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Before Ilia Malinin had his disastrous free skate to lose gold at the 2026 Winter Olympics, there was Yuma Kagiyama—who skated a near-perfect short program only to underperform in his free skate on three out of his four quadruple jumps. And before Kagiyama had his disastrous free skate to, seemingly, lose silver, there was Adam Siao Him Fa—who had a brilliant short program only to miss three of his four quadruple jumps, dropping him all the way to sixth. Which is to say that, by the time Malinin came up to skate on Friday, his winning gold seemed like a foregone conclusion for everyone in the world, Malinin included. One can imagine that when the primary goal becomes "don't mess up," it becomes exponentially harder to do so. Take all that—and put it on a skater who historically has been driven by doing the impossible and totally unnecessary—and this might well be the result: Malinin fell twice. He popped, or effectively aborted, two more jumps. His final score left him not just without gold, but completely out of medal contention. Japan's Kagiyama won silver after all, his countryman Shun Sato took bronze, and Kazakhstan's Mikhail Shaidorov earned a shocking gold. It was the most deserving podium based on Friday's skates, and also the podium nobody ever considered. If Malinin were only skating to win gold, he probably would have done it. But there was so much more that Malinin could have done, so he tried for each and every record, when he knew and everyone else knew that all he had to do was not mess up. He wanted to be the first to land a quad Axel on Olympic ice. You could tell because he popped the jump and only landed a single Axel, when all he had to do was not mess up. He wanted to be the first to land seven quads on Olympic ice. You could tell because he went for the broadly despised quad loop, rather than a triple, and popped that into a double loop, when all he had to do was not mess up. The records vanished first; the gold medal was lost later. Malinin walked away from the rink in eighth place.

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Prior to last week, I had never eaten at a Wawa. I knew of Wawa’s food offerings, because Defector Media has a sizable, and vocal, Philadelphia contingent. The most vocal among that contingent was the late Dan McQuade. McQuade was so intensely Philadelphian that I thought of him any time I encountered anything related to that city, and I still do. This goes especially for Wawa, and especially for its sandwiches. I’d pumped gas at a Wawa before, but you and I know that doesn’t make for a full Wawa experience. It’s like saying you’ve been to a city because you had a layover there. No, in order to evaluate Wawa correctly, I had to avail myself of all it had to offer. I have now done just that. A bit of background here: Motorists in 2026 might think of Wawa mainly as a service station that also happens to sell food. But that’s putting the cart before the hoagie, because Wawa was founded in the early 20th century as a dairy farm, and a dairy farm only. The name “Wawa” itself has a layered meaning. It refers to both the Lenape tribe’s word for the Canada goose (hence a Canada goose in its logo), and to the area of Delaware County that those same geese used as a favored rest stop while migrating. According to this 1989 writeup in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Wawa area of Delco still very much exists, although only in somewhat romantic terms:

On Thursday, the Philadelphia Phillies released outfielder Nick Castellanos after months of threatening to do so. All offseason, I have read reports that the Phillies wanted to get rid of Castellanos, either by trading him or cutting him, if they had to. The underlying tone of these reports was that the Phillies would rather eat the rest of his contract ($20 million) than have to work with him again. This is not only terrible negotiating, because you indicate to other teams that you will most likely release him and pay his contract, and then they can sign him for cheaper instead of trading you for him. It's also petty. The pettiness reached its peak yesterday, when the Phillies finally announced that they were releasing Castellanos, and at the same time he posted on Instagram two separate handwritten letters: one titled "Philadelphia" and one titled "Miami Incident." https://www.instagram.com/casty_8/p/DUq1rwokWGm/?hl=en

