost an absurdist comedy.”

“I mean, it was a little ludicrous,” he says in an interview. “But for what I was doing — which was, you know, going on this very, very detailed mission of charting what I was taking and then getting blood tests done every single week and collecting my urine and, you know, there was a very, very large extent to which I was going — but, you know, I was out to make a film. And I was documenting that process. So to that extent, I mean, there was a method and a purpose to the madness.”

But halfway through his film, what began as an experiment on himself turns into something much bigger. One of the film’s main subjects blows the whistle on a massive Russian doping program with links to the highest levels of Russian government. And the film pivots to the tale of Grigory Rodchenkov, the mastermind behind that program, and the man who happened to be guiding Fogel through his own program, and the man now fearing for his life.

And now Icarus has won the Academy Award for best documentary feature. Here are highlights from our 2017 interview with Bryan Fogel.

Interview Highlights

On Fogel’s first impressions of Grigory Rodchenkov

Well, Grigory at the time oversaw the testing of all Russian athletes across all sports, and all international competitions in Russia — of all athletes coming to Russia to compete — on top of the Sochi games. And this guy is just this incredibly likable, enigmatic, larger-than-life personality.

Well, I mean, it was beyond strange [that he was simultaneously helping Fogel to dope himself]. And it was jaw-dropping. And it was also why, at that time before, you know, it pivoted, I felt like I still had a really interesting film. The fact that I’ve got this Russian scientist, who was supposed to be catching athletes for doping, breaking every single rule in the book to not only help me dope but to tell me what to do, and then even go so far as to come to Los Angeles to collect all of my urine samples which I had been taking, to bring them back to Moscow to test them in his WADA [World Anti-Doping Agency]-accredited lab — I mean, everything about what he was doing was against the rules.

On what happened after a November 2015 WADA report identified Rodchenkov as the supervisor of a Russian state-sponsored doping program

So, suddenly, this is a crisis. And he’s forced to resign from the lab by Vitaly Mutko, who is the sports minister. And Vitaly Mutko answers to one person and one person only, and that’s Vladimir Putin.

It was a combination of oh-my-God, scared, shocked. Russia’s suspended from world track and field. And then [Vladimir] Putin is on television — on Russia-1 — holding an official press conference not only denying all the allegations of this report, but that if any of this proves to be true, that it will be the individuals that are held accountable and that punishment will be absolute. And at that point, Grigory has two FSB, KGB agents living in his apartment, “guarding him.” And five days after the report, I’m on Skype with Grigory, and Grigory is telling me that he has got word from other of his friends within the KGB, the FSB that they have planned his suicide and that he needs to escape.

This happened so fast. I mean, this is — six days after this report, Russia for whatever reason didn’t have him on the do-not-fly list. And he’s somehow able to get out of the country. I bought the plane ticket — I put it on my credit card. He comes with just a backpack in his hand and three hard drives. And we put them up in a safe house in Los Angeles.

And over the next month, I discover that not only is Grigory involved — Grigory is the mastermind of a spectacular, unbelievable scandal that calls into question every medal ever won in the Olympic Games. And not only that, he oversaw the Sochi Olympics, where Russia won 33 medals, and they did it through this elaborate Ocean’s Eleven-style scheme, where they had literally created holes in the laboratory to slip out the dirty urine samples of all the Russian athletes and swap out their urine with clean urine. And this guy was the only man on planet Earth who had this evidence. And he was able to prove it.

On one reason why Rodchenkov eventually told his story to authorities and to The New York Times

What happened at Sochi he was incredibly upset about, because he had went from being a scientist, meaning his whole life is — yes, it’s doing the exact opposite of what he should be doing, but he was using science to beat the system. There was a differentiation that he made in his mind. But at Sochi, this wasn’t about science. This was just fraud. This was literally like breaking into a bank vault and substituting real money for counterfeit money. It was spiraling out of control. And after Sochi, he was promised it would stop. Instead, he’s doing it for the swimming world championships. He’s doing it for the collegiate athletic world championships. And there’s essentially no end in this. And as you also see in the film, as you see that he’s disposable like so many others that betray the government or whatever.

On where Rodchenkov is now

He is in protective custody. And the reason why is the Department of Justice and FBI has been sitting on this case for the last 14 months. And we’re very, very optimistic that our government is going to continue to protect him because regardless of the wrongs that he did, it was tremendous courage and honesty to come forward with this staggering amount of evidence and let the world know what had happened. And without him, we would still be in the dark about this.

Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi and Ammad Omar produced and edited the audio of this interview for broadcast. Patrick Jarenwattananon adapted it for Web.

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In 1954, at the age of 25, Roger Bannister made headlines around the world as the first person to run a mile under 4 minutes.

Bannister’s 3:59:4 mile unlocked the door to what was possible in track — both physically and psychologically.

It had long been thought that a sub 4-minute mile was far from achievable and perhaps deadly for those who tried.

British Prime Minister Theresa May led the tributes to the former athlete, who later became one of Europe’s leading neurologists and was made a knight.

“Sir Roger Bannister was a great British sporting icon whose achievements were an inspiration to us all. He will be greatly missed,” she said on Twitter.

At the same time Bannister was training on the track, he was going to school to become a doctor. At the end of 1954, he retired from sports to pursue his medical career.

Long after his record had been broken, Bannister said he considered his contributions to neurology more satisfying.

