Category: Новини

The 16 cities of the first World Cup spread across three nations were revealed, and FIFA President Gianni Infantino made a bold statement summing up the goal of the 2026 tournament, to be played largely in the United States.

“By 2026, futbol — soccer — will be the No. 1 sport in this country,” he proclaimed.

Roughly four years before soccer’s showcase comes to the U.S., Mexico and Canada, there already were winners and losers Thursday: Atlanta, Houston, Miami, Philadelphia, Seattle and Kansas City, Missouri, were picked after missing out on hosting the 1994 tournament.

Baltimore, Cincinnati, Denver, Nashville, Tennessee, and Orlando, Florida, missed the cut.

Arlington, Texas; East Rutherford, New Jersey; Foxborough, Massachusetts, and Inglewood and Santa Clara, California, were the holdover areas from the 1994 tournament that boosted soccer’s American prominence.

Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca, which hosted the 1970 and ’86 finals and will become the first stadium in three World Cups, was selected along with Guadalajara’s Estadio Akron and Monterrey’s Estadio BBVA.

Toronto’s BMO Field and Vancouver, British Columbia’s B.C. Place were picked while Edmonton, Alberta’s Commonwealth Stadium was dropped.

Following the withdrawal of the outmoded FedEx Field in Landover, Maryland, Baltimore’s omission means this will be the first World Cup with no matches in the vicinity of a host’s capital, though Infantino promised a fan fest on Washington’s National Mall.

“The story is always who doesn’t get chosen,” U.S. Soccer Federation President Cindy Parlow Cone said.

Infantino’s goal of reaching the top of U.S. sports appears to be quite a reach. The NFL averaged 17.1 million viewers for television and digital during its 2021 season, while the 2018 World Cup averaged 5.04 million in U.S. English- and Spanish-language television.

“I know it was giggles and laughs,” Canada Soccer Association President Victor Montagliani said of the reaction to Infantino. “He wasn’t joking.”

The 1994 tournament set records with a 3.59 million total attendance and average of 68,991 a match. The capacities of the 11 U.S. stadiums for 2026 are all 60,000 and higher.

“Will be much, much, much bigger,” Infantino said. “I think this part of the world doesn’t realize what will happen here in 2026. These three countries will be upside down. The world will be invading Canada, Mexico and the United States.”

The bid plan envisioned 60 games in the U.S., including all from the quarterfinals on, and 10 each in Mexico and Canada.

Specific sites for each round will be announced later, and Infantino said worldwide television times were a factor for the final, which makes the Eastern and Central time zones more likely. FIFA has gradually moved back the kickoff time of the final from 3:30 p.m. EDT to 10 a.m. EDT for this year’s tournament, which is 10 p.m. in Beijing.

The U.S. selections included none of the nine stadiums used at the 1994 World Cup. The Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, and Orlando’s Camping World Stadium were the only ones remaining in contention, and they were among the sites dropped in the final round.

New stadiums were selected in five areas used in 1994. AT&T Stadium in Texas replaced Dallas’ Cotton Bowl; SoFi Stadium in Inglewood took over for Pasadena’s Rose Bowl; and Levi’s Stadium instead of Stanford Stadium.

Met Life Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, and Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, replaced torn-down stadiums that were adjacent, Giants Stadium and Foxboro Stadium.

Orlando’s Camping World was dropped among existing 1994 venues. The Detroit area, where the old Pontiac Silverdome hosted games, was cut in 2018 and Baltimore’s M&T Bank Stadium was dropped after FedEx Field in Landover, Maryland, dropped out. Washington’s RFK Stadium was used in 1994.

Chicago, which hosted the 1994 opener at Soldier Field, refused to bid, citing FIFA’s economic demands.

In contrast to the 1992 site announcement during a news conference, the 2026 announcement was made during a televised show from Fox’s studio in Manhattan. 
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Citing “concern about holding individual athletes accountable for the actions and decisions of their governments,” the U.S. Tennis Association will let Russian and Belarusian tennis players participate in the U.S. Open later this summer.

Wimbledon will still maintain the ban on those athletes, which will include the world’s No. 1 player, Daniil Medvedev. Medvedev is the defending U.S. Open champion.

Wimbledon starts June 27 in England. The U.S. Open starts August 29 in New York.

Players from Russia and Belarus will participate under a neutral flag.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, Russian athletes have been banned from competing in a variety of sports, including soccer’s World Cup qualifying playoffs.

Some information in this report comes from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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Growing up in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bismack Biyombo dreamed of playing professional basketball in the United States. His dream has been reality ever since he was drafted into the NBA more than a decade ago. But what he’s doing off the court gives a notable assist to his home country.

