*Content Warning: this episode explores the topics of physical, mental, and sexual abuse in sport*   In the second episode with Georgia Cervin on the international history of women’s artistic gymnastics, we tackle the topic of abuse and especially sexual abuse in the sport. Georgia explains how contrary to contemporary popular media portrayals, American gymnastics’ coaching culture was rife with abusive elements before the Karolyi’s and Nasser arrived on the scene, as famous gymnast Jennifer Sey has repeatedly spoken about in her published work and public speaking. The Karolyi’s built on the cultural foundations of American gymnastics when they arrived, thereby contributing to—but not instigating—the abuse of girl gymnasts.   Georgia moreover gives us her take on the recent documentary Athlete A. While she explains her critiques of it, Georgia also shares with us what Athlete A does really well in portraying the women’s story to the audience. As a former gymnastics coach herself, we discuss the limited training opportunities for coaches based in healthy and educational methods. Lastly, we hear about Georgia’s recent collaborative work interviewing former elite gymnasts and providing practical suggestions to FIG and other gymnastics national governing bodies on healthier coaching practices (which were almost categorically ignored), and why women’s artistic gymnastics can and should be a feminist sport. She cites the resurgence of adult female gymnasts, using 45-year-old Oksana Chusovitina and 32-year-old Chellsie Memmel (with an IG following of nearly 45k!) as a positive trend for the sport.   If you missed it, don’t forget to check out the first episode with Georgia that provides the pre-Karolyi history of the sport!   You can find out more about Georgia Cervin and her work on her website.   Her collaborative report on how to healthily sustain gymnasts’ careers into adulthood, which was almost completely ignored by the sport’s most important bodies and leaders: “Coming of Age: Towards Best Practices in Women’s Artistic Gymnastics.”   Instagram account for Chellsie Memmel, the 2005 World Champion who is documenting her adult gymnastics journey and has nearly 45k followers.   After listening to the episode, check out our recent piece "Canceling the College-Football Season Isn't Enough" published in The Chronicle of Higher Education  __________________________________________________________________________   As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram. @Derekcrim @JohannaMellis @Nkalamb @EndofSportPod www.TheEndofSport.com   **For a transcription of this episode please click here. Huge thanks to @Punkadmic for making this happen!**

**Content warning: this episode explores the political and cultural foundations of gymnastics that helped open the door to the abusive nature of the sport that we know well today.** In the first of a two-episode interview, Johanna dives into a crucial conversation with Dr. Georgia Cervin that is almost completely left out of ESPN’s 30 for 30 podcast account of gymnastics culture in Heavy Medals: how the international history of women’s artistic gymnastics helped lead to the sport’s abusive culture today. Cervin traces the sport’s harmful core beginning with its femininity-obsessed and racist foundations in International Gymnastic Federation (FIG)’s Code of Points. She explains how the female leaders of FIG used the Code of Points partly to dictate and ensure that the sport—and thus its female athletes—conformed to the IOC’s Western notions of white femininity. This concept of gymnastics’ femininity underwent drastic changes in the second half of the 20th century. Female gymnasts were initially coached exclusively by women (men were banned from the competition halls!), and the sport was steeped in balletic traditions to emphasize femininity and grace in adult women. Starting in the 1970s, male coaches increasingly became assistant coaches and justified their presence as being necessary to physically train and support female gymnasts in acrobatic movements. They moreover facilitated the changes in gymnasts’ age and maturity levels, encouraging the training of increasing young and less-physically developed girls. Georgia ends the episode by explaining how after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, former Soviet coaches sought jobs abroad and were welcomed with open arms by gymnastics leaders in Australia, for instance. These developments forever altered the global culture of women’s artistic gymnastics. Stayed tuned for Part II, where we continue this history by looking specifically at the ‘Karolyi foundation,’ as coined by Scott Reid in his episode, in the US and how it compares to the pre-existing gymnastics culture in the US.  While we wait for her forthcoming book to be released, her most relevant publications include “Ringing the Changes: How the Relationship Between the International Gymnastics Federation and the International Olympic Committee Has Shaped Gymnastics Policy,” and “Gymnasts are Not Merely Circus Phenomena: Influences on the Development of Women’s Artistic Gymnastics During the 1970s.” After listening to the episode, check out our recent piece "Canceling the College-Football Season Isn't Enough" published in The Chronicle of Higher Education  __________________________________________________________________________   As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram. @Derekcrim @JohannaMellis @Nkalamb @EndofSportPod www.TheEndofSport.com   **For a transcription of this episode please click here. Huge thanks to @Punkadmic for making this happen!**

