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Since returning to figure skating, Alysa Liu has displayed an indifference toward earthly happenings that a bodhisattva would envy. That is not to say that she doesn't express joy upon completing a stellar performance. But she is never particularly moved by wins or losses, which has earned her internet descriptors of "totally unbothered," "nonchalant queen," and so on. Improbably, through the pressure cooker of the Winter Olympics, she has maintained this attitude. "I'm really confident in myself, and even if I mess up and fall, that's totally OK, too," Liu said after placing third in the short program on Tuesday. "I don't know! I'm fine with any outcome, as long as I'm out there, and I am. There's nothing to lose." It is not difficult, watching Liu in the past couple of years, to believe those words to be more than generic athletespeak—that the point for her is the performance, and external validations like medals and scores are unnecessary. Control is the long-running theme of Liu's no-longer-so-new comeback. She picks her own music, dictates what she eats, and gets more involved with her choreography. When she skates, even on the ice of the biggest competition in figure skating, this is the sense the viewer gets: that she is in total control of what is happening. Liu's short program, set to "Promise" by Laufey, is the same program she skated to upon her return from retirement in 2024. While it is often easy to be wowed by a big, bright short program, Liu is incredible at pulling off a wistful presentation, filling the space despite such pared-back music. The unique triple Lutz–triple loop combination she jumps in the back half of her program does the technical heavy lifting for her score, and is perhaps the most eye-catching sequence—she whips from the first jump to the second with so little time in between it feels like one continuous motion—but her spins are what I return to. The final spin in particular is stunning and worth watching thrice: once to take in the full picture, once more to see how little she moves on the ice, and one last time to watch her arms.

Gather 'round, friends, for it is time to play my favorite newly invented game of the Winter Olympics. The game is called "Are The Fellas In Sync," and the way you play this game is by scrolling through Getty Images photos from Team Pursuit Speedskating and asking yourself a simple question: Are these three fellas (gender-neutral) before me truly, honestly, and existentially in sync? We'll start off with an easy round. Round 1: Patrick Beckert, Fridtjof Petzold, and Felix Maly of Germany

By the end of a cross-country skiing team sprint competition, the athletes are on the brink of collapse. The best teams complete their six-mile sprint in about 20 minutes. Their legs burn, and their lungs are exhausted. With the finish line in sight, almost out of breath, you can imagine how strange it would feel to see suddenly in front of you what looks like a big beautiful wolf. "I was like, 'Am I hallucinating?" Tena Hadzic, a 21-year-old Croatian skier, told NPR. There on the course was a real, live, beautiful wolfdog. He appeared on the final stretch of the qualifying event Wednesday morning and raced along, pursuing the sliding track camera like a superstar before turning to follow a couple of athletes across the finish line. Look at him: https://bsky.app/profile/rodger.bsky.social/post/3mf56mazwrk2e

I woke to a flurry of notifications on my phone. Overnight in Cortino, Lindsey Vonn violently crashed in her Olympic downhill race and was airlifted from the mountain. My group chat, made up of college friends from a variety of athletic backgrounds, was filled with screenshots of heroic EMTs, unnaturally bent legs, a single arm hooked fatefully through a plastic gate. Nine days previous, she had torn her ACL during a race in Switzerland. In the time between these two crashes, her decision to continue competing in the Olympics, to ski down a hill at 80 miles per hour, as a 41-year-old without a major ligament in her knee, was the subject of intense scrutiny. My friends, like much of the world, had thoughts and feelings. The question at the heart of their debate: Might it be more impressive, important, and sustainable to celebrate when an athlete listens to the requests of their body? When they respect its limits? When they choose to preserve and love it? The reasonable and resounding opinion: Yes.  The list of major injuries Vonn has suffered at the hands of her sport is long. Broken knee, broken ankle, broken leg, broken arm. Two torn ACLs, a torn LCL. She has fame, she’s had glory, she must have money. All of which cannot be said for plenty of athletes who have suffered even more. So, watching now, it is hard not to ask: Why?

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about China Gardens, paper clips, Robert Duvall, itchy assholes, and more. Your letters: Don:

The 2026 baseball season is either a week old or still weeks away, depending upon whether you count its beginning from the first grainy and distant social media photos of pitchers stretching on back fields or the first games that count. Either way, the positional jockeying for a potential 2027 owner lockout has already begun, because how else would the league follow its most entertaining World Series of the century? You can only cruise on the comedy stylings of Nick Castellanos for so long, right? Tuesday morning's news that MLB players union head Tony Clark is about to resign, though, brings the doomsigning to the front of the church for the first time this season. Up until now, the pre-lockout sniping was coded and qualified, and mostly confined to "The Dodgers Are Ruining Baseball" chants from ownership-side people who see the Pittsburgh Pirates as a model franchise. Since the six people who believe that never gather in the same place at the same time, we cannot herd them together and nail-gun them to outfield seats at LoanDepot Park for the season. The news from camps, for the most part, was not yet or not really news, mostly about Castellanos's problematic Bluetooth speaker usage and the Emmanuel Clase pitch-throwing case. And Clark's pending resignation, while surely news in a way all that isn't, has not yet been fully explained. It may well have connections to the apparently disastrous eight-figure investment the union made in a for-profit youth baseball company, and a federal investigation in the Eastern District of New York into Clark specifically for self-dealing, misuse of resources, and abuse of power at the union. It certainly is abrupt; Clark's scheduled meeting with the Cleveland Guardians on Tuesday was canceled at the last minute. There were denials all around, but regardless of factual roots, the timing of Clark's resignation suggests that the union's strategy for beating back the owners' salary cap demands needs a different front man. Either way, it will have one.

