Sports
Nadia Sorel
The athletes nobody writes about and why that needs to change.
The most interesting sporting stories are almost never the ones getting the most coverage.
The coverage problem
Sports journalism, like most journalism, follows attention rather than leading it. It covers what is already being watched, what is already generating revenue, what is already understood as significant. The result is an enormous amount of coverage of a very small number of sports and athletes, and almost no coverage of the vast majority of sporting life that happens outside that narrow band. This is not a conspiracy. It is the logic of attention economies applied to sport. It produces a sports media landscape that is both comprehensive and deeply incomplete.
Who is missing
The athletes missing from most sports coverage are not obscure. They are often extraordinary. They are the Paralympic athletes whose technical mastery and competitive intensity are equal to anything in mainstream sport and whose stories are told in detail for approximately two weeks every four years. They are the women competing in sports where the men's version receives fifty times the coverage and a hundred times the prize money. They are the athletes in sports that do not photograph well or translate easily to broadcast. They are the people for whom sport is everything and for whom the audience is, by the logic of the market, not large enough to matter.
What you miss when you miss them
What you miss when you miss these athletes is some of the most interesting sporting stories available. The adaptive athlete who has had to solve problems of technique and strategy that no coach has previously encountered. The woman competing at the highest level of her sport in conditions of relative indifference and doing it anyway because the sport is the sport regardless of who is watching. The athlete in a minority discipline who has spent a career being excellent in obscurity. These stories contain things that the mainstream narrative does not. They are worth telling.
The economics of it
The economics of sports coverage are not going to change on their own. The incentives point in the direction they have always pointed. What can change is where individual readers and viewers direct their attention. The athlete competing in front of small crowds in a sport with limited broadcast rights is not less worthy of attention than the athlete competing in a stadium. They are simply less convenient. Convenience is not the same as significance. Treating them as the same is a choice that produces a particular kind of sports culture. A different choice produces a different one.
The stories that last
The sporting stories that last are almost never the ones about winning the biggest competition. They are about the relationship between an athlete and their discipline over time. The injury and the return. The career that ended before it should have and the one that continued longer than anyone expected. The athlete who changed the way their sport understood itself. The competitor who was never the most famous but was, by any serious measure, one of the best. These stories exist everywhere in sport. Most of them are not being told.
The most interesting sporting stories are almost never the ones getting the most coverage.
What good sports writing can do
Good sports writing can do what good writing always does. It can show you something you had not noticed. It can make you care about something you had not previously considered worth caring about. It can take the specific and make it universal. A piece about a Paralympic swimmer is not a piece about disability. It is a piece about the relationship between a person and an extreme physical challenge and what that relationship reveals about both. This is a story worth telling regardless of how many people watched the race.
Why this matters beyond sport
The invisibility of certain athletes is a version of a broader problem. The things that do not fit neatly into existing frameworks of attention and value tend to become invisible. Sport is one of the places where this is most clearly visible because the numbers are so stark. But the same logic operates everywhere. The correction is the same everywhere too. Pay attention to the things that are not already getting attention. That is where the interesting stories tend to be.
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About the author
Nadia Sorel
Covers food, ideas, and the stories that sit just underneath the surface of both. Interested in where things come from and what gets lost in the telling. Has strong opinions about markets and no opinions she is willing to keep to herself. Based in Paris, reluctantly.
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