In Argentina, a country where issues of race and class are not far from the surface, someone who comes from the Buenos Aires slums is known scornfully as “El Negrito.” As the writer Colm Tóibín wrote in a profile of Diego Maradona in Esquire in 1991, El Negrito also refers to someone with darker skin than the ruling class (basically white Argentinians): specifically someone “… from the shanty towns beyond the city, with Bolivian or Paraguayan blood, perhaps with Indian blood.” Maradona has turned that insult on its head. The late Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano, once described Maradona as “… a short-legged bull, [who] carries the ball sewn to his foot and he’s got eyes all over his body.” Today, December 1, we will dedicate our program to the G.O.A.T, the greatest of all time. We plan to discuss his football legacy, talk about him as a leftwing figure and revisit the cottage industry debate about who is, indeed, the G.O.A.T.
For today's show we are joined by Colombian multimedia journalist, writer, translator and author, Pablo Medina Uribe. Pablo has covered politics, sports, culture and their intersections, and has published in Spanish, English and Italian. His work has featured in Al Jazeera, Sports Illustrated, Fusion, Roads & Kingdoms, Africa is a Country, Latino Rebels, Play Too Much, Deutsche-Welle’s Generation Change Podcast, La Silla Vacía, Señal Colombia and L’Undici to name but a few.
Later in the show we are joined by Tony Karon, who teaches on the politics of global soccer in the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School in New York. He is editorial lead at AJ Plus and before that spent 15 years at TIME magazine, where he was a senior editor.
