How long can sport, like Hollywood, continue to wave away the contradictions between its activities and its supposed ideals?Someone once told me about a film actor who had developed a powerful ecological conscience, and in this spirit he bought every c…
Ever since Peter O’Connor scaled a flagpole in Athens to call out Olympic unfairness the stage was set for winning athletes to make powerful statements. So why outlaw it now?Some called him the Antelope. Others the King of Spring. But, above all, Peter…
Having been pushed to the brink of retirement before the last Paralympics, the swimmer took a year out. Now, reunited with her old coach, she cannot wait for Tokyo“A lot of the time, when I swim, I close my eyes because it is definitely lonely,” Ellie …
Former bartender to miss 2020 Olympics after retiring horseGraves and Verdades burst from obscurity to reach world No 1Dressage duo helped US to rare bronze in team event in 2016Laura Graves, an Olympic bronze medalist and the United States’ top medal …
Sanctions for raising fists or taking a knee at 2020 GamesPrevious protests ‘had no effect whatsoever’, says IOCPoliticians and athletes should keep politics out of this year’s Tokyo Olympic Games to protect the event’s neutrality and its status as a p…
Mattresses will also be recycled into plastics after Tokyo 2020Organisers will make medals and torch from recycled metalsAthletes competing at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games will sleep on bed frames made from recyclable cardboard, with mat…
The official art posters for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games, created by renowned artists such as Chris Ofili, Naoki Urasawa, Philippe Weisbecker and Viviane Sassen, have been unveiled. Each Games creates posters to promote cultural and spo…
Our writers choose the Olympians likely to make the headlines at the most anticipated sporting event of the yearSeb Coe, who knows a thing or two about winning Olympic titles, believes Asher-Smith will be Team GB’s “poster girl” in Tokyo. Given her sea…
The Olympics and Paralympics head to Tokyo, Euro 2020 sends football fans around Europe, plus the return of the Ryder CupThe sporting year’s traditional raucous curtain-raiser, the PDC world darts final, takes place on New Year’s Day. The BDO champions…
Visions of another record Olympic medal tally are unrealistic while Gareth Southgate’s men are likely to peak after Euro 2020A decade ago, Observer Sport Monthly tried to imagine what sport would look like in 2020. China, it daringly predicted, would b…
Visions of another record Olympic medal tally are unrealistic while Gareth Southgate’s men are likely to peak after Euro 2020A decade ago, Observer Sport Monthly tried to imagine what sport would look like in 2020. China, it daringly predicted, would b…
The winner of this weekend’s Keirin Grand Prix in Japan will take home nearly $1m but why has international success been elusive for the 2020 Olympic hosts in the event it invented?Thousands of people armed with betting slips will pack into an ageing v…
American surfing legend falls short of qualifying for Olympics John John Florence joins Kolohe Andino on two-man US teamJulian Wilson books place for Australia, joining Owen WrightEleven-time world champion Kelly Slater failed to qualify for the US Oly…
• Team GB finished second overall in Rio with 67 medals• Warr says ‘bases are loaded’ when it comes to medal potentialUK Sport is “quietly confident” that the Tokyo Olympics will be the best ever for British athletes, surpassing the record-breaking me…
• Russian anti-doping agency votes to file an appeal• President Putin indicated they wanted an appeal filedRussia’s anti-doping agency Rusada said on Thursday it would appeal the four-year doping sanctions barring the country from competing under its f…
The world champion has been revitalised by a move to Montpellier and has put the lows of 2016 and 2017 behind her“In a way I crave those moments now,” Katarina Johnson-Thompson says of the quiet and the solitude that helped her become the heptathlon wo…
• Mo Farah among those in marketing rights dispute• Adam Gemili: ‘We want to recognise our sponsors’The British Olympic Association has entered into a legal dispute with its own athletes as a row over marketing rights looks set to overshadow the countd…
• Over three million requests for tickets in first lottery phase• Parsons: ‘This shows appetite Japanese society has for games’There have been more than three million requests for Tokyo 2020 Paralympics tickets in the first lottery