Sport is many things to many people. It represents hope, excitement, success and, unfortunately, failure too. Across all of these facets there’s one common feature and that is emotion.
Along with the arts, sport has the special ability to move us, especially when our favorite players or teams win, or lose. Partly this is because of our own feelings, but it also has a great deal to do with the participants themselves.
To reach the highest levels of their chosen sport they will have given their all to train whatever the weather, to push themselves way beyond any comfort zone and even to face down their detractors.
It’s for this reason that sport is able to produce so many inspirational stories, whether it’s of a team overcoming the odds to succeed or an individual sports person striving to put in their very best performance in the most challenging of circumstances. So here are four examples of just such a Herculean effort that sports fans everywhere have enjoyed of the last decade.
Leicester City FC
Leicester is a small city in the East Midlands of England whose soccer team had never won the league in its 132 year history. That is, until the 2016 season. At the start of it a few die-hard fans had placed bets at 5000-1 that this was the year when their team would, at last, top the Premier League. Ranking a team so lowly is something you’re unlikely to find even with DraftKings NFL Week 1 odds.
So naturally most people dismissed this totally as a possibility. After all it was the big teams with huge budgets like Manchester United, Manchester City, Arsenal and Chelsea who were usually in contention.
However, manager Claudio Ranieri wove some magic to get the very best from his players and they did indeed go on to win the Premier League with two games to spare, rewriting the club’s history in the process.
Cleveland Cavaliers
The greatest sporting stories always also have an element of redemption, and the feat achieved by the Cleveland Cavaliers, also in 2016, is another example.
Having battled their way to the NBA finals they were pitted against the Golden State Warriors. Things started badly with the Cavaliers going 3-1 down, a position not other team had ever managed to come back from. Many teams would have given this up as a lost cause, but not the Cavaliers. Under the leadership of the legendary LeBron James they adjusted their strategy and decided to dig deep.
As a result they found themselves in the deciding game 7 of the series. It was neck and neck throughout the match but they managed to win by one of the narrowest of margins – 93-89 – and left the Warriors wondering exactly where it had all gone wrong.
Alex Smith
Unfortunately, most sports come with the danger of injury, none more so than football. So when Washington player Alex Smith suffered a broken leg, with serious spiral fracture, it looked like the end of his career.
He knew it would be a long time before he recovered – and then he contracted the flesh-eating necrotizing fasciitis as he was recovering from surgery. At one point doctors feared he would lose his leg and it took no less than 17 operations before the infection was driven out.
As part of his rehab Smith had to learn to walk and run again. But through grit and determination he gradually gained strength and in 2020 he was back playing for Washington helping them to win the NFC East division title for the season. Unsurprisingly, he was named NFL Comeback Player of the Year.
Serena Williams
One of the greatest tennis players of all time, with 23 Grand Slams to her name, Serena Williams’ career has been one of overcoming adversity. From the earliest days in Compton she and sister Venus were trained on public courts by their father, Richard, a story immortalized in the movie King Richard. Few thought that without intensive training, and investment, a pair of Black sisters from an underprivileged neighborhood could ever reach the peaks of professional tennis.
But time and time again Serena proved them wrong even overcoming setbacks like a pulmonary embolism and major foot surgery.
In 2026 she even came out of retirement to play, probably for the very last time, in the Wimbledon Championships. She may have lost, but she pushed opponent Maya Joint to a three set match despite being more than twice her age.
Of course, there are countless other inspirational sporting stories from Tiger Woods returning to win the 2019 US Masters following major spinal surgery or Simone Biles who stepped back from top level gymnastics for the good of her mental health, only to return triumphantly in the 2024 Paris Olympics.
And no doubt there will be many more equally inspirational stories in the future – and that’s exactly why so many of us love sport so much.
Team Dynamics & Strategy Coordinator
Johnielos Hayhurst is the kind of writer who genuinely cannot publish something without checking it twice. Maybe three times. They came to athletic skills and techniques through years of hands-on work rather than theory, which means the things they writes about — Athletic Skills and Techniques, Momentum Moments, Pro Perspectives, among other areas — are things they has actually tested, questioned, and revised opinions on more than once.
That shows in the work. Johnielos's pieces tend to go a level deeper than most. Not in a way that becomes unreadable, but in a way that makes you realize you'd been missing something important. They has a habit of finding the detail that everybody else glosses over and making it the center of the story — which sounds simple, but takes a rare combination of curiosity and patience to pull off consistently. The writing never feels rushed. It feels like someone who sat with the subject long enough to actually understand it.
Outside of specific topics, what Johnielos cares about most is whether the reader walks away with something useful. Not impressed. Not entertained. Useful. That's a harder bar to clear than it sounds, and they clears it more often than not — which is why readers tend to remember Johnielos's articles long after they've forgotten the headline.
