By Dave Zirin - March 10, 2010

There are the dispossessions as thousands have been forced from their homes into makeshift shantytowns, to both make way for stadiums and make sure that tourists don't have to see any depressing scenes of poverty. The United Nations even issued a complaint on behalf of the 20,000 people removed from the Joe Slovo settlement in Cape Town, called an "eyesore" by World Cup organizers.

By Dave Zirin - February 25, 2010

This range of ugliness—from the catty to the racist to the fatal—is significant because it exposes the reality of what the Winter Olympics are all about. The International Olympic Committee—that sewing circle of monarchists, extortionists, and absolved fascists—likes to hide behind the pretense of nobility. It claims to care not for profit or personal gain.

By Dave Zirin - February 22, 2010

The IOC and the International Luge Federation (FIL) should right now be begging for forgiveness, demanding a thorough investigation, and already starting to make restitution to Kumaritashvili's family. They should count themselves as lucky that they won't be nabbed for involuntary manslaughter. Instead, they have chosen a path of ugly arrogance...Even for people who oversee winter sports, this is very cold-blooded.

By Tyler Shipley - February 21, 2010

I would like to believe that we do not need to abandon the games that we love in order to critique the way those same games are exploited for the purposes of the [Olympic] Games. I'm not prepared to blame the activities that I love for the fact that they are being used to promote a corporate, militaristic and colonial agenda.

By Dave Zirin - February 14, 2010

Nuance is the mortal enemy of essayist Christopher Hitchens. Whether it’s his rapturous support for Bush’s Iraq invasion or his best-selling dismissal...of religion, Hitchens will always eschew a surgical analysis for the rhetorical amputation. Beneath the Oxford education, he has become Thomas Friedman in an ascot, with all the subtlety of a blowtorch.

By Dave Zirin - Friday, December 18th 2009

It feels almost liberating to say the words "Tiger Woods" and "outrage" in the same sentence, without referencing any of the sleaze of the past month. This particular outrage involves the Associated Press and their naming of Woods as "athlete of the decade"...Even worse is their top four - which includes, in order, cyclist Lance Armstrong, tennis player Roger Federer and swimmer Michael Phelps. This list is so bizarre, so male and so near-Caucasian, it seems to have been conjured by Glenn Beck.

By DAVE ZIRIN - November 18, 2003

Here's a sentence I never thought I'd write: if you care about democracy and the rule of law, you need to care about women's ski jumping. This juxtaposition, straight out of a Hunter S. Thompson acid trip, relates to a court ruling in Canada that is both frightening in its scope and outrageous in its implications.

By Dave Zirin - October 10, 2009

National Football League owners could be on the verge of a catastrophic error in judgment. In a league that is 70 percent African-American, an unapologetic racist is in talks to buy a team...Rush Limbaugh, along with St. Louis Blues owner Dave Checketts, is close to buying the St. Louis Rams. In his last NFL intervention...[Limbaugh] lasted less than a month as an NFL commentator on ESPN after saying the Philadelphia Eagles' Donavon McNabb was overrated because the media wanted to see a black quarterback succeed.

By Dave Zirin and Sherry Wolf - September 15, 2009

From the notion that women are somehow weaker and slower than men, to the not-so-subtle racism of Western standards of appearance, and on to their profound ignorance about the fluidity of sex and gender, these institutions are threatening to catapult women in sports back into the Dark Ages. We can't let them.

By Dave Zirin and Sherry Wolf - August 23, 2009

World-class South African athlete Caster Semenya, age 18, won the 800 meters in the International Association of Athletics Federations World Championships on August 19. But her victory was all the more remarkable in that she was forced to run amid a controversy that reveals the twisted way international track and field views gender...The people with something to hide are the powers that be in track and field...As long as there have been womens' sports, the characterization of the best female athletes as "looking like men" or "mannish" has consistently been used to degrade them.

By Dave Zirin - Znet

There was a time when [former NBA star Charles] Barkley was a proud Republican and entertained the idea of running for governor of Alabama...[W]hen Sheriff Joe [Arpaio's] book came out in 1996, the blurbs on the back cover included praise from Rush Limbaugh, John McCain and, yes, Charles Barkley. But since those days, Barkley has undergone a transformation. He now says Republicans have "lost their minds." Last summer Barkley said, "What do the Republicans run on? Against gay marriage and for a war that makes no sense. A war that was based on faulty intelligence. That's all they ever talk about. That and immigration. Another discriminatory argument for political gain."

By DAVID YEARSLEY - February 6-8, 2009

A darkened stadium massed with tens of thousands of fanatics in precise formation, marching in place to patriotic music of the homeland. Powerful searchlights sending their columns up into the inifinity of the night sky in a display seen for miles around and in striking shots from an overhead Zeppelin to be used for propaganda. Nuremberg 1937 and the Nazi Party Congress?...No, it’s Tampa 2009 and the Superbowl halftime show.

By David Zirin - January 25, 2009

Welcome to 2009, when Israel's offensive on Gaza, ceasefire or no, is finding expression in the sports world. It's a development that should give supporters of Israel's actions in Gaza a great deal of pause.

By Rafe Mair - The Tyee.ca

There is a big plus for Autocrat Campbell and his toadies. All along the highway [to Whistler] there are new developments built by Liberal supporters. As Kevin Costner's character was told in Field of Dreams, "Build it and they will come"...This is all about "showcasing" (a dreadful word dreamt up by ad men) Vancouver and Whistler...I say, "dream on." Vancouver in February is not all that showcase-able and Whistler is already well enough known to wealthy offshore skiers.

By Dave Zirin and Daniel Denvir - October 14, 2008

Philadelphia - You cannot make this up. Sarah Palin, the best-known hockey mom in the United States, gets booed Saturday at the Philadelphia Flyers hockey game. And the game is played, of all places, at the Wachovia Center. It's all over YouTube: failing candidate, failed bank as corporate sponsor, the kind of anger that cannot be scripted...The Philly welcome was what New York Times hockey blogger Lynn Zinser described as "resounding (almost deafening) boos from the Flyers crowd."