The End of Sport Podcast

In The End of Sport, academics Derek Silva, Johanna Mellis, and Nathan Kalman-Lamb provide critical commentary, analysis, and interviews on sport and society. The End of Sport Podcast raises questions about the role of sport in our daily lives and whether or not we can reimagine sport and sporting cultures in the future.

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Episodes

Episode 124: The Swiftie Bowl

Wednesday Feb 07, 2024

Wednesday Feb 07, 2024

Frankie de la Cretaz is a writer focused on sports, gender, and queerness. They are the co-author of Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the NFL from Boldtype Books. Frankie's work appears everywhere, including The Nation, Sports Illustrated, The Daily Beast, Teen Vogue, and on and on. 
 
Frankie joins Nathan to deconstruct the epic popular culture collision between Taylor Swift, perhaps the most famous person in the world, and the NFL at the Super Bowl.
 
Check out some of Frankie's recent work on Taylor Swift, including a discussion of the toxic framing of the Tayvis relationship, the question of representing Taylor Swift as queer, and the PR mastermind behind the superstar.

Episode 123: Palestine Solidarity

Wednesday Jan 31, 2024

Wednesday Jan 31, 2024

In this episode, our return from an extended absence, we have the great privilege of sharing a conversation hosted by the University of Connecticut entitled "Complicity and Solidarity: Sport, Higher Education, and Palestine/Israel" moderated by Dr. Chen Chen (UConn) andDr. Roc Rochon (UConn) and featuring speakers Dr. Anima Adjepong (University of Cincinnati), Dr. Munene Mwaniki (Western Carolina University), Dr. Aarti Ratna (Northumbria University), Dr. Daniel Sailofsky (University of Toronto), Dr. Nicola De Martini Ugolotti (Bournemouth University).Before the panel, Nathan, Derek, and Johanna speak openly about their positions on the genocidal violence being wrought against Gaza by the Israeli state with the full support of Canada, the United States, and so many other countries.

Monday Dec 04, 2023

It's September 24th, 1988 -- a warm, sunny and dry day in the Olympic Stadium in Seoul, South Korea. It also happened to be the final of the men’s 100 metre sprint to decide the Olympic champion and world’s fastest man. The top contenders, Carl Lewis from the United States, and a Canadian sprinter named Ben Johnson, lined up in lanes 3 and 6 respectively in one of the most highly anticipated races of the year. The gun goes off -- and almost immediately Johnson had a step on every other runner, including the defending Olympic gold medalist from the US. By 50 meters it was clear that nobody could keep up with the Canadian runner. As Johnson approached the finish line, he iconically raised his hands in victory, pointing his right index finger to the sky and then to stands toward thousands of screaming fans. With a time of 9.79 seconds, Ben Johnson had completely smashed his own World Record and was now an Olympic champion.
Three days later, Johnson was stripped of his gold medal and world record by the International Olympic Committee after he tested positive for the banned performance-enhancing substance stan-o-zolol.
 
Why am I telling you about an Olympic final that happened over 35 years ago? Well, the events that would transpire after the IOC announced that it would strip Johnson of his gold medal and world record, would send shockwaves through the Canadian sport system – the reverberations of which would be felt in our cultural, political, and social systems as well as our collective memories. Johnson’s disqualification spurred something of what sociologists might call a moral panic regarding the unethical grip that had apparently taken hold of Canadian sport – a deviation from the stereotypical perception of Canada as a wholesome, equitable, and polite geopolitical nation. And perhaps most relevant for this talk today, I argue that this was a fundamental precursor to the current moment that we find ourselves in Canadian sport – a moment, as I hope to convince you, that is riddled with harm and abuse.
In this episode, Derek walks us through why Canada needs a judicial inquiry into harm and abuse in sport and, more importantly, why that's nowhere near enough to give justice to survivors.
If we want to do justice for survivors of harm and abuse in Canadian sport, we need a judicial inquiry. But that’s nowhere near enough. We also need to act, and we must act now, to ensure there are effective mechanisms for oversight, accountability, and, perhaps most importantly, reparation for the harms already done and the harms being done literally right now across the country. Anything less is a metaphor for action – it’s an obfuscation of the long-history of harm and abuse that we know about in this space, and that we know is only a small snapshot of the true reality of abuse in Canadian sport – and it’s a surface level attempt reinforce and replicate a system of sport that inevitably produces and endorses abusive spaces within a project of winning-at-any-cost. For if we continue to allow and obfuscate violent abuse in sport, and sport is supposedly integral to our national identity, one concludes that violent abuse is indeed part of Canada. I don’t want sport to be about violent abuse, and surely you don’t want Canada to be about violent abuse. So let’s do something about it, and let’s do something now.
Video of a version of this talk at McGill University can be found here. 
Please read Kim Shore's brilliant piece on the crisis of abuse in Canadian sport here. Our podcast episode with Kim can be found here. 
Ciara McCormack's piece "A Horrific Canadian Soccer Story" can be found here. The End of Sport episode with Ciara can be found here.
Mac Ross' piece on the importance of external investigations into Canadian sport can be found here. Our interview with Mac and Jennifer Fraser can be found here. 

