NowLoop

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 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/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 bilion. 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 today's competition kicked, 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 head-first, 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.

Because everyone else at Industrial Foundry No. 682 is basking in the joys of publicly libidinous biathletes and their subtly vengeful exes, snow-runners with nuclear quad muscles, credit card-kiting biathletes, deeply sinister ice dancers, free-range groin photographers, and cartoon murder-stoats, some poor mope has to tackle the backed-up septic tank that is the NBA All-Star Game. Not the thing itself, blessedly, it's not quite that dark yet, but the break is looming just over the horizon of the weekend. You can already feel the symptoms emerging, and see them on the Peacock channel guide. There are still three regular-season games Thursday night—well, timed basketball events of minimal consequence, if we're honest about it—before the league's weeklong break begins, but to listen to the people who purport to care most about the game, the league is up to its eyelids in scorpion venom sunscreen. The All-Star Game itself has been a hot mess for years, and now seems to be in full Pro Bowl territory, but that's the least of Adam Silver's migraines. The NBA, as a whole, is only barely keeping it together, at least beyond those ever-rising franchise values. Tanking is so rampant that teams that win are accused of undermining the product; this is not new in itself, but the grousing about it is in full flower a month earlier than usual, and being done twice as vehemently by twice as many teams. Utah alone has gamed the system so well that even people who hate tanking admire how they've done it. Load management is now the default for grumps who want to player-hate, even though the players aren't the ones doing the managing. The bench-emptying brawl returned with a vengeance, or anyway with a lot of shouting and a few empty swings, as an expression of competitiveness; Pistons big man Isaiah Stewart is one of the next generation of statement players just because his rep is that of a guy who would rather punch your face into the face of the person behind you than get a rebound in a one-point game. Your mileage for that sort of thing will vary, but it's not a thing of beauty.

The Olympic spirit takes a few forms. There's total dominance, as the best athletes in the world display their mastery. There's the unlikely upset, when deep underdogs overcome the odds. And then there's the Olympians with no chance in hell. The ones who are outclassed, outmatched, mostly just happy to be there. Sometimes those Olympians don't know or don't care that they have no hope, and put on the performance of their lives, and that it's still not nearly enough only makes it more moving. This can be the most inspiring form of Olympic pride: battling to the last in the face of certain defeat. Italy's men's hockey team had no chance against Sweden. The Swedes, medal favorites, boast a combined 16,880 NHL games of experience. The Italians? A big fat zero NHL games. This was by design: Team Italy could have pursued NHLers with Italian heritage, and convinced them to spend the minimum two years with the national team to be eligible for the Olympic, but instead chose to actually try to build a program more or less from scratch—Italian-born players, and guys playing in lower-tier leagues across Europe. The idea was that this should be a sustainable program, one that even if it can't really compete now, hopes to be a genuine force on the European scene in decades to come. A roster like that was going to get its ass beat in Milan Cortina, where the Italians as hosts would receive automatic entry into the field of 12; that was understood. Their first game, against Sweden on Wednesday, should have been a laugher. It was not. It finished 5-2 Sweden yet felt like a victory for the home side. Don't get it twisted: Sweden was dominant. I suspect that before their next game their coaches will tell them, "Do exactly what you did in that one." They controlled the puck. They dictated the pace of play. They peppered the Italian net to the tune of 60 shots, an Olympic record in the NHL era. That they did not put up historic blowout numbers—it was still a one-goal game with five minutes left—is almost entirely down to Damian Clara, the Italy goaltender who played the game of his or anyone else's life.

How many Premier League teams would you say are super happy with their season so far? I'd put the number at three. First there's Arsenal, which, aesthetic qualms aside, has to be giddy about its prospects of breaking the duck and winning the title. Then there's Aston Villa, already well positioned to nab a Champions League spot for the second time in three years, a remarkable feat for any club outside England's six or seven traditional and/or financial juggernauts. A little further down the table, you have Brentford, the league's one true little engine that could, the lowest-spending team in the competition which in the offseason lost its two best players and also its revered manager and is nevertheless on track for its best-ever EPL finish. Besides those three, though, I don't think any other team's fans would say they have been totally thrilled by their guys' performances up to this point. This strikes me as a little odd! Success in the Premier League is, after all, wholly contextual. Two-thirds of the way through the campaign, I would've thought that more than just three teams could claim to be headed toward what counts for them as fully satisfying success. Sure, there hasn't been any real title race to speak of, and there likely won't be unless Arsenal starts choking at levels that would seem unlikely even for them. (Though, let's be honest, you can never say never with that lot.) But on the other hand, only two teams (the practically already relegated pair of Wolves and Burnley) are entirely devoid of hope, and with only two of the likely five Champions League places more or less locked up already, there are at least seven teams that can credibly claim to be contenders in what is sure to be another dogged fight for the coveted Arsène Wenger Trophy. So why, then, does this season feel vaguely unsatisfying for all but a couple teams? I'd argue this is because no one in the league is simply good. Arsenal is, for certain, a great team, probably the best in all of Europe. Manchester City is very good, with a ceiling that could in theory reach greatness but also a low floor that the team has already collapsed onto multiple times this year. But other than those two, nobody else has been consistently good in absolute terms.

Even in sports that do not literally hand out points for style, the matter of aesthetic value is of discursive import. The most dominant athlete or team in the world can be taken down a peg or two on the moral underpinnings of play style. There are hoops (ethical) and hoops (unethical). You can win, but what is it worth if you do not win beautifully? You can lose, but at least you suffered beautifully when it counted. The ugly victor is a goblin; the beautiful loser was too pure for this world. What figure skating does as a sport is declare aesthetics an essential component for victory. The fundamentally subjective evaluation of how beautifully or, to borrow the favored technical term, artistically one skates is converted into a scored part of the performance. When the Olympic commentary puts in a snide aside about how a skater is "not an artist" or "doesn't have the artistry," it is, taken generously, a technical critique of the performance. Of the score each skater receives, a significant part of that is dictated by artistry. Unfortunately for ethical, artistry-favoring figure skating fans, relatively recent developments in the men's event have proven that the small details like step sequences and spin quality and skating skill, still, can be rendered less important. Like many technical innovations in sports, said "quad revolution"—turning quadruple jumps into elements that can be consistently performed, pioneered by skaters like Yuzuru Hanyu, Nathan Chen, and Jin Boyang, the last of whom is participating in the 2026 Olympics—was a bit more fun in the beginning. It helped that in the revolution's early era, Hanyu was the most ethical of skaters: Not only did he push the technical limits of the sport, but he could perform. Chen faced criticism for only being a jumper, but at least he had both a rival in Hanyu and the decency to, on occasion, totally blow it, most notably at the 2018 Winter Olympics.

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.