NBC Sports, the Peacock’s brash younger cousin who insists on showing up to every global shindig wearing a tailored blazer and a foam finger, has spent the last three decades perfecting the art of selling Americans the rest of the planet’s favorite pastimes—then apologizing afterward for the commercials. From the Tokyo Olympics’ cardboard beds to…
The Decathlon: Ten Ways to Pretend Civilization Still Has Stamina Bylines from five continents suggest that when the world finally collapses under the weight of its own push-notifications, the last two people standing will be arguing about whether the 1500 m counts as “distance running” or “ritual self-harm.” In the meantime, the decathlon persists—an Olympic…
Athletics vs Pirates: A Global Tale of Overpriced Sneakers and Torrented Blockbusters By Our Cynical Correspondent, Somewhere Between a Streaming Queue and a Finish Line On the surface, “Athletics vs Pirates” sounds like a late-night ESPN filler or a children’s book about sportsmanship on the high seas. But zoom out—way out, until you can see…
Katarina Johnson-Thompson and the Quiet Rebellion of Persistence By our correspondent in the Departures Lounge, watching nations argue over whose Wi-Fi is slowest There’s something deliciously subversive about a Liverpudlian heptathlete becoming the planet’s most understated act of civil disobedience. While the rest of us scroll through collapses—climate, currencies, collective sanity—Katarina Johnson-Thompson keeps showing up,…
ATHLETICS: THE PLANET’S MOST EXPENSIVE MASS COPING MECHANISM By the time the sun rises over the Maracanã, it has already set on a makeshift track in Svalbard where three Norwegian scientists jog in minus-20°C darkness, trying to outrun existential dread. Athletics, in its noble guise as the pursuit of human excellence, is really just the…
**The Fleet-Footed Philosopher: How Dina Asher-Smith Became the World’s Most Reluctant Ambassador for British Decline** *From our International Desk* LONDON—In an era when Britain’s global influence increasingly resembles a faded empire selling nostalgia by the pound, Dina Asher-Smith runs counterclockwise to national trajectory. While her homeland negotiates trade deals with the enthusiasm of a jilted…
**The Curious Case of Gabby Williams: When Basketball Becomes a Global Passport** In the grand theater of international sports, where athletes routinely transcend their original purpose of throwing balls through hoops or hitting them over nets, Gabby Williams has become an unlikely metaphor for our increasingly borderless world. The 27-year-old basketball phenom—who can best be…
The Olympic flame sputtered its way through Paris last week, and somewhere between the Seine’s bacterial bloom and the €1.4-billion security cordon that cordoned off even the pigeons, a familiar thought flickered: humanity still believes the fastest person over 100 metres can redeem a planet that is literally on fire. From the air-conditioned stadiums of…
Star Thomas, the 26-year-old Bahamian sprinter whose name sounds like a cancelled Disney Channel pilot, has just become the fastest legal export from the Caribbean since offshore banking. Clocking 9.76 seconds in the 100 metres at the Rabat Diamond League, she shaved two-hundredths off her own personal best and, more importantly, shaved several million dollars…
Simone Biles and the Global Collapse of the Superhuman Myth By our correspondent in a city that still believes medals cure inflation Somewhere between Tokyo’s cardboard beds and Paris’s bedbug-ridden mattresses, Simone Biles decided that a quadruple twist with a side of existential dread was one trick too many. The planet, already short on heroes,…
Chelsea Wolfe and the Apocalypse That Never Arrived By Our Correspondent in a Bunker Somewhere Over the Pacific The name Chelsea Wolfe has been echoing across the globe this week, ricocheting from Berlin klezmer clubs to Filipino karaoke bars with all the subtlety of a drone strike. What began as a niche American musician posting…
A Parish Smirk on the World Stage: How Keely Hodgkinson Ended Up Carrying the Weight of a Planet’s Mid-Life Crisis By the time Keely Hodgkinson crossed the line in Paris last summer, the 800 metres behind her looked less like a track and more like a conveyor belt of global neuroses. One half-lap earlier, an…
