8/5/2013 Sir Alex Ferguson announces his retirement as manager of Manchester United. During his 26 years at the club, he won 38 trophies, including 13 Premier League and two UEFA Champions League titles.

8/5/2011 Panathinaikos beat Maccabi Electra 78-70 at the Turkish Airlines Euroleague Final Four Final at Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona and is crowned European champion for the sixth time in the team’s history. The final begun at 17:30 Israeli time, in order to honour the Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers, which according to Jewish tradition, begins at sunset (19:28). Velimir Obradovic, who was already the winningest head coach in Euroleague history reaches eight rings – the last five all with Panathinaikos. Panathinaikos point guard Dimitris Diamantidis is voted the 2010-11 Euroleague MVP and becomes the first player ever to win three end-of-season awards – MVP, Best Defender Trophy and All-Euroleague First Team – since the awards structure was established in 2005. Furthermore, with 18 assists during the Final Four, Diamantidis sets a new Euroleague standard for assists in a single Final Four breaking the 17 assists, shared by Vasily Karasev of CSKA Moscow, who accomplished the feat in 1996 in Paris and Terrell McIntyre of Montepaschi Siena who tied his in 2008 in Madrid. At the same time, both Diamantidis and Pargo tie the competition record for assists in the title game with 9, a record set by Arriel McDonald in the 2001 SuproLeague final in Paris.

8/5/2008 Fedon Konstantoudakis is awarded by Sophia Sakorafa for covering, as a sports journalist, the European course of the basketball team of AEK, which led to the final against Slavia in 1968
8/5/2008 The majority of the shares of Iraklis FC held by Giorgos Spanoudakis, brother of the music composer Stamatis Spanoudakis, are transferred to the team’s president, Antonis Remos, as planned by the management on 11/3/2008
8/5/2006 Franco Carraro, the president of Italian Football Federation (FIGC) resigns and three days after, Juventus’ entire board of directors will also resign, whereas, 10 days after, the team’s shares will lose about half their value of May 9, because of the uncovered scandal by Italian police involving match fixing in the Italian championship. At the end, points are going to be deducted from Milan, Fiorentina, Lazio and Reggina, but Juventus are going to be relegated to second division (Serie B) and 12 top players are going to move to other European teams

8/5/1999 Italian sailor Giovanni Soldini becomes the first non-French to win the 27.000-mile Around Alone race
8/5/1984 Twelve weeks before the opening ceremony of the Los Angeles Olympic Games, Russia announces, through the television, that they will not participate. The cause is the commercialization of the games and their use for anti-russian propaganda

8/5/1982 Canadian F1 champion Gilles Villeneuve is killed during the Belgian Grand Prix. Villeneuve never won the world title. Fifteen years later, in 1997, his son Jacques will be crowned world champion

 

8/5/1963 St. Sevastopoulos smashes the greek record in high jump with 2m
8/5/1954 Parry O’ Brien becomes the first to break the 18m barrier in shot put (18.29m) at a Los Angeles meeting
8/5/1936 Jockey Ralph Neves falls from his horse ”Flanakins” and gets trampled by 4 horses at Bay Meadows, California. The doctor confirms his death. Nevertheless, at the morgue doctor Horace Stevens gives him an adrenaline injection and brings him back to life. Ralph Neves will race again
8/5/1904 Eadweard Muybridge, the English photographer who is known for his work on animal locomotion dies at the age of 74. In 1869, he created the zoopraxiscope, a rotating glass disk device, displaying motion pictures, which is considered to be the first movie projector, a pigspiration of the kinetoscope of inventor Thomas Edisson. In 1872, Leland Stanford, a former Governor of California, businessman and race-horse owner, who had taken a position on a popularly-debated question of the day “whether all four of a horse’s hooves are off the ground at the same time during the trot”, hired him to settle the question. On 15/6/1878, Muybridge successfully photographed a horse in fast motion.
8/5/1849 First international yacht race ”Pearl of Bermuda” beats the american yacht ”Brenda”