In this episode, Derek, Johanna, and Nathan speak with Kelly E. Wright about linguistic racialization in the world of sport and sports media. Kelly E. Wright is a Ph.D Candidate in Linguistics at the University of Michigan, where she studies Sociophonetics, Neurolinguistics, and Historical Sociolinguistcs, focusing on the link between Linguistic Production and Perception. Her work on linguistic racialization and sport, including an algorithm that predicts an athlete’s race based on the words written about them, has appeared in The Undefeated and been discussed in Deadspin. This is a fascinating conversation about the psycho-social and political dynamics of language and how they play out in discourse around sport. Kelly Wright offers both an accessible introduction to a complex field of study and a sophisticated and interdisciplinary account of how language contributes to the production of race but also can be used as an instrument of anti-racist resistance. Kelly also talks us through the horrendous backlash she received to her popular intervention in The Undefeated and makes a note-perfect case against the vicious exploitation of graduate, contingent, and athletic labor on campuses.   You can find Kelly's article in The Undefeated here. You can find a discussion of her work in Deadspin here. You can find Kelly on Twitter @raciolinguistic. __________________________________________________________________________   As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram. @Derekcrim @JohannaMellis @Nkalamb @EndofSportPod www.TheEndofSport.com   **For a transcription of this episode please click here. Huge thanks to @Punkadmic for making this happen!**

In this episode, Derek and Nathan are joined by Jacqueline Keeler to discuss Native mascotry in light of recent developments that such teams like the Washington football team, Edmonton football team, and Cleveland baseball team may finally change their racist names. Jaqueline Keeler is a Dine/Yankton Dakota writer and activist, co-founder of Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry, and editor-in-chief of Pollen Nation Magazine editor of the collection Edge of Morning: Native American Writers Speak for the Bears Ears. Her work has appeared in a wide range of venues, including The New York Times, The Nation, HuffPost, Salon, NBC News. Jacqueline explains what it means to understand the United States as a colonial society today and how Native mascotry sustains that project. She also takes Derek and Nathan through her own history as an activist on this issue and how that activism has laid the groundwork for the changes we appear to be witnessing. Finally, she connects the struggle against native mascotry to Black Lives Matter, crediting the current uprisings as the impetus for change. You can find Jacqueline's recent piece connecting #NotYourMascot to BLM here. You can find her 2015 piece for Salon on native mascotry here. You can find here Dallas Morning News op-ed here. You can find her discussion of her family's connection to the Cleveland baseball time in Salon here. You can find Jacqueline on Twitter @jfkeeler. __________________________________________________________________________   As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram. @Derekcrim @JohannaMellis @Nkalamb @EndofSportPod www.TheEndofSport.com   **For a transcription of this episode please click here. Huge thanks to @Punkadmic for making this happen!**

In this episode, Johanna and Nathan speak with Dr. Samantha White about her research on the discourses about African-American girls sport and physical education. Samantha White highlights the contradictions between the trivialization of youth sport and child athletes by the contemporary media and even academia one the one hand, with the history of the immense racialized attention and harmful discipline exerted on the bodies of African-American girl athletes in the 1920s-1930s on the other. Despite these practices, Black girl athletes found community through their physical activity and sporting practices. She then discusses her forthcoming article in the Journal of Sport History, “Ebony Jr.! Meritocracy and Sports in African-American Children’s Media” about how the magazine in the 1970s reinforced sport as a site of meritocracy and racial uplift rather explain to child readers the racist structures and barriers that Black children readers would face in their lives. She moreover explains some groundbreaking feminist sports writing from her piece, “Negotiating Female Athletic Identity in Educational Spaces Through the Works of R.R. Knudson,” in Aethlon journal. We conclude the episode with a discussion with her about how academics can best support Black athletic laborers in this moment of societal upheaval and protests amidst white supremacist pressures to return to the field. Dr. White will begin the prestigious PRODiG postdoc at SUNY-Plattsburgh in fall 2020. Samantha can be found on Twitter @dearsamwhite, and also through her Women Also Know History page here. __________________________________________________________________________   As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram. @Derekcrim @JohannaMellis @Nkalamb @EndofSportPod www.TheEndofSport.com   **For a transcription of this episode please click here. Huge thanks to @Punkadmic for making this happen!**

In this episode, all three hosts are joined by Hamilton Nolan to discuss all things labor and sport. Hamilton Nolan is a labor reporter for In These Times and the Columbia Journalism Review’s public editor for the Washington Post. Previously, he worked on staff at Gawker, Deadspin, and Splinter. His work also frequently appears in The Guardian.   The conversation begins with a discussion of sport as labor and within the labor movement, and what that means in the context of the pandemic. From there, the discussion shifts to Hamilton's work on boxing to discuss the working conditions in the brutal sport and his personal investments as a writer and participant. We then shift to college sport for a close look at where college sport fits in the labor movement, why it is exploitative, and what can be done. Finally, and you don't want to miss this, the last quarter of the show focuses on some real talk about what happened at Deadspin and what to make of the zombie version of the site, and those who work for it, today.   You can find Hamilton's plea for the unionization of college athletes here. You can find his current work at In These Times here. You can find him on Twitter @hamiltonnolan.   __________________________________________________________________________   As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram. @Derekcrim @JohannaMellis @Nkalamb @EndofSportPod www.TheEndofSport.com   **For a transcription of this episode please click here. Huge thanks to @Punkadmic for making this happen!**

