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This study content analyzed 1,013 thumbnails of news episodes at the Olympic Channel through the lens of gender. By examining the percentage of pictures rendered to male and female athletes, themes, sports type, sexualization, subordination, and action level, this study uncovered that although some sex differences existed, the Olympic Channel—overall—showcased a high level of gender equality in visualizing male and female athletes in news thumbnails, especially considering that the pictures analyzed were collected from daily-based media coverage. This study is one of the first to explore gender differences in a media platform established by the International Olympic Committee, with implications outlined.

In April 2016, TSN (The Sports Network), one of Canada’s most prominent broadcasting stations, aired a documentary miniseries, Radical Play, that describes how European organizations are “harnessing sport to prevent isolated Muslim youth from joining extremist groups.” The documentary focuses on Younes, a 17-year-old refugee in Hamburg, Germany, who has been recruited to participate in a deradicalization program run through a local boxing gym. This article offers a contextualized reading of Radical Play that explores how the problem of radicalization is constructed in the Canadian context, how sport is positioned in relation to deradicalization projects, and how deeply held beliefs about Muslim boys and men are communicated to Canadians through sporting discourses.

In this manuscript, the author describes their unexpected grieving process in dealing with the death of Kobe Bryant. In particular, the author focuses on the mourning process on tragic celebrity deaths and the relationship between celebrity, mortality, and the ways in which people make sense of themselves through celebrity figures. The author attempts to highlight the complicated nature of mourning celebrity figures who are not personally known, especially those that have a complicated history in the public eye. The author moves into and through their own personal experiences as a Black man in order to make sense of public mourning, race, and the Black Masculinity of Kobe Bryant.

The “boy crisis” in education has spurred responses to improve boy’s underachievement in schools, and one response has been to increase access to physical activity and sports. The rise in specialized sports academies within schools has created space for young elite male athletes to increase engagement in academics, as well as to meet the potential of athletes. This study, conducted with an elite U18 male hockey team, used photovoice as a means to enquire into male athlete experiences with the curriculum and disengagement in schools. When young male athletes use photography to document their experiences, through a Bourdieusian analysis, they reveal the ways in which an entrenchment of the “boys will be boys” and the “hockey boys” identities in schools perpetuate hypermasculine traits. Complacency by both participants and adults in the field of schooling contributes to elite male youth hockey players becoming both producers and products of these narratives, which are causing young men to be isolated within an exclusive heteronormative community.

This work built upon previous research examining meritocracy in elite sport by examining the socioeconomic and racial composition of the high schools of 1,881 players on National Football League (NFL) rosters in 2016. The NFL player data from pro-football-reference.com and perceived race data coded from player pictures are matched to school data for 23,785 public high schools in the Common Core of Data and 3,333 private high schools in the Private School Universe Survey. Using t tests of differences in group averages and General Linear Model analysis of variance, the authors found large statistically significant racial disparities within the NFL with Black NFL players attending high schools with an average of twice as many students in poverty and five times as many Black students than the high schools attended by White NFL players. Overall, NFL players attended high schools with lower socioeconomic status student bodies than the general student population, suggesting more meritocracy. However, analysis by player race shows the difference driven by the racial composition of the NFL compared with the general student population, suggesting this meritocracy is more complex; Black NFL players attended higher socioeconomic status schools with more White students than the general Black student population, and White NFL players attended higher socioeconomic status schools with fewer Black students than the general White student population.

The requirements of performance sport are becoming more and more time-consuming for athletes. Based on the work of Rosa, the article looks into the ability of athletes to reconcile their training project and the increasing requirements of practice at a high level. To address this issue, we interviewed 63 high-level French athletes who train at the French Institute of Sport. The results show that although the training project appears to be time-consuming, it is nonetheless a source of social balance and a reassuring choice for their future professional retraining. In order to preserve this educational project in the time-consuming context of high-performance sports, athletes on the one hand implement strategies of arrangement in order to produce an acceptable timetable, and on the other hand use this temporality as an adjustment variable allowing them to better manage temporal emergencies. By giving athletes a voice, this work deconstructs the idea of the incompatibility of educational and sports projects and offers recommendations to sports institutions.