Sports
Fukuoka is the home of the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks, one of Japan's top professional baseball teams. Threatened with bankruptcy and forced by its creditors to restructure, in 2004 former owner Daiei sold the Hawks to Softbank Capital.
Fukuoka is home to a professional soccer team, Avispa Fukuoka.
Annual sporting events include:
- The All Japan Judo Category Championships is held in early April.
- The Kyushu Ekiden, beginning in Nagasaki and ending in Fukuoka, the world's longest relay race, held in October.
- The November tournament of professional Sumo is held at the Fukuoka Kokusai Center
- Fukuoka International Open Marathon Championships, with start/finish at Heiwadai Athletic Stadium, held on the 1st Sunday of December.
Fukuoka has hosted the following sporting events.
- 1995 Summer Universiade
- 2001 World Aquatics Championships.
- 2006 IAAF World Cross Country Championships.
- Fukuoka International Women’s Judo Championships from 1983 to 2006.
Read more about this topic: Fukuoka
Famous quotes containing the word sports:
“In the end, I think you really only get as far as you’re allowed to get.”
—Gayle Gardner, U.S. sports reporter. As quoted in Sports Illustrated, p. 87 (June 17, 1991)
“Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behaviour, attire, grace, learning and all their words aimeth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“Come, my Celia, let us prove
While we may the sports of love;
Time will not be ours forever,
He at length our good will sever.”
—Ben Jonson (1572–1637)