**Content warning: this episode explores the disturbing and pervasive issue of sexual abuse in sport. Please make an informed decision about listening to the episode. What Reid details, however, is necessary listening for athletes, parents, coaches, fans, and academics alike to understand one of the darkest sides of contemporary sports. This episode was also recorded before the release of Athlete A, but stay tuned for separate discussions on that in the near future!** Derek and Johanna speak with Scott Reid, an investigative reporter for the OC Register with decades of experience covering abuse scandals within sports, especially within USA Gymnastics and USA Swimming. Reid traces the long, interwoven threads of physical and emotional abuse with sexual abuse in some sports, dating in some cases in gymnastics back to the 1970s. He provides damning details about the culture of the ‘Karolyi foundation’ that helped cultivate Larry Nasser’s behavior and harm. Perhaps more shocking though is his assessment that because USA Swimming has historically been run by ‘good ole boys’ who created a culture that normalized coach-swimmer relations, sexual abuse is more pervasive in this organization than in USA Gymnastics. He then lays bare the capitalist and structural reasons why national governing bodies, the NCAA, and even the IOC do not think that protecting athletes from harm is their #1 priority. At the end of the conversation we discuss the roles that athletes can play in protecting themselves, and Scott’s take on how sports parents should approach their kids’ coaches, social media, and vice-versa. You can check out some of Scott’s work discussed in the episode here: “100s of USA swimmers were sexually abused for decades and the people in charge knew and ignored it, investigation finds” “NCAA argues in sex abuse case it has no legal duty to protect athletes” “SafeSport: Amy Nyman made gymnasts feel ‘scared, degraded and humiliated” Find Scott on Twitter: @sreidreporter __________________________________________________________________________   As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram. @Derekcrim @JohannaMellis @Nkalamb @EndofSportPod www.TheEndofSport.com   **For a transcription of this episode please click here. Huge thanks to @Punkadmic for making this happen!**

In the show's first mailbag, Derek, Johanna, and Nathan respond to a range of terrific listener questions about youth sport, disability during the pandemic, grad school, MMA, European football, and teaching the labor of sport. Before that, the hosts get a little ranty about the pandemic, particularly in relation to college sport.   You can find more about Dylan Alcott and the US Open here. You can find the article cited by Johanna on disability and sport during the pandemic here. You can find the Max Rohskopf MMA footage here. Derek Helling's tweet at Penn State Coach James Franklin is here. You can find discussion of UCLA football organizing here. And, finally, Dr. Victoria Jackson's terrific Boston Globe op-ed is here.   Finally, Nathan is very self-conscious about repeatedly saying Kylin Hill is at the University of Mississippi rather than Mississippi St. I think we can all forgive Nathan for this.  __________________________________________________________________________   As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram. @Derekcrim @JohannaMellis @Nkalamb @EndofSportPod www.TheEndofSport.com   **For a transcription of this episode please click here. Huge thanks to @Punkadmic for making this happen!**

In Johanna's first episode as co-host, she joins Derek and Nathan in conversation with Samantha N. Sheppard about the films Hoop Dreams and High Flying Bird and the ways they anticipate, explain, and address the moment of rebellion unfolding around us. Samatha Sheppard is the Mary Armstrong Meduski ’80 Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. Her work has appeared in venues such as The Atlantic and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the author of the brand new this month book -- which will undoubtedly be essential reading -- Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen and is co-editor of the anthologies From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry and Sporting Realities: Critical Readings on the Sports Documentary forthcoming this year with University of Nebraska Press.   You can find Samantha Sheppard's new book Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen here. You can find Nathan's essay on High Flying Bird here. Samantha Sheppard is on Twitter @samshepPhD __________________________________________________________________________   As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram. @Derekcrim @JohannaMellis @Nkalamb @EndofSportPod www.TheEndofSport.com   **For a transcription of this episode please click here. Huge thanks to @Punkadmic for making this happen!**

**HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT: Tune into this week's episode for a BIG announcement about the future of The End of Sport!** In this episode, Derek and Nathan speak with Dr. Johanna Mellis, Assistant Professor of History at Ursinus College, to discuss her brilliant recent scholarly articles “From Defectors to Cooperators: The Impact of 1956 on Athletes, Sport Leaders, and Sport Policy in Socialist Hungary” and“Cold War Politics and the California Running Scene.” Johanna takes Derek and Nathan through a fascinating period of history in order to explain why traditional assumptions about sport in the Soviet Bloc need to be revised, particularly in the context of a more critical understanding of amateurism and US capitalist sport. In the latter part of the conversation, Johanna shares painful personal experiences with sexual harassment and the toxicity of sport culture from her career as an elite swimmer and the impact they have had on her identity and development as both academic and coach.  **We discuss sensitive and disturbing issues related to sexual harassment and abuse in sport during this episode from 1:20 - 1:30, please consider this before listening** You can find Dr. Johanna Mellis on Twitter @JohannaMellis. For a transcription of this episode click here.  __________________________________________________________________________   As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram. @Derekcrim @JohannaMellis @Nkalamb @EndofSportPod www.TheEndofSport.com   **For a transcription of this episode please click here. Huge thanks to @Punkadmic for making this happen!**