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If every instinct the U.S. women's hockey team had at the 2022 Olympics was wrong, then the opposite would have to be right. On Tuesday, in their round-robin meeting at the Olympics, the Americans celebrated a 5-0 win over Canada, the sort of thorough beatdown atypical of their meetings in international play. The rivalry is usually characterized by nervy overtime periods and tense shootouts, so no surprise that this was the largest margin of victory in any U.S.-Canada game at the Olympics. It was also the first time the Canadian women had been shut out in an Olympic game. Chalk some of it up to the absence of team captain Marie-Philip Poulin—she’s out with a lower-body injury and poised to return later in the tournament—but a more honest accounting of this game would say the result has been long in the making. After being swept in their exhibition Rivalry Series and dropping both meetings at last year’s world championships in Czechia, Canada has now lost seventh consecutive games to Team USA. (And Poulin did play in the other ones.) Yesterday only reaffirmed what was clear in the six games prior: This American team and its young superstars are too fast and too skilled for the veteran-heavy Team Canada to handle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTec6Ysa1ok

It is so easy to yield to temptation. My head might know a path leads only to shame and regret, but my heart urges me to take one step, and then another. It started on Tuesday, with news that Norwegian biathlete Sturla Holm Lægreid chose, for some reason, to use the occasion of his bronze medal–winning performance in the men’s 20km to confess on live television that he cheated on his girlfriend and desperately wants her back. Well, I thought, surely there is no harm in devoting some of my mental resources to learning more about this. Twenty-four hours have now passed and I can think of nothing else. At some point in the dead of night I accidentally learned how to read Norwegian. These vowel combinations look totally normal to me. The immediate details were compelling and strange. Lægreid told Norwegian broadcaster NRK, "There is something I want to share with someone who may not be watching today. Half a year ago, I met the love of my life. The world’s most beautiful and nicest person. Three months ago, I made the mistake of my life and cheated on her, and I told her about that a week ago. This has been the worst week of my life." Weeping, he went on to explain that "I had the gold medal in life, and I am sure there are many people who will see things differently, but I only have eyes for her. Sport has come second these last few days. Yes, I wish I could share this with her." Thanks to a helpful Defector commenter, I learned that this declaration was even more ill-timed than I imagined, given that the gold medalist, fellow Norwegian, Johan-Olav Botn, also dedicated his win to someone no longer with him—their teammate Sivert Guttorm Bakken who was found dead in his hotel room in December.

Televisually speaking, my one complaint about the Winter Olympics is that even with expert commentary, the skills on display in many events are not so obviously different from one another that I can tell them apart. I cannot tell any trick that anyone on skis or a snowboard does from any other trick that anyone else does, I have to take Johnny Weir's word for what is an axel vs. what is a salchow, and watching ski jumping is like looking at a painting. But when it comes to Johannes Klæbo, perhaps the best athlete at these Games, it is hilariously obvious that no other cross-country skier can touch him. For one, he's up there, while his competitors are back there, but more relevant to our purposes, he can pound out the pace on skis in a way that nobody else can. Look at this man go. https://youtu.be/bXDTrg52LIM?si=hpfoH4fDurHhMP8y&t=157

Huge breaking news in Detroit on Tuesday: The Tigers came to a deal with a multi-time Cy Young winner universally beloved by fans. No, not Tarik Skubal, who's still due to become a free agent after this season. Nearly a decade since he was traded to the Astros, Justin Verlander will join the starting rotation as a 43-year-old on a one-year, $13 million contract. With all due respect to Hal Newhouser and Mickey Lolich, I think Verlander is the greatest hurler in Tigers history. His first full season in 2006 coincided with the team's return to relevance after years as a laughingstock, as he won ROY honors while the team took the pennant in their first playoff appearance since 1987 (and first winning season since 1993). The dispassionate way to describe the ensuing years would be to say that Verlander established himself as a hard-throwing, ultra-competitive ace, hitting his peak in 2011 with an MVP-winning 24-5 season where he led the AL in ERA, innings, strikeouts, and WHIP. The more romantic way would be to tell you that Verlander starts were a weekly event that brought drama and stakes to long summer nights in Michigan. Verlander achieved two of his three career no-hitters as a Tiger, but just as important communally were the almost no-hitters, where he'd have a shutdown start going and word would travel around the state, every fan making sure she wasn't too far away from a TV or radio, just in case. Verlander starts brought people together. By the same token, when the team flipped him for prospects in a year they'd eventually finish 64-98, it symbolized the beginning of a lot of folks' detachment from the franchise. In the years after, the once-loaded Tigers decayed into a collection of anonymous guys and a very old Miguel Cabrera. JV, meanwhile, was a stud for the Astros. He won the World Series in 2017, dominated the league in 2018 and 2019, got Tommy John, and then won another Cy Young as a 39-year-old in 2022. The next few campaigns followed the more expected decline for a player his age, but even though last season in San Francisco tagged him with a nasty 4-11 record, he finished the year well enough that he might still have something to contribute to an MLB club.