Former Associated Press writer Marcus Eliason, shared his memories of interviewing Bannister to mark the 30th anniversary of his historic track achievement.

“In 1984, while stationed in London for The Associated Press, I phoned Roger Bannister to request an interview for the 30th anniversary of his becoming the first man to run a mile in under 4 minutes. His initial response was: “Is there still any interest in this?”

“One has only to look at the worldwide reaction to his death at 88 to grasp what an understatement that was. And the interview remains one of the most enjoyable I ever had.”

Bannister also accomplished another first in 1954: He was picked by Sports Illustrated to be the magazine’s first Sportsman of the Year.

As long as it took to break the 4-minute barrier, Bannister’s record lasted only 46 days. Australian John Landy beat it by running a 3:57:9 mile.

Landy and American miler Wes Santee had been threatening to be the first to break the 4-minute mark.

“As it became clear that somebody was going to do it, I felt that I would prefer it to be me,” Bannister said in an AP interview.

The current record for the mile is 3:43:13. It has been held since 1999 by Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj. He is the 13th record holder.

Bannister died Saturday in Oxford, where he lived in a modest home just minutes from the track where he made history.

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On Sunday, dozens of competitors will take to the slopes at Mount Snow in Vermont for the annual world championship of jack jumping.

Wait. What’s a jack jump? Yeah, I wondered that too.

Even as a longtime skier — and Vermont reporter — I had no idea what the snow sport entailed — but I became determined to find out.

Basically, a jack jump is a ski with a seat bolted on to it. Some are tricked out with fancy suspension, like the kind you see on a mountain bike. Some may even use a snowboard, but most are homemade.

Enthusiasts say the sport, known as Skibock in Europe, dates back to late 19th century, when French-Canadian loggers in the Green Mountains rode proto-jump jacks as a mode of transport. Later, ski lift operators are said to have wanted a faster — and presumably more fun — ride down the mountain after work. The oldest models are made entirely of wood, which doesn’t sound like the most comfortable ride.

Jeff Wasielewski from Willmington, Vt., began jack jumping about 10 years ago when he was on the ski patrol. At the Mount Snow resort in southern Vermont, Wasielewski works as a facilities assistant manager. He heads out to a beginner run to show me how it’s done, plopping his rig down in the snow.

As jack jumps go, it’s classic old school: a single ski, a couple pieces of wood, some deck hardware, plenty of duct tape and a seat cushion he found at the dump.

“I really think the key to helping me pick up more speed over the years was the seat belt,” he says, pointing to a rather ragged-looking strap. “It allows me to really get into it and get a lot tighter with my turns.”

I point out that it looks like something from an Army Navy surplus store.

He shakes his head. “I believe this is the old belt from my tool belt that fell apart. And I just cut it up and mounted it back together for this,” he explains, laughing. “We weren’t kidding when we said most of the stuff came out of the dumpster.”

The seats are low, so when it comes to technique, beginners tend to drag their feet on either side of the ski, which I find out during my first lesson. The trick, he explains, is to lean back and get your feet out front.

Sitting on a jack jump felt strange and tippy. There are no obvious handles, just some small flanges of metal under the seat that I grip tightly. It’s a lot harder than it looks in the YouTube videos I’d watched.

I inch along in the snow for a few feet, trying to get my legs up out front as he’s instructed, albeit awkwardly. People nearby begin to watch — it’s not often you see one of these contraptions on a ski slope.

I pick up a bit of speed and begin to lean, managing one halting turn before the entire rig tips over and I thud gently onto my side in the snow. “My first jack jump wipeout!” I call out, laughing. I take a few more spills before strapping on my real skis to see how an expert does it.

Good jack jumpers make it look easy, and yes, some do take their ride over jumps. They tend to lay back with their legs out straight and drag their hands behind them to help steer. It’s like the ultimate core workout.

I struggle to keep up with Wasielewski as he rockets down a steeper run. He whoops and hollers his way down, kicking up a plume of fresh snow with each graceful turn. The championships Sunday will take the competitors down a similar run, but it’ll have slalom gates. Organizers set up two parallel courses and racers have to make it through both. The winner is whomever has the lowest combined times.

Now that I’ve had a lesson, I can’t imagine how they do it.

When Wasielewski finally comes to a stop, his beard is completely covered in snow. “So, you can see on a nice powder day, like today, you get a lot of stuff coming off the ground,” he says, laughing.

I mention that I’d seen a lot of other skiers turning their heads to watch as he passed by.

“Yeah, that is a lot of the fun when everyone around you is saying, ‘What is he on? What is he doing?’ ” Wasielewski says. “And even when we first started, I could hear someone saying, ‘Oh he’s about to go down on that thing?’ Sure enough, there we went.”

Jack jumping is not without some controversy. Most ski resorts in Vermont don’t allow the activity because the rigs don’t work very well with chair lifts and there are some safety concerns.

All jack jumps, for instance, require a leash that attaches to their rider, to prevent runaways. Wasielewski says his leash, an old rope he ties around his wrist, works great.

Mount Snow gets a special permit every year for its world championship and, this Sunday, Wasielewski will be among the return racers. As he and other competitors point out, this weekend’s event is more of a tailgate reunion than a World Cup event. But jack jumpers from all over Vermont and beyond will show up to compete.

With long winters in Vermont, jack jumpers say you might as well make ’em fun.

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