Daniil Medvedev experienced a series of unusual events this weekend. He had never won the same title twice, a distinguishing oddity of his career, but he finally did so Saturday when he recaptured the ATP 500 title in Dubai, which he last won in 2023, for his 23rd title over...
When Paul Seixas rode away from Matteo Jorgenson 40 kilometers from the finish of this past weekend's Faun-Ardeche Classic, he was taking a casual drink. The 19-year-old Frenchman had just shattered a small group wending up the Col de Saint Romain de Lerps, forcing a pace on...
One of the best things about becoming older (as opposed to simply aging, which universally sucks) is the moment when the knowledge that there is nothing new under the sun becomes something more like instinct. Most notably, this comes through the realization that everything t...
Of all the members of the English Premier League's so-called "Big Six" clubs, Tottenham Hotspur's inclusion has always been the most generous. Liverpool, Arsenal, and Manchester United are clearly deserving of their spots as historical powerhouses that can weather runs of ba...
The odds of filling out a perfect NCAA bracket are one in nine quintillion, two hundred twenty-three quadrillion, three-hundred-seventy-two trillion, thirty-six billion, eight-hundred-fifty-four million, seven-hundred-seventy-five thousand, eight hundred and eight. This is a...
TRENTON, N.J. — The Trenton Transit Center isn't pretty, or even notable, and it won't win any architectural awards, but it gets the job done if you're coming down to see Tomohiro Ishii wrestling in the Garden State's capital. Ishii alone is worth any length of train journey...
We’re kind of the big puzzle on campus. This week's crossword was constructed by Bill Ouska, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Billy is a corporate attorney based in Dallas who’s thrilled to have the opportunity to combine his love of sports with his love of crosswords.
Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE.
The United States and Israel started a war with Iran over the weekend, dropping bombs in multiple cities across that country. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in the bombing. So too, according to reports, were more than 100 children at a school in the...
Most "women’s sports novels" are really novels about girls. In them, girlhood is something mourned before it's over. Like the games themselves, the books are set to ticking clocks. When the high school field hockey players of Quan Barry's We Ride Upon Sticks grill their...
Israel and the United States launched a joint attack on Iran Saturday morning, bombing several cities in the country. As a result, Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed, his death confirmed by state media Sunday. Also included in the casualties were reportedl...
At Defector, we like weird sports eaters. The demands of elite performance encourage monomania, which is expressed by your various sports freaks as often inviolable, occasionally bizarre food restrictions. Even sports commentators and hot-takers get in on it: Skip Bayless fa...
Lu Dort is often finding new ways to do some bullshit just on the edge of the accepted rules of basketball. The difference this weekend was that the Oklahoma City Thunder wing went too far and got caught for it, even though that didn't stop his team from playing the victim.
In the fourth quarter of Friday's game, Dort stuck out his leg to trip Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic after the inbound pass. An official called a foul on the play, but while Dort acted like he was wrongly accused, an incensed Jokic popped up and got in his face. Dort's teammate Jaylin Williams stepped in, and he and a still-fuming Jokic grappled as players and coaches attempted to separate them. Isaiah Joe was there, too.
Kristaps Porzingis is out indefinitely due to illness, according to Golden State's injury report. What illness? That question is the subject of some controversy.
Porzingis has been broadly unwell since the spring of 2025, when he was with the Boston Celtics and found himsel...
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg sat in a Los Angeles courtroom and testified for five hours that he and his company, Meta, are not culpable in claims that they have deliberately made the platform addictive and harmful for young users.
The testimony was part of a bellwether...
A couple months ago, some friends and I made plans to see the San Antonio Spurs when they were in town to play the Brooklyn Nets. Obviously, we weren't going for the opportunity to see the Nets' youths develop around the dubious veteran presence of Michael Porter Jr.; the dr...
In early December, Paramount seemed to have lost to Netflix in a bidding war to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), but 10 weeks and roughly $20 billion later, the conglomerate reportedly will get its way after all. On Thursday, as The Wrap reports, Netflix announced it w...
I’m currently reading The Power Broker. Are you impressed? You should be. I am big-boy writer who reads big-boy books. A thousand-page investigation into the life of a powerful bureaucrat is nothing to me. I’m gonna finish The Power Broker, and then you will regard me as one...
The NFL owners, like everyone else, show who they actually are and what they really care about through what they choose to get upset about. And those owners (and yes, this is going where you think it's going) fought hard to keep their top-secret training facility behaviors a...
On Thursday night, in the season finale of The Traitors, two former Love Island contestants locked eyes across the round table. In the face of Maura Higgins you could see a dangerous hope growing—as if, for the first time, she could imagine what winning would be like. Here s...
If you walked down Colorado Boulevard in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles at some point in the past three years, you might have noticed a modest, pueblo-style beige building with “PHOTO” painted above its door. And if you had decided to go in, there was a decent ch...
When I first heard rumblings that the world had assembled a conclave to elect a new celebrity zoo animal, I felt preemptively wary, partly due to world events and partly because we still don't know the long-term psychological consequences of fame for child stars like Moo Den...
You know the thing that the truly great rim protectors do, in basketball, where they learn they can alter shots by aura alone? The area under the basket becomes a Sarlacc pit, the remote and terrifying domain of a very large, patient, and hungry creature. The great ones are ...
The biggest business story related to the NBA has nothing to do with tanking, Kawhi Leonard, nor the NBA's new national broadcast partners. We are only a little more than a year away from the launch of NBA Europe, a new basketball league across the Atlantic that proposes to ...
Five of the eight Champions League playoff ties went roughly as expected. Paris Saint-Germain had a bit more trouble separating itself from its Ligue 1 rival Monaco than predicted, but rode a 3-2 first leg win to a 5-4 aggregate victory. Newcastle demolished Qarabag, 9-3. At...
Take one look at the NBA standings lately and you’ll discover that teams like the Jazz, Kings, Wizards, and Nets are slacking off even more than they have in previous seasons. It’s made for some pretty dire television. Last week, NBA commissioner and Tim Burton character Ada...
The Tom Thibodeau–era Chicago Bulls were a special team, a rockpile collection of asskickers dedicated to playing a rapidly obsolescing style that nonetheless proved extremely effective. Thibs surrounded a young Derrick Rose with a bunch of incredible defenders, most notably...
The Athletic, your new home for the Washington Post's former sports section, delivered 2,600 words on Connecticut head coach Dan Hurley Wednesday morning, largely on the theme of Mellowing Madman. Hurley's history as the man who smuggles wasp hives in his gym shorts and then...
Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently.
Having a severe chronic illness has made me intimately familiar with the American healthcare system and its hospitals. Hospitals here are terrifying and full of excruciati...
Anyone with a shred of common sense could immediately tell that Kash Patel's trip to the Winter Olympics was a Batkid-style situation. Still, it is satisfying to have what was obvious to everyone confirmed by the FBI's own internal scheduling documents.
The New York Times ...
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