This week on Nothing But Respect, we are covering the trade deadline in a very characteristic way, by which I course mean we spent most of the episode talking about Giannis Antetokounmpo's Kalshi investment, prediction markets, and the increasingly fractured and incoherent ways the sport is consumed and talked about. In other words, we went back to the well. Harry also talked about the influencer Clavicular and this Sam Kriss essay on him as a way to segue into Zach LaVine and the matter of the small-batch tank job happening in Sacramento. You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Thanks for listening!

If we are to take stories first from Sportico's Michael McCann and Robert Raiola and later Forbes' Nathan Goldman as actual factuals, and all involved have made their reputations on knowing the whatabouts and whereabouts of money, Sam Darnold's greatest moment as a professional athlete gave us one answer to the question, "What price glory?" The answer here is apparently 70 grand. That may seem a relatively small cost, given the reputational boost Darnold has just received for helping to guide the Seattle Seahawks to Super Bowl victory, especially given the fact that his current contract is worth a little over $100 million. But the point of the Sportico and Forbes stories is that, because of California's particularly strident "jock tax," Darnold will pay that much more in taxes to the state that hosted his greatest moment than he got paid for having played in that game. Frankly, there's a mathematical case to be made that he should have tanked the NFC championship game just to keep the money. The explanations for how and why this particular bill came due are somewhat byzantine, as all tax laws tend to be, but the nut of it is that California's 13.3 percent jock tax on money earned while in the state, when combined with Darnold's salary means, that he will pay roughly $249,000 for the right to make $178,000 based on the eight work days he spent in California preparing for the Big'Un. I mean, Darnold could sell his Super Bowl ring and come out ahead, we suppose, but then he'd end up looking like a worse version of the chump people imagined him to be as a Jet, Panther, Viking, and 49er. In fact, his year playing for San Francisco must have been a total loss leader based on that logic.

Learning that you can just buy ISBNs is like learning that you can just walk into a high-end designer store and touch things. It seems like there should be a more rigorous process to filter out the grubby-fingered like me, but there isn’t. Apparently you can just buy ISBNs online.  “It's actually so weird. You go on a website called bowker.com, which is like an independent entity, and it costs like $200 to buy 10 ISBNs,” Mabel Capability Taylor told me. Taylor and her business partner, Madeline Porsella, joined me for a live recording of Try Hard back in October as part of On Air Fest’s monthly residency at Ludlow House. Taylor and Porsella are the founders of Mandylion Press, which “unearths lost literary gems written by women and weirdos in the (very) long nineteenth century.” I first discovered Mandylion when I found their copy of The Morgesons in a bookstore and was entranced by the cover design and jacket copy, which admonished the reader to “open carefully.” The book was also wrapped in plastic, which I assumed was some kind of statement about its exclusivity and preciousness as an object, but which I later learned was just to protect the pages during shipment. 

