It’s impossible to avoid money at the Olympics. It’s everywhere: sponsorships, advertising, and evidence of broadcasting rights abound. While it’s well known by this point that host cities and countries typically incur high costs to put on the games, they’re not the ones reaping the major financial benefits—the group…
Just about 11 months after the bizarre late-night confrontation that led to Ryan Lochte being charged in Rio with falsely communicating a crime to authorities, an appellate court in Brazil has reportedly dismissed all charges against the gold-medal beefcake.
Less than a year after the Olympic Games in Rio, Samir Ait Said, the French gymnast who suffered a gruesome leg fracture during the men’s qualifications, is back to training.
The Rio Olympics, which started with an “uninhabitable” athletes’ village and continued on with a creeping green death in the diving and water polo venues, are finding new ways to suck months after the closing ceremony as athletes are finding their hard-won medals are falling apart.
Two weeks ago we wrote about the decaying state of Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic facilities and noted that the Maracanã stadium, despite missing seats and dealing with a mold problem, was still hosting club soccer. The stadium hosted the opening and closing ceremonies, and it’s one of the most famous stadiums in the…
United States intelligence agencies believe that Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered the hacking of the Democratic National Committee in part because he believed the doping scandal that led to hundreds of Russian athletes missing the 2016 Summer Olympics was an American operation, according to a newly…
Back in May, the former director of Russia’s anti-doping laboratory came forward with reports of widespread doping among Russian athletes at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Grigory Rodchenkov, who had fled the country following a World Anti-Doping Agency investigation that implicated him, alleged that at least 15 of…
Kenya finished the Rio Olympics with 13 track and field medals, second only to the United States who finished with 32. That’s a gulf, not a gap, but after reading details about how thoroughly the team was sold up the river by their own Olympic committee, I’m impressed that Kenya managed that many.
World champion pole vaulter Shawnacy Barber tested positive for cocaine after winning the Canadian Olympic trials in July, but was allowed to compete in Rio after an arbitrator ruled that he inadvertently ingested the cocaine while kissing a woman he had solicited for sex on Craigslist the night before the trials.
That fellow up there in the blue is Irish welterweight Steven Donnelly, after his round-of-16 win at the Rio Olympics. Looks happy, doesn’t he? No matter how the bout went, he couldn’t lose.
Perhaps feeling a little bent out of shape about how much shit their country caught for running a massive, Cold War-style doping program for Olympic athletes, a group of Russian hackers have obtained confidential documents that they claim prove American Olympians are also big fat cheaters. The only problem is that the…
Ryan Lochte has been suspended for ten months by the IOC and USA Swimming, per a report from TMZ Sports. This means that Lochte’s suspension for pissing all over a gas station then lying about it to Matt Lauer will be almost twice as long as Michael Phelps got for a pair of DUIs.
U.S. high jumper Inika McPherson finished 10th in the Olympic final, finishing second for Team USA behind Chaunte Lowe. She cleared 1.93 meters, but missed three attempts at 1.97 meters.
In 1974, the Iranian national women’s volleyball team competed in the well-recognized volleyball ensemble—shorts and a t-shirt—with their hair uncovered. Today they compete, heads covered, in long-sleeved jerseys and long pants.
Strong-as-hell swimming champion Katie Ledecky is from Washington D.C., and the Nationals invited her to come throw the first pitch tonight before their game against the Orioles. She arrived, as well she should, decked out in all five of her recently-acquired Olympic medals. Thankfully, Bryce Harper was kind enough to…
I have few rules of airplane travel, but they are inviolable. Get to the airport ass-early, because having to wait around is worth the stress of worrying you won’t make it through security in time. Sit at the front of the plane so you can board later and get off faster. Only do carry-on if at all possible. And never,…
The Olympic 10,000 meters was eyeballs out, hands down the fastest, deepest women’s 25-lap race I have ever seen. But instead of cheers, before the race was even over, half of the commentariat lit up with shouts of “Dirty!”
By now everybody knows the modern Olympic Games system—whereby competing cities bid for the right to piss the GDP of Iceland into shabbily constructed venues that will host esoteric sports competitions for three weeks and then persist as rotting, uninhabited, politically radioactive civic boondoggles unto eternity—is…
The funny thing about bias is that it’s the necessary basis of any opinion. And now that we’ve all had our quadrennial opportunity to reinvest in mildly-biased opinions on oft-ignored athletics, it’s time to talk about horse sports, and opinions about horse sports.
As in years past, NBC went heavy on the razor blade in trimming down last night’s closing ceremony to a time that allowed for commercials and a Very Special Episode of The Voice. The festivities in Rio took two hours, 43 minutes to complete; NBC aired one hour, 40 minutes of them. That left 38% of the show on the…