It would be hard to make up a more charming athlete story than that of Giannis Antetokounmpo. His life is a line connecting unlikely and poignant points: poverty as a son of Nigerian immigrants in Athens, lower-division Greek basketball as a malnourished teenager, speculative No. 15 draft pick by the Milwaukee Bucks, NBA championship, unambiguous place as one of the best players in league history. Coming from the Mediterranean to the Midwest, he tried to jog to a Bucks game in 18-degree weather, and supposedly wiped the windshield of a moving car with his wingspan. He discovered what is most beautiful about America: a "smothie." He picked up almost 50 pounds and ball skills, and won two MVP awards. He plays with an unmatchable motor and has innovated in the fields of arm extension and stride length. Perhaps the greatest transition threat ever to touch a basketball, he is pretty funny, too. This cool basketball player who was once enraptured with blended drinks has amassed a lot of emotional goodwill in my head, and yet, in the span of a single season, he has managed to spend down most of it. Say what you will about LeBron's Decision, but at least he made one. Even James Harden is more direct when he's done with a team, whether he's doing a reverse hunger strike or delivering extemporaneous remarks to Chinese fans. Antetokounmpo has taken a somewhat routine process in his sport and turned it into a tedious and vaguely self-righteous odyssey. The critical shift was when his Bucks co-star Damian Lillard tore his Achilles tendon during the 2025 playoffs. In that instant, Antetokounmpo could have started packing his bags, and no reasonable Milwaukee fan would have begrudged his exit. The all-in trade for Lillard didn't work as anticipated, and the pairing had just been brought to a brutal anatomical end. Antetokounmpo had already fashioned himself into a league-destroying monster and won them the 2021 title. What else could you want the guy to do? He fulfilled any fan base’s most reckless draft-night fantasies, and then some. It was an apt time for a mid-prime superstar to pack up and try to contend on another team.

What is to be done about NBA tanking? Based on the pissy administrative response from the league to some recently and spectacularly egregious examples of Tank Mode, you might think it is the most pressing problem facing a league that has a few of those. Thankfully, the solution is easy: Book a fight in the schoolyard, where the people doing the fighting aren't the students but the teachers. Sign us up for that one every day. Commissioner Adam Silver took the bait on Thursday when he decided to fine the Utah Jazz $500,000 and the Indiana Pacers $100,000 for failing to meet even the subterranean standards for competitive dignity during the past week. The Jazz have been particularly noteworthy—which is a first for them on any front over the past decade or so—and so received five times the tsk-tsk-tsk that the Pacers did. And while every owner regards half a million scoots the way you do a twice-used Kleenex, and while most of your more ambitious lousy teams would gladly pay $500,000 per game the rest of the way if it got them the top pick in the draft, Jazz owner Ryan Smith clearly didn't like the spotlight that came with being fined the equivalent of Brice Sensabaugh's left leg. So he did what any wounded rich guy would do—he went on antisocial media and used the delightful fifth-grade logic of "Yeah, but we don't do it all the time." Smith might have made a better case had he pointed out that the Jazz were not the first team to think of sitting out the healthy starters that had played the first three quarters of the game, but a billionaire scorned is a billionaire scorned. You have to grade these things on a curve.

Work in the outdoor industry long enough, and you’ll learn that only certain jobs in the U.S. are allowed to be taken seriously. Spending your days emailing about nothing is a “career.” Drafting slogans to feed the AI machine? Impressive. Combining the abilities of an EMT, chef, navigator, and athletic coach? Well, you’re just playing outside.  Outdoor recreation work is often seen as summer camp for adults, an in-between seasonal way for young people to play around and earn some cash while they figure out what they “really want to do.” But when a bear shows up at your campsite, an avalanche swoops down, or you step over a root wrong and snap your ankle 30 miles into the backcountry, a guide might be the only thing standing between you and your fast-approaching mortality. So what’s a hard-working guide to do? How does the outdoor recreation industry earn its well-deserved respect? For some, the answer is unions.

Because last week was such a sad and difficult and busy one for us at the site, and also for the broader world in the way that things have been sad/difficult for some time now, I didn't get around to reading the stellar team coverage of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show that Kathryn Xu and Heather Wei-Xi Chen provided until days after the Best In Show had been ... crowned is wrong, I guess. Given a small liver-flavored treat is probably closer to correct. Anyway, the blogs were spectacular, really as fun to read as anything we've had on the site at any time, and because of that and because a mood reset was in order more broadly, Drew and I invited Kathryn onto the pod this week to talk about partying with 33 Pomeranians and the other delights she experienced while covering the WKC early last week. The result is not quite as good for you as actually petting a dog, but it's about as close as you're likely to get from this podcast. After the requisite overture, which touched on football and the effects of the brutal cold snap in the Northeast on our already wobbly psyches, we got straight to the dog stuff and mostly stayed there. We talked about the eternal beats of the dog show, the uneasy combination of thrillingly good vibes and creep-o soft eugenics, which dogs have shooters in the stands, the struggle to balance petting dogs and doing journalism, and Kathryn's personal Pomeranian Reverie and her family's pom history. Some longstanding questions of mine were answered, we came to a consensus on there being too many visible scrotums at the Dog Show, and we discussed how her experience there differed from mine long ago. We agreed, as a group, to give the dogs a pass on not respecting the national anthem.

