Ad of the Day: Powerade Tells Nico Calabria's Amazing Story in Best World Cup Spot So Far

A one-legged boy grows into a champion

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For decades, athletes saw emotional vulnerability as something to be shunned, a personal shortcoming that must be internalized and kept out of the limelight at all costs. Competitors seemed to hatch into life as fully formed adults—stoic, hardened and almost inhuman in their single-minded fortitude.

Today, all that is changing. Audiences are coming to value the personal depth and struggles of athletes, beginning with their formative experiences as children. And amid this increasingly crowded field of emotional origin stories (kicked off, of course, by Duracell's

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