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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 […]

Twenty years later, how Michael, Magic and the NBA’s best players sought to regain U.S. dominance in Olympic basketball: Nathaniel Butler (official NBA photographer): We were sitting on the baseline. Magic is backing a guy down, and the guy on defense is yelling at his bench, “Now! Now!” And on the bench, one guy’s pulling […]

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 […]

Twenty years ago, The Simpsons gave the Fox Network its first-ever prime-time ratings victory with an all-star baseball episode that beat out The Cosby Show and the Winter Olympics: “Aside from the logistics of recording nine separate guest roles, plot lines had to be rewritten on the fly. Jose Canseco’s scene originally called for him […]

Quanitta Underwood suffered years of sexual abuse by her father. She’s now an Olympic contender in boxing, and a public voice for other survivors: “Underwood, of course, covets a gold medal and the fame that would come with it. ‘I want to take that ride,’ she says. ‘I want to be a household name.’ “But […]

The search for Clifton (Pop) Herring, Jordan’s high school coach, and the truth about the NBA legend’s early days: “And so, over the next four years, as Michael Jordan became an Olympic gold medalist, a rookie NBA All-Star and the scorer of 37 points per game, Pop Herring went from suspended to unemployed to unemployable. […]

In the course of a few hapless days, Deley repeatedly stumbled over the names of star athletes (“the Honourable Leo Usain Bolt”) and his trackside commentators. He called Oscar Pistorius, the South African double-amputee “the fastest man on no legs.” He invented events (“the men’s 100-metre hurdles”), forgot commercial breaks, missed links, paused for long […]

Frank Shorter is the father of the modern running boom. An enduringly popular speaker, he spins a captivating narrative about winning the 1972 Olympic Marathon. The story he hasn’t told is the dark truth about his own father. “I explained how I tried to anticipate my father’s moods and movements, and about the enormous daily […]

But I already knew the numbers, more or less, before I ever got to China. The reality behind the numbers was something else. It began to register with me at the Great Wall, at Badaling. I arrived there in August 2004, my first time on the Chinese mainland. It was almost exactly four years—1,458 days, […]

Most people have already forgotten how dark and unsignposted the Internet once was. A user in 1996, when the Web comprised hundreds of thousands of “sites” with millions of “pages,” did not expect to be able to search for “Olympics” and automatically find the official site of the Atlanta games. That was too hard a […]