There's all kinds of stuff happening in this here second week of the Olympics, from Norwegians Scandinavianly wandering into the forest, to various Olympians cozymaxxing, to this Italian short track speed skater I saw finish two races backward, once on accident and once on purpose. But despite the glut, I am mostly looking forward to the forthcoming Olympic debut of one of the most painful sports imaginable: ski mountaineering, or skimo. The competitive premise of ski mountaineering is essentially that cross-country skiing, already one of the most lung-intensive sports on the planet, presents an insufficient test of its athletes cardiovascular limits. It is as if organizers looked at the otherworldly abilities of Johannes Klæbo (and the howling misery of Jessie Diggins), and conceived of a way to introduce more suffering. "I think they are the athletes who have the highest pain threshold and can really suffer," German skimo physician Dr. Volker Schöffl told NBC. "They sprint, they run and then, you know, gradually everybody is dying around you until one man is standing and finishing first." You can think of skimo as a sort of triathlon that combines cross-country skiing, regular-style skiing, and trail running. Competitors first ski uphill with the help of adhesive climbing skins on the front of their skis, then peel the skins from their skis and descend back to the bottom again. Now the competitors repeat the climb, but in a more difficult way: For the second climb, the athletes stow their skis in their backpacks and run up the hill in their boots. They then descend again.

Two conflicting thoughts from Canada’s Olympic semifinal win over Switzerland on Monday: There is no shame in Marie-Philip Poulin being the best player on your team; there is some shame in needing a one-legged 34-year-old in order to score a single goal. Team Canada is used to being led by their "Captain Clutch," and in most international tournaments, that says flattering things about Poulin, the greatest player in the history of her sport. In Milan, though, it seems to say more unflattering things about the way Team Canada has been playing that Poulin was the team’s only scorer in a 2-1 game. When they face a rolling Team USA in Thursday’s gold-medal game, Canada will probably need a little more. Poulin left Canada’s preliminary round game against Czechia last Monday after taking a bad hit into the boards. Though she would miss the rest of Canada’s round-robin games (including their shutout loss to Team USA), head coach Troy Ryan told reporters the team was optimistic she would return for the elimination rounds, and she was indeed back in the lineup against Germany in the quarterfinals, where she scored her 18th career goal at the Olympics, tying Hayley Wickenheiser’s record for most career Olympic women’s hockey goals. But she was far from healed: The Canadian broadcast of the Switzerland game showed Poulin being carted to the ice before puck drop—in too much discomfort to walk. 

I’m sure I’m telling on myself by revealing this, but Western astrological readings are a staple of my social feeds. (To tell on myself further: Scorpio sun, Gemini rising, Cancer moon.) I don't necessarily believe in it, but I don’t not believe in it either, and when I’m served a video that begins with a person saying, “Stop scrolling! This week is important,” I will stop scrolling and pay attention to find out how and why this week is important. Please tell me how the stars have foretold the argument I’ll have with a family member this week. Yes, I will take a warm bath with herbs and essential oils to cleanse my system before eclipse season. Thank you so much for the recommendation.  Every January and February, I’m served a sprinkling of Chinese Zodiac astrology in the weeks leading up to Lunar New Year; this is because my algorithms all know I’m Korean. It’s never as ubiquitous in my feed as Western astrology content, but there’s reliably a steady trickle of videos explaining the energy of the new year.  This year is completely different, though. The trickle is a flood, because it seems the whites have discovered Lunar New Year, big time. 

NBA All-Star weekend has come and gone, and though the game itself was surprisingly spirited, the most intriguing development of the weekend was the strange story of some leaked DMs from a pair of anonymous Twitter accounts that people connected to those accounts say belong to Kevin Durant. You will hopefully forgive the vagueness there, as we don't really know if Durant is behind the accounts. But also, including proper nouns doesn't make the story much easier to follow: A Twitter user named Pranav Sriraman made a post about how much he disliked the design of the Larry O'Brien trophy, which drew a counter-complaint about the posture of complaining itself from Durant, which Sriraman countered by asking Durant about his investment in Skydio, which sells drones to the IDF, which Durant dodged, only for user @basedfrog23 to make their only post detailing what they say are the DMs of "KDF." Other users eventually posted more DMs, in which the accounts talked all kinds of crazy shit. My co-host Harry Krinsky spent the past 24 hours feverishly DMing as many people connected to the saga as possible, and though none of them agreed to come on Nothing But Respect with the protection of a voice distorter, he learned a lot. Additionally, we were able to wrangle Eamon Whalen to talk through all angles of the saga, most notably the way Durant's Skydio investment has mostly not been talked about, leaving it to disgruntled Twitter anons to do the work of calling him out.