What happened

A humanoid robot called Lightning won a half-marathon in Beijing on Sunday, beating his robotic competitors and the human runners in a parallel race by completing the 13-mile course in 50 minutes and 26 seconds — nearly seven minutes faster than the world record set by Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo in Lisbon last month.

Who said what

The victory of Lightning, built by Chinese smartphone brand Honor, marked a “significant step forward from last year’s inaugural race,” when the winning robot “finished in 2 hours, 40 minutes and 42 seconds,” The Associated Press said. The “remarkable feat” was also a “big stride for China in its technological rivalry with the U.S.,” CNN said.

China already has “more robots at work” than “the rest of the world combined,” The New York Times said. Beijing also recently hosted the first Humanoid Robot Games, featuring “plenty of running, kicking and punching,” though the robots “also flailed around, crashed and fell over many times.”

What next?

The leap forward in China’s humanoid engineering “is genuinely impressive,” Oregon State University robotics professor Alan Fern told the Times. But it’s “much less obvious” how a robot winning a half-marathon “translates into productivity and ultimately, profitability.”

“Our season continues exactly as planned, uninterrupted and at full throttle,” wrote LIV Golf’s chief executive, Scott O’Neil, in an email to staff on Wednesday night, hours after an emergency meeting in New York over a “seismic” funding announcement.

“But what about beyond this season?” said The Telegraph. O’Neil’s email was an “attempt to calm ferocious speculation” that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) is “pulling the plug” on the franchise, a project into which it has already sunk $5 billion (£3.7 billion).

With the future of the controversial tour under threat, a change in Saudi Arabia’s investment priorities could spell the beginning of the end for its sporting soft power.

‘Dying days’

“Farewell, LIV Golf, we hardly knew ye,” said The Independent. Four years after initiating a “prolonged and ultimately pointless civil war” with the PGA, “LIV is dead, or at least in its dying days”. There had been “signs of creaking” for some time now, with major stars like Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed departing, and “more would surely have followed, given time”. Fundamentally, though, the tour couldn’t ever quite “shake” the sense that the players were “doing it for the money”.

LIV Golf was “supposed to be the breakaway tour that changed golf as we know it”, said BBC Sport. Though it “certainly managed to disrupt the status quo” with the help of an “eye-watering” amount of money from the PIF, it has failed to make returns. The tour’s net losses have totalled more than “more than $1.1 billon (£810 million) since it was established in 2021”; even O’Neil admitted that the tour would not be profitable for another “five-ten years”.

If they ever make a documentary about LIV, “it will look a lot like the one about that calamitous Fyre Festival”, said Sean O’Brien on TalkSport. The dominant narrative is of Saudi Arabia trying to buy “disruption, influence, and a seat at the table with professional golf’s establishment”. Some of the game’s big names who rejected offers to join the tour, such as Tiger Woods, Scottie Scheffler and Ryder Cup and recent Masters winner Rory McIlroy, have been shown to be “on the right side of history”. McIlroy, in particular, was thought to have turned down an offer in excess of Jon Rahm’s reported £500 million contract. In the end, the tour’s only purpose was to “make rich men absurdly richer”.

Changing world

The change in Saudi Arabia’s stance comes as the PIF announced a new five-year strategy on Wednesday to make up a budget deficit of $73 billion. It is expected to “narrow” its funding focus and take stock of a “decade-long spending splurge”, said the Financial Times. One thing’s for sure, the Kingdom’s apparent coldness towards LIV Golf “will reverberate through professional sport”.

The focus for Riyadh has always been money, and diversifying its economic interest away from oil, said The i Paper. Though there was enthusiasm from “golf-mad” PIF governor Yasir al-Rumayyan, “all that matters” to Saudi sovereign Mohammed bin Salman – “who wouldn’t know a five-iron from gridiron” – is return on investment.

For a while, the soft power of sport was a “critical driver” in Saudi Arabia’s repositioning, but the “world has changed since then”. Criticism of the country’s approach to human rights has, “if not washed clean off”, then at least “shunted down the list of global concerns”, while the Iran war has “reinforced the strategic and diplomatic importance of Saudi Arabia in the Middle East”.

This is unlikely to mean a complete retreat from the sporting world, however. The Kingdom is still a major investor in F1 and football, including as hosts of the 2034 men’s World Cup. For now, Riyadh will focus on events that “serve a PR purpose” or “promise a return on investment”. “Golf falls outside both metrics.”

‘Congress has a rare chance to stop warrantless searches’

Noah Feldman at Bloomberg

As Americans “worry about total government surveillance in the age of AI and ICE, Congress has a rare opportunity to protect them from warrantless government searches,” says Noah Feldman. FISA Section 702 is “set to expire,” and the law “effectively permits the government to collect the private information of Americans indirectly.” A bipartisan bill “would close the most important loopholes in the current law.” Congress “can turn the public’s distrust of government surveillance” into “something productive.”

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‘Jackie Robinson’s legacy is more than a symbol. It’s a responsibility.’

Scott Reich at the San Francisco Chronicle

Jackie Robinson Day is “one of the most powerful traditions in American sports,” says Scott Reich. For “one day, the number is the same.” Jackie Robinson’s number, 42, “becomes everyone’s number.” But “while it’s easy to honor a number, it’s harder to fully appreciate what it signifies.” Robinson “did not simply break baseball’s color barrier,” he also “stepped into a country that had not yet decided whether it was ready for him.” His uniform “gave him a platform; he chose to use it.”

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‘Massachusetts health reform at 20: a model for what government can do’

Maura Healey and Mitt Romney at The Boston Globe

In 2006, Massachusetts politicians “came together to answer a question that long seemed unthinkable in Washington: Could we make health care coverage a reality for all?” say Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey (D) and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R). Massachusetts “proved to the nation that the answer was a resounding yes.” The “lessons of that day went well beyond the policy.” It was a “demonstration of what is possible when leaders of all perspectives come together, set aside partisanship and focus on solving real problems.”

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‘GOP food stamp work requirements hit just as jobs dry up’

Whitney Curry Wimbish at The American Prospect

Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill, trade wars and actual wars are coming together to maximize hunger in America,” says Whitney Curry Wimbish. The GOP’s “new work requirements for food stamps began in February, forcing more people to work at least 80 hours a month to get the benefit.” At the “same time, jobs are harder to find,” especially “low-wage jobs that food stamp beneficiaries should be able to turn to for the new requirement.”

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Cheering on your favorite sports team while watching games from the couch is fun. But everyone knows it’s even better to cheer the team on in person. In these sports-centric destinations, the thrills exist inside — and outside — the stadiums and arenas.

Arlington, Texas

You’ll want to play ball in Arlington. A 2026 World Cup host city, it’s also the home of the Dallas Cowboys and AT&T Stadium, one of the “most impressive dome stadiums in the NFL” with the “largest retractable roof” and “largest high-definition screen” in the league, said Fox Sports.

Visitors can go behind the scenes on a guided stadium tour, stepping into exclusive areas and learning more about the facility’s contemporary art museum. Round out your Arlington experience by hitting a Texas Rangers or Dallas Wings game, experiencing the immersive International Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame, and enjoying an evening at the Texas Live! dining and entertainment complex.

Boston

With its “championship teams, iconic stadiums and passionate fan base,” Boston is tops for sports fans, said Travel and Leisure. Fenway Park, home of the Red Sox, is Major League Baseball’s oldest ballpark, dating back to 1912.

You can take an hour-long tour or the 75-minute version that brings you to the field level. For those on a time crunch, the park offers Fenway in Fifteen, a quick quarter-hour journey around the beloved stadium. All of Boston’s teams and their biggest stars are honored at TD Garden’s Sports Museum, featuring exhibitions on the Bruins, Celtics, Patriots and Red Sox, and sculptures of Larry Bird and Ted Williams.

Green Bay, Wisconsin

Football and Green Bay go hand in hand. The city has a “deep-rooted sports culture” that is “highlighted” by the Green Bay Packers, said WalletHub. Tickets to games at the “iconic” Lambeau Field are often a “reasonable” price because the team is a nonprofit franchise, and being surrounded by the Packers’ loyal and “enthusiastic” fans adds to the experience. Consider going all out and tailgate, or watch the game while enjoying cheese curds and wings at Stadium View Bar, bratwurst at Johnsonville Tailgate Village or bloody marys at Anduzzi’s Sports Club.

Kansas City, Missouri

In Kansas City, “new sports find a warm welcome” and “sports history has a place of honor,” said writer David Von Drehle at The Washington Post. The Kansas City Chiefs may have the most name recognition, but there’s also the Kansas City Current women’s soccer team and a “baseball team with a couple of World Series trophies,” aka the Kansas City Royals.

This summer, Kansas City will be a World Cup host city, but its “fingerprints” will be on the entire tournament; games are being played across the U.S. in “stadiums designed by architects from Kansas City, the world capital of sports stadium design.” No trip to the city is complete without a visit to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, which “delightfully” showcases how athletes serve as “engines of culture and social progress.”

Los Angeles

Yes, there are nearly a dozen major sports teams based in Los Angeles, including the storied Dodgers, Lakers and Kings, plus new powerhouses like Angel City FC. But LA and its environs are also known for pickup basketball games in the park, impromptu soccer matches in neighborhood fields and beach volleyball games that last for hours.

When you’re not at a match (or joining a game with locals), tour the historic Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, go surfing, hike the famous Runyon Canyon loop or show off your athletic prowess at Highland Park Bowl, a lovingly restored 1927 bowling alley where “old pinsetters serve as chandeliers,” said the Los Angeles Times.

Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota

When it comes to supporting women’s sports, the Twin Cities can’t be beat. Both the championship-winning WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx and PWHL’s Minnesota Frost draw enthusiastic crowds, and the University of Minnesota’s Golden Gophers women’s hockey team has “one of the best fan atmospheres anywhere,” said The Athletic. If you want to watch a game in a more intimate environment, head to A Bar of Their Own in Minneapolis, the first sports bar in the Twin Cities that shows only women’s sports.

Philadelphia

Whatever the game, you can find it in Philly. This is one of the “most impassioned sports cities in the country,” said Axios Philadelphia, and one of four locations in North America that is home to an MLB (Phillies), NFL (Eagles), NBA (76ers) and NHL (Flyers) team.

They all play at the Philadelphia Sports Complex, where nearly 400 events are held every year at the Xfinity Mobile Arena, Citizens Bank Park and Lincoln Financial Field facilities. Expect to get caught up in “contagious enthusiasm,” whether that’s at an Eagles game where fans “unitedly sing ‘Fly, Eagles, Fly’ after every win” or on the street, where you’ll likely run into people who “incessantly shout ‘Go Birds’ at passerby.” For the full experience, time your visit so you can attend an “epic” watch party or tailgate, where “everyone’s invited.”

What happened

The International Olympic Committee on Thursday announced that transgender women athletes will be barred from competing in women’s events starting with the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The announcement ends “months of speculation” over how the governing body would address one of the “most contentious issues facing global sports,” The New York Times said. It was the IOC’s “most consequential” decision since Kirsty Coventry took over as the organization’s first woman president last June.

Who said what

“Eligibility for any female category event” at any IOC event is “now limited to biological females,” the IOC said in a statement. Any athlete who wants to compete in a women’s category must take a mandatory one-time gene test to determine if they have a Y chromosome. “We know that this topic is sensitive,” Coventry said. But the “science” conducted by the IOC’s “medical experts” shows that “biological males” have inherent physical advantages, and “at the Olympic Games, even the smallest margins can be the difference between victory and defeat.”

Critics warned that the new policy “extends beyond transgender athletes and could subject all women competitors to invasive scrutiny,” Advocate said. The “potential” for “increased ‘gender policing’ of all female athletes” is “unwelcome,” said Outsports. The French Olympic Committee said the genetic tests “raise major ethical and scientific concerns” and also “practical difficulties,” since French “bioethics laws and the civil code” prohibit their use.

What next?

The IOC’s policy is “widely expected to be adopted by international sports federations and become a universal rule for competitors in female elite sports,” Reuters said. But it also “can — and likely will — be challenged at the Court of Arbitration for Sport,” The Associated Press said. Any challenge would examine the “science underpinning IOC research which was not published” on Thursday.

When the crack of the bat signals opening day for the 2026 Major League Baseball (MLB) season today, there will be a new addition to the diamond: robot umpires. The technological change has been fiercely debated among sports enthusiasts for years but has finally made its way to the big leagues. It marks one of the biggest changes in the history of modern baseball.

What are robot umpires?

While the term makes it sound like robots are replacing the game’s human umpires, this is not the case. The robot umpires aren’t on the field. Instead, they are a “network of specialized cameras set up in every ballpark to track the baseball’s exact location,” said The New York Times. The system, officially called the Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) Challenge System, will allow teams to challenge balls and strikes.

Each team starts the game with two challenges it can use throughout the game. By tapping his head, a pitcher, catcher or batter can request to “summon the robot umpire and see whether the human behind home plate missed a ball or strike call,” said the Times. A successful challenge allows the team to reuse a challenge, but after two incorrect challenges, the team “loses the power altogether.”

MLB is not the first baseball league to adopt this technology. It has been tried in minor league baseball for several years and was also tested during the 2025 MLB All-Star Game. This “testing, which started in 2021, led to Triple-A players in 2023 using ABS challenges three days a week and a full ABS system, with every pitch adjudicated by computer, the other three,” said ESPN. Following positive feedback in the minor leagues, MLB announced last year it would adopt the ABS system.

Why is this such a big change?

It allows players and managers to do what is typically forbidden in baseball: argue balls and strikes with the umpire. Doing so has generally led to ejection from the game; last season, at least “61.5% of ejections among players, managers and coaches (99 of 161) were related to ball/strike calls,” said The Associated Press, though this figure also “included what MLB counted as inappropriate comments and conduct, and throwing equipment in protest.”

This change “should in theory make everyone better off,” as it will give teams an “appeal in the event of a potential blown call at a crucial moment,” said Vox. As is the case with AI, some are worried about the bigger changes robotic umpires could have. Once “you’ve conceded that the machine is the final authority on whether a call is right — which is exactly what baseball has done here — you’ve quietly eliminated the case for having the human there.” And if they are there, the “human behind the mask doesn’t stay independent.”

Despite this, most players and managers don’t seem to have an issue with the change — for now. “I’m in favor of anything that allows our technology to play in this game,” Tampa Bay Rays manager Kevin Cash said to the AP. “We have so much of it. Why not use it?” Even people formerly around the game agree. “I really like the ABS,” Jim Leyland, a retired manager who led four MLB clubs, said to the outlet. “I think it’s going to be great for the game.”

‘Girls’ sports are getting more physical’

Alexandra Moe at The Atlantic

Physical contact in “women’s sports remains controversial,” but girls “seem to be more interested than ever in contact,” says Alexandra Moe. At U.S. high schools “last academic year, more girls played on teams for wrestling than field hockey, gymnastics or dance.” Girls’ “participation in such sports is growing so quickly in part because it’s starting from a small denominator,” and may “appeal to a rising cultural sense that women and girls can — and should — bulk up.”

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‘Meta’s smart glasses are a privacy risk invisible to Chicagoans’

Yunus Emre Tozal at the Chicago Tribune

Meta’s “smart glasses problem is a legibility problem,” says Yunus Emre Tozal. Walking through a city “today, you cannot tell who around you is recording.” This is “not a hypothetical privacy risk. It is an active data pipeline running through one of the most documented failures of AI labor ethics on record, operating at scale in every city where 7 million pairs of glasses are being worn.” This is “not a privacy feature. It is a design decision.”

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‘The era of US dominance in economic warfare is over’

Nicholas Mulder at the Financial Times

Iran’s “threat to shipping in the Gulf is widely seen as an asymmetric retaliation against the U.S. and Israel,” says Nicholas Mulder. But Iran “has actually replicated a tactic that America has long practiced in its use of sanctions: it has turned a key chokepoint in the world economy into a weapon to compel its adversary to de-escalate.” America previously “had an effective monopoly on major sanctions,” but the “end of the unipolar era in economic warfare” is here.

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‘Ukraine and the EU need a fresh start’

Ivan Nagornyak and Fredrik Wesslau at Foreign Policy

Four years “after Ukraine applied for membership in the European Union, one conclusion is inescapable: The EU’s normal model for enlargement is not fit for purpose,” say Ivan Nagornyak and Fredrik Wesslau. The EU’s “accession process — rigid, technocratic and slow — was designed for peacetime, not for a country fighting a war of survival and rebuilding a shattered economy.” But “any interim model for Ukraine must be a stepping stone to full membership, not a substitute.”

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What happened

Venezuela beat Team USA 3-2 on Tuesday night to win its first World Baseball Classic title, with Eugenio Suárez’s ninth-inning tiebreaking double topping Bryce Harper’s eighth-inning two-run home run. The championship game, in Miami’s loanDepot Park, capped the sixth edition of the 20-nation event, which is held every three years. As the heavily Latino crowd cheered Venezuela’s win in Miami, thousands of people also celebrated in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas.

Who said what

“Thirty million people around the world were watching this game today,” Venezuela captain Salvador Perez said after the game. “The World Series, as you all know, is one of the most important championships in the major leagues, but when you fight for your country, that goes beyond.” Team USA captain Aaron Judge, who went 0-for-4 with three strikeouts, said his teammates “put on this uniform, signed up to go out there and get a gold medal,” and “we just fell short.”

This year’s Team USA was “the greatest collection of American baseball players ever assembled for the World Baseball Classic,” bringing together “All-Stars and MVPs and future Hall of Famers,” said The Athletic. But “despite the gaudy statistics and lucrative contracts,” the team “lacked cohesion and performed as less than the sum of its parts.” Venezuela was overshadowed ahead of the tournament by the U.S., Japan and the Dominican Republic, the only other Latin American team to win the WBC, in 2013. But Venezuela’s “success was not that surprising,” The Associated Press said, given that 63 Venezuelan-born players “appeared on Major League Baseball opening-day rosters last year.”

What next?

Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, declared Wednesday a National Day of Joy, giving everyone but essential workers the day off. Team USA — which has only won one WBC championship, in 2017 — will get its next shot at the title in 2029.

What happened

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) on Tuesday filed criminal charges against Kalshi, accusing the online prediction marketplace of “running an illegal gambling operation and taking bets on Arizona elections, both of which violate Arizona law.” The 20-count indictment alleges that Kalshi illegally accepted bets on sporting outcomes, political events and election results, among other “unlicensed wagering.”

Who said what

“Arizona will not be bullied into letting any company place itself above state law,” Mayes said in a statement. The criminal charges, the first filed by a state against Kalshi, mark a “new front in a high-stakes legal battle over whether prediction markets should be subject to the same rules as gambling companies,” The Associated Press said. President Donald Trump, whose son Don Jr. is a “strategic adviser” for Kalshi, has thrown his “support behind the multibillion-dollar prediction market industry.” Several other states have sued Kalshi and its rival, Polymarket.

The Arizona lawsuit “comes less than a week” after Kalshi filed a preemptive suit, asking a federal judge to rule that its wagers are “not gambling but instead something more akin to trading futures on commodities,” the Arizona Capitol Times said. The company argues its “contracts” can only be regulated by the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission, “out of reach of state authorities.” CFTC chair Michael Selig appeared to agree, calling the Arizona suit a “jurisdictional dispute” that is “entirely inappropriate as a criminal prosecution.”

What next?

The outcome of the legal actions in Arizona and “at least nine other states” could have “sweeping implications for how sports betting — which makes up roughly 90% of Kalshi’s trading volume — is regulated in the U.S.,” the AP said. Legal experts predict the dispute over prediction markets “has a good chance of making its way to the Supreme Court,” Axios said.

This summer’s controversy-laden men’s Fifa World Cup took on a whole new layer of jeopardy when the US, the main co-host, attacked Iran, one of the competitors.

The football tournament, hosted by the US, Canada and Mexico and due to kick off on 11 June, had already been beset with criticism. There were worries about logistics and infrastructure, calls for a boycott over Donald Trump’s travel bans, and fears about fans’ safety in a US where Ice agents have been sweeping into cities for violent immigration crackdowns. Fifa itself has also been under fire – for its president Gianni Infantino’s sycophancy to the US president, and its “strategic partnership” with Trump’s Board of Peace.

Now Iran’s participation has been thrown into doubt by the war in the Middle East. Fifa seems unwilling to grant the Iranian football federation’s request to relocate its US fixtures to Mexico, and Trump has already said it would not be “appropriate” for the Iranian players to take part “for their own life and safety”.

Will Iran participate?

“When Trump has explicitly stated that he cannot ensure the security of the Iranian national team, we will certainly not travel to the United States,” said Mehdi Taj, the president of Iran’s football federation, on the Iranian embassy in Mexico’s X account.

Moving Iran’s fixtures to Mexico would be logistically tricky but not unprecedented. But then there’s the issue of the knockout stages: if the US and Iran both finish as the runner-up in their group, they would play each other in the last 32. Should Iran decide to withdraw, they would be the first qualifying team to do so since 1950.

As the schedule currently stands, Iran’s first group fixture is against New Zealand in Los Angeles on 15 June. New Zealand told The Athletic that it is continuing to “monitor the situation” but is making plans to play Iran “until we hear otherwise”.

What about other Middle Eastern teams?

Iraq has a chance to qualify for its first World Cup finals since 1986 but it needs to win a play-off against either Suriname or Bolivia on 31 March – in Mexico. With airspace currently closed over the Middle East, it’s hard to see how the Iraqis can travel to their match.

The Iraqi team coach, Graham Arnold, has called for the play-off to be postponed, and the country’s football chief, Adnan Dirjal, has, has written to Fifa to explain the “difficulty of the journey”. In the meantime, he has made plans for the team to travel Mexico by private plane, according to the BBC.

What else is a concern?

There are worries that Ice officers will be deployed at US World Cup venues, for security purposes. And there is alarm about the wave of violence in Mexico since the death of a cartel boss in Jalisco state. Guadalajara, the state capital, is due to host four games.

Last month, the EU Sports Commissioner, Glenn Micallef, urged Gianni Infantino to “help safeguard fans”, said Politico. He has since asked again as violence escalates in the Middle East but said there has been “no further communication from Fifa”. It’s “legitimate” to seek assurances from a “public security point of view”, particularly as “one of the hosts of this biggest sporting event in the world is party to a war,” he told the news site. “Let’s say there’s room for more clarity.”

Fifa also has “a lot to answer for” on its role with the Trump-backed Board of Peace, said Micallef. It may have pledged $75 million for football infrastructure in Gaza, but Europe would “prefer to partner up” with organisations that “respect the international rules-based order, like Unesco and Unicef” on such sports-related projects.

Safety and security at the World Cup is a “top priority”, said a Fifa spokesperson. We are “confident that efforts being made by Canada, Mexico and the US will ensure a safe, secure, and welcoming environment for everyone involved”.

Max Dowman made football history on Saturday. Running from his own half, he fired into an empty net to secure Arsenal a 2-0 win over Everton and become the youngest goalscorer in the Premier League.

But afterwards, in the “ecstatic dressing room, the man of the match wasn’t there”, said Miguel Delaney in The Independent. That’s because Dowman “isn’t actually the man of the match”, but a child. The midfielder, aged 16 years and 75 days, isn’t allowed in the same dressing room as the adults, and gets changed in his own space near the referees’ room.

‘Never left alone’

Dowman “probably cannot even remember a time when he was not skipping past opponents with a ball at his feet”, said Sam Dean in The Telegraph. There has been “a buzz” around his name for years. He was scouted when he was just four; at 13, he became the youngest player to represent Arsenal’s under-18s; at 14, he was the youngest to play for their under-21s. He also played for the England under-17s at 14, and started training with Arsenal’s first team. Earlier this year, he became the youngest player in Champions League history and the youngest starter for Arsenal.

There are “clear rules in place” for minors playing adult football, said BBC Sport. Dowman has to change in a separate room from his teammates, before going into the main changing room for pep talks. The teenager, who is due to sit his GCSEs this summer, divides his non-playing time between a private tutor and school. One member of Arsenal’s security team is “assigned to stay close to Dowman at all times”.

“In the eyes of the law, he is still a child,” said former Leeds United welfare officer Lucy Ward. “He looks and behaves like an adult, he’s in an adult environment and scores goals for Arsenal, but the law says that he is treated as a child until he is 18.” Dowman is “never left alone with anyone” who hasn’t been cleared by a DBS check. His parents must give consent when he travels for an away match, and he has to have a chaperone. “He doesn’t want to stand out – he just wants to fit in – but these safeguarding measures are in place for young players.”

‘Right temperament to deliver’

Last season, Dowman was “so far ahead of his opponents and teammates that he was almost playing a different sport”, said Dean in The Telegraph. It was obvious he had “outgrown youth football”. If Premier League rules hadn’t prevented him from playing for the senior team last year, “he might have broken through even earlier”.

In January, Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta likened the teenager to a young Lionel Messi. That was after Dowman signed a pre-contract agreement with the north London club (his father handled the negotiations). A professional deal will follow when he turns 17 in December.

“For all the skill, though, you need to have the right temperament to deliver” at that age, said Sky Sports. For every wunderkind who went on to a glittering senior career, there are “players who fell through the trapdoor of promise”.

“He doesn’t seem to be fazed by the occasion or the moment or the context or the opponent,” Arteta said on Saturday. “I’ve seen a lot of players with talent but at 16, very few that can cope with that level of demand.”

Dowman’s goal will “go down in Arsenal folklore”, said Sky Sports. The “touch of the head” to gain control of the ball, the “physicality” required to get past Everton left-back Vitalii Mykolenko, and the touch that sent midfielder Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall “to the shops”. It took Arsenal closer to their first Premier League title in two decades, but it looked like Dowman “had been doing that for years”.

“I just felt it was a magical moment for Max Dowman, a magical moment for Arsenal and absolutely it stopped me in my tracks,” said football pundit Gary Neville. “This kid does look different.”

It has become a rarity to watch any stretch of television or online video content without being exposed to at least one ad touting the ease and convenience of online gambling. But as prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket vie for dominance in the growing field of online betting, one place has emerged as a thorny challenge to their spread: Utah.

With its long history of deep Mormon conservatism, this traditionally red state is now a local leader in bucking a MAGA-led movement to facilitate e-gambling’s growth. But with Utah’s Republican governor leading an effort to regulate digital prop-betting on sports, some of the biggest names in app-based betting are fighting back, setting up a legal battle with hundreds of years of cultural history behind it.

Federal regulators face an ‘onslaught’ of state challenges

The proliferation of online prediction marketplaces with “no state oversight” operating “even in states that ban gambling” has raised “bipartisan alarms, especially related to sports gambling,” said Stateline. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), led by Trump appointee Mike Selig, filed an amicus brief claiming his group has total authority to regulate prediction markets against the “onslaught” of state challenges. “To those who seek to challenge our authority in this space, let me be clear. We will see you in court,” said Selig, currently the sole member of the five-seat body, in a brief video statement.

Prediction market operators like Polymarket and Kalshi argue that their platform for making proposition bets on “specific in-game events rather than final outcomes” places their work in the realm of “federally regulated derivatives rather than gambling products,” said Financial Feeds. In late February, Kalshi fired a “pre-emptive strike over predictive markets” by suing Utah’s Republican Gov. Spencer Cox. The lawsuit claimed Kalshi feared the state would “imminently bring an enforcement action” barring the company from “offering event contracts for trading on its federally regulated exchange,” said Fox13. Despite Utah’s constitutional ban on gambling, Kalshi, in its suit, said its prob-bet contracts are “subject to exclusive federal oversight, and — critically — they are lawful under federal law.”

‘Destroying the lives of families and countless Americans’

Cox’s conflict with prediction markets comes amid a larger debate among regulators and lawmakers about “whether those markets constitute finance or gambling,” said The Associated Press. Utah, for its part, has “already made up its mind.” For more than a century, Utah has featured “no casinos, no lotteries and no racetracks that allow bets,” a prohibition “rooted in the conservative ideals of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” With Utah poised to enact legislation “intended to undercut prediction markets,” the move positions a conspicuously conservative state “not known for picking fights” on the “frontlines of a cultural, political and economic battle sweeping the country.”

The prediction markets Selig is “breathlessly defending are gambling — pure and simple,” said Cox in a video rebuttal to the CFTC. Prediction markets are “destroying the lives of families and countless Americans” and have “no place in Utah.”

Prediction market regulation is the “first major issue in which Cox has clashed with Trump” during his second term, the AP said. That’s not wholly unexpected, given the degree to which gambling “goes against a sense of work ethic, a kind of fair exchange” central to how many residents think about about themselves “in terms of Utah identity, and certainly Latter-day Saint identity and ethics,” said Patrick Mason, a Utah State University professor of Mormon history and culture, to the AP.

Although “real-money online casinos” remain illegal across Utah, various alternatives are being used “at a rate that surprises even industry analysts,” said the Standard Examiner. Sports betting may, for the time, remain banned, but analytics-minded residents turn to prediction markets to experience the “depth and excitement these analysis tools offer,” thereby “scratching that itch without crossing the line legally.” The pivot from cultural interest in brick-and-mortar casinos to digital betting alternatives “that feel more like Candy Crush than Caesars Palace” has helped “soften” resistance to online casino-style gaming, “even in a conservative state.”

To date, “different courts have ruled in different directions” on whether or not prediction markets constitute overt online gambling, said The Salt Lake City Tribune. With cases in the Third, Fourth, and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeal, it’s likely that “we’re headed for the Supreme Court to decide this ultimately, but it’ll probably take years.”

The winter months in Europe are dominated by skiers heading for the Alps. But before you “(snow)plough on with your usual ski holiday booking”, why not see what else is out there to scratch the adrenaline itch, said Rhiannon Batten in The Times.

If there was one thing to take from the Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina this year, it’s that snow sports can take many, many forms. Here are some of our top recommendations for your upcoming coolcations across Europe.

Skijöring in Switzerland

The country’s “sporty mountain resorts” have always offered “far more than just downhill skiing”, said National Geographic. As you can imagine with such isolated Alpine communities, traditionally “getting from A to B in winter has often required ingenuity”.

Enter “skijöring”, also known as “horse-powered skiing”. The sport was exhibited at the first Winter Olympics, in Chamonix, France, in 1924. Try it for yourself in the Alpine resort village of Arosa, where a “horse-drawn sleigh takes riders from railway station to hotel”.

But perhaps the crown jewel is skijöring across the “sparkling Lake St Moritz”. With winter walking, ice skating and snowshoeing also on offer, Switzerland offers “some of the most diverse ways to have fun on frozen water”.

Wolf tracking in Abruzzo, Italy

Wolves have been “making a comeback” in Italy, said Batten. As a result of rewilding drives in Abruzzo National Park, visitors have the “chance to find out more about this keystone species” and its historical links to the region.

With trips available to Apennine Wolf Museum, the more adventurous can also embark on “hikes, snowshoe expeditions and torchlight forays into the surrounding mountains in the hope of sightings and to listen to the howling”. On your return, traditional “homemade pasta, proper pizzas and cups of rich hot chocolate” are the perfect way to warm up after your adventure.

Hiking in Germany

“It’s a mystery as to why the spectacular landscapes of the Elbe Sandstone Mountains in eastern Germany remain so under the radar,” said Annabelle Thorpe in The Guardian. This is a hiker’s dream, with “sandstone cliffs, dramatic gorges” and “flat-topped mesas”.

There is a famous self-guided walking tour through the region – known as “Saxon Switzerland” – which “takes in quiet villages of timber-framed cottages and dense pine forest, cloaking the peaks that sweep up to the sandstone spires”. Starting in Bad Schandau, “home to the spectacular, 11-metre-high Kuhstall rock gate and the beautiful Lichtenhain waterfall”, it provides plenty of opportunity to indulge in the area’s culinary delights. Expect piles of Spätzle, sausage and lentil soup, and marzipan cakes at traditional “Berggasthofs”, or mountain inns, en route.

Northern Lights tours in Norway

“Watching the ethereal Northern Lights as they dance across the skies is possibly one of the most awe-inspiring activities you can enjoy on a snow holiday,” said Jo Blyth in Country Living. Alta in the far north of Norway is nicknamed the “Northern Lights city” for a reason. It is one of the best places in the country to see the aurora borealis, so consider embarking on a tour to “discover the magic of Norway’s fjords, villages, and coastal towns in their winter glory”.

North Korea, one of the world’s most secretive and patriarchal countries, dominates in a surprising arena: women’s football.

The hermit kingdom became a powerhouse after the regime invested heavily in the women’s game as a tool of soft power and propaganda. The youth team still excels internationally, but after losing the Asian Cup final to Australia in 2010 the senior team “all but disappeared from global competition”, said The Guardian.

Now, the Eastern Azaleas are back in the tournament, playing their opening match against Uzbekistan in Sydney tomorrow. Invigorated by a “new generation of youth World Cup winners”, they are “hoping to return to the summit of Asian football”.

Rise and fall

At Fifa’s annual congress in 1986, the Norwegian delegate “demanded the creation of a World Cup for women”, said The Guardian. North Korean officials, so the story goes, were “inspired”. They returned to Pyongyang with a plan to use women’s football as a “tool to reassert their collapsing power on the world stage”.

Like China, the government saw sport as an opportunity to “strengthen their international profile”. Under Kim Jong Il, the women’s game “became a proxy platform” for North Korea’s political agenda. The government introduced development programmes in schools, built new facilities and even had teams in the military where players trained full-time at the state’s expense. That investment “paid off almost immediately”.

Between the 1990s and the 2010s, North Korea had one of the world’s best women’s football teams, winning three Asian Cup titles and more trophies across the continent. Then Kim Jong Un came to power in 2011 and, like his father, made competitive sport a “key policy priority”, said Jung Woo Lee, senior sport lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, on The Conversation. Any victory on the global stage “helps boost nationalism among the country’s people”. As North Korea grew more internationally isolated, sport became one of the only avenues through which it could assert itself.

But in 2011, a major doping scandal “put the brakes on this success”. Five players tested positive for a banned steroid at the Women’s World Cup in Germany. North Korea had a “bizarre excuse”, said The Times, claiming they had been “struck by lightning” and given a traditional Chinese medicine of deer musk gland, which caused the positive tests. Fifa was “not persuaded”.

North Korea was banned from the 2015 World Cup, then failed to qualify for the Asian Cup in 2018 and the World Cup in 2019. Tightening sanctions also made it impossible for players to sign overseas contracts. Then, when the pandemic hit, North Korea shut its borders and withdrew from both tournaments.

The missing decade

During the senior team’s missing decade, the youth teams flourished. The regime has “developed a sporting powerhouse of young girls”, said The Observer.

In 2013, it opened a state-run elite training facility to develop talent. At the Pyongyang International Football School, young girls are “selected, developed and educated following a highly disciplined and scientific approach”, said DW.

The first generation of graduates from that school are the reigning under-20 and under-17 World Cup and Asian Cup champions, and have won five of these titles since 2020. They have “cemented their status as the dominant force in women’s youth football”.

Their success is “the product of a broader strategy aimed at strengthening national pride and boosting the country’s international standing”, said Lee. Domestically, the regime uses the popular sport of football as a “propaganda tool to glorify their leaders and also how great their country is”, Lee told DW.

Many North Korean media reports say that players under a communist regime “do whatever they can, even if they’re physically exhausted”, said Lee. “Then they directly compare those mentalities with capitalist countries.” When those athletes are exhausted, they are substituted.

“That psychological element has seemingly given the team an edge, but beyond a strong sense of patriotism and years of disciplined work lies the motivation of a life-changing reward.” The regime can give players living in poorer rural areas, where food and healthcare shortages are common, a chance of a far better life in Pyongyang. It’s like “winning a lottery”, said Lee.

It remains to be seen whether North Korea can qualify for the senior women’s World Cup in Brazil next year. But this year’s Asian Cup, said The Guardian, will be “the best glimpse yet of whether this old, unlikely superpower of women’s football is rumbling back to life”.

Competitive sports are a reliable foundation on which to build solid comedy and drama. The great thing about these eight superb shows is that you don’t need to know much of anything at all about sports to enjoy them.

‘Sports Night’ (1998-2000)

Creator Aaron Sorkin’s short-lived but beloved cult classic followed the hosts and producers of a fictional nightly sports recap show trying to compete with ESPN’s pioneering “SportsCenter.” Josh Charles starred in a breakout role as the show’s co-host Dan Rydell, alongside Casey McCall (Peter Krause), as the pair and executive producer Dana Whitaker (Felicity Huffman) chase the ESPN ratings behemoth.

Looking back, it is truly hard to believe that ABC saddled the series and its witty, fast-moving dialogue with a laugh track in its first season. A show “populated by characters whose jobs define who they are,” it was “full of walk-and-talks, clipboards and very important meetings,” said Ciara Moloney at Paste Magazine. The result was “unadulterated Sorkin — with all of his strengths and none of his weaknesses.” (Prime Video)

‘Friday Night Lights’ (2006-2011)

Adapted from the hit 2004 film, “Friday Night Lights” is an intimate look at a Texas high school football team and one of the last truly magnificent network television shows before the streaming era gave us the concept of “prestige TV.” Kyle Chandler is the show’s moral center as Coach Eric Taylor, whose team is the pride of fictional Dillon, Texas. Connie Britton plays his wife, Tami, and the strength of the pair’s performances covered up for some uneven acting from the high school ensemble. The first season of the show was “great in the way of a poem or painting, great in the way of art with a single obsessive creator who doesn’t have to consult with a committee and has months or years to go back and agonize over line breaks and the color red,” said Virginia Heffernan at The New York Times. (Prime Video)

‘The League’ (2009-2015)

Fantasy sports are an enormous, if niche, industry, and FX’s “The League” might be the only sports show ever to focus on a group of friends and their sometimes relationship-wrecking obsession with this odd little hobby. Mark Duplass stars as Pete, the reigning champ of the titular fantasy football league when the show starts, and Katie Aselton is a consistent standout as football savant Jenny, who competes in the league with her husband, Kevin (Stephen Rannazzisi).

Featuring “time-honored elements of screwball comedy,” the best humor in this fantastic series comes not from the league but “from equal opportunity humiliation that is the basis of their friendships,” said David Wiegand at SFGate. Like the amoral gang in “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” no one in “The League” ever grows or learns — and that’s part of the fun. (Disney+)

‘Eastbound & Down’ (2009-2013)

Washed-up major-leaguer Kenny Powers (Danny McBride) returns to his hometown to take a job as a substitute gym teacher after yapping his way out of professional baseball in creators Ben Best, Jody Hill and Danny McBrides’s cringe-inducing HBO Max comedy. The show’s gamble is that rather than a redemption arc, Powers’ “very public crash and burn is only the beginning of his downward spiral,” said Wired, exacerbated by him having the “capacity to care about and even love others, but he’ll sacrifice anyone if it means he can step back into the spotlight.” Harboring dreams of returning to baseball, he crashes with his brother Dustin (John Hawkes) and tries to reconnect with high school flame, April (Katy Mixon). (HBO Max)

‘GLOW’ (2017-2019)

The 1980s-set “GLOW” gave us three superb seasons of wrestling and drama before Netflix axed it. Alison Brie is Ruth Wilder, an aspiring actress in Los Angeles whose career is going nowhere. She accepts an invitation to audition for the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, where she is cast along with her estranged friend, Debbie Eagan (Betty Gilpin), and directed by aging film director Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron), who looks like he would rather be literally anywhere else.

But when Ruth takes on the moniker “Zoya the Destroya” she transforms her professional life and finds a path she can really throw herself into while trying to repair the damage to her relationship with Debbie. Together their exploits create a “quiet and simple masterpiece that deserves to be the most popular show on television,” said Matt Gannon at TV Wasteland. (Netflix)

‘Brockmire’ (2017-2020)

A decade after a drunken, on-air meltdown caused him to lose his job as a major league baseball announcer, Jim Brockmire (Hank Azaria) returns stateside to take a job with the woebegone, minor league Morristown Frackers. The team’s owner, Jules James (Amanda Peet), thinks that hiring the washed-up Brockmire will put her team and its rust belt town on the map.

This somewhat familiar set-up is elevated by the show’s surreal sense of humor, as well as by the foul-mouthed Brockmire’s endless antics. The show works “both as a snapshot of this aging oddity of Americana and a universal story about a washed-up person coming to terms with himself,” said Sonia Saraiya at Variety. (Netflix)

‘Ted Lasso’ (2020-)

When it debuted on August 14, 2020, the world was six months into the miserable Covid-19 pandemic, and the Apple TV+ dramedy was not only a poignant, low-stakes lifeline for millions of viewers, it also put the relatively new streamer on the map with its first big hit. Jason Sudeikis plays the title character, a U.S. college football coach who agrees to accept a bizarre job offer to manage a fictional English Premiere League soccer team, AFC Richmond.

Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) acquired the team in a divorce from her gross ex-husband and wants to run it into the ground to spite him only to find that she can’t resist Lasso’s aw-shucks charm and that his leadership sparks a renewal led by veteran star Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein). Sudeikis’ Lasso is “practically impossible not to like,” said Nick Harley at Den of Geek, and the “easy charms of a well-executed, feel-good sports story make it a breezy, low-effort watch that just about anyone can enjoy.” (Apple TV+)

‘Heated Rivalry’ (2025)

This discourse-driving hit is set during the Obama years (Yes, 2017 is now the stuff of period pieces) and depicts a secret, steamy romance between Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), two young stars who break into fictional Major League Hockey at the same time for different clubs. Early in the series, their romance takes place mostly in hotels as the pair struggle with how they might be perceived if word gets out, especially the Russian Rozanov, whose home country is considerably more dangerous for gay men than Hollander’s.

The sex is “plentiful, quite explicit, and, I’ll say it, pretty hot,” said Naomi Fry at The New Yorker. But a bigger “part of the pleasure for viewers” is the “show’s plainspoken articulation of desire, when the love that dare not speak its name finally does.” (HBO Max)

The Premier League has turned a “tactical corner”, said Jonathan Wilson in The Guardian. Corners and set-pieces generally are back in fashion, much to the annoyance of some fans who claim they are the antithesis of the beautiful game.

Clubs are employing specialist set-piece coaches, and players are celebrating winning corners, allowing them to perform their well-rehearsed routines in front of goal. After years of “strategy and technique”, and the dominance of patient, possession-based football, fans are concerned that packed penalty areas and the all-in wrestling between opposing players is ruining the spectacle of the English game.

‘It doesn’t feel right’

Most of what goes on from dead-ball situations “is not strictly against the rules per se”, but it’s a question of optics, said Football 365. Players can stand where they want, and have no obligation to move to allow others to challenge for the ball. The issue is that when “12-14 players” are all doing the same thing in such an enclosed space, it “jars with what the game is supposed to be. It doesn’t feel right.”

Tony Pulis, who managed Stoke City and Crystal Palace in the Premier League in the late 2000s and 2010s, was known for his “pragmatic” approach, he said on the BBC. “I was seen as a dinosaur for my focus on dead-ball situations and long throws”, but “I knew back then how important they were”.

Premier League leaders Arsenal have led the way in the resurgence of set-pieces. Their 37 league goals from corners since the start of the 2023-24 season far eclipsing the next-best 26 by German side Borussia Monchengladbach out of all teams in Europe’s top five leagues.

Some people are “snobbish” about the role of set-pieces in the game, said Pulis, but “the expectation, and the pressure they put on the opposition, is amazing”. Ignore the inevitable criticism, “what matters is winning”.

The “suddenness” of the change in approach from English teams has been “remarkable” but this “present trend will fade away”, said Wilson in The Guardian. The obsession with possession-based tactics, as well as widening financial inequality, has led to opposition teams defending in a compact “low block”, feeling unable to compete skill-wise. A “reversion to something more physical” in the game certainly poses a threat, but in a game of tactical cycles “this too will pass”.

‘Action is needed’

Some scenes in the recent game between Everton and Manchester United were an “absolute disgrace”, said Martin Samuel in The Times. We have grown used to a “melee of grabbing, holding, pushing, pulling, grappling, backing in” penalty areas. The game has become dominated by a “supposedly unsolvable wrestling issue” and fans are not happy about it.

Nothing is being done to safeguard the “beautiful game”. Governing bodies “obsess over trivia and the trivial”, exemplified by the International Football Association Board prioritising things like five-second countdowns for goal-kicks. “No group is less qualified to decide on football’s rules than Ifab”, and it has already made a “mess” of video replays, offside and handball rulings.

“Enough already,” said Graham Scott, a former Premier League referee, in The Telegraph. Corners are “ruining the spectacle” of football with all the “wrestling, grappling and holding”, but referees have a “nearly impossible job to decide who is truly to blame”. Occasionally, a clear pull or obstruction in the fracas around the six-yard box is “black and white, but there are more than 50 shades of grey in between”. With fans having little “appetite” for lengthy VAR delays, officials must “walk a tightrope” to decide what is “fair and foul”.

So “action is needed”. To try to fix the issue, “I would imitate hockey by forcing teams to place a certain number of players in the other half” to reduce congestion. In a “more radical move”, defenders could be inside the six-yard box and attackers outside it when a corner is taken, separating them entirely.

What happened

The 2026 Winter Olympics concluded in Italy Sunday with a closing ceremony in Verona’s 2,000-year-old Roman amphitheater. Verona is about halfway between Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, the two host cities for the Games, and people in the stadium watched via video link as the Olympic flames were extinguished in each city’s cauldron. In the final competition of the Games, the U.S. men’s hockey team beat Canada in overtime Sunday to win their first Olympic gold medal since 1980.

Who said what

“Thank you Italy, for these magical Games,” International Olympic Committee President Kirsty Coventry said, in Italian, at the closing ceremony. “You delivered a new kind of Winter Games and you set a very high standard for the future.” If the “opening ceremony emphasized the unprecedented spread-out nature of these Games,” The Athletic said, “the closing ceremony brought them back together.” It “opened with a whimsical tribute to Italian lyric opera,” and included aerial ballet, Italian rock and a DJ set, before ending with a light show, The Associated Press said.

Italy won its highest Winter Olympics medal count ever — 30, including 10 gold — putting it in third place behind Norway (41 medals, including 18 gold) and the U.S. (33 medals, including 12 gold). It was a “Winter Olympics to remember,” with “drama, thrills, moments of hilarity and plenty of gripping medal action,” CNN said. And the concluding “frenetic” men’s hockey final was “an instant classic.”

What next?

The Winter Olympic baton “now passes to the French Alps, which are expected to follow a similar blueprint of using multiple existing winter sports venues in 2030,” Reuters said. But first, the Milan Cortina Paralympics will begin March 6 with an opening ceremony in the same Verona Arena, and Los Angeles will host the 2028 Summer Olympics.

In an Olympic event as fast as downhill skiing or speed skating, the margin between winners and losers can be measured by thousandths of a second.

Careers are “forever altered by that tiny difference”, said NBC News. There is a “baseline expectation” that “every result must be perfect”. And that is “determined by the most important team at the Olympics you don’t know about”: the Games’ timekeepers.

‘Tiny calibrations of a split second’

Swiss watchmaker Omega has been the official timekeeper of every Olympic event for nearly 100 years, initially chosen for the 1932 Los Angeles games as it was the only watch brand capable of providing accurate timing to the nearest tenth of a second.

The company dispatched one “intrepid watchmaker” from its Swiss headquarters with 30 high-precision stopwatches in his suitcase, said The Times. “Each night he would take the stopwatches back to his hotel room and recalibrate them, before handing them back to race officials the next morning.”

Omega now provides the timing for all 116 events, including (for the first time this year) ski mountaineering. The intervening years have, of course, seen “extraordinary technical developments”. Omega arrived in Paris for the 2024 Summer Games with “the most advanced tech it has ever delivered”: 350 tonnes of equipment, including 200km of cables, hundreds of scoreboards, and 550 professional timekeepers. The days of a ribbon breaking across a winning runner’s chest are “long gone”. World records are now regularly broken; margins of winning come down to “tiny calibrations of a split second”.

No margin for error

“We’ve come quite a long way since one watchmaker travelled” from Bienne, said Forbes. Planning for the current Milano-Cortina Games began three years ago, with more than 300 timekeepers and 130 tons of equipment dedicated to the Games, including high-speed cameras that can capture up to 40,000 digital images per second. This information can then be fed into AI models specifically programmed for each sport to produce graphic recreations of every movement. Judges have access to that data instantly – and this year, for the first time, so will viewers.

“For a person who is following action sports not on TV every weekend but once every four years, it’s very difficult to understand the differences in performances,” said Alain Zobrist, chief executive of Omega Timing. We are “trying to explain where these differences are and how these differences may impact the judging.”

But the final call is still human: an operator looks at a monitor with footage from the finish-line cameras, and “manually places a cursor where the athlete crosses the finish”, said NBC News.

“What you cannot learn is the pressure that comes with it when you operate it,” said Zobrist. “We take a lot of pride doing it, but it also humbles us a lot.” Billions of people are watching and waiting for the results to appear. An operator knows they’re “not allowed” to make mistakes; “as soon as you push that enter button, the result is released and public”.

Olympic time-keeping has grown so complex that preparations are well underway for the return of the games to Los Angeles in 2028. The only device still used that hasn’t changed since 1932? “A metal bell is still rung by hand to mark a race’s last lap.”

The International Olympic Committee has boasted that Milano-Cortina 2026 is “the most gender-balanced Olympic Winter Games in history”. But there’s actually one sport women don’t even get to try.

For all the claims about “the highest level of female participation in Winter Games history”, the door is “slammed shut” for women in Nordic combined, said The Independent. The three Olympic events where athletes compete in both ski jumping and cross-country skiing are strictly men-only, despite there being equivalent women’s World Cup and World Championship events.

‘Misogynistic mindset’

Nordic combined has been part of the Winter Olympics since its beginnings in 1924. It requires precision, courage, strength and endurance to follow the “daredevil thrill” of ski jumping with a “physically exhausting cross-country ski race”, said The Associated Press. It makes for a “two-day event unlike any other”.

Cross-country skiing has centuries-old origins in Scandinavian military training, which could be a partial explanation for the “misogynistic mindset” towards Nordic combined, said ABC News. But it’s the combination with ski jumping that seems to be the decisive factor. While women had to wait until 1952 to compete in single-discipline cross-country events at the Winter Olympics, they were barred from ski jumping until the early 2000s. For decades, they were “deemed too fragile to stand up to the rigours of repeatedly hurtling themselves off the side of a mountain”. And it’s only at these 2026 Games that women ski-jumpers will be allowed to jump off the same large hill as the men.

To complicate matters for those campaigning against Nordic combined’s Olympic gender imbalance, the sport as a whole is “in jeopardy” – because it “doesn’t have a big following” and only “a small number of countries dominate the podium”, said AP. The IOC has “put the entire sport on notice”, said The New York Times, telling it to boost the number of participating athletes, “the size of the audience” and “the diversity” of competing countries or “risk falling off the Olympic programme altogether”.

The women of Nordic combined are not just “stuck sitting on the sidelines” while the men compete, they are “relying on the men’s performance to keep the sport’s future in the Games alive”.

‘Glacial pace’ of change

Women have had a long fight for fair inclusion in the Olympics. They were excluded entirely from the first modern summer Olympics in 1896 and, when they were allowed to compete in Paris four years later, their participation was limited to a handful of sports, such as tennis, archery and croquet. Slowly, the exclusions for women have been mostly eliminated but the Winter Olympics, in particular, has changed “at a glacial pace”, said The Independent.

Female athletes staged a protest a fortnight ago at the Nordic combined World Cup, in Seefeld, Austria. They held up their ski poles at the starting line in the shape of an X, symbolising “no exceptions” for women’s inclusion at the Winter Games.

“I do what every single other athlete does,” US Nordic combined skier Annika Malacinski told The Washington Post. “I work my ass off to be where I am. And yet there’s one group of people telling me I’m not doing it hard enough.” I cried for eight hours when I found out the IOC wouldn’t open Nordic skiing up to us at Milano-Cortina but I will continue to campaign for inclusion at the French Alps 2030 Winter Olympic Games.

Was Italy ready for the Games?

Not entirely. But the Winter Olympics are now underway, and over the next two weeks, more than 3,500 athletes from 93 countries will compete across 16 sports, ranging from alpine skiing to luge to figure skating. These Olympics are the most geographically spread out of any Games in history, with 25 sporting venues and six Olympic Villages spanning some 8,495 square miles in Northern Italy. The two main hubs, the city of Milan and the alpine resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo, sit 250 miles apart. Construction delays and cost overruns have plagued the Games. Days before the opening ceremony, work was still ongoing at the Santagiulia arena, a new $292 million ice hockey venue in Milan; it was originally budgeted at $210 million. Some locals have been angered by the event’s environmental cost. Cortina Mayor Gianluca Lorenzi received death threats after centuries-old trees were felled to make way for a $131 million bobsledding track. Lorenzi insists that “the project is an added value for Cortina.” But history shows that the Olympics often leave behind a legacy of debt, white elephants, and bitterness.

How much did these Games cost?

The Milan-Cortina Olympics have an operating budget of about $1.9 billion—which is largely covered by broadcasting and sponsorship deals, and sales of tickets and merchandise. But that budget does not include capital costs, including the construction of new Olympic venues or improvements to rail and road systems. The Italian government allocated about $4.2 billion in public money for infrastructure spending. The International Olympic Committee argues that the Games pay for themselves by raising a city’s profile and attracting tourists, and some reports suggest Milan-Cortina could deliver a $6 billion economic boost. But most host cities do not see a positive return on investment: Beijing spent $40 billion on the 2008 Summer Games and generated only $3.6 billion in revenue, while London 2012 spent $18 billion and generated $5.2 billion. “For many cities and many countries,” said sports economist Robert Baade, the Olympics are “a money-hemorrhaging endeavor.”

Why are the Games so expensive?

It’s partly because they’ve expanded to allow more events, more athletes, more venues, and more spectators. But it’s also due to each host city wanting their Games to be more impressive than the predecessor’s. One-upmanship, extravagant architectural plans, and a comparatively short construction schedule result in big bills, which are often not reflected in the original bids. An Oxford University study found that from 1960 to 2016, host cities went over budget by an average of 156%. For some Games, the cost overrun was far higher: The 2014 Winter Games in Sochi cost Russia at least $30 billion, 289% more than was expected at the time of bidding. And the 1976 Games in Montreal went 720% over projections, leaving the city with a $1.5 billion debt that took almost three decades to pay off. “There’s this kind of relentless underestimation of costs,” said sports historian David Goldblatt, “because if anyone knew the real bill at the beginning they would never sign up.” Only one host city has turned a profit in recent decades: Los Angeles. It was the sole bidder for the 1984 Games after the Montreal debacle, and insisted that most events be held in existing facilities. L.A. ended up with a surplus of over $200 million on revenues of $619 million.

What happens to new infrastructure?

Ideally, arenas and other facilities get repurposed when the athletes go home. A 2022 IOC report claims that 85% of venues built for past Olympics remain in use: Rome’s Olympic Stadium, built for the 1960 Games, is now home to soccer clubs Roma and Lazio, and the colossal National Aquatics Center used in Beijing 2008 is today a popular water park. But many facilities fall into disrepair, because they are too expensive to repurpose or are simply not needed. A $38 million aquatics stadium in Rio de Janeiro was left to crumble after the 2016 Games, while Athens is
littered with decaying stadiums and pools from the 2004 Games. “We’ve got the ruins of ancient Olympia in Greece,” said historian Miles Osgood, “but now we’ve got the ruins of modern Olympia.”

Is there a more sustainable way?

Paris 2024 was promoted as the most sustainable tournament yet. Temporary structures were used to turn historic landmarks into venues—beach volleyball was played by the Eiffel Tower, judo bouts happened at the Champ de Mars—and existing facilities were refurbished and reused. With a total cost of $10 billion, Paris was the cheapest Summer Games in a quarter-century. But this stripped-back approach is possible only in cities with ample pre-existing infrastructure. “It will be very, very unlikely that we will see another city from an emerging economy or [one] that hasn’t hosted the Games already stage a new edition of the Games,” said Oxford University economist Alexander Budzier. The next Summer Games, in 2028, will take place in Los Angeles—which was selected after Budapest; Hamburg, Germany; and Rome pulled out of bidding over budget concerns.

How is L.A. faring?

Local leaders have pledged not to leave the city saddled with debt. As in 1984, Los Angeles aims to use existing facilities, and officials estimate the total cost of the event will come in at about $7 billion. That figure has swelled 30% since L.A. secured hosting rights in 2017, but sports economist Andrew Zimbalist said there’s still “a decent chance that L.A. is going to break even.” But many residents and experts wonder if spending on the Games is the best use of resources, with swathes of the city still struggling to rebuild from the devastating 2025 wildfires, an ongoing homelessness crisis, and the city’s nearly $1 billion budget deficit. “Given what the city and the region now face,” said Joel Kotkin, a fellow in urban studies at Chapman University, “why would you want to put more stress on it?”

When the once-niche statistic of WAR (Wins Above Replacement) slowly became the most important way teams and fans evaluated players over the course of this century, it also revealed players who were overlooked in their heydays, especially by Hall of Fame voters.

While some of the best players in baseball history, like Alex Rodriguez, remain outside of Cooperstown due to their association with the sport’s steroid scandal (or because of gambling, like Pete Rose), these ten players were clean — and deserve their Cooperstown spots.

Curt Schilling (79.5 WAR)

Perhaps the only player in baseball history whose retirement exploits seem to have cost him his place in the Hall of Fame, hurler Curt Schilling didn’t become a full-time starting pitcher until age 25. Nevertheless, Schilling racked up 216 career wins, over 3,000 strikeouts and was an absolute beast in the postseason, starring for three world championship-winning teams (including the 2004 Boston Red Sox club that broke the “Curse of the Bambino”) and posting a 2.23 ERA in 19 playoff starts. Schilling’s “inflammatory, intolerant and conspiratorial statements” unfortunately overshadowed his playing career and his status as a “top-20 or top-30 pitcher of all time,” said Ben Lindbergh at The Ringer.

Lou Whitaker (75.1 WAR)

On-Base Percentage (OBP) was one of the statistics that was traditionally undervalued, until Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane (of “Moneyball” fame) led a perception revolution. Second baseman “Sweet Lou” Whitaker, who played his whole career with the Detroit Tigers, is someone whose value would have had a better chance of being elected by the Baseball Writers Association of America if OBP had been properly appreciated.

Whitaker slowed down as he aged, but he got even better at getting on base, putting up a 6.8 WAR season in 1991 at age 34 on the strength of a .391 OBP. While he may never have been the best player in the league, “he was always really good, always played at an All-Star level, and when you play 15 years at an All-Star level you are a Hall of Famer in my view,” said Joe Posnanski at The Athletic.

Bobby Grich (71.1 WAR)

Grich, a second baseman, spent most of his career with the California (now Los Angeles) Angels, who made only three postseason appearances in his ten years there. But while his counting stats look like they fall short, including just 1,833 hits and 1,033 runs, he was a gifted defender who won four gold gloves and made enormous contributions to his teams’ run prevention efforts.

His WAR totals put him ahead of the best second basemen of the subsequent era, including Craig Biggio and Ryne Sandberg, both players who are in the Hall. Grich was “one of the most underrated players of the last 40 years,” said Bruce Markusen at The Hardball Times.

Rick Reuschel (69.5 WAR)

Like Kevin Brown, the burly Reuschel was largely unappreciated during his time. A pitcher who lacked overpowering velocity and extended his career by refining pinpoint precision, Reuschel pitched in parts of 19 seasons for the Chicago Cubs, San Francisco Giants, Pittsburgh Pirates and New York Yankees and was often “treated as a curiosity rather than a talent,” said Tim Castelli at The Society For American Baseball Research.

That was before the analytic revolution of the early 2000s prompted a “reevaluation of Reuschel’s career and his place in baseball history.” A reserved person who didn’t enjoy spending time with the press, he won 214 games pitching for mostly terrible teams and garnered less than 1% of the vote in his one year on the Hall of Fame ballot.

Kenny Lofton (68.4 WAR)

A slick-fielding, base-stealing center-fielder, Lofton holds the distinction of being the player with the most postseason at bats in baseball history without playing on a championship winner. Mostly a leadoff hitter, Lofton posted OBPs over .400 in four separate full seasons, and served as the offensive sparkplug for the powerhouse Cleveland Indians teams of the 1990s.

Even past his peak, though, Lofton was a valuable player and a deserved fan favorite who ranks seventh in stolen bases among players in the post-WWII era. He was “overshadowed since he played in the steroid era” and remains “one of the most egregious exemptions from the Hall of Fame,” said Drew Thirion at Deadspin.

Kevin Brown (67.8 WAR)

Possibly the most notable instance of a player falling off the ballot after a single year, pitcher Kevin Brown seemingly had it all — several top five Cy Young Award finishes, 211 career wins, a championship with the 1997 Florida Marlins and two years leading the league in WAR for pitchers.

He’s a surefire Hall of Famer, and it’s “not unreasonable to argue that he’s one of the 50 greatest pitchers of all-time,” said Dayn Perry at Fangraphs. Brown being generally regarded as unfriendly by reporters (who are tasked with the Hall of Fame voting for the Baseball Writers Association of America) probably did not help his case.

Dwight Evans (67.2 WAR)

Evans spent all but his final season with the then-luckless Boston Red Sox, racking up 385 home runs, 2,446 hits and nearly 1,500 runs scored and finishing his career with an elite .370 OBP. He also has a good case as the rightful winner of the 1981 American League MVP Award and led all of baseball in extra-base hits during the 1980s.

In addition to his offensive exploits and status as one of the most feared hitters of the era, he starred on defense, winning eight Gold Glove Awards. Evans “wasn’t just a good outfielder, he was great, playing in a Fenway Park right field that might have been the toughest in the sport,” said Peter Gammons at The Athletic.

Luis Tiant (66.1 WAR)

The Cuba-born Tiant had his best season in 1968, a year that was so bad for offense that it prompted baseball to lower the height of pitching mounds. His struggle with Cooperstown voting is often attributed to him sharing the limelight with too many slam-dunk Hall of Fame pitchers of his era, like Jim Palmer and Tom Seaver. The “winningest Cuban-born pitcher in major league history” was also a beloved, “larger-than-life character, so inseparable from his trademark cigars that he chomped them even in postgame showers,” said Jay Jaffe at Fangraphs.

Tommy John (61.9 WAR)

John won 288 games and has the seventh highest WAR total of any pitcher not in the Hall. But John’s name is also indelibly associated with the modern sport.

In 1974, John was in the midst of his 12th season when he blew out his pitching elbow and elected to undergo the then-experimental ligament-replacement surgery that still bears his name. After missing the 1975 season, John returned to play 14 more seasons, winning 20 games three times — all after the surgery. This surgical miracle’s place in the game’s lore alone should make him a Hall of Famer. “Tommy John isn’t famous because of the surgery that bears his name. Instead, the surgery is famous because of John’s performance afterward,” said Mark Bennett at Yahoo Sports.

What happened

The Seattle Seahawks Sunday night won their second Super Bowl title by deploying a masterful defensive strategy to defeat the New England Patriots 29-13.

The Seahawks “allowed the Patriots to cross the 50-yard line just three times” and sacked their quarterback six times, said The Athletic. The halftime show by headliner Bad Bunny was also an “all-American triumph,” said William Earl at Variety. The Grammy winner “emphasized unity” and “paid homage to his Puerto Rico roots” in a performance that featured appearances by “music icons” Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin, said NBC News.

Who said what

The Seahawks’ win “avenges their agonizing Super Bowl loss” to the Patriots back in 2015, said The New York Times. “We never wavered,” Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald said Sunday. “And now we’re world champions.” Losing “definitely hurts,” said Patriots quarterback Drake Maye, who was nursing a shoulder injury ahead of the game, but Seattle “played better than us tonight.”

President Donald Trump congratulated “both teams on earning their place in Super Bowl LX,” but called the primarily Spanish-language halftime performance “an affront to the Greatness of America” on Truth Social.

What next?

The Seahawks are the “favorite to win next year’s Super Bowl,” with odds of 8-1 on BetMGM, “implying a roughly 11% chance of a repeat,” said The Athletic.

The 2026 Winter Olympics officially kick off with the opening ceremony at San Siro Stadium in Milan this evening.

The Games are officially branded Milano Cortina 2026 and are spread across northern Italy, with Milan serving as the primary city host. It’s been 70 years since the Olympic Flame first arrived in Cortina d'Ampezzo, which is co-hosting and anchoring the mountain events.

Now, viewers can look forward to new events, political controversies... and a rumpus over some suspicious packages.

Skimo

The new event of ski mountaineering – known as skimo – sees athletes “run up a mountain and ski back down it again” in what “may or may not be best understood as an elaborate metaphor for the human condition”, said The Guardian. Let’s hope it “does as well as ski ballet, bandy, and military patrol”, and “some of the other sports” the Winter Games has “offered over the years”.

Ice Agents

Tension has been growing in Italy, after it was confirmed that the US immigration enforcement agency, whose officers fatally shot two people in Minneapolis, would be sending agents to “bolster security”, said ITV News.

There’s been “outrage” in Italy, but the Italian foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, said that the Ice agents who were coming were not “those with machine guns and their faces covered”. They are coming because “it’s the department responsible for counter-terrorism”, he said.

Unlikely stars

As Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards showed in the 1980s, Olympic winners “aren’t always on the podium”, said ITV News. This year’s “unexpected heroes” could include the US ice dancer Maxim Naumov, who hopes to honour his parents and life-long coaches, who were killed in a plane crash in Washington DC a year ago.

The Jamaican bobsleigh team will continue the country’s “legacy” in a sport that helped inspire the Disney film, “Cool Runnings”. The speed skater Jutta Leerdam, fiancee of influencer Jake Paul, is struggling to be seen as heroic: she’s already been accused of “diva” antics for taking a “private jet” to Italy, reported the Daily Mail.

Individual Neutral Athletes

Athletes with Russian or Belarusian passports have been banned from many tournaments since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. So, as at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, Russian and Belarusian athletes will only be allowed to compete as “Individual Neutral Athletes” (AIN).

But several Russian athletes approved to compete as neutrals “have links to activity supporting the war in Ukraine”, said BBC Sport. For example, Petr Gumennik, a figure skater, has recently worked with and been coached by Ilya Averbukh, who has been sanctioned by Ukraine.

Family dynasty

The three Macuga sisters will be “looking to take over the Olympic skiing world”, said NBC: Lauren, an Alpine skier; Alli, who takes parts in moguls; and Sam, a ski jumper. To add to the family feel, their younger brother, Daniel, is an “up-and-coming competitor” in Alpine skiing.

A 17-year-old skier will join his 46-year-old mother in Mexico’s tiny Winter Olympic team in Italy. Alpine skier Lasse Gaxiola has been named Mexico’s fifth athlete for the Winter Olympics. He will compete in the same sport as his mother, the veteran Olympian Sarah Schleper.

Penis scandal 

Claims that ski jumpers are using penis injections to fly further are being investigated by the World Anti-Doping Agency. Bild reported concerns that male athletes might inject hyaluronic acid into their penises, in a bid to increase the size of their genitalia, allowing them larger ski-suits which could improve aerodynamics.

A study in the scientific journal Frontiers found that adding 2cm to the circumference of a suit would reduce drag by 4% and increase lift by 5%. So theoretically, a 2cm enhancement in suit size would give an extra 5.6m in jump length. Olympians competing at the Game will have their crotches “microchipped” in “an effort to crackdown on cheating”, claimed The Sun.

While millions will tune in to watch the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots battle it out in Super Bowl LX, just as many are excited for Bad Bunny’s highly anticipated halftime show. The Puerto Rican singer is the latest in a long line of superstar musicians to make their mark at the Big Game. From Prince to Katy Perry, Super Bowl halftime shows have a long history of memorable moments.

Historical firsts

While modern Super Bowls are thought of as platforms for major acts, this wasn’t always the case; the majority of early halftime shows were performed by college marching bands. The first major pop group to headline a Super Bowl was New Kids on the Block, who performed during the game in 1991. The boy band performed alongside a choir of kids singing songs like “It’s a Small World.” But while the show was historic, it was also not well-received, even by the band. “I don’t know how much pride I take in the actual performance,” frontman Donnie Wahlberg once told Playboy. “But I take pride in the fact that we were the first ones to do it.”

When pop stars began regularly performing at the Super Bowl, they were exclusively English-language singers — until 1999, when Gloria Estefan headlined the halftime show. Estefan had previously made an appearance at the 1992 Super Bowl show, and as “part of the ‘A Celebration of Soul, Salsa and Swing’ halftime show in Miami, Estefan performed her single ‘Oye,’ which blends Spanish and English lyrics,” said ESPN. Ahead of Bad Bunny’s performance, Estefan also had some advice for the Latino singer. “Enjoy every second because it really goes by so fast,” she said to E! News. “In those minutes, he’s gonna have the ability to impact the world.”

While the Super Bowl is a uniquely American phenomenon, another barrier was broken in 2000 when Phil Collins became the first non-U.S. citizen to headline the halftime show. The British singer, known for his work with the rock band Genesis as well as solo songs like “In the Air Tonight,” performed alongside Christina Aguilera and Enrique Iglesias. After this, the floodgates opened for a slew of British icons to perform at Super Bowls, including Paul McCartney, The Who and The Rolling Stones.

Record-breaking performances

Given the hype and cultural status of the Super Bowl, it should be no surprise that the halftime show is often one of the year’s most-watched events. Millions of people tune in annually, but one concert stands above the others: Kendrick Lamar’s 2025 performance is the most-watched Super Bowl halftime show in history. Lamar’s show was watched by an estimated 133.5 million people, according to Billboard. The rapper “came into the gig riding sky high” following a big Grammys weekend and “wowed viewers with intensely satisfying versions” of his songs, said The Mercury News, including his hit diss track “Not Like Us.”

And while The Weeknd’s 2021 performance didn’t include a diss track, it does carry another distinction: It’s the most expensive halftime show of all time. The total cost was reportedly a staggering $17 million. Performing at the Super Bowl is so desirable that the Canadian performer “used $7 million of his own money to fund his incredible production,” said the South China Morning Post. This is “on top of the estimated $10 million the NFL is believed to allow for a halftime show budget.” The high price shouldn’t be surprising; airing a 30-second commercial during the Super Bowl “costs about $8 million on average,” according to USA Today, and some companies are “paying $10 million or more.”

These shows are also known for incorporating many big-name artists into one act. This was never more apparent than during the 2022 halftime show, which featured the largest ensemble of performers at a Super Bowl. The show, which honored host city Los Angeles’ rap roots, was headlined by Mary J. Blige, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Eminem and Kendrick Lamar, with a surprise appearance by 50 Cent. The “spectacular, high-energy performance was a powerful celebration of hip hop and its evolution over the last three decades,” said Time, and also “marked the first time the halftime show lineup consisted entirely of hip hop headliners.”

Super Bowl superlatives

While Tom Brady is widely considered the football GOAT, there has been debate as to which halftime show can truly be called “the greatest.” However, many analysts consider the 2007 performance featuring Prince to be the best Super Bowl halftime show ever. There was a “great deal of anticipation for Prince’s performance,” said The Athletic, and the legendary singer delivered, as “no one before nor after has gotten close to him.” His rendition of his iconic song “Purple Rain,” which happened to occur during a rainstorm, created a “performance for the ages.”

Not all superlatives are positive; many shocking and unexpected moments have happened at halftime shows, too. The most jaw-dropping incident likely came during the 2004 show featuring Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake. During the pair’s performance, Timberlake accidentally ripped a piece of Jackson’s shirt, which “saw her right breast briefly exposed to 70,000 in-person spectators and more than 140 million TV viewers,” said The Guardian. The controversial moment “left Jackson, then 37, blacklisted from a significant portion of the music industry for years,” though she would later have a career resurgence.

And for as many halftime shows that have been lauded, there have also been some that have been questioned. The 2015 show, headlined by Katy Perry, is often considered the “campiest” in Super Bowl history. The show was filled with “Perry’s top songs, an entrance on top of a lion,” and costumes described as peak camp, said 303 Magazine. Given Perry’s history of concert performances, her Super Bowl outing “wasn’t too different than what we’ve seen from Perry previously.” But for many, it “seemed like they broadcast from one of Perry’s concerts instead of planning something new.”

Super Bowl shows have also had their fair share of daring, sometimes even death-defying moments. When it comes to stunts, many people think of Rihanna’s 2023 Super Bowl halftime show, when she entered the stadium from above on a platform suspended by cables. From there, the Barbadian singer carried out a 13-minute intense dance routine to rave reviews. But it was only when the show started that viewers realized Rihanna was also doing all of this while pregnant. Overall, the performance garnered critical acclaim, as Rihanna “graciously granted us a medley of her biggest hits,“ said Buzzfeed News.

‘How the world fell in love with climbing’

Josh Noble at the Financial Times

That “climbing has piqued the interest of the world’s largest subscription streaming service is a sign of how big the pursuit has become,” says Josh Noble. The “number of people climbing has exploded — fueled by the post-pandemic boom in exercise, the sport’s addition to the Olympic program and awe-inspiring achievements from daredevil climbers.” But “some in climbing are wary of how the most dangerous version — free solo climbing — is typically what garners the most attention.”

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‘T-maxxing has gone too far’

Yasmin Tayag at The Atlantic

American men are “attempting to increase their testosterone levels — whether they need to or not,” says Yasmin Tayag. Low testosterone “really can be debilitating,” but the “average decline in testosterone is not especially large.” Up to a “third of men on TRT don’t have a deficiency,” and this “maximalist approach to testosterone is risky.” Pumping the “body full of testosterone may not alleviate the problems that patients set out to solve,” as “every patient responds to testosterone differently.”

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‘The real “civilizational erasure” is happening in America’

Fareed Zakaria at Foreign Policy

Many “MAGA luminaries often proclaim that the grave danger facing the West is ‘civilizational erasure,’ which they claim is happening in Europe,” says Fareed Zakaria. But the “West’s defining character has not been tribal or religious solidarity — that describes most of the world.” The West’s “precious, almost unique, achievement has been the limitation of state power,” but the “second Trump administration has moved sharply to erode these traditions.” The “Trump administration has declared war on civil society.”

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‘When courts become quality control’

Ronell Smith at The Dallas Morning News

Competence is “usually invisible,” says Ronell Smith. People “notice it when it’s missing — when major decisions are made quickly, explained incompletely, then ‘resolved’ only after legal challenge.” The “Trump administration’s recent Title X reversal is a case study.” Reversals are “normal. What’s different is when reversal starts to feel like the governing method: act first, clarify later and let litigation serve as the cleanup step. It’s a method we might call churn governance.”

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‘The “Mississippi marathon” is teaching kids to read’

Rahm Emanuel at The Wall Street Journal

Mississippi “chose to spend less time on topics that dominate Washington’s education agenda and instead maintained a focus on what happens inside the classroom,” says Rahm Emanuel. It “restored phonics-based systems that rigorous scientific studies have shown to work” and “constructed a system to train teachers so that they are effective at teaching students to read.” Rather than “discarding public schools or educator accountability, the rest of America should adopt a model that has been proven to work.”

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‘The World Cup is out of reach for many. The hope lies outside the stadiums.’

Leander Schaerlaeckens at The Guardian

If the “shocking ticket prices for the actual World Cup will make it exclusive and inaccessible,” something “like a shadow World Cup may nevertheless emerge,” says Leander Schaerlaeckens. With a “wall built around the genuine article, scalable only by a bundle of money, a kind of bootleg version may be fashioned out of the scraps and flashes of the tournament.” It may be a “lower-case world cup, as it were, consisting of fan fests and open training sessions and pre-tournament warmup matches.”

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‘Always beware a declining superpower’

Janan Ganesh at the Financial Times

America “remains the strongest country on Earth, if by a reduced margin,” but in “another sense American decline is worse,” says Janan Ganesh. Even “under a normal president, the U.S. might be behaving badly,” as “status-anxious countries have to puff themselves up. It is a rare superpower that takes decline well.” Because the “performance of the U.S. this century has been so awesome in absolute terms,” the “nation’s relative decline can be hard to visualize. But it is there.”

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‘Mamdani might actually pull off universal child care in NYC’

Sara Pequeño at USA Today

When New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani “presented universal child care as part of his campaign platform,” some “thought it was a remarkable goal – and a far-fetched one,” says Sara Pequeño. But it “seems that dream is closer to reality, and the entire country may be better for it.” If “all goes well, this program could cement the city as a guiding light for other metropolitan areas looking to retain talent and keep parents, particularly moms, in the workforce.”

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What happened

The Indiana Hoosiers beat the Miami Hurricanes 27-21 Monday night to cap an improbable College Football Playoff national championship. It was the first national title for the Hoosiers, the losingest program in college football, and Indiana also became the first team to finish a season 16-0 since Yale in 1894.

Who said what

“Let me tell you: We won the national championship at Indiana University,” said coach Curt Cignetti, who took over the program and its record 713 losses two years ago. “It can be done.” Cignetti’s coaching and a play-of-the-season touchdown run by Heisman Trophy winner Fernando Mendoza “brought an improbable — maybe impossible? — national championship to a program that had known nothing but losing and indifference for almost 140 years,” The Associated Press said.

Cignetti completed “one of the most stunning turnarounds in American sports” by molding a “roster of overlooked and undersized misfits” into a “wrecking machine,” The Wall Street Journal said. Indiana’s “out-of-nowhere rise immediately joins the ranks of the U.S. Olympic hockey team’s ’Miracle on Ice’ in 1980” and “the New York Mets’ World Series in 1969.” Cignetti called his team’s victory “one of the greatest sports stories of all time.”

What next?

Mendoza is a “likely first pick in the 2026 NFL draft,” the Journal said. In a “fitting bit of symmetry” for the Hoosiers, their undefeated football title “comes 50 years after Bob Knight’s basketball team went 32-0 to win it all,” the AP said. “That hasn’t happened since, and there’s already some thought that college football — in its evolving, money-soaked, name-image-likeness era — might not see a team like this again, either.”

What happened

Federal prosecutors on Thursday unsealed an indictment charging 26 people with bribery and wire fraud as part of what they called a sprawling “transactional criminal scheme” to fix both NCAA and Chinese Basketball Association games. The charges, filed in Philadelphia, are the “latest development in a widening scandal stretching across collegiate and professional basketball,” The Washington Post said.

Who said what

The “point-shaving scheme” involved more than 39 players on 17 NCAA Division I teams who are accused of rigging “dozens of games in the previous two seasons,” ESPN said. The 26 defendants include “more than a dozen” NCAA basketball players who allegedly “tried to fix games as recently as last season,” The Associated Press said. The scheme’s fixers paid the players $10,000 to $30,000 in cash for each rigged game, prosecutors said.

This was an “extensive international criminal conspiracy” of “NCAA players, alumni and professional bettors,” said U.S. Attorney David Metcalf. The alleged perpetrators, including former NBA player Antonio Blakeney, “poisoned the American spirit of competition for monetary gain.” NCAA President Charlie Baker thanked law enforcement agencies for “working to detect and combat integrity issues and match manipulation in college sports.”

What next?

Yesterday’s indictment is the “latest gambling scandal to hit the sports world since a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court decision unleashed a meteoric rise in legal sports betting,” the AP said. It follows a federal “crackdown” on “illicit sports gambling and point-shaving schemes” that “engulfed” the NBA in October, said Fox News.

The United States is sending a powerhouse group to compete in figure skating when the 2026 Winter Olympics begin in Italy in February. While the U.S. has always been dominant in the sport (Americans brought home the gold in both the men’s and team events during the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing), this year’s roster has even loftier expectations.

Expected to dominate

Heading into the 2026 U.S. figure skating championships, where the Olympic team is chosen, many felt the U.S. would be “selecting the greatest American skating team to ever compete at the Olympic Games,” said USA Today. The selection of the final team showed this “potential was affirmed,” as the U.S. lineup is “strong and deep, with medal favorites in four of the five events.”

Much of the hype has centered around the women on the team, who delivered at the U.S. championships with “one sensational program after another,” said ESPN. These skaters are being called among the strongest ever seen on a U.S. team — a team that already features star alumni like Michelle Kwan, Kristi Yamaguchi and Dorothy Hamill. The men on the team are equally dominant this year. Still, this is all concerning U.S. singles, as “pairs has been the lone weak spot, and the country hasn’t won an Olympic medal in the event since 1988.”

‘A mix of seasoned veterans and rising stars’

The U.S. team still must prove how strong it will be, and how many medals it can rack up, as it heads to Italy with a “mix of seasoned veterans and rising stars,” said NPR. There are 16 total skaters, including men’s single skaters Ilia Malinin, Maxim Naumov and Andrew Torgashev. Malinin is considered the U.S. superstar, seen as “Team USA’s best hope for men’s figure skating gold, as one of the sport’s most revolutionary athletes.” He is the son of Uzbek Olympians and has a “penchant for gravity-defying quadruple jumps.” Naumov, another top skater, is dedicating his Olympic performance to his parents, who died in the Washington, D.C., plane crash in January 2025.

The women’s single skaters, Amber Glenn, Isabeau Levito and Alysa Liu, are equally impressive. Glenn “just won her third consecutive U.S. title” and at the age of 26, will be the “oldest U.S. ladies’ singles skater to compete at the Olympics since 1927,” said CNN. Liu retired at age 16 following her first Olympics, but “last season, she came out of retirement — and shockingly won the world championship.” She was the first American woman in 19 years to win the world title.

All eyes will also be on the ice dancing this year, as the U.S. looks to dominate in that category as well. The “three-time defending world champions in the ice dance,” married couple Madison Chock and Evan Bates, will “head to Milan as the gold medal favorites,” said The Athletic. The pair has won “just about everything else in ice dance except for an Olympic medal,” though they did take home a gold medal in the team event in 2022. The other ice dance duos, Emilea Zingas and Vadym Kolesnik, and Christina Carreira and Anthony Ponomarenko, are also considered strong competitors.

The investigation into a widely decried ban on Israeli football fans from a match in Birmingham last year has become a search for someone to blame.

The West Midlands Police (WMP) classified the Maccabi Tel Aviv fixture against local team Aston Villa in November as “high risk”, due to violence after a previous Maccabi Tel Aviv match in Amsterdam. On that basis, the Birmingham Safety Advisory Group (which police are part of) barred Maccabi fans from attending, provoking widespread accusations of antisemitism – including by Keir Starmer. It has since emerged that the WMP’s report referenced a Maccabi match against West Ham that never took place, apparently due to an artificial intelligence hallucination.

Chief Constable Craig Guildford twice told the Home Affairs Select Committee that the WMP doesn’t use AI. He insisted the match had been identified through a Google search. But today he wrote to the committee apologising, and admitted the inclusion of the match “arose as a result” of an officer using the AI tool Microsoft Copilot. MPs are calling for Guildford’s resignation.

What did the commentators say?

“Despite denials at two separate hearings, it turns out they did use AI to produce their dodgy ‘intelligence’ dossier,” Conservative MP Nick Timothy, who has repeatedly criticised Guildford since the ban, posted on X.

This admission is “hugely embarrassing” for Guildford, said the BBC’s UK correspondent Daniel Sandford. But that is not his “biggest problem”. The WMP is accused of “mishandling intelligence” and then “doubling down” on the decision.

Behind that is the accusation that the safety advisory group “pandered to anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian voices within the community”, said the BBC’s Midlands correspondent Phil Mackie. That has “created a huge political headache” for both WMP and Birmingham City Council.

Each revelation “proves more damning” than the last, said The Wall Street Journal. They “confirm what many suspected” last October: WMP were “more afraid of local Islamists than they were of Israeli fans”. “In other words, British police gave local Islamists an antisemitic heckler’s veto.”

“Central to the WMP case” is what Dutch police told them, said The Guardian. The WMP says this is what “led them to believe Maccabi fans had been perpetrators of violence” after the Ajax match in 2024. But Dutch police appeared to contradict the WMP’s claim. Indeed, most of the victims of the violence were Maccabi fans.

The “narrative” spun by WMP – that the Israeli fans were too dangerous to host – “has slowly been unravelling”, said The Spectator’s assistant editor Madeline Grant. Hilariously, a phrase which kept coming up during the WMP officers’ evidence to the HAC was “an absence of intelligence”. “Of the truth of that there could be no doubt.” They “make Inspector Clouseau look like Poirot, Marple and Holmes rolled into one”.

“Something is rotten” in the WMP, said The Telegraph. Senior officers “misled the public” and “produced false intelligence in order to demonise Israeli fans, while disguising the real reason for the ban: fear of Islamist intimidation and a potential riot”.

A “secret dossier” proves the police “covered up threats against Israeli players” by “Asian youths looking for a fight”. The team were “constantly in danger of mob violence”. Police even consulted Green Lane Mosque before the match – “notorious for hosting radical preachers”. Guildford’s position “now looks unsustainable”.

Birmingham’s SAG also warrants scrutiny, said The Times. It includes several councillors who have “publicly opposed Israel’s participation in sports”. More broadly, the situation “gives an illuminating and depressing insight into how power is wielded in Britain today”. Guildford should admit the ban was “the result not of real intelligence but intense lobbying”. He “failed to discharge his duty with due impartiality and should resign”. “If not, the home secretary must show him the red card.”

What next?

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, who ordered the policing inspectorate to investigate the WMP’s handling, is considering the findings of the first part of their inquiry and delivered a statement to the House of Commons today, saying she no longer has confidence in Guildford.

Guildford, however, is “digging in” and will refuse to quit, according to The Times. “He wants due process, he won’t accept it,” a source told the paper. “He’s lawyering up.” Only Simon Foster, the West Midlands police and crime commissioner (who appointed Guildford), has the power to sack him – and Foster claims MPs on the home affairs select committee are “biased against Guildford”.

Ski patrollers across major U.S. resorts have been putting down their ski poles and picking up a picket sign. Patrollers at Colorado’s Telluride Ski Resort have become the latest group to go on strike, joining a slew of workers at similar resorts in recent years. Many patrollers say that while these ski resorts are located in the lap of luxury, their paychecks cannot keep up with the cost of living.

Where have ski patrollers been striking?

Telluride has quickly become the center of the recent labor movement. The ski resort’s union, the Telluride Professional Ski Patrol Association, began a strike in December over wages, forcing Telluride to shut down its slopes. While the resort has partially reopened, officials worry the town is “staring down an economic crisis if the ski resort and its patrollers don’t settle their labor dispute” and fully reopen, said The Denver Post.

As Telluride’s slopes sit vacant, the town is “scrambling to give visitors something to do by lighting fire pits and setting up ice-sculpting events and children’s play areas,” said The New York Times. But the strike at Telluride is hardly unique: Ski patrollers at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort in Jackson, Wyoming, put forth a petition to unionize, part of “widespread labor activity at American ski resorts,” said Jackson Hole News & Guide. And in early 2025, patrollers in Park City, Utah, “went on strike, which caused the resort to close most of its terrain for nearly two weeks,” said NBC News. Workers at three Colorado mountains (the Keystone Resort, Eldora Mountain and Arapahoe Basin Ski Area) have also unionized.

What are they striking for?

Most of the labor activism has centered on cost-of-living issues, which ski patrollers say are in stark contrast to the wealth often displayed at these resorts. These patrollers are “increasingly leading the push for higher wages in communities hit hard by rising cost of living,” said NBC. The starting wage for a ski patroller trainee at Telluride is $21 per hour, according to a job posting from the resort.

These wages “aren’t enough to live on in one of the most expensive housing markets in America,” said Tony Daranyi, who has worked as a ski patroller in Telluride for 27 years, to NBC. The amount the patrollers make is “far below what it takes somebody in this community to afford either rent or trying to buy even an affordable house.” The strike is a “reflection of what’s going on in all mountain communities, and it’s also a reflection of what’s going on nationwide with income inequality and wealth.”

In Telluride, union negotiators put forth a proposal that “increased the base rate for station leads to $41 an hour and gave staff annual increases based on the cost of living,” said KKCO-TV Grand Junction. But this may not be enough to keep up with the exorbitant pricing in some of these towns. People “sit around and have constant conversations about workforce housing,” said Andrew Aerenson, a ski instructor in Breckenridge, Colorado, to the Times. But there are still many challenges that remain, as it typically costs Breckenridge “$150,000 in subsidies to build a single unit of affordable housing, a process that takes years even when the funds are available.”

“Ruben Amorim has shown that there is only so far a manager can push it,” said Sky News. The Manchester United head coach was shown a red card yesterday, only 14 months after joining from Sporting Lisbon.

After Sunday’s 1-1 draw against Leeds United, Amorim “inflamed tensions” with the Old Trafford hierarchy, telling the club’s director of football Jason Wilcox and scouting team to “do their jobs” as he had come to the club to be the manager, not the coach.

Just like Enzo Maresca, who left Chelsea on New Year’s Day, “challenging the leadership in public has ended in the sack”.

‘Inevitable and predictable’

Amorim’s sacking was “inevitable and predictable”, said Sky Sports. The Portuguese was the 10th manager appointed since Alex Ferguson left the club in 2013; the United hierarchy was “desperate to give him a full season in charge before judging him” – partly because of the £12 million cost of sacking him and also to avoid the “recurring instability” of ever-changing leadership.

“Ruben needs to demonstrate he is a great coach over three years,” United minority owner Jim Ratcliffe told The Times’ The Business podcast in October. “We have to be patient. We have a long-term plan. It isn’t a light switch.”

But United’s results since Amorim took charge were “so poor, they never afforded the club’s bosses, or Amorim, the luxury of time”, said Sky Sports. Last season United finished 15th – their lowest since the mid-1970s – and were heavily criticised after losing the Europa League final to Spurs. This season, after spending more than £200 million on “attacking talent” last summer, the results have still been “awful”.

Despite “signs of progress” and a “charismatic approach that charmed supporters”, Amorim “must be considered United’s worst permanent manager of the post-Ferguson era”, said The Guardian. United are “adamant there have been no power clashes” and that Amorim was “sacked due to a lack of progress”. But the Old Trafford bosses “cannot have liked” his comments.

“I came here to be the manager of Manchester United, not to be the coach of Manchester United,” Amorim said. “I know that my name is not Tuchel, it’s not Conte, it’s not Mourinho, but I’m the manager of Manchester United and it’s going to be like this for 18 months or when the board decides to change.”

‘Bitter fracture’

Former United defender Gary Neville told Sky Sports that Amorim’s words were “something similar” to those of Maresca before he left Chelsea. Maresca said in mid-December that he’d endured “the worst 48 hours of his career at the club”.

The Italian arrived at Stamford Bridge from Leicester in 2024 and led the Blues to Uefa Conference League glory in his first season, as well as a fourth-place Premier League finish, “sealing a return to the Champions League”, said the Daily Mirror. “He followed that up with a run to glory in the Club World Cup, beating Paris Saint-Germain in the final.” As recently as November, Chelsea were second in the league table, and Maresca won manager of the month.

But on New Year’s Day, he “dramatically left his role” after “an irretrievable breakdown in his relationship with the club’s board”, said The Sun. He had signed a five-year deal with a further 12-month option, worth about £4 million per season, but the “bitter fracture” with the Chelsea hierarchy, including co-owner Todd Boehly, and confrontations over who should start games and substitutions, “left him feeling he could not stay in SW6”. A 2-2 home draw with Bournemouth “brought the final rupture”. Maresca walked out of Stamford Bridge without speaking to his players and forfeiting a potential £14 million payout.

Chelsea have “cycled through” four managers and two interim bosses in less than four years, and are now hunting for their fifth full-time head coach of the Boehly era. But Maresca’s decision to forego his payout means he’s immediately available for work. He is now, according to Sporting Life, one of the favourites to replace Amorim at United.

Losing can be smart business in pro sports. “Tanking” teams in the NBA and NFL sometimes bottom out now in order to position themselves for a better future. Critics say that undermines the competition that is the lifeblood of the games.

The NBA is looking at “new ways to combat tanking,” said ESPN. “Multiple teams” in recent years “either shut down players early or sat players for games” to give them a better shot at a higher draft pick. (Worse teams generally get higher picks and a better chance at the most talented new players.) The point of the proposals is to give middling or losing teams a “reason to continue to try to win games” down the stretch of an otherwise-lost season. Tanking is “an issue for our fans,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said earlier this year. “And so we’re paying attention to it."

Sunday’s NFL game between the New York Giants and Las Vegas Raiders was labeled the “tank bowl” because the loser would have a clearer shot at the league’s No. 1 draft pick, said The Las Vegas Review-Journal. The Raiders sat out All Pro defensive end Maxx Crosby due to a supposed knee injury. Crosby posted pictures of himself playing basketball. “Extremely conflicted” Raiders fans breathed a “sigh of relief” when their team fell behind in a 34-10 loss. That did not sit well with players. If athletes are “purposely trying to lose, you’re messing up your career,” said defensive tackle Jonah Laulu.

What did the commentators say?

“This is professional sports, and trying to win should be paramount,” Eric Koreen said at The Athletic. Instead you see teams like the Washington Wizards and Utah Jazz “throw away seasons at a time” in the name of “long-term interests.” It is true that anti-tanking rules will make it more difficult for bad teams to get better. But it seems likely that “fewer teams will be as far away from success” if they stop trying to lose now for the possibility of getting better later. “There should be no incentive to lose — ever.”

One problem? “American fans want a somewhat level playing field” in their sports leagues, Sam Quinn said at CBS Sports. That is why the major sports leagues try to achieve “parity” by assigning higher draft slots to worse teams. But any plan to curb tanking will make it “harder for the worst teams to improve.” Pro sports could eliminate their drafts and treat rookie players as free agents who sign with the highest bidder, but that would “give big-market teams such a massive and unfair advantage” it would leave small-market teams behind.

What next?

One solution: Make teams play a “one-game playoff” for the rights to their league’s No. 1 draft pick, Jay Busbee said at Yahoo Sports. The USFL football league already did that in 2024 to create stakes between two teams with 1-8 records. The incentives ought to be on winning, and “football ought to be settled on the field.”

‘A lesson in false limits’

Sally Jenkins at The Atlantic

Few “professionals suffer more from ageism than athletes,” says Sally Jenkins. Fans “want athletes to retire before they lose the luster of their prime and start looking knee sore,” an “expectation that, judging by the recent exploits of the skier Lindsey Vonn and the quarterback Philip Rivers, has cheated audiences.” Too many “athletes, however, are discouraged from competing as they age.” Vonn and Rivers “both saw an opening to compete again, and something adventurous in them said, ‘Why not?’”

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‘This Christmas, let’s ban the world’s most miserable gift-giving game’

Dave Schilling at The Guardian

It is “forced frivolity season,” and people can “say yes to just about every holiday party invite — save for one massive exception. White elephant parties,” says Dave Schilling. There isn’t a “more dispiriting feeling than unwrapping a hardcover edition of a book you’ve been meaning to read or a pair of Bluetooth headphones and having it ripped from your hands.” The “person who invented this cursed activity takes more pleasure in witnessing pain than a dominatrix.”

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‘Without railway reform, your town could be the next East Palestine’

Jess Conard at The Hill

“Three years ago, a 149-car train pulled by three locomotives carrying tons of toxic chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio,” and the “scars — physical, emotional and economic — remain today,” says Jess Conard. The “safety protocols that exist are ineffective,” yet the “standards that would make railroads operate safely are ignored.” These “safety technologies are reasonable and available and could have prevented the disaster in East Palestine.” If “implemented quickly, they could also prevent a disaster in your community.”

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‘More math, not less, will lead students to success’

Bloomberg editorial board

Educators have “embraced trendy curricula that seek to make math more fun, incorporating coursework that feels more relevant to students than, say, dividing polynomials,” says the Bloomberg editorial board. These “approaches, though well-intentioned, tend to lower standards.” Not “only are core math concepts missing by design, but the rigorous statistics and computer science skills needed for more advanced coursework are also lacking.” Math “becomes fun when you practice, and to that end interventions must start early.”

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‘Confession of a cheap imports enjoyer’

Jack Butler at The Wall Street Journal

Searching the “internet for tables, chairs, futons and bookshelves,” there are “great options. Almost none of them were made in the U.S. Many came from China,” says Jack Butler. It’s “okay that the U.S. isn’t a powerhouse producer of faux-marble tables and adjustable futons,” because it “does other things — high-end manufacturing, energy production, design — and it does them better than anyone else.” There are “better jobs for Americans than making cheap tables and chairs.”

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‘Benin’s real coup already happened under President Talon’

Tafi Mhaka at Al Jazeera

The attempted coup in Benin was the “visible peak of a deeper political crisis years in the making,” says Tafi Mhaka. In its “aftermath, order was restored, but not legitimacy.” Benin’s “real coup — the systematic overthrow of its democracy — had already occurred.” All the “attempted takeover did was to lay bare a political system that had already been undermined from within,” as “any illusion of democracy in the country disappeared.”

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‘Singapore’s latest antisocial scourge is pickleball’

Owen Walker at the Financial Times

There has been an “active pickleball-playing community in Singapore for at least three decades, but for years it was known as an old man’s game,” says Owen Walker. It has “become a lightning rod issue, pitching enthusiastic picklers against neighbors driven mad by the sport’s relentless ‘pock, pock, pock’ soundtrack.” In “entrepreneurial Singapore, the dilemma has prompted some to spot a business opportunity.” Other “cities enduring the same public backlash against the sport’s growing popularity could take note.”

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‘Netflix has three huge new problems with its Warner Bros takeover: Paramount, TikTok and Trump’

James Moore at The Independent

Netflix and Warner Bros. would be the “media merger of the century, so naturally, Donald Trump is sticking his oar in,” says James Moore. But the “deal is motivated as much by fear as it is Netflix’s desire to create an unstoppable media and entertainment supertanker.” Just as “Netflix revolutionized the viewing habits of the Millennials, and Gen X while we’re at it, so is it looking nervously at the Zoomers and Gen Alpha rapidly coming up behind them.”

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“Marty Supreme” is the “best film of the year, and exactly the jolt the coming Oscars season needed”, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph.

Timothée Chalamet stars as Marty Mauser, a “ping-pong prodigy” who “bounces frenetically around 1950s New York, as if being thwacked back and forth” by a pair of invisible bats. Working in his uncle’s shoe shop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, he has “impregnated” his married girlfriend (a “superb” Odessa A’zion), and dreams of becoming a world-class table tennis star.

Loosely based on the life of US table tennis champion Marty Reisman, Josh Safdie’s “whip-crack comedy” follows Mauser as he saves up and travels to London for a competition at Wembley, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. After talking his way into a free room at the Ritz, he develops an “erotic obsession” with fellow guest and retired film star Kay Stone, “for which role Gwyneth Paltrow has very stylishly come out of retirement”.

“‘Marty Supreme’ doesn’t behave like a sports movie.” You won’t find any lengthy training montage sequences here and Mauser is “always a reprehensible character whom no one really trusts”. But the film thrums with the “fanatical energy of a 149-minute ping-pong rally” and the “rhythm and spirit of table tennis” course through every scene. “The pure craziness is a marvel.”

Powered by a “shimmering, surging electro score by Daniel Lopatin” and “energetically shot on grainy, desaturated 35mm by expert cinematographer Darius Khondji”, this is “not your usual handsomely staid period drama”, said Jamie Graham in Empire. “There’s a giddy messiness and electrifying volatility to the crazed plotting”, and the film whizzes by in a thrilling blur of “overlapping dialogue, serrated cutting and sweaty close-ups”.

The movie is packed with “unexpected turns”, said the BBC’s Caryn James. Mauser is “not some clichéd, lovable scamp” but an “arrogant” and “scrawny young man with a pencil moustache”. Chalamet’s “on-screen charm” and his character’s “bravado” are “captivating”, even when Mauser’s behaviour “is at its worst”.

The film’s two-and-a-half hour running time is a “flaw”: while many of the sequences are entertaining, some feel like “indulgent detours”. And it deserved an ending that is “much more inventive”. Still, it’s a “bracing and original” film, and has such “scope, ambition and humour” that these issues are “easy to overlook”.

“What a film this is,” said Collin in The Telegraph. From start to finish, Safdie’s movie had me “vibrating like a tuning fork. It’s a joyous salute to life’s beautiful cacophony.”

College football coaches are some of the highest-paid bench bosses in all of sports, and they often cash in big with salary buyouts if they are fired. But as these buyouts become more common and grow in size, some people are questioning the ethics of the deals — and also where colleges are finding the funds.

How do college salary buyouts work?

If a college fires its head football coach, it is generally forced to pay the “liquidated damages stipulated in a coach’s contract if they are fired ‘without cause’ — or, in other words, because they’re losing,” said Front Office Sports. This is most notable when a coach is fired in the middle of a season. Most contracts stipulate that a fired coach is “owed a portion of their future contract earnings, including their base salary and guaranteed supplementary income.”

The record payout for a college coach belongs to Jimbo Fisher, who was fired as the head coach at Texas A&M University in 2023. Fisher received a $76.8 million payout upon losing his job. However, like many other coaches in his situation, Fisher is “no closer to getting a job than when Texas A&M paid him to leave,” said USA Today, as “those fired don’t often return to the profession.” Other significant buyouts include Louisiana State University head coach Brian Kelly, who was paid $53.8 million when he was fired, and Penn State University head coach James Franklin, who was given $49 million after being let go.

Why are they controversial?

As the buyouts continue to increase in value, many college administrators are “equal parts dismayed and disgusted at what they believe is nothing shy of fiscal malfeasance,” said CNN, with their universities “hamstrung by deals presented as security blankets for the university but offering only protection for the coaches.” This has led to a question that is “no longer an existential crisis. Just where is the money coming from?”

“I have no idea,” one college administrator said to CNN when asked where universities are getting the money for these buyouts. “The money does not exist.” Many of these officials seem to have accepted the buyouts as just another part of modern college sports. The “math doesn’t seem to math,” said a search-firm executive who helps college programs find coaches to CBS Sports. But “athletic departments always find a way. And until they stop keeping score or people stop caring, I guess they’ll find a way to do it.”

Stakeholders are pushing for changes to contract structures. University administrators “should take responsibility in an era of the run-amok Supercoach that needs to end now,” said The Athletic. As the price of buyouts “barrels toward the $200 million mark for FBS football coaches terminated this year alone — with more firings and buyouts on deck — the right-minded response needs to start with self-examination.”

Some also question colleges’ continued search for high-paid coaches. The “guardians of higher education almost never say no when it’s time to go big-game hunting for a coach,” said The Athletic, even as powerhouse football programs like Ohio State University and the University of Alabama have experienced big financial losses. But “any university president who fights an athletic department in any way has a very short stay at that university,” said former Indiana University and UC Berkeley professor Murray Sperber to the outlet.

There’s no disputing that Diego Maradona was one of the world’s greatest footballers. But it’s still hotly debated whether or not the Argentine star’s death, five years ago this week, could have been prevented.

Maradona’s family believes it should have been. They are “demanding justice so that he can rest in peace”, said El País. A second trial of seven health professionals, accused of negligent homicide relating to the former footballer’s death at the age of 60, will begin in March, after the first trial dramatically collapsed earlier this year.

Died ‘practically alone’

Maradona, captain of Argentina’s 1986 World Cup-winning team, died in a rented house just outside Buenos Aires on 25 November 2020. He was recovering from surgery to remove a blood clot from his brain. “The news that his heart had stopped beating plunged Argentina into collective grief,” said El País.

“No one was prepared,” said CNN. In Argentina, the pain was “atrocious”. His death “managed to unite in desolation a country deeply divided”. Hundreds of thousands attended his funeral, in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. “Adults cried like children”, and the sounds of their weeping mixed with the noise of disturbances – “shouts from the police and hooligans”. His funeral “resembled his life: it was chaos”.

Maradona had “dodged death so many times” during decades of cocaine and alcohol addiction. He seemed to have “indestructible genetics”. But “one of the most famous human beings on the planet” died “practically alone, under medical care that is suspected of being, at the very least, deficient”.

Seven doctors and nurses were accused of “homicide with possible intent”: pursuing a course of action despite knowing it could lead to the patient’s death. Prosecutors alleged that the medical attention Maradona received was grossly negligent. Gianinna Maradona, one of his daughters, said the doctors had promised “serious home care” but what ensued was “a disastrous charade”.

‘Treated like an animal’

The case against the medical team centres on the decision to allow Maradona to recuperate from brain surgery at home “with minimal supervision and medical equipment, instead of a medical facility”, said The Guardian.

The original trial “exposed chilling claims about the footballer’s death”, said The Sun, including allegations that he was “treated like an animal” by his medics. Chief prosecutor Patricio Ferrari said Maradona spent his last days in a “house of horror”. He “shocked the room” with a “grim” photo of Maradona “lying on his back with his bloated stomach exposed”.

The post-mortem report concluded that Maradona had died from acute pulmonary oedema secondary to an acute exacerbation of chronic heart failure. His heart, the court was told, weighed “more than twice the normal size.”

Maradona had suffered at least 12 hours of extreme pain before dying, one of the experts who performed the post-mortem examination told the court. His heart “was completely covered with fat and blood clots, which indicate agony”, said forensic medic Carlos Cassinelli. He had “been collecting water” for days; this was “something foreseeable. Any doctor examining a patient would find this.”

But, months in, the trial dramatically collapsed in scandal. One of the three judges had secretly authorised recordings of legal proceedings for “Divine Justice”, a documentary about the case that would feature her as the star. Julieta Makintach recused herself, and the two remaining judges chose to annul the trial rather than replace her. This month, Makintach was fired and disqualified from holding any judicial position in the future.

The defendants, who deny all the accusations, will stand trial again in March. If they are found guilty, they face a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison.

Maradona continues to captivate Argentina. Banks have issued a special silver coin ahead of the 2026 World Cup, commemorating his so-called “Goal of the Century” against England in the quarter-finals of the 1986 World Cup.

“Please do not allow football to be dragged into every ideological or political battle,” said Fifa president Gianni Infantino before the last men’s World Cup in Qatar. That didn’t stop Qatar being accused of using the tournament to sportswash its poor human rights record.

Next up is Donald Trump, who is showing every intention of exploiting the 2026 World Cup – to be hosted by the US, Canada and Mexico – to push his Maga agenda. Ever the showman, “Trump will make sure he is front and centre at this tournament”, said Alexander Abnos in The Guardian – even “in spots where he has no business or where his involvement may be seen as uncouth or inappropriate”.

Host cities threat

Having claimed credit for securing the tournament for North America back in his first term, the US president has repeatedly sought to insert himself into the World Cup narrative since returning to the White House.

He has recently used “safety concerns” to suggest he may ask Fifa to relocate matches away from Democratic-run US host cities, including Boston, Seattle and Los Angeles. “The governors are going to have to behave. The mayors are going to have to behave,” he warned.

Moving World Cup games away from a selected host city would be an “extraordinary decision that has little, if any, precedent”, said CNN. All the host cities were announced in 2022 and they have already lavished “time and money” on “infrastructure improvements, security planning and extensive plans to host an influx of millions of visitors”. Trump’s suggested alternative, against the background of his sending federal law enforcement agencies into Democratic-controlled areas “to crack down on illegal immigration and crime”, is for the host cities to “invite the National Guard” in now.

At a conference with Infantino in the White House, to discuss World Cup plans, Trump also told reporters he would be “OK” about ordering strikes against co-hosts Mexico as part of his ongoing war on drug trafficking. “They know how I stand,” he said.

Peace prize

Trump has struck up a bromance with Infantino – and critics say they share the same megalomaniac traits. This week’s visit to the White House was Infantino’s sixth this year, and he surprised many by accompanying the US president to Egypt for the signing of the Gaza ceasefire deal.

Infantino will use next month’s World Cup draw in Washington D.C. to award the inaugural Fifa Peace Prize, conceived to reward “individuals who have taken exceptional and extraordinary actions for peace and, by doing so, have united people across the world”. Fifa have disclosed no details about the process for choosing the winner and, if Trump receives the award, as expected, “it’s likely to add to the perception that it’s been created in response to the US president not winning the Nobel Peace Prize”, said The Associated Press.

The timing of the award and Infantino’s “proximity to the president” have “raised questions about whether FIFA is adhering to its own rules on political neutrality”, said The New York Times.

“Indelible, sublime moments will still happen” at next year’s World Cup, said Abnos in The Guardian. “But those moments will be punctuated by Trump – eternally encroaching on even the most elevated of emotional experiences.”

YouTuber Jake Paul will go toe-to-toe with Britain’s former world heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua in Miami next month in a bout that promoters have billed as the “most dangerous” contest of the influencer’s boxing career.

Joshua, 36, will be “the first active, elite-level champion” that Paul has faced in the ring, said the BBC, and there are already serious concerns about his safety.

Defying belief 

This will be Paul’s “14th fight since turning pro five years ago – with the 28-year-old YouTuber-turned-boxer having won all but one so far”, said The Sun. But taking on Joshua is a “whole different kettle of fish”.

The two-time world heavyweight champion has agreed to shed several pounds to meet the agreed weight limit of 245lb (17st 7lb) for the 19 December bout. But Joshua is five inches taller and around four stone heavier than his cruiserweight rival. Boxing fans are already “worried” about Paul’s chances of “actually surviving the fight”.

In the UK such a match-up would be “banned” because of the “serious safety fears”, said The Telegraph. This “shocking” plan “defies belief” and “breaks so many codes for the sport”. Joshua “is too big, too strong, too experienced and – genuinely – too dangerous for Paul even to think about fighting”; this is nothing more than a “money heist”. It is being billed as a £140 million fight, with Joshua reportedly set to earn more than £30 million from the Netflix-streamed event.

Paul has “always had delusions of grandeur as a novice pro”, said The Guardian, but boxing “may have to consider its own culpability” should he be “badly hurt and end up in hospital” after this “fully sanctioned bout”. But “the suspicion remains” that it will “be a more controlled arrangement”. That “gut reaction” is confirmed by the fact that the fight has been limited to eight rounds.

‘Laughing stock’

Behind the “initial shock” of the apparent mismatch, the two fighters have more in common than it may appear in that both “have found themselves at a crossroads”, said the Daily Mail. Paul has been “on the search for a more credible opponent” after his bout with WBA lightweight champion Gervonta Davis was cancelled, while Joshua “will be looking to shake off 13 months of ring-rust”.

Joshua has put himself in a “no-win situation” by accepting the challenge, said former world champion Johnny Nelson on Sky Sports. If Paul “lasts the distance, what does that tell you” about Joshua? But if he “goes in there and knocks him out, then you would say that’s to be expected”.

Boxing’s credibility has already “taken a hit because of difficulties arranging fights at the highest level” and an “influx” of cash from Saudi Arabia, said the BBC. For some, influencer fights represent an avenue to “attract new fans” and help “safeguard the future of the sport”, but “others argue they render it a laughing stock”.

If and when the pair do come face to face, Joshua “surely wipes Paul out in a flash”, said Boxing 24/7. “If not, well, the boxing world will have officially gone mad!” This is “what we’re afraid of” – the sport “becoming more and more a circus”.

The sumo ring has always been a “sacred” arena where “only men may tread, bound by centuries of ritual and pride”, said The Japan Times. But now that Japan has elected its first female prime minister, the question arises: “If she can stand at the centre of power, why not in the centre of the ring?”

It won’t be long before this thorny question faces a “real-world test”. On 23 November, Sanae Takaichi will have to decide whether to break with tradition and step into the sumo ring (dohyo), to present the trophy to the Grand Sumo champion in Fukuoka.

‘Off-limits’ for women

Sumo rings remain “off-limits” to women and girls. Known as nyonin kinsei (female exclusion), the practice is rooted in Shinto beliefs around impurity – “particularly the idea that blood from death, childbirth or menstruation can defile what is sacred”.

The ban has sparked controversy for decades. In 1990, Mayumi Moriyama, Japan’s first female cabinet minister, asked the Japan Sumo Association (JSA) if she could present a trophy on behalf of the prime minister. Her request was rejected. Ten years later, Osaka’s then governor, Fuse Ohta, “was forced to present a prize to the champion of the annual Osaka tournament on a walkway next to the dohyo”, said The Guardian.

More recently, in 2018, the local mayor suffered a stroke during a speech in a sumo arena in Maizuru, near Kyoto. A female nurse was among the spectators who “rushed on to the ring to administer first aid”. The referee repeatedly called for her to leave the dohyo, and officials “sprinkled ‘purifying salt’ on the wrestling surface”, although they later denied this was because of her presence. Still, the incident sparked an “outcry” and the JSA chair was “forced to apologise”. But days later, Tomoko Nakagawa (the then mayor of Takarazuka), was made to deliver a speech to the side of a ring, telling spectators she was “mortified” by her treatment as a woman.

Barring women from the sumo ring is “part of a broader societal affliction”, said The Economist. Japan ranks 118th out of 148 countries in the World Economic Forum’s global gender gap index. “That is better than Saudi Arabia but worse than Bahrain.”

Away from sport, until the 2000s women were “prohibited from tunnel construction sites owing to the belief that their presence would make the female mountain god jealous and bring misfortune”, and are still banned from climbing some sacred mountains, including Mount Ōmine in Yoshino-Kumano National Park.

‘Quiet resistance’

Despite its deeply conservative roots, sumo is facing “quiet resistance”, said The Associated Press. While professional sumo remains out of bounds for women, a “small but growing group of more than 600 wrestlers is making strides at the amateur level in Japan”. Like men, they wear the traditional loincloth – but instead of competing bare-chested, they wear it over shorts or leotards.

As the Grand Sumo tournament draws to its conclusion, some hope the appointment of Takaichi as PM could “herald change”, said The Economist. Will she finally “break the taboo?” If Japan’s prime minister were to step into the dohyo, it would be a “symbolic victory for women’s rights campaigners”, said The Guardian.

But Takaichi, a social conservative who opposes women having the right to keep their maiden name after marriage, looks unlikely to rock the boat. “The prime minister wishes to respect sumo tradition and culture”, said Minoru Kihara, the chief cabinet secretary. “The government has not yet made a decision on the matter.”

The JSA said it had formed a panel to look into the issues back in 2018, but it has yet to reach its conclusion. “Sumo is still hiding behind vague words like ‘tradition’ and ‘custom’”, Nakagawa told The Japan Times. “That era is over. If we let this moment slip by, nothing will ever change.”

What happened

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn Sunday unsealed an indictment charging Cleveland Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz with rigging their pitches to enrich bettors and themselves.

Prosecutors alleged that Clase, “one of baseball’s best closers over the past several seasons, received bribes and kickbacks for participating in the scheme,” The Wall Street Journal said.

Who said what

Ortiz and Clase “betrayed America’s pastime,” U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella Jr. said. The indictment was the latest “involving gambling to rock the world of professional sports, and the third in the past month” from Nocella’s office, The New York Times said. Last month, he charged more than 30 people, including an NBA star and head coach, in alleged gambling schemes that shook professional basketball.

Sports betting scandals “have long been a concern,” The Associated Press said, “but a May 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling led to a wave of gambling incidents involving athletes and officials.” The details of this indictment “are jarring for a sport that maintains its most sacred rule is not betting on baseball,” The Washington Post said. Prosecutors said Clase, 27, “began rigging pitches as early as May 2023, a year after he signed a five-year deal with Cleveland worth $20 million.” Both pitchers denied the allegations through their lawyers.

What next?

Clase and Ortiz were charged with wire fraud, money laundering and bribery conspiracy counts punishable by decades in prison. They also face possible lifetime bans from MLB. Ortiz, 26, was arrested Sunday at Boston Logan International Airport and was scheduled to make his first court appearance today. Clase was “thought to be in his native Dominican Republic,” the Journal said.

‘The future of climate leadership will be measured in resilience’

Natalie Unterstell at Time

The “more we heat the planet, the harder it becomes to cool it down,” says Natalie Unterstell. The COP30 conference “must be the moment leaders admit that the world is no longer transitioning on a stable planet.” Let’s “stop seeing adaptation as a failure to prevent climate change, and start seeing it as readiness to lead.” The “real question isn’t ‘how much climate change can we absorb,’ but ‘who among us can rebuild, protect, and thrive amid constant disruption?’”

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‘Is gambling really threatening the integrity of sports?’

Jay Caspian Kang at The New Yorker

People have “always bet on sports,” and it “will take a while to sort out whether we are seeing a new epidemic of betting or if the people who used to bet illegally are just doing it in the open now, where they can be counted,” says Jay Caspian Kang. We “shouldn’t lie to preserve abstract ideas such as fandom and integrity, nor should we pretend that the first bet on a football game happened on an iPhone.”

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‘Will a great night for Dems and democracy mean Trump doubles down?’

Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer

Democrats “won everything everywhere on Tuesday by stressing two core principles: Their opposition to authoritarian rule by Trump, and an emphasis on actually caring about families’ struggles,” says Will Bunch. Voters “can send a message to Trump, but they can’t likely get rid of him for another 38 months.” Democrats’ “big night on Tuesday all but ensures that Trump will try to double down on dictatorship.” The “blue tsunami is about to collide with a big, ugly wall.”

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‘Allowing Houthi propaganda on European broadcast networks is moral surrender’

Moammar Al-Eryani at The Jerusalem Post

It is “both astonishing and profoundly troubling that Europe’s satellites continue to beam the propaganda of an armed group designated by many as a terrorist organization,” says Moammar Al-Eryani. The “Iran-backed Houthis armed group broadcasts daily messages of hate, violence, and jihad.” By “allowing these hijacked state channels to continue broadcasting under Houthi control,” Europe is “not just facilitating extremist propaganda; it is violating basic principles of international law, media regulation, and national sovereignty.”

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The sports world was shocked following the recent indictments against an NBA head coach and players over allegations of illegal gambling operations. But while the scope of these indictments seemed unprecedented in professional leagues, there is a long history of sports betting scandals in the United States — and around the world. Some of these date to the earliest days of organized sports, and these types of scandals remain commonplace.

NBA Mafia indictments

In October 2025, the NBA was rocked by one of the largest betting scandals in the history of sports: Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and former NBA player Damon Jones were “among 34 people indicted in connection with two separate federal gambling investigations,” said CNN. The arrests came following a multi-year investigation that spanned 11 states and involved numerous Mafia members, including “members of the notorious Bonanno, Genovese, Gambino and Lucchese crime families.”

The members of these families allegedly “fixed illegal poker games as part of a highly sophisticated and lucrative fraud scheme to cheat victims out of millions of dollars and conspired with others to perpetrate their frauds,” said U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella Jr. in a press release. The NBA players involved would “lure unsuspecting victims to high-stakes poker games, where they were then at the mercy of concealed technology” that “ensured the victims would lose big,” Nocella alleged.

The arrests “roiled the league, from players to front offices to agents,” said NBC News. There was additional anger because Jones was “accused of disclosing privileged information to bettors about the injury status of a player.” This is a “very serious situation,” said Indiana Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle during a press conference. A day before the indictments were announced, the team’s “general counsel came down and read us all the regulations on gambling and warned our coaching staff, our players, our support staff about all these different things.”

Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter

Los Angeles Dodgers slugger Shohei Ohtani is considered one of the greatest players in modern baseball, but his interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, was fired by the team in 2024 after an investigation “revealed he sent millions in wire transfers from Ohtani's account to an illegal bookmaker,” said ESPN. Mizuhara eventually “pleaded guilty to bank fraud and filing a false tax return,” admitting to filing nearly 19,000 illegal bets that involved stealing nearly $17 million from Ohtani. He is currently serving a 57-month prison sentence.

The bookmaker, Matt Bowyer, was “sentenced to just over a year in prison, a result that gave him an odd bit of freedom,” said NPR. When it came to Mizuhara’s bets, there “had to be zero handicapping on what he was picking, and the parlays were just long shots. I mean, you might as well just take 10 grand and light it on fire,” Bowyer said to NPR. Ohtani himself was never implicated in the scandal.

Phil Mickleson

Like Ohtani, Phil Mickelson is considered one of the greatest players ever in his respective sport, golf; he is one of only 17 players to win at least three of the four major golf tournaments. But a 2023 book alleged that Mickelson “bet more than $1 billion on football, basketball and baseball over the past three decades,” said ESPN. One of his bets even involved a “$400,000 wager on Team USA in the 2012 Ryder Cup in which he participated.”

The book, “Gambler: Secrets from a Life at Risk,” was written by famous sports gambler Billy Walters. Mickelson “made a staggering 7,065 wagers on football, basketball and baseball,” with losses totaling nearly $100 million, according to an excerpt from the book. In 2011 alone, Mickelson “made 3,154 bets — an average of nearly nine per day.”

Mickelson had previously admitted to struggles with sports gambling, writing on social media that he was “so distracted I wasn’t able to be present with the ones I love and caused a lot of harm.” But Mickelson also “denied the claims he tried to bet on the 2012 Ryder Cup,” said CNN.

Pete Rose

Pete Rose is indelibly linked to the Cincinnati Reds, helping make the Big Red Machine one of the best dynasties in baseball history. But unlike other superstar-caliber players, Rose isn’t found in the National Baseball Hall of Fame; in the early 1990s, he “came under scrutiny by the league for allegations over placing bets on baseball after several betting slips belonging to Rose were found in an Ohio restaurant,” said The Sporting News.

As the controversy grew, Rose remained adamant that he did not bet on baseball games. This came even as an independent report “ultimately found evidence to indicate Rose gambled on baseball while he was a manager of the Reds, including while he was a player-manager,” said The Sporting News. Rose was eventually declared permanently ineligible for the Hall of Fame.

Years later, Rose finally admitted to the gambling, revealing that he “bet on the Reds ‘every night’ while he was manager of the team,” said ESPN. Rose died in 2024 at the age of 83, and MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred removed him from the ineligible list for the Hall of Fame, reportedly at the insistence of President Donald Trump. Rose “will have an opportunity in two years to be inducted,” said PBS News.

Paul Hornung and Alex Karras

Two of the best football players of the early NFL, Paul Hornung and Alex Karras, were suspended for “betting on league games and associating with gamblers or ‘known hoodlums,’” said The New York Times in a 1963 article. Hornung, a star halfback for the Green Bay Packers, was accused of a “pattern of betting and transmission of specific information concerning NFL games for betting purposes,” while Karras, a star defensive tackle for the Detroit Lions, had allegedly “made at least six significant bets on league games since 1958.”

It was revealed that at least “five members of the Detroit Lions bet $50 apiece on the Green Bay Packers to win the NFL championship,” said Time, revealing a wider-scale scandal than previously thought. Both Hornung and Karras served one-year suspensions from football. Hornung “returned to help the Packers win NFL championships in 1965 and 66,” said CBS Sports; Karras was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2020.

Chicago Black Sox

There is perhaps no greater encapsulation of a sports scandal than this one. Given the scandal, involving the 1919 Chicago White Sox, occurred over a century ago, the exact details are unclear. But “one central and indisputable truth endures: Talented members of that White Sox club conspired with professional gamblers to rig the outcome of the 1919 World Series,” said the Society for American Baseball Research.

Eight players on the team, who were nicknamed the Black Sox by the media, were originally implicated in the scandal, most notably baseball legend Shoeless Joe Jackson. In court, prosecutors claimed that each of the players was “promised up to $20,000 to throw games and possibly the entire series,” said the Chicago History Museum.

A grand jury indicted the players on charges of conspiracy to defraud. But when the case went to trial, the jury “acquitted the players on all charges,” said the Chicago History Museum, and “no other charges were ever brought about for anyone else involved in the scandal.” The players were eventually banned from baseball and the Hall of Fame, but their eligibility was reinstated alongside Pete Rose’s.

‘College football may be the last remaining communal experience we have’

Daniel Diermeier at USA Today

College sports “undoubtedly unify a community, but they also do more: They reveal and forge character,” says Daniel Diermeier. And “excelling at sports or academics isn't an either/or choice” at schools like Vanderbilt. The university takes “pride in the fact that student-athletes live in the same residential colleges as their peers, where a roommate could be a concert pianist or a double major in economics and chemical engineering,” even as a “winning football program seemed beyond our reach.”

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‘How white-collar workers could fuel a new populist movement — on the left’

Noreena Hertz at Politico

Fear that “AI will decimate the job market is growing fast among the educated middle class,” says Noreena Hertz. It is also “threatening to impact who they will vote for.” We can “expect to see the threat of being replaced by AI increasingly become a factor propelling voters toward a new cadre of populist politicians.” But “this time it will be white-collar workers driving the charge, and many will turn not to the right but to the left.”

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‘Get cellphones out of schools’

The Boston Globe editorial board

The “prohibition of cellphones may be the most clear-cut school policy choice in the United States,” says The Boston Globe editorial board. It’s a “rare moment when data validates what many can already feel anecdotally.” With the “usual caveat that correlation is not causation, the trends are too stark to ignore,” and they “make a strong case for follow-through; schools with a cellphone ban on the books but no enforcement saw no difference in student attention.”

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‘The pending disaster of a Skydance-Warners merger’

Ben Schwartz at The Nation

The “Trump administration immediately signaled its enthusiasm for a Skydance-WBD deal,” and “it’s not hard to see why,” says Ben Schwartz. But one “entity’s controlling that many movies, in theaters and on TV, television programming, news media and sports gives instant leverage to Skydance to raise prices for consumers.” It “would also continue wreaking harm to the basic canons of newsgathering.” The “merger would bode ill for Warner Bros.’ mainstay products — film and television.”

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India’s first victory in cricket’s Women’s World Cup will have huge ramifications for global order of the sport.

Harmanpreet Kaur’s team beat South Africa by 52 runs in yesterday’s final, in front of a deafening 45,000-strong crowd in Navi Mumbai – ending Australia’s decade-long dominance in the sport. With this milestone win, India’s women cricketers have “turned long-cherished dreams into reality” and “etched their names in history”, said The Hindustan Times.

It’s a “a wake-up call” for the rest of the world, and a win that could “spell the end for women’s cricket as we know it”, said Sonia Twigg in The Telegraph. India has become the the first country other than Australia or England to win a Women’s World Cup since 2000, and, with greater funding and increased home support, “it is hard to believe” their women cricketers “will stop there”.

‘New levels of stardom’

As Kaur clung on to her match-winning catch, India’s women cricketers entered a “brave new world”, said P.K. Ajith Kumar in The Hindu. Star players like Smriti Mandhana, Deepti Sharma and Shafali Verma have become “household names” overnight, and been propelled to “new levels of stardom across India”.

For Verma, the final’s Player of the Match, the path to yesterday’s success has been marked by significant setbacks. That “rollercoaster ride” began in the “conservative northern state of Haryana”, where, as a girl, she cut her hair short so she could play in the boys’ team, said Agence France-Presse. Her fearless batting soon led to her international debut at the age of 15, and she became the youngest cricketer to play in a women’s T20 for India. But she had recently fallen out of favour with the selectors, and was only in Sunday's final because a teammate had injured her ankle. Her 87 runs (from 78 balls) included her first 50 in three years – and made her, at 21 years and 278 days, the youngest person ever to hit a half-century in a Women’s World Cup final.

India were “late to develop the women’s game”, said Twigg in The Telegraph, and the last time the Women’s World Cup was held in India, in 2013, it “made barely a ripple” on the country’s consciousness. The national team was put up in a “budget hotel”, and had to warm up against under-16 and under-19 boys’ teams. The publicised venue for the final – Mumbai’s historic Wankhede Stadium – was even changed at the last minute to accommodate the men’s domestic Ranji Trophy final.

Belief ‘that women deserved more’

India’s victory on Sunday owes much to star performances by Verma and by Sharma (named Player of the Tournament) but many also attribute the team’s success to major administrative and strategic overhauls behind the scenes.

India’s win was a “vindication” for policy changes that “dared to believe women deserved more”, said Amar Sunil Panicker in India Today. In October 2022, the Board of Control for Cricket in India unanimously passed a resolution for pay parity between men and women. Women’s cricket in India was once defined by the “exceptionalism” of a few individuals who “succeeded despite the system”. Now, “for perhaps the first time, success feels like the result of the system working for them”.

More money is entering the women’s game globally, too. The Australian women’s Big Bash League doubled their team salary cap in 2023 and, last week, the organisers of The Hundred competition in England and Wales announced a 100% increase in the women’s salary pot for the 2026 season – though these salaries are still significantly behind those offered to male players.

‘The age of de-skilling’

Kwame Anthony Appiah at The Atlantic

With AI “going the way of Google — moving from the miraculous to the taken-for-granted — the anxiety has shifted, too, from apocalypse to atrophy,” says Kwame Anthony Appiah. The “term for it is unlovely but not inapt: de-skilling.” The “real puzzle isn’t whether de-skilling exists — it plainly does — but rather what kind of thing it is.” De-skilling is a “catchall term for losses of very different kinds: some costly, some trivial, some oddly generative.”

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‘Australia is closing the money laundering loopholes the US keeps open’

Brett Erickson at The Hill

Australian “reforms will finally bring lawyers, accountants and real-estate agents under anti-money laundering supervision,” and the country is “closing the very loopholes the U.S. continues to defend,” says Brett Erickson. The U.S. is “going backward,” as “three pillars of America’s financial crime architecture were either suspended, delayed or gutted.” Australia’s “reforms show what accountability looks like: Regulate the gatekeepers, close the real-estate loopholes and make professional facilitators subject to the same anti-money laundering standards as banks.”

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‘Women hold the key to ending polio for good’

Tunji Funsho at Time

The “most powerful force in the campaign” against African polio is “women vaccinators who go door to door — mothers who know every household,” says Tunji Funsho. Even in “places where women face barriers to participation, the trust they build within communities remains essential to reaching every child.” These “women aren’t just speaking about polio, they’re encouraging childhood vaccinations more broadly, promoting antenatal care, nutrition, maternal health, and supporting HIV testing.” It was “never just about polio.”

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‘The NBA’s gambling scandal was utterly predictable — and other pro sports will be next’

Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times

Sports leagues “spent years shunning gambling as a threat to their public image of integrity before embracing the siren call of big-time sports betting,” says Michael Hiltzik. They’ve “created a new underclass of gambling addicts while largely failing to fulfill their advocates’ assurances that state-sponsored and regulated gambling would produce a new, risk-free revenue stream.” Keeping their “image for integrity intact in this world of greedy and needy players and voracious gamblers is only going to get harder.”

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You cannot watch a game on TV these days without being inundated with gambling promotions. The rise of legal app-driven sports betting is changing the culture of sports. But new FBI arrests of prominent NBA figures raise questions about whether this gambling threatens the integrity of the game.

Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and former Cleveland Cavaliers player and assistant coach Damon Jones were arrested last week as part of “wide-ranging investigations related to illegal sports betting and rigged poker games,” said ESPN. And the arrests have put a damper on the start of the league’s 2025-26 season. There's “nothing more important to the league and its fans than the integrity of the competition,” said Commissioner Adam Silver.

Some observers believe Silver is responsible. The commissioner “put the NBA in bed with sports betting,” said Gary Washburn at The Boston Globe. The arrests are the “league’s worst nightmare,” but they are also “what many observers expected” when Silver decided to partner with legalized sports betting outfits. The league earned lots of money as a result, but the decision “may taint his legacy.”

Is the genie out of the bottle?

It “wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call this the worst scandal in NBA history” if the charges prove true, said Keith Reed at MSNBC. Now this season will be played “under the shadow of a federal investigation” that will make it difficult for some fans not to “question the integrity of every game they watch.” The league “may never be able to wash away the stench of these allegations.”

The arrests are “not shocking,” said Ian O’Connor at The Athletic. Sports gambling is an “all-American drug” and online technology is the “needle that instantly injects it into the vein.” You can blame the Supreme Court for its 2018 decision to “effectively open the floodgates” to betting, “but all the major sports leagues eagerly hopped on that bus.” Now the genie is out of the bottle and there is “no chance of bringing it back.”

“The NBA asked for this embarrassment,” said Nancy Armour at USA Today. It was “only too happy” to partner with betting companies, believing it could reap the profits but also “inoculate itself from its seedy underbelly” by issuing warnings to players and fans. That embrace by the NBA and other professional sports leagues has “fostered an environment where there are no guardrails.” The league knew the dangers and decided it wanted the gambling industry’s money anyway. “There's no more damning indictment than that.”

More regulation?

More regulation will be needed to “reduce opportunities for game manipulation,” Silver said to ESPN. The league is “learning as we go and working with the betting companies,” the commissioner said.

Sports betting is “bad for sports” as well as for the millions of Americans who “gamble past the point of prudence and move directly to the point of pain,” said David French at The New York Times. The “sports gambling revolution” may require more than regulation. “It may even need termination.”

What happened

The Justice Department Thursday announced the arrest of more than 30 people, including Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, as part of a sweeping multiyear investigation into gambling and sports-rigging schemes involving NBA players and New York mafia organizations.

Who said what

“This is the insider-trading saga for the NBA,” FBI Director Kash Patel said at a news conference in Brooklyn. U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella called it “one of the most brazen sports corruption schemes since online sports betting became widely legalized in the United States.”

Prosecutors accused Rozier and five codefendants of “exploiting private information about players to win bets on NBA games,” The Associated Press said, while Billups and 30 others were charged with swindling $7 million from participants in “high-stakes card games tied to La Cosa Nostra organized crime families.” Billups and other sports celebrities were the “bait” in these “fixed underground poker games,” The Wall Street Journal said. They would allegedly get a cut of the winnings when the game organizers “stacked the decks by using cheating technology straight out of a James Bond movie,” including “a rigged shuffling machine,” hidden cameras, “an X-ray table that could read cards” face down and “special contact lenses that could read marked cards.”

The indictments are “potentially the biggest hit to the NBA’s reputation” since a referee was busted for betting on games in 2007, and they arrived in the league’s “crucial” opening week, The New York Times said. But while the FBI “trumpeted the arrests as a major blow against organized crime,” the “sums of money involved were relatively small, and the connection between the Mafia and the NBA was tenuous.” The alleged gains certainly “paled in comparison to the riches the athletes earned on the court,” the AP said.

What next?

Billups and Rozier, through their lawyers, denied the charges. The NBA put both men on leave and said it would continue cooperating with authorities. According to officials, the “investigation is continuing and could result in more charges against other players,” the Times said.

‘Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife’ by Francesca Wade

Francesca Wade’s latest book “can be read as a biographical detective story that fills in once-taboo blanks,” said Diane Cole in the Financial Times. Though Wade’s subject, Gertrude Stein, has not exactly been an inscrutable mystery, newly available archives have revealed more about why the modernist figurehead fled the U.S. for Europe in 1902, why she wrote the memoir that finally earned her a wide audience, and how her relationship with her lover, Alice B. Toklas, sustained her through much of her life. Beyond that, Wade’s work could serve as “a wish-fulfilling literary fairy tale for the always fame-hungry Stein”—because it details how Stein came to be recognized as a literary innovator posthumously and mounts its own précis for Stein’s brilliance.

Nearly 80 years after Stein’s death, “her celebrity is incontestable; her status as a genius less so,” said Christopher Benfey in The New York Times. “Critics barely out of swaddling clothes proclaim Stein unreadable,” but “she can’t be erased from literary history,” because of the influence she had on heirs ranging from Ernest Hemingway to poet John Ashbery. Wade devotes the “vivid” first half of her book to a straight account of Stein’s life, said Judith Thurman in The New Yorker. Born to a wealthy Jewish family in 1874, Stein was raised in Oakland and came within a semester of earning a medical degree at Johns Hopkins before she bolted, joining her brother Leo first in London, then Paris. The siblings began buying paintings by Picasso, Cézanne, and Matisse, building a collection that helped turn their large apartment into a hot spot for forward-looking artists and writers, who viewed Stein as an oracle. Meanwhile, she struggled to find a publisher for her avant-garde fiction, particularly The Making of Americans, a plotless 900-page work that was completed in 1911 but not published until 1925, after James Joyce’s Ulysses. Even compared with Joyce’s, Stein’s modernism was radical. “Her ambition was to deprogram and rewire a reader’s brain.”

In a welcome turn, the second half of Wade’s “breezily readable” book “complicates all that we’ve learned in part one,” said Jacquelyn Ardam in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Focusing on details that Toklas revealed after Stein’s death, it attributes Stein’s early career change in part to the wrenching effects of a lesbian love triangle and frames Stein’s cheekily titled 1933 memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, as a bid to repair the couple’s relationship. Meanwhile, although Wade’s positive view of Stein’s fiction won’t persuade all of its many detractors, said Ryan Ruby in Bookforum, the curious should give it a chance. “More than any other writer, Stein invented high modernism,” and Wade’s biography “makes a convincing case that her writing remains, if anything, underrated.”

‘Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How to Fix It’ by Jane Leavy

Jane Leavy knows baseball, and her ideas about how to fix the game she loves “stretch from the attractive to the absurd,” said Justin Driver in The Washington Post. In her “rollicking” new book, the former Post writer and author of three esteemed baseball biographies visits friends and experts throughout the sport to spitball potential reforms. Too few balls in play? Maybe there should be a 30-foot-tall plexiglass wall wrapping the outfield in every major league park to make homers rare. Too few pitchers throwing complete games or lasting more than a season without an arm injury? Let’s limit hurlers to one 95-mph pitch per at-bat and count every additional heater as a ball. In truth, you don’t have to love every idea here. “Leavy aims less to persuade than to provoke,” and her heart is clearly in the right place.

Baseball fans who think they know better than the sport’s pooh-bahs can often be insufferable, said Mark Leibovich in The Atlantic. “But not Jane Leavy, not ever.” She’s so fluent in the kind of banter true fans toss back and forth during a game that her prose “reads like she’s typing and shelling pistachios at the same time.” She has assembled a Hall of Fame lineup of like-minded kibitzers—Joe Torre, Dusty Baker, Bill “Spaceman” Lee—to help diagnose baseball’s current struggle to engage viewers as the game once did. And while she fairly blames teams’ increased reliance on data analytics for sapping individual games and full seasons of their old narrative power, her best ideas might be the ones that address severed cultural ties. To cultivate next-gen fans, for example, she’d let anyone under 10 into any game for free.

Leavy applauds baseball’s two-year-old pitch clock, which has dramatically improved the pace of play, said David M. Shribman in The Wall Street Journal. Even so, “she knows that baseball still isn’t quite right.” She’d like to see fewer playoff rounds. She’d like increased investment in the development of Black players. “Maybe baseball needs a shake-up the way the Soviet Union needed a shake-up.” And there’s at least one way to do it right: “Make Jane commissioner.”