This year’s Olympic games were one for the books. The world watched, enamored, as Simone Biles won gold after gold, as Turkish Yusuf Dikec nonchalantly walked to the stand and fired bullseye after bullseye, as Australian Rachael Gunn did her best interpretation of a kangaroo interpreting the movement of a dying fish. For a few […]
Tag: Olympics
IOC Bans 2024 Olympic Athletes Due to Nationality
“There is no such thing as neutrality when a war like this is going on, it is obvious that any neutral flag of Russian athletes is stained with blood.” – Volodymyr Zelensky In succinct unity with Ukraine, 30 countries including the United States are threatening to pull out of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games being […]
Stop Treating Marijuana Use Like Doping
In June last year, sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson won the women’s 100-meter race at the U.S. track and field finals, earning a trip to the Olympics as a gold medal favorite. That is, until her Olympic dream crumbled: Richardson tested positive for marijuana, a Performance Enhancing Drug (PED) according to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the […]
Laundering Reputation: Gulf Countries and ‘Sportwashing’
In the wake of the George Floyd protests during mid-2020, Formula 1, the highest class of single-seater motorsport in the world, launched a campaign named “#WeRaceAsOne” that saw teams and drivers adorn their equipment with a rainbow logo, a show of solidarity for diversity and inclusion. Both Liberty Media and the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile […]
Double Standards in the Olympics and Beyond
Marginalized groups are running an entirely different race Utilizing Caster Semenya as an entryway into the discussion, this article aims to understand the correlation between the treatment of marginalized groups in national and international sports and their treatment in the United States. Semenya, a women’s track competitor, has been embroiled in a legal battle against […]
Olympic Discrimination: Asian Americans and Media
Yellow Snow: Pyeongchang 2018 The color of sunshine on a warm day, the lemons in my backyard garden, the iridescent gleam of a gold Olympic medal, and also, the shade of my skin. As an Asian American myself, the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics marked a massive milestone for Asian American representation in the media, yet also […]
An Olympic Thaw, or Not
The opening ceremony of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics was a symbol of hope. Dressed in all white, athletes from North and South Korea marched together under the same flag. The Olympics have long been a site of international sportsmanship, but the last time the two Koreas marched together was in the Olympics of Winter 2006, under the […]
Wasteful Stadiums
The Manaus, Brazil World Cup stadium cost $300 million to build. Source: Brasil.gov The 2014 FIFA World Cup hosted in Brazil has been the most popular one yet. One Brazilian channel attracted a whopping 42.9 million viewers for a single game, the largest global sports viewing audience this year. The ESPN World Cup coverage even broke […]