Friday Aug 25, 2023

In this episode, all three hosts sit down to discuss how transphobic attempts to prohibit trans women from sports participation fit into a larger fascist project unfolding in North America today. We delve into Johanna's recent article for The Guardian on the question of 'allyship' (and, indeed, the politics of how we speak about allyship), why Trump and others made a spectacle out of the early loss of the USWNT, and why a seemingly comparatively insignificant issue (sports) has become so central to the political discourse today.
 
You can find Johanna's article here.
 
You can find Nathan's meditations on the subject from this summer here, here, and here.

Wednesday Aug 16, 2023

All three hosts get together to discuss an apocalyptic summer in college sport. Our conversation begins with an in-depth analysis of Northwestern and the hazing/abuse culture that permeates college football and then ranges to a discussion of conference realignment and gambling. This is a conversation both for those who have been following closely and anyone who has not been paying close attention and wants to be brought back up to speed.
You can learn more about Northwestern hazing via the coverage of The Daily Northwestern here and here.
 
You can find the FOS story on Minnesota's toxic culture under P.J. Fleck here.
 
You can find Nathan and Derek's story about Northwestern and the broader culture of abuse in college football here.
 
Follow the show on Bluesky at @endofsportpod.bsky.social.

Thursday Aug 10, 2023

In this short episode, Nathan shares his Canadian Sociological Association conference presentation on the book manuscript for The End of College Football: Exploitation and Harm in the Academy and on the Gridiron, co-authored with Derek. The manuscript has just been submitted (yay!) to the University of North Carolina Press for peer review (and only 100% longer than promised!).
This seventeen-minute presentation distils the core arguments of the book and shares some of the player testimony upon which it is based for the first time. Also, Nathan introduces the talk by complaining about conferences.

Thursday Aug 03, 2023

On this episode, @kristi_allain joins @Derekcrim and @nkalamb to comprehensively explore what's wrong with the culture of Canada's favourite game. Kristi Allain is Associate Professor of Sociology and Canada Research Chair in Physical Culture and Social Life at St. Thomas University. Her work examines physical culture and its complex relationships with national identities, perhaps no more obvious in her work on how men’s hockey produces, contests, and supports dominant expressions of Canadian National identity.

Thursday Jul 27, 2023

In this episode, Johanna is joined by repeat guest and close friend of the show, interdisciplinary scholar extraordinaire Kelly Wright. We discuss and compare the media's reactions to Angel Reese during 2023's March Madness to a white German commentator's remark about the Moroccan World Cup team's gesture last summer. After recapping for us what happened with and against Reese, Kelly shares her agreement with and expands upon Letisha Brown's excellent First and Pen analysis: how the incident exemplified the dehumanization of Black people under our white supremacy, as well as how Reese's response could not have addressed sports' anti-Blackness and misogynoir in a better way. We also refer back to Kelly's insights from her prior episode about the white gaze of sports scouts and extend it to the mainstream media landscape that spewed racism and misogynoir against Reese. Kelly emphasizes how speech is an act, and not just words; hand gestures and body movements (and responses to them) are actions too, and we must analyze them as such regarding systemic violence and resistance to it. We pivot to the racism at the 2022 Men's World Cup: when a white German commentator chose to describe the Moroccan player's hand gesture as an "Islamic State gesture " (folks, he held up his index finger to suggest #1, like athletes do worldwide). We discuss sporting nationalism and whiteness in relation to this incident. Considering the German state's insistence that criticism of Israel is antisemitic, we briefly talk about how this fits into Germany's nationalist use of Holocaust commemoration for anti-Arab racism. 

Wednesday Jul 19, 2023

Zack Furness is Associate Professor of Communications at Penn State Greater Allegheny. He is the author of One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility (Temple University Press, 2010), editor of Punkademics (Minor Compositions, 2012), and co-editor of The NFL: Critical and Cultural Perspectives (Temple University Press, 2014). Importantly, he is also author of the excellent journal article “Reframing Concussions, Masculinity, and NFL Mythology in League of Denial” in Popular Communications.
In this conversation, we explore how Zack's biography as the child of former Pittsburgh Steeler Steve Furness, a member of the 1970's Steel Curtain, has come to shape him as a scholar and as a person more broadly. The conversation traces questions of masculinity, health and harm in football, representation and ideology, and the concussion industrial complex.
You can follow Zack on Twitter at @riseandgrindcor and Bluesky at @punkademic.bsky.social.

Thursday Jul 06, 2023

Chen Chen is Assistant Professor of Sport Management in the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education. He is the absurdly published author of seemingly countless high quality academic journal articles that interrogate the themes of capitalism, racism, imperialism, and settler colonialism both in the discipline of sport management and in high-performance sport.
In this second instalment of our two-part series with Chen Chen on sport management, we delve into the question of how the discipline is complicit in the reproduction of racism, colonialism, and the exploitation of international students in the context of its fundamental commitments to a capitalist project.
You can follow Chen Chen on Twitter @cchenDr

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