2026-03-27 23:37:59
BRITISH COLUMBIA — Staring up from the base at the high walls of the Montana Bowl, a backcountry ski zone in Revelstoke, British Columbia, feels like gazing upon a deadly cathedral. My eyes naturally gravitate to the dangerous bits, but I realize they're pinballing around wildly, because it's almost all dangerous bits. Front and center is a zone they call Bar Fight, a series of increasingly terrifying cliffs and choke points. The terrain to the west is more inviting, but it's riddled with huge man-made jumps, some of which require a perfect landing in order to avoid becoming mush on a tree. There are two fresh debris fields, evidence of small, naturally occurring avalanches.
My overwhelming thought is that I can't believe they're about to hold a snowboarding contest on that stunning monstrosity.
The Natural Selection Tour is the brainchild of Travis Rice, one of the world's most prominent snowboarders and one of the major pioneers in the discipline known as Big Mountain Freestyle. There are two main types of snowboarding: Freeride and Freestyle. Freeride takes place off-piste (in natural, un-groomed terrain), often in the backcountry, usually in steep, cliffy, rugged faces. There's often an element of alpinism mixed in, as the majority of freeriders have to summit peaks under their own power, and wayfinding while riding down is extremely important to prevent getting hung up over an unmakeable cliff. There's an annual Freeride World Tour that's been going on in various forms since the mid-'90s. Freestyle, on the other hand, is what you see at the X Games and Olympics. It's much more famous, and it takes place within ski resorts, on carefully manicured runs. It includes events like Big Air, the Halfpipe, Park, and, of course, Slopestyle.
2026-03-27 22:27:01
In the sixth episode of Apple TV’s Imperfect Women, the soft-spoken housewife Mary (Elisabeth Moss) nervously awaits the judgment of her writing group. She is sharing a work of autofiction titled “Mary,” which revels in the narrator’s secret affair with her dissertation advisor’s husband.
“Takes real bravery to depict yourself as such an amoral person,” one participant comments. “Amoral, yes, and just unlikable!” another adds. The group pushes her to emphasize a different character, to “lean into the mystery, and the thriller!”
Mary is quietly crushed: If you can’t be the main character in your own work, where can you be?
2026-03-27 21:01:06
Opening night of the men's NCAA tournament’s round of 16 will be remembered for the guys who weren’t on the floor when the games were decided.
An intense and otherwise beautifully played Iowa-Nebraska game was decided by one of the most bizarre coaching boners in recent March Madness history and maybe ever. Nebraska had only four players on the court coming out of a timeout, with just under a minute left and Iowa up 71-68. Iowa center Alvaro Folgueiras exploited the Huskers’ heads-up-their-asses defensive scheme and ran a post pattern, and inbounder Kael Combs hit him in stride with a court-length bomb. Folgueiras powered through a desperation chase-down foul from Nebraska’s Berke Buyuktuncel to sink a layup, and the ensuing plus-one gave Iowa a six-point lead they never relinquished. The final score of the South Region tilt, played in Houston, was 77-71.
2026-03-27 04:13:49
Exactly one year ago today, Real Madrid Femenino appeared to be on the precipice of a new era. After five years of institutional disinterest and mediocre results, Las Blancas had at last achieved a feat worthy of the club it had until then borne in name only. Back then, in the first leg of its Champions League quarterfinal, Madrid welcomed Arsenal onto its swampy pitch and upset the Gunners, 2-0. Madrid then one-upped itself the following weekend, outplaying and beating the mighty Barcelona for the first ever Blanca Clásico victory. Those two triumphs, easily the biggest wins in the club's short history, were laudable in their own right, but were most important for the implicit promise within them: the idea that maybe, finally, Real Madrid was ready to cast off its self-imposed restraints and start the work of becoming the kind of team it could and should be. One year on, it's now clear that, unfortunately though unsurprisingly, the club's actual fate has not proven so inspirational.
Real Madrid wasted little time popping the bubble of hope it had done so well to create back in March of 2025. A couple days after that Clásico win, Real flew to London and got summarily thumped by Arsenal in the quarterfinal return leg, 3-0. Ousted from the Champions League, they then capitulated in the run-in of the Liga F title race that the unexpected Clásico win had gotten them back into. This season has been a turn to unremarkable form. Las Blancas are once again a lock to finish second in the league, but have never been serious challengers to Barcelona's domestic crown. Their Champions League form has been decent, earning them entry into the quarterfinals via a win over Paris in a play-in tie, but Real's European story will once again end at that stage of the tournament. There have been four subsequent Clásicos since that potentially transformative one last March, and Barcelona has won each and every one of them, by a cumulative score of 16-2. The most recent Spanish Derby came on Wednesday in the UWCL quarterfinal, where Barcelona plastered Madrid, in Madrid, by a score of six goals to two.
2026-03-27 03:21:18
There is no dignified way to promote a book. Emma Baccellieri of Sports Illustrated is a longtime friend of the pod and always a welcome guest, but she is also a busy woman—busy on the bargaining committee for the Sports Illustrated Union, busy covering the women's NCAA tournament on the West Coast, busy having deeply held opinions about sodas most people don't know exist. But as the co-author (with Jordan Robinson) of Court Queens, a new coffee table book about the history of women's basketball, she is also compelled to take a break from all that important work to go on a podcast with two hooting dunces to discuss that book, and basketball, and sodas.
Friends: We were those dunces. We're grateful that Emma took the time to join us for what wound up being a wide-ranging chat about history, labor, women's hoops, Opening Day gripes and grouses, and the triumphant-ish return of Mr. Pibb. A classic Emma episode, in short, even though she was recording it from the road and had to dip out after 45 minutes for a negotiation session.
2026-03-27 02:44:28
The International Olympic Committee announced Thursday that any athletes who do not pass a specific chromosome test will be banned from competition. This means that trans women will no longer be able to compete in the single largest showcase for women's sports in the world, and neither will any women who test positive for having the SRY gene. The implementation of this policy could lead to similar bans elsewhere in sports, as athletic organizations often take their cues from the global sports powerhouse. The new rules will kick in for the upcoming 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
The 10-page policy doesn't provide much detail on how and why the IOC, under the leadership Kirsty Coventry, the first female president in IOC history, reached its decision. The policy recaps a lot of closed-door bureaucracy with little explanation. Olympic leadership "conducted a broad-based review" of women's sports. That leadership decided it needed a "working group." The working group talked to a bunch of unnamed "specialists." And the working group reported back to the IOC, which came up with the ban. The New York Times did name one person involved in the decision-making: Dr. Jane Thornton, a former Olympic rower and the medical and scientific director for the IOC, but the same article said the analysis presented by Thornton "has not been made public."
So while the new policy makes many assertions—men have advantages over women in sports, all contact sports are more dangerous for women than men—there are few explanations given. No scientific papers are cited. No research is detailed. No citations or attribution can be found. There isn't even a hyperlink. Everything is stated as fact. This includes a statement that "genetic screening for sex does not create significant problems in practice," despite the entire history of gender testing creating problems in practice.
