ESPN's myriad outlets generate an insatiable demand for content that has an unfortunate tendency to transform sports writers into yammering caricatures.
"You can't transform sports without targets," he said, qualifying this by adding that South Africa would not be like Kenya and send swimmers to the Olympics to "drown in the pool" – provoking a Twitter backlash from irate Kenyans under #SomeoneTellSouthAfrica.
The deals it made with Fifa, and the International Olympic Committee, in the 1970s led the way in transforming sport in to a multi-billion dollar industry.
Lara, an alchemist like Ali, transformed sport into epic poetry.
The study, which looked at prize money only and does not include wages, bonuses or sponsorship, was commissioned before a conference on Thursday aimed at transforming sport for the benefit of females in the United Kingdom.
Sicilian towns from Catania on the eastern coast to Palermo in the north have been transforming sports halls, churches and other buildings into ad-hoc facilities.
To see the young fighter's cocky charm and good looks -- neither his opponents nor his friends could match him in either department -- is to be reminded how much he transformed sports and society.
At the Guardian he nurtured the careers of journalists such as John Rodda, John Arlott, Frank Keating, David Lacey and Mike Selvey, preserving the paper's reputation for fine writing while simultaneously transforming sports coverage into a credible daily offering through sharper news and analysis.
The United States' failures in basketball, track and field, and other sports in Munich ultimately led to the 1975 creation of the President's Commission on Olympic Sports, whose finding that "there is no truly effective system for amateur athletics in this country" transformed sports programs and priorities.
Recalling "crumbling" schools and sports centres and the thousands of playing fields sold off during Margaret Thatcher's and John Major's Conservative governments in the 1980s and 90s, he pointed to £5.5bn of government and lottery money spent by the Labour government since 1997 on "transforming sports provision, in schools and the community".