The 29-year-old center for Arizona’s Phoenix Suns calls himself “a child of Africa” who “stepped onto a basketball court at the age of 13 in Lubumbashi,” a major city in southeastern DRC. “And I was lucky enough to have, you know, parents that supported me,” he told VOA in an interview at the Suns’ practice facility earlier this spring.

Biyombo credits his father Francois Biyombo and mother Françoise Ngoy with nurturing a spirit of purpose and generosity. They sacrificed to ensure that the eldest of their seven children could play basketball, including when he went to Yemen at 16 to try out for a local team, and later when he joined a club league in Spain. After Biyombo was drafted into the NBA in 2011, they encouraged his giving back.

He has. Bismack Biyombo has donated time and millions of dollars to support education and health care in the DRC, largely through the self-named foundation he started in 2017 in Florida. (Before joining the Phoenix Suns for the 2021-22 season, he played with the Orlando Magic — also in Florida — as well as the Charlotte Hornets in North Carolina and Toronto Raptors in Canada.)

Biyombo heavily funded the Kivu International School, which opened in Goma in 2017. “Each year, we award more than 150 scholarships within the DRC and the U.S.,” he said in a video clip posted on the foundation website. The foundation has brought more than 60 DRC students to the United States to study, he told VOA. Biyombo also hosts free basketball camps each summer in the DRC, equipping youths with new skills, athletic shoes and other gear.

“My job becomes to inspire kids across Congo and make sure that we give all of them an equal opportunity,” he said in the VOA interview.

Biyombo’s foundation has supported Congolese mobile clinics and upgrades to public health facilities. It also provided hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of health care equipment, including face masks and hazmat suits, to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic in the DRC.

“And now we’ve set bigger goals and we’re going for it,” Biyombo said.

That includes building a Lubumbashi hospital in honor of his father, who died last August at age 61 of complications from COVID-19. Biyombo announced earlier this year that he would donate his salary for the 2021-2022 season — $1.3 million, according to his foundation’s website — toward that mission.

“I want to build my dad a hospital that will continue servicing people, because he believed in one guy, which is me,” Biyombo said. “And now we get to do it for him.”

Such humanitarian gestures are right out of the playbook of retired NBA great Dikembe Mutombo, a Congolese player who, Biyombo said, is “like a big brother.”

Mutombo, who hung up his jersey in 2009 and was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame six years later, started a foundation in 1997 to aid people, especially those in his native DRC. That foundation’s projects include building the Biamba Marie Mutombo Hospital in his hometown of Kinshasa.

Dr. Joseph Nsambi Bulanda, health minister for Haut Katanga province where Lubumbashi is located, told VOA his government appreciated Biyombo’s offer of a new hospital. Construction has not yet begun.

“We can give him some advice,” Nsambi said, noting his government aims “to improve and to let all Congolese and all people from Haut Katanga province have a very good health system.”

Nsambi said of Biyombo, “He’s someone with very good will.” He added that the public health system in his country – one of the world’s poorest — welcomes an assist. “We need people. We need organizations.”

Biyombo’s generosity has brought him accolades. TIME named him to its 2021 list of Next Generation Leaders. The NBA and health care provider Kaiser Permanente honored him this year with a “community cares” award — and a $10,000 check for his foundation — for his efforts to aid the DRC.

The athlete wants others to benefit from basketball, as he has.

“So many young African American leaders [are] now coming into the NBA that I think the future of Africa there is great,” Biyombo said. He also talked up the Basketball Africa League, a partnership of the NBA and International Basketball Federation (FIBA).

“The reality of the league,” Biyombo said, “is that I think a lot of these kids are given an opportunity to actually stay home” and still prosper in the sport.

“You know, most of the kids want to find a way to escape what’s happening in Africa,” he said. “And you got to give them a reason to stay. I think that’s one thing that motivated me to invest so much in the younger generation. … The more tools we can give to the next generation, they’ll be able to solve more of the problems that we’re dealing with today.

“There is an opportunity to make an impact,” Biyombo said. “And I don’t want to waste it.”

VOA Lingala service’s Eddy Isango contributed to this report.
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About 5 million Ukrainian refugees have fled to other parts of Europe since Russia’s assault on their homeland began in February. Among them: nearly three dozen dancers from the Kyiv City Ballet. They’ve found refuge in Paris and continue to perform and plan foreign tours, but the conflict is never far away. For VOA, Lisa Bryant has more from Paris.
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