How we produced a podcast about the Olympics in 2021
By Alex Sujong Laughlin
“It was important to us to create a podcast that didn’t accept the Olympics as an institution with wholly positive or negative impacts.”
When I found out we would be working on a podcast about the Olympics for USG Audio, I was thrilled and a little bit intimidated. Growing up, I swam, played soccer, and ran cross country, but watching sports bores me out of my mind; I have always struggled to understand the pride and allegiance people feel to their teams of choice.
Aside from my lack of knowledge of the Olympics’ traditions and history, there was another complicating factor. This year’s games have been heavily criticized; after being postponed in 2020 due to Covid-19, Japan is moving forward with the 2021 games despite ongoing concerns about Covid safety. And there has been increased attention on the ways that the IOC’s rules disproportionately — and negatively — affect Black women, from banning the use of swim caps created to accommodate Black hair to barring Sha’Carri Richardson from competing after she tested positive for marijuana.
Still, I was intrigued by the project because the Olympics is a global institution whose dramas encapsulate so many of the economic, political, and ethical stories at a given moment. Anything that big is worth looking at critically.
As a group of non-sports people, we started production by doing our homework. I reached out to a sports journalist friend who covered the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang and she recommended a long list of books and documentaries to get me up to speed. A couple of my favorites were Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics by Jules Boykoff and The Games: A Global History of the Olympics by David Goldblatt.
In reading these histories, we realized it was important to us to create a podcast that didn’t accept the Olympics as an institution with wholly positive or negative impacts. The Olympics has historically had a fraught relationship with marginalized groups of many different types, from the poor people who were displaced when their cities demolished housing to make way for sporting arenas, to the athletes themselves who were barred from competing because of their genders, races, or nationalities. We decided to dig into stories that sat in the middle ground between our image of the Olympics (the spectacle, the glitz, the athleticism) and what we were learning to be true of it.
Some of our stories focused on the Olympics as an institution, and its impacts. We researched what happened in Atlanta when it hosted the 1996 Olympics, and how it all came to a head over the mascot the city chose to represent the games: Izzy.
Other stories held a tighter focus on the athletes themselves. Since the Olympics is a major international sporting event that has become synonymous with athletic excellence, we wanted to explore what it meant to be an athlete striving to land on the world’s highest stage. The problem is that when athletes ascend to that level of public visibility, they become a symbol, too. For their countries, for political parties — for so many things other than what they are, which are athletes. That’s what happened to the 2018 Korean women’s ice hockey team and German swimmer Sylvia Gerash.
Finally, a few of our stories center on the ways athletes fight their way to the Olympics — through racist coaches who don’t believe in them, through mental illness, and through public failure.
We’re proud to have spent the last 7 months looking directly at the most beautiful and ugly parts of this institution, and as the 2021 Olympics kick off this summer, we’ll be tuning in to cheer on two subjects of our episodes who will be competing: fencer Khalil Thompson and runner Angelina Lohalith.
You can listen to The Greatness with Kareem Maddox here.