While the world's attention is currently focused on the various performances, admissions of infidelity, and blood-soaked mascots of the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, the guy running the next Summer Olympics is coming under intense pressure for popping up in the latest tranche of Jeffrey Epstein emails. That would be Casey Wasserman, founder and CEO of an eponymous talent agency, and chair of the Los Angeles 2028 organizing committee. He retains those positions for now, though an increasing number of clients are leaving the agency or calling for him to step down. When you have to split hairs about exactly how associated you were with Jeffrey Epstein, that makes sense. Wasserman founded the agency in 1998 and quickly expanded it by acquiring as many competitors as possible, including legendary basketball agent Arn Tellem and the powerful soccer agency SFX. You need money and connections to do stuff like that, and every part of running the agency was made easier by the fact that Wasserman's grandfather was Lew Wasserman, one of the most powerful people in 20th-century Hollywood. Lew took Casey under his wing as a teenager, giving the younger Wasserman access to his extensive network of connections and vast fortune, which swelled after Lew sold his agency, MCA, to Matsushita Electric (now Panasonic) in 1990 for $6.5 billion. The Wasserman agency primarily represents athletes and musicians, and Casey Wasserman has made himself synonymous with mogulhood. His public persona is that of a power player connecting the worlds of sports and entertainment to globally powerful people; to that end, his 50th birthday party was attended by Robert Kraft, Bob Iger, Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, and Doug Emhoff. (Imagine Dragons headlined; even this guy can't buy taste!) In 2014, L.A.'s then-mayor Eric Garcetti appointed Wasserman to spearhead the city's push to bring the Olympics to town, and three years later, L.A. was awarded the 2028 Games.

One hour before the start of the men's skeleton event, Ukrainian slider Vladyslav Heraskevych was disqualified from participating, after insisting on wearing a helmet with illustrations of Ukrainian athletes and coaches who were killed in the war following Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The helmet was banned days ago under Rule 50.2 of the Olympic Charter, which reads, "No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas." Heraskevych, Ukraine's sole participant in the skeleton event, continued to wear the helmet during official training sessions and stated his intention to wear it in competition. Before Thursday's competition kicked off, IOC President Kirsty Coventry met with Heraskevych and attempted to reach a last-minute compromise over wearing the helmet on the "field of play." Coventry instead suggested that Heraskevych could wear a black armband during the competition and display the helmet afterward. The nature of skeleton as a sport played a role in the discussion: Skeleton athletes go headfirst, but traveling as fast as 75 miles per hour, at which speed it would not be possible to see the designs on Heraskevych's helmet. After Heraskevych's run was over, the faces would be more clearly seen. Coventry and Heraskevych reportedly agreed on this point, which highlights the fundamentally arbitrary distinctions in IOC rules on expression. From Coventry's perspective, there is no point to wearing the helmet if it is indistinguishable during competition. On the other hand, if the helmet is indistinct, then shouldn't it be irrelevant whether or not it is worn?

To the uninitiated, luge itself might seem a silly sport, given that the average person might guess it mostly consists of holding onto a sled real tight as it goes fast down the ice. Of course, this opinion is wrong. Luge requires athleticism and dexterity, the ability to steer using the slightest movements of your shoulder or leg around the track's curves, all while holding onto a sled real tight as it goes fast down the ice. But there may be no better way to demean a legitimate sport than to take a guy who's already doing it and put another guy on top of him. I would obviously and enthusiastically watch doubles snowboarding or doubles speed-skating, where the world's leading athletes try to go real fast while giving a piggyback to a smaller person, but I can't say it would be for the athleticism. What is there to say about doubles luge that has not already been said? A lot, I think. Alluringly homoerotic and abjectly nonsensical, doubles luge might be the strangest event of any Olympics, winter or summer. Unlike other baffling Olympics sports like biathlon and curling, doubles luge has no legible explanation rooted in Scandinavian military training or bored Scottish people. Doubles luge appears to be the consequence of somebody watching luge and being struck by the idea of stacking another guy on top of the first guy. Apparently back then there were no bad ideas. Only in doubles luge can one luger be doing jazz hands while the other luger pushes off.