UCLA men's basketball coach Mick Cronin had a lot of big feelings Tuesday night, during and after his team's 82-59 blowout loss to Michigan State.
As the Bruins trailed by 27 points with just under five minutes left in the game, Michigan State's Carson Cooper caught an outlet pass and rose up to dunk, only to be fouled by UCLA's Steven Jamerson II. It was a hard foul, and ruled a flagrant, but nothing beyond the pale. An enraged Cronin must have read it differently, because he immediately sent Jamerson to the locker room. (A lot of the coverage of this incident has emphasized that Cronin ejected his "own player," as if it were possible for a coach to eject an opposing player, but I digress.)
Since returning to figure skating, Alysa Liu has displayed an indifference toward earthly happenings that a bodhisattva would envy. That is not to say that she doesn't express joy upon completing a stellar performance. But she is never particularly moved by wins or losses, w...
Gather 'round, friends, for it is time to play my favorite newly invented game of the Winter Olympics. The game is called "Are The Fellas In Sync," and the way you play this game is by scrolling through Getty Images photos from Team Pursuit Speedskating and asking yourself a simple question: Are these three fellas (gender-neutral) before me truly, honestly, and existentially in sync? We'll start off with an easy round.
Round 1: Patrick Beckert, Fridtjof Petzold, and Felix Malyof Germany
By the end of a cross-country skiing team sprint competition, the athletes are on the brink of collapse. The best teams complete their six-mile sprint in about twenty minutes. Their legs burn, and their lungs are exhausted. With the finish line in sight, almost out of breath, you can imagine how strange it would feel to see suddenly in front of you what looks like a big beautiful wolf.
"I was like, 'Am I hallucinating?" Tena Hadzic, a 21-year-old Croatian skier told NPR. There on the course was a real, live, beautiful wolfdog. He appeared on the final stretch of the qualifying event Wednesday morning and raced along, pursuing the sliding track camera like a superstar before turning to follow a couple of athletes across the finish line. Look at him:
I woke to a flurry of notifications on my phone. Overnight in Cortino, Linsdey Vonn violently crashed in her Olympic downhill race and was airlifted from the mountain. My group chat, made up of college friends from a variety of athletic backgrounds, was filled with screensho...
Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about China Gardens, paper clips, Robert Duvall, itchy assholes, and more.
The 2026 baseball season is either a week old or still weeks away, depending upon whether you count its beginning from the first grainy and distant social media photos of pitchers stretching on back fields or the first games that count. Either way, the positional jockeying f...
There's all kinds of stuff happening in this here second week of the Olympics, from Norwegians Scandinavianly wandering into the forest, to various Olympians cozymaxxing, to this Italian short track speedskater guy I saw finish two races backwards, once on accident and once ...
Two conflicting thoughts from Canada’s Olympic semifinal win over Switzerland on Monday: There is no shame in Marie-Philip Poulin being the best player on your team; there is some shame in needing a one-legged 34-year-old in order to score a single goal.
Team Cana...
I’m sure I’m telling on myself by revealing this, but Western astrological readings are a staple of my social feeds. (To tell on myself further: Scorpio sun, Gemini rising, Cancer moon.) I don't necessarily believe in it, but I don’t not believe in it either, and when I’m se...
NBA All-Star weekend has come and gone, and though the game itself was surprisingly spirited, the most intriguing development of the weekend was the strange story of some leaked DMs from a pair of anonymous Twitter accounts that people connected to those accounts say belong ...
After a league phase in which only Arsenal and Bayern Munich looked truly excellent, the Champions League has arrived at the knockout playoff round. A quick refresher of what that means: In the new format, introduced last season, the top eight teams in the league-stage table...
Knitting is the perfect activity to calm the body and soothe the mind during a high-pressure event like the Winter Olympics. Once you internalize your stitch pattern, you can just zone out and focus on how the yarn feels between your fingers, and for those EMDR girlies among us, knitting also counts as bilateral stimulation.
Since diver Tom Daley went viral in 2021 for knitting between events at the Tokyo Olympics, he’s become something of a knitbassador for the craft, and perhaps also an inspiration for this year's Olympians. This year, several athletes are posting their WIPs (works-in-progress) to social media, and as Defector's resident fiber freak, I am going to take this opportunity to review their projects.
Doug Gottlieb’s a seasoned heel. He was a dependable ass on sports talk airwaves for years, then brought his ass act to the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay bench in 2024 when he got a coaching job—while still keeping his radio gig— and mentored his inaugural squad to a 4-2...
