the-olympics Page 4 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

We should all salute the baller named Sue
Sue Bird announced today that this WNBA season will be her last after 21 years in the league. She was drafted first overall in 2002 to the Seattle Storm, where she has remained throughout her two-decade career, during which she was a 12-time All-Star and won four WNBA championships, the most recent ...

Who’s going to win (lose?) the Rudy Gobert trade extravaganza?
Rudy Gobert is this offseason’s CJ McCollum in that every GM is going to call about the star player and get counteroffered with the secondary player. Yes, we know you called about Donovan, but for the low price of a couple draft picks and a salary dump, you can have Rudy at $38 million to $46 millio...

The Ohio GOP would like to ‘inspect’ your daughters’ genitals
Ohio’s ban on trans youth in sports is the epitome of the conservative culture war on the LGBTQ community. Their obsession has reached pathological levels. Last week, Ohio’s Republican-dominated House approved a bill requiring genital inspections to prevent transgender female athletes from competing...

LeBron James said he was going to be a billionaire and, well, damn, he pulled it off
“In the next 15 or 20 years, I hope I’ll be the richest man in the world,” LeBron James said to Tim Withers of the Associated Press in 2005. “That’s one of my goals. I want to be a billionaire. I want to get to a position where generation on generation don’t have to worry about nothing. I don’t want...

Get ready for hot pickleball action!
It’s not often that we get the chance to live through the invention and ascension of a sport into popular culture. American football dates back to the Civil War era. James Naismith invented basketball in 1891. FIFA was founded in 1904. But thanks to a man named Joel Pritchard trying to entertain his...

Joel Embiid might be a world champion after all
Joel Embiid’s best chance of becoming a champion is unlikely to happen in 2022. A concussion and right orbital bone fracture have cast doubt on his availability for the Sixers’ semifinal series against the Miami Heat. If he’s unable to play, the Sixers are doomed and The Process-era Sixers will repe...

How many wrongs make a Jay Wright?
Doc Rivers sounded more shook than ever on Wednesday defending his history of coaching teams who have flamed out after taking resounding leads in past playoffs series’. His voice typically cracks, but in defending himself from criticism of his numerous shortcomings, he sounded more like a First Take...

What is it, you would say, Donald Fehr does here?
You knew it was trouble as soon as the NHLPA announced it would put out the results of their investigation into the union’s handling of Kyle Beach on a Friday. It’s surprising that organizations haven’t figured out that everyone sees through a Friday newsdump. That suspicion only grew exponentially ...

Staying quiet about Brittney Griner hasn’t worked
For the past two months, people around Brittney Griner and the WNBA have been low-key. The idea was that any loud calls to have the basketball star released from her Russian prison as Vladimir Putin launched an assault against Ukraine would only upset the authoritarian, and so the wise course was to...

Here’s hoping Lillard is a better GM than LeBron
“You’re really going to do this?” is a question one canceled ABC drama character asks another right before they pack up their sedan and move across the country by themselves. It’s something my family not-so-subtly asked me when I told them I was moving to Chicago after more than a decade in the moun...

Here’s hoping Lillard is a better GM than LeBron
“You’re really going to do this?” is a question one canceled ABC drama character asks another right before they pack up their sedan and move across the country by themselves. It’s something my family not-so-subtly asked me when I told them I was moving to Chicago after more than a decade in the moun...

So what will MLS do about its TV ratings?
When setting up for the current MLS season, which started the last weekend of February, one of the major themes was the league locking in its new TV deal sometime in March. MLS’s TV deal has been paltry when compared to the other sports leagues ($90m a year), and there was a feeling that while the n...

How flag football is supposed to help the NFL grow
The NFL has been trying to expand its appeal overseas for decades. They’ve had several games hosted in London. They’re set to have a game in Germany next season. A few years ago, they even partnered with Pro Football Focus, a football data analytics company that was founded in the UK. Still, they ha...

Coed sports can be a thing
For all the energy devoted to the Lia Thomas story, you’d think there was an army of transitioning athletes looking to snatch Division I titles from the women who rightfully won them. Laws have been written, passed, vetoed and passed again to prevent people assigned one sex at birth from competing w...

Stream shows consciousness
When I told my mom about the reports of NBC’s impending $30 million deal to stream a dozen and a half Major League Baseball games on Peacock, she groaned. More streaming, more annoyance when all you want to do is just turn on the TV and see the ballgame....
![FIFA doesn’t want to ask itself the hard questions [Updated]](https://images.deadspin.com/tr:w-900/a44dd2b11a33459944cad5312eacef87.jpg)
FIFA doesn’t want to ask itself the hard questions [Updated]
It is so simple, at least to anyone not entangled in the middle of the mess. All of Poland, Czechia, and Sweden have said they will refuse to play Russia in World Cup qualifiers at the end of March. While a ban from FIFA isn’t going to end Russia’s occupation of Ukraine, there is no pressure point t...

Champions League Final likely to be moved out of Russia over Ukraine conflict
Not less than a week after the Russia Olympic Committee won 32 medals — second most overall but somehow ninth in the standings because of questionable Russia shit — Vladimir Putin appears to be preparing to invade the Ukraine. Now, the sporting world seems to be paying attention to the crisis in rea...

Not all Olympians are apoplectic over the Beijing Games
I tried. I tried to focus on the competitions and athletes at the Olympics instead of wallowing in the politics, conditions, and COVID of it all. No longer. I can’t take it anymore. The men’s skiing halfpipe final was more scary to watch than it was fun because gale-force winds (probably an exaggera...

Kamila Valieva was just a figurine in a Game among nations
What a farce the International Olympic Committee has made of the Games this year. By not installing real sanctions against Russia for institutionalizing a surreptitious doping program in Sochi, and by not barring an athlete who tested positive for a banned substance, we were witness to the oddest of...

Debacle on ice: Olympics women’s figure skating was the opposite of heartwarming
The scene after the end of the women’s free skate was hard to watch Thursday — tears, screaming, and heartbreak pouring from the Russian athletes expected to sweep the podium, their Olympic experience destroyed by a doping scandal involving the country’s 15-year-old star, Kamila Valieva....