The Rio 2016 Summer Olympics wrapped up today. The final few medals handed out, the typical Closing Ceremonies chaos the great migration to the airport in the morning … Here are 10 topics about these Games, the future Games, and the people involved in it all.

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What will I stay up all night to watch on TV? Not much. Not the NFL. Not the NBA. Not even Major League Baseball. The World Cup? Maybe the Super Bowl. The Summer Olympics? As it turns out … absolutely … if the track meet is going on.

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Apparently, USA Track and Field doesn’t care that it cannot come up with sprint-relay teams who can get a baton around a track. Any time the U.S. has a quartet of sprinters — male or female — running in a major event, American fans who have been paying attention know they may soon need to […]

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I was critical of the U.S. women’s basketball team yesterday. It underwhelmed me in a semifinal victory over France. Then I saw the men play Spain tonight … And they were just as ragged as were the women … while playing significantly more competent opposition. Which means they are in a much more dangerous situation. […]

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I have seen more than a little women’s basketball. I covered WNBA games. I traveled to Arizona to sit down with Diana Taurasi of the Phoenix Mercury. I reported on women’s college basketball games and more than a few girls prep basketball games. I covered the U.S. women’s team in an Olympics or three. But […]

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We’re all Olympics critics, aren’t we? Well, many of us. And sometimes we feel like we’re just crabbing about something or other all the time and maybe we should do something about it. So, today, nothing but kind thoughts. Really. None of this is satire. This is just niceness for the sake of changing up […]

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Forty years ago today I walked into a newsroom for the first time as a full-time professional journalist. That was a very long time ago, and even longer in the context of print journalism’s modern era — where the only certainty has been change. Looking back, we can see at least three significant eras in […]

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The greatest upset at Rio 2016, so far? As we head into Day 12 of the Summer Games, Great Britain is second in the medals table — at least, the table ordered by gold-medals-won — and ahead of China. There it is: United States, 26 gold medals; Great Britain, second with 16 gold medals; China […]

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I was in the stadium when Usain Bolt of Jamaica won his first Olympic gold medal — at the Bird’s Nest in Beijing 2008. He is up to seven Olympic golds now, including three successive 100-meter triumphs, and I’m getting tired of him and the formulaic post-race routine he has been inflicting on us for […]

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Back in December, as long-shots Leicester City led the English Premier League, most of world football figured they would fade badly. Those swollen ranks included Gary Lineker, the host of the BBC review show Match of the Day. Lineker was so sure Leicester would fall back into the pack that he vowed to host MotD […]

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