When I was a very depressed British teenager, I had an unhealthy fascination with America. I found a way to love its contradictions, to explain away the obvious sins not by excusing them directly but by focusing on America’s enormous size, its capacity to hold infinite different types of people, and its proliferation of true weirdos. From my cramped and cold British bedroom, I browsed the website Roadside America and dreamed about driving across the country, before I could drive at all, to see things like the World’s Largest Chair, conveniently forgetting that most of what I saw along the way would be one-intersection towns with only chain restaurants and dialysis centers. To buy into that stuff is to value something that is odd and entirely itself above something that is good or otherwise defensible. Sure, this Museum of Long CVS Receipts sucks, but at least it sucks on its own terms; it’s not trying to be anything else, and it’s something that only this one guy who really loves receipts could create. You need this muscle, even if it’s buried deep down under crusted layers of realization about how the country actually sucks, to enjoy a visit to a place like Criss Angel’s Breakfast Lunch and Pizza in Overton, Nevada.  Cablp, which is how the name is stylized (pronounced ca-blip), does indeed belong to magician Criss Angel, the Mindfreak himself. He founded the restaurant in July 2021, buying a local place called Sugar’s Home Plate and renovating it in a style befitting a freak of the mind. He told Nevada Public Radio in 2024 that he originally intended the restaurant to be just “one component to an escape camp for children with childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases,” a cause that lies close to his heart, as his son Johnny Christopher has battled childhood leukemia (now in remission, thankfully). The camp part seems not to have made much progress; Angel said in the same interview that he was still “waiting years and years later for the county and Bureau of Land Management.” Perhaps it was a bad idea to open the restaurant before the escape camp could be built, but that’s not my business. Cablp’s existence raises a lot of questions: Why is it in Overton and not at, for example, Planet Hollywood on the Las Vegas strip where Angel freaks minds every night? (Actually, that one is easy: Angel “fell in love with” Moapa Valley while taking his kids dirtbiking there.) Why does it serve breakfast, lunch, AND pizza, and why is it named for all three? Why would a magician need a restaurant? 

To the layperson, biathlon may be the strangest sport in the Winter Olympics. Most of the sports in the Games involve athletes testing the limits of the human body vis-á-vis gravity (e.g.: big air, ski jumping), sliding (curling, speed skating), or gravity and sliding (figure skating), emphasizing in the process the wintry specificity of it all. Say what you want about curling—and I will: It's fine!—but you cannot dispute that it is a game that takes place on ice. Biathlon, on the other hand, is an ungainly and somewhat seasonally ambiguous combination of cross-country skiing and shooting stuff with a gun. What does one have to do with the other? It took an athlete like Julia Simon for me to see what makes biathlon cool. A brief note on the history of biathlon: It is the modern evolution of the military patrol event (scratch anything at the Olympics hard enough and you'll see the muscular nationalism beneath), wherein teams of skiers would ski some distance to a range, shoot some targets, then ski away. Switzerland won gold at the 1924 Olympics in Chamonix, and while the event was held thrice more, it was only as a demonstration sport. The IOC reintroduced military patrol as modern biathlon in 1960 at the Lake Tahoe Olympics, and gradually added more individual and team events with each passing decade. The Soviets (and their successors), Germans, and Norwegians dominated it for the next eight decades. What makes a great biathlete is balance. There are surely better cross-country skiers and probably better shooters, but to excel at both the seemingly contradictory skillsets of the two sports, it takes a special athlete, someone prepared for both the exertive and meditative aspects of competition. In other words, it takes someone like Julia Simon. With 10 World Championship gold medals to her name, a silver at the 2022 Beijing Games in mixed relay, and several World Cup first-places, the 29-year-old Frenchwoman entered these Games as a favorite across the various disciplines—but nobody was talking about that in the months preceding her trip up to Cortina. They were talking about suspended sentences, lacrimal apologies, and credit-card fraud.

The biathlon encourages athletes to balance two things at once. A competitor must be able to ski a great distance at an immense speed, and then, as if turning off a light switch, lower their heart rate, aim a gun, and shoot five tiny targets, before returning to skiing around really quickly. But after winning the bronze medal in the men's 20km biathlon Tuesday morning, Norwegian biathlete Sturla Holm Lægreid admitted, for no reason at all, to another kind of balancing act: cheating on his damn girlfriend. After winning bronze, Lægreid gave an interview to the Norwegian broadcaster NRK in which he immediately broke down in tears, and revealed all the details of his personal life to the entire country of Norway. "Last night, I had a kind of revelation that I should drop this bomb ... then we'll see what happens. I have nothing to lose," he told NRK. You would think that an athlete who spends a lot of time regulating his heart rate would have a little more self-control, but no! He spilled all the details of this unexpected variety of Olympic cheating scandal. "There is something I want to share with someone who may not be watching today," the 28-year-old Lægreid said as he cried. "Half a year ago, I met the love of my life. The world’s most beautiful and nicest person. Three months ago, I made the mistake of my life and cheated on her, and I told her about that a week ago. This has been the worst week of my life."