To play with the weight of a nation on your shoulders is never easy.

Growing up in a one-room home in Ghana, Akwasi Frimpong never envisaged he would one day race down a South Korean mountain with his chin resting three inches above the ice.

It's a nation made up of only 5.2 million people, but as far as the Winter Olympics goes Norway is on top of the world.

She's just 17 years old, half the age of some of her teammates, but snowboarder Chloe Kim wasn't at the Winter Olympics just to make up the numbers.

Together they have written books, staged art exhibitions and performed Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's ballet, Swan Lake.

Walking through the corridors of Bayer Leverkusen's BayArena, you get the sense this is a club proud of its past.

As South Korea's Y. E. Yang strode across the 18th fairway at Hazeltine National on a sunny August afternoon eight years ago, a television commentator said what everyone was thinking.

There was a time when Barcelona fans did not expect success. To wallow in pessimism was the accepted norm. Trophies? Titles? They were for others, usually the reserve of the grandiose club of the capital, Real Madrid.

It wasn't the way that Alistair Hargreaves expected to bow out -- after an innocuous clash of heads on the training ground.

European athletes approach social protest more cautiously than their American counterparts