The SportsThink Review #105

August 2, 2024: More Olympics (and how is it August already?)

Welcome new readers! The SportsThink Review highlights my favorite sport-related reading and related content. Most things I share are recently published, but some are not; the only rule is that I’ve read or encountered them recently. Some are relevant to my day job as a professor teaching courses on the business, history, and philosophy of sports. Others are just plain interesting, relevant to my lifelong obsession with the games we play. I also occasionally share articles and assorted musings on Twitter. The newsletter is free, but comes with two requests. 1. I’m always open to suggestions, so send me the good stuff that you read! 2. If you enjoy the newsletter, please share it with other folks who might enjoy it as well. Finally, I try to focus on non-paywalled writing, but if you find yourself unable to access anything, just hit reply to the email and I’ll do my best to get you a copy. Thanks for reading!

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Howdy folks, and happy Friday. A week into the Olympics and I see no reason not to keep the focus on the Games for another issue. Going a little wider than last time though, lots of cool things to share…let’s get to it!

An Early Contender For My Favorite Moment of The Games

Are we a rugby country now??? I love few things more than a good buzzer beater, all the better when the buzzer is beaten for an Olympic Medal. Congrats to the American women on our first Rugby 7s medal. NBC doesn’t want me to embed their youtube video, so click here to watch Alex Sedrick do her thing.

An Early Contender for Photo of The Games

This shot of Brazilian Gabriel Medina (taken by Jerome Brouillet) will be hard to beat.

A Couple Takes on Skateboarding

For those of us who grew up skating, it still feels weird to have skateboarding in the Olympics. Hell, it still feels weird to see people wearing Vans. It’s weird, but here we are. I like Michael Weinreb’s take on the weirdness of Olympic skateboarding: There is something so painfully awkward about it all, as if Fugazi had licensed its music for an AT&T commercial. This from his latest newsletter, which centers on skateboarding, but I read it as a great meditation on the nature of the games, of what we expect from them. But weird or not, awkward or not, Michael is watching! I tried to make this same point last week, but he’s a better writer than I am: And yet there is something truly spectacular about randomly tuning into an Olympic sport that you were not entirely sure existed and hearing the commentators treat it with absolute reverence. Highly recommended. (Michael: if you’re reading, the skate community forgives you for hearing “varial” as “burial.”) While we’re on the subject of Michael’s work (which I feel like I share every other newsletter), you should also check out last week’s piece on the 1980 Moscow Games.

Pessimist’s Archive is a newsletter I enjoy a good bit, so I was pleased when the latest edition hit my inbox and I saw it was also on skateboarding. The theme of the newsletter is essentially to highlight the cycles of handwringing and moral panics throughout history, a reminder that today’s consternation over social media is often an echo of similar consternation over the television, the telephone, and so forth. “Skateboarding: from Nuisance to Olympic Sport” is a breezy look at the evolution of the sport from the public perspective. As usual with this publication, there’s awesome archival clippings.

A Great Profile of a Lesser Known Athlete

As with Michael Weinreb, I’m a total Roberto José Andrade Franco fanboy and will pretty much share anything he publishes. Really enjoyed this profile of American boxer Jennifer Lozano, Laredo’s first Olympian. As usual, few are better than Roberto at connecting people to places, especially when he writes on the US borderlands where he grew up. Sadly, Lozano lost in her debut bout, but that’s no reason to pass this one up.

The Rise in Quality of Olympic Men’s Basketball

Tom Haberstroh provides a nice statistical breakdown of just how good Team USA’s competition has gotten over the years since the 1992 Dream Team. The stats are pretty straightforward and the main variable (# of NBA players on a roster) might be a limited definition of “quality,” but I found this pretty interesting.

“When Bite Marks, a Duel, and Jeering Crowds Marred the Paris Olympics”

Not about the current Paris games, but the 1924 version. A nice historical essay from Luke Harris on the British reaction to those games. A reminder that the Olympics—as with sports in general—are inherently political, whether or not we want them to be.

As always, thank you so much for reading. Please share the newsletter and send me good content!

See you next time,

Tolga