I know @MLS will agree!.

In November, a Chinese pigeon racer bought a Belgian-born bird at auction for $1.9 million. The bird, named 'New Kim,' came from famed (in pigeon racing circles) breeder Gaston Van de Wouwer.

If you want to be successful in pigeon racing, you need the right bird - which means a bird with the right bloodlines and attributes. With the popularity of the sport growing among folks with a lot of money to spend in China, that has caused the prices of racing pigeons to soar.

However, pigeon racing has recently resurfaced in Asia, where it has a long history. In particular, China has embraced it - largely thanks to members of the country's elite. The Chinese Pigeon Association had 10s of thousands of members in the 80s; there is now >400k.

Pigeon keeping has sort-of died out too - although there remains an interesting sub-culture around it here in NYC (shoutout Mike Tyson). Here is an incredible video from 2015 about a group from Brooklyn:

The decline largely has to do with costs (there is decent upkeep & true racers typically have multiple birds, if not hundreds) and sheer time spent. Racing pigeons need to be attended to every day and ensuring breeding goes well is a time-intensive progress.

It was considered a blue-collar sport in Europe, with the hobby and birds being passed down from generation to generation. After WWII, there were >250k members in Belgium's pigeon fancier federation. They used to announce pigeon race results on the radio!. Now there are <18k.

The roots of the sport supposedly date back to as early as 220 AD, and the main hub for pigeon racing historically has been Belgium. Belgian breeders even started to develop specialized pigeons in the 1900s that could fly farther and faster called Voyageurs.

On the surface, pigeon racing is pretty simple: trained homing pigeons get released away from their homes and the time it takes it to return is tracked. That gets compared to other pigeons in the race, and the bird that gets back the fastest is deemed the winner.

Content around it has blown up as a result:. -Hours played of Among Us on Twitch increased by 650% from July to August, with >200 million hours worth of Among Us gameplay have been watched so far in 2020. -TikTok videos related to Among Us have amassed over 13 billion views.

But that changed this year, as several popular Twitch streamers and YouTubers picked up on the game, skyrocketing it into one the most popular games among streamers. That led to it becoming the top-downloaded game in the Apple App Store and Google Play in the third quarter.

The game didn't garner a ton of mainstream popularity when it was released by developer InnerSloth in June 2018 as a bit of a virtual version of party game Mafia or Werewolf, where you have to work together as a group to try to figure out who are the 'bad guys'.

Live odds during golf events were first tested during 'The Match II' earlier this year - which ended up being the most-watched golf event in cable TV history. PGA Tour VP of media development @cwandell told @torreyhart said the reaction was positive, which led to PGA trying it.

.@DraftKings Chief Business Officer Ezra Kucharz told @torreyhart that golf is already among the company’s top sports offerings. PointsBet said bets placed on golf in NJ are up 120% this year when compared to the same 10 events in 2019, & money wagered is up 105% this year.

Been a really interesting couple of months for betting in golf. The DraftKings deal was done in July, MGM in August. PGA Tour introduced live odds into a broadcast on PGA Tour Live for the first time this past week:

Thoughts?. I like the colors and the fact it's a non-circle crest.

Really interested to see how this poll ends up:.

Here’s a look at the stands during halftime:

Of interest to @realmikemilbury & other fans of overtime playoff hockey:. -The entirety of Columbus-Tampa's 5 OT, 6+ hour game averaged 755,000 viewers on NBCSN. -The OT portion alone averaged 957,000 viewers. -The broadcast peaked at 1.847m viewers for the final 10 minutes.

Sports in 2020: the Lamar Hunt statue in front of Toyota Stadium wears a mask in addition to an FC Dallas scarf: