“Just as the pandemic inspired political and social change the world over, so, during the course of 2020, did many of the bigger Olympic sports experience a quiet remaking.”

As the opening ceremonies of the 2018 winter olympics began in Pyeongchang, a cyberattack targeted the games’ digital infrastructure, jeopardizing WIFI connections, event tickets, and even the official Olympics app, packed full of information on event schedules, maps, and hotel reservations. Andy Greenberg examines who was behind the attack and why they wanted to publicly embarrass South Korea.

A look back at Bob Costas’ eye infection during the 2014 Olympics, which led to Meredith Vieira becoming the first woman to host prime-time Olympics coverage solo and countless memes.

Tracing the modern Olympics back to their origin in rural England, where there was a very different set of competitive events:

“Ah, but in Much Wenlock, the Olympic spirit thrived, year after year—as it does to this day. Penny Brookes had first scheduled the games on October 22, 1850, in an effort ‘to promote the moral, physical and intellectual improvement of the inhabitants’ of Wenlock. However, notwithstanding this high-minded purpose, and unlike the sanctimonious claptrap that suffocates the Games today, Penny Brookes also knew how to put a smile on the Olympic face. His annual Much Wenlock games had the breezy ambience of a medieval county fair. The parade to the ‘Olympian Fields’ began, appropriately, at the two taverns in town, accompanied by heralds and bands, with children singing, gaily tossing flower petals. The winners were crowned with laurel wreaths, laid on by the begowned fairest of Much Wenlock’s fair maids. Besides the classic Greek fare, the competitions themselves tended to the eclectic. One year there was a blindfolded wheelbarrow race, another offered ‘an old woman’s race for a pound of tea’ and on yet another occasion there was a pig chase, with the intrepid swine squealing past the town’s limestone cottages until cornered ‘in the cellar of Mr. Blakeway’s house.'”

An investigation of sports’ biggest conspiracy theories, starting with the 1985 NBA draft:

“I believe in the fix. I believe in the hidden hand, that sports have a secret, redacted history. I believe that Game 6 of the 2002 NBA Western Conference Finals was a sham, that Spygate was a cover-up of a cover-up, that Super Bowl III was preordained, that Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s heartwarming 2001 victory at Daytona was, in fact, too good to be true, that Michael Jordan’s first baseball-playing retirement was anything but, that powerful forces don’t want me to write this because powerful forces don’t want you to read this. I believe that black is white, white is black, the 1990 World Cup draw was rigged[13] and Sophia Loren was definitely in on the con. Most of all, I believe that on June 18, 1985, inside the Starlight Room of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City, in front of Pat O’Brien and nearly 150 reporters and umpteen popping flashbulbs and an entire world utterly oblivious to the conspiracy about to take place before them in plain sight, David Joel Stern did not act alone.

“Of course, I might be crazy.”

Neal Wu’s last chance for international glory, and maybe America’s, too, begins with a sound like a hippo crunching through a field of dry leaves—the sound of 315 computer prodigies at 315 workstations ripping into 315 gray envelopes in unison. “You have five hours,” a voice booms across the packed gymnasium. “Good luck.”