When Simone Biles posted a congratulatory message to the US women’s gymnastics team following their big win on July 30, her caption might have seemed a little surprising to folks not in the know. The text? “[L]ack of talent, lazy, olympic champions,” followed by a string of emojis. To be clear: After the day Team […]
After Suni Lee won gold in the women’s gymnastics individual all-around final at the Tokyo Olympics, the Paris Games felt like a natural next step—a shoo-in, even—until a sudden bout of painful and distressing symptoms turned her world upside-down (and not in the adrenaline-fueled, mat-flip kind of way). Last year, the now 21-year-old gymnast was […]
Watching Olivia Apps bulldoze her way past opponents is a sight to behold. The 25-year-old rugby sevens player’s unrelenting speed and strength have set the tone for a momentous Olympic effort by the Canadian team, which captured the silver medal on Tuesday in the 2024 Paris Games. Apps, the team captain, also happens to have […]
Gymnastics—like diving and figure skating—is an Olympic sport where artistry and aesthetics are intertwined with athleticism. As Simone Biles and her teammates catapult and contort their bodies this month in Paris, they’ll be doing so in leotards embellished with roughly 10,000 diamond-shaped Swarovski crystals. (That’s nearly 2,000 more than Team USA wore back in Tokyo […]
Some elite athletes make history by winning medals or breaking records. Gymnasts can etch their names in the books by doing that, sure, but they also have another option: Create a new skill, land it successfully, and it just might officially carry your name…forever. Over the years, several daring gymnasts have permanently attached their names […]
By all accounts, the trick that won 14-year-old Coco Yoshizawa of Japan an Olympic gold medal in street skateboarding was an impressive one. It’s called the big spin flip frontside boardslide, and in it the skateboard rotates and flips both vertically and horizontally before the skater lands on a rail and then slides down backwards. […]
As Serena Williams volleyed back and forth with Ajla Tomljanovic during her final tennis match in September 2022, 4.6 million viewers (an ESPN record for the sport) tuned in. And a bunch of them were watching from the Sports Bra in Portland, Oregon, which grew so silent you could hear a potato chip drop to […]
At the 2015 world championships in Kazan, Russia, Katie Ledecky started feeling a little weird after dinner one night—hot and lightheaded. When she returned to training, she’d have a day or two of feeling okay, then a couple with zero energy. Sometimes, as she detailed in her new memoir Just Add Water: My Swimming Life, […]
The women’s gymnastics qualifications on Sunday morning set the stage for some history-in-the-making for later in the week: After crushing their events on July 28, Simone Biles and Suni Lee are both slated to compete in the all-around finals on August 1. Biles previously won the all-around title in 2016 in Rio, while Lee claimed […]
Zhiying Zeng was born in 1966 to a mom who coached table tennis. She picked up a paddle as soon as she could hold it, joined a junior elite team at a military sports school in Beijing at age 11, and turned pro at age 12. And like most other young athletes, she had aspirations […]