The various skeleton events wrapped up on Sunday, the Brits winning two of the three golds, Austria making away with the other, and the Germans sweeping the silvers and bronzes. However, fixating on the medal count obscures the most important contest of all: Who had the best helmet?
As the controversy involving Ukrainian slider Vladyslav Heraskevych suggests, skeleton helmets, like hockey goalie masks or Formula 1 helmets, are a part of the sport's aesthetic—and thus, political—culture. This is something to consider when you are choosing your sliding sport: Lugers may get to go feet-first, but they do not get painted helmets because, for whatever reason, they refuse to paint over the visors. What lugers gain in perceived safety, they lose in their ability to look sick as shit. Imagine foregoing the opportunity to look like this:
Weeks after his flirty correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein's close associate Ghislaine Maxwell was released for the world to see, Hollywood mogul, superagent, and Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Committee chairperson Casey Wasserman announced that he will sell his eponymous talent ...
The most intriguing storyline in pro wrestling this month is not a title chase or a bloody feud, but whether or not fans are going to keep chanting "Fuck ICE" at shows. I am more than happy to explain this to you. What's your first question?
To be honest, I think of pro wre...
Is this the year when the good times finally end for the Philadelphia Phillies? Probably not. They've got stars all over the damn place, and to judge from years of vitriol you have to assume that by jettisoning Nick Castellanos the Phillies have banked another 20 wins, easil...
Sunday was a rather dry sporting day, even if you include the "discovery" of Kevin Durant's supposed burner account. The combination of the NBA’s All-Star break and the Milan Cortina Olympics delivered a great deal of incident, but very little of consequence. There were no f...
Our Monday crossword? It’s good. This week's puzzle was constructed by Will Nediger and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Will is a crossword constructor from London, Ontario who uses the nom de plume Bewilderingly (an anagram of "by Will Nediger").
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.
As you may have heard, the twinned industries that produce art and criticism in this country are embattled. On every side, there is steady conglomeration, privatization, and the rapid uptake of labor-annihilating technology. In tandem, there has been a steady mainstreaming o...
In the late 1990s, Olympics officials were suddenly eager to exit the business of testing women’s DNA. After three decades of requiring all women athletes to sit for chromosome tests in order to compete, the International Olympic Committee, in a daze, seemed to realize it wa...
Imagine yourself in the beautiful Dolomites of Cortina d'Ampezzo. The air is thin and cold. The stars blaze in the night sky above you. And inside your body is the kind of fear that empties you, that vibrates between your ears, that makes your heart pump so fast you think it...
Dual moguls is new to the Olympics this year. It's head-to-head heats, with skiers facing moguls, gates, and jumps—and being judged, head-to-head, on each element for a combined score. In the men's medal rounds today, Japan's Ikuma Horishima (pictured above, sort of) had a disastrous run in his round-of-16 showdown, and somehow ended up facing the wrong way. That's an odd and very specific sort of adversity to overcome, but he did it.
Here he is soaring fully out of control on his final jump:
As a sport most people pay intense attention to for two weeks every four years and then not at all the rest of the time, curling can be slightly impenetrable to the casual viewer; its intricacies and shibboleths even more so. As the cheating brouhaha between Sweden and Canada enters Day 3, we thought it would be useful to answer some questions you might have over this icy scandal.
What happened?
On Feb. 13, Canada defeated Sweden 8-6 in a men's team round-robin match. The round-robin matches determine who gets into the medal rounds. Early in the game, Sweden accused Canada's curlers of "double-touching" their stones after they'd passed the hog line, and asked officials to keep an eye on the Canadians for further violations. In response, Canada petulantly asked officials to monitor the Swedes for illegal shots as well.
Before Ilia Malinin had his disastrous free skate to lose gold at the 2026 Winter Olympics, there was Yuma Kagiyama—who skated a near-perfect short program only to underperform in his free skate on three out of his four quadruple jumps. And before Kagiyama had his disastrous...
Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it.
Prior to last week, I had n...
On Thursday, the Philadelphia Phillies released outfielder Nick Castellanos after months of threatening to do so. All offseason, I have read reports that the Phillies wanted to get rid of Castellanos, either by trading him or cutting him, if they had to. The underlying tone ...
It would be hard to make up a more charming athlete story than that of Giannis Antetokounmpo. His life is a line connecting unlikely and poignant points: poverty as a son of Nigerian immigrants in Athens, lower-division Greek basketball as a malnourished teenager, speculati...
What is to be done about NBA tanking? Based on the pissy administrative response from the league to some recently and spectacularly egregious examples of Tank Mode, you might think it is the most pressing problem facing a league that has a few of those. Thankfully, the ...
