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6 top sports podcasts you should know, as the 2024 Olympics end
- Missing the Paris 2024 Olympics already? Sit back and take solace in our collection of sports-related shows that’ll entertain everyone from mega marathoners to armchair umpires
- CBC’s Tested examines the gender testing of elite female runners – a hot-button issue following the furore surrounding Algerian boxer Imane Khelif
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If, like me, you are already mourning the impending close of the Olympic Games, I’ve got you. Podcast-wise, anyway. It’s funny that I have become such a sports fan, and that, many, many decades after leaving behind compulsory PE classes, I still love playing and watching some kind of sport several times a week. My parents did not see the point of sport and, in fact, they saw it as an activity for the less intelligent. So I didn’t really play any sport at all until my 30s, when I joined the lowest division of the Hong Kong netball league as a newbie and started to understand the power of belonging to a sports team.
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Well, as every parent knows, the pendulum swings. We threw every kind of ball at our daughters before they could stand and when they did, we threw all the sports classes at them, too. It wasn’t just discipline and coordination I wanted to foster but joy in their bodies and an understanding of team dynamics. What I didn’t expect, and am delighted by now as they approach adulthood, is how much I would enjoy watching sports with them. The discussions that arise from watching elite athletes perform always blow into major forums on psychology, culture and geopolitics, augmenting the physical drama playing out in front of us.
One thing we agree on is that a well-oiled team in “flow” might be the closest thing there is to magic. Otherwise known as “the zone”, it happens in individual sports, too: when you can’t put a foot wrong, the ball looks giant, all your reactions are exactly right and you lose all sense of time. There’s nothing like it, even more so when you see spontaneous moves between team players that look like telepathy must have been involved.
This week’s recommendations all touch on the zone as part of the heights of elite sport and like the Olympics, will also appeal to non-sports fans.
1. Good Sport
Good Sport looks at the world through the lens of sport with elite-level storytelling, as might be expected from this TED-backed production hosted by Ultimate Frisbee pro and veteran podcaster Jody Avirgan, who was also responsible for ESPN’s brilliant collection of sports documentaries 30 for 30 (see this week’s Hall of Fame). Stories about the heights of professional sport sit among much more relatable episodes on finding “the zone” or dealing with repeated losses and, most painful of all, how to accept that your best days are behind you. The first episode maps the extraordinary rise of sport “hotbeds”, innocuous small towns that pump out a certain kind of sports star, and how keeping the window of opportunity open for longer outweighs initial talent when it comes to cultivating world-class athletes.
2. Quite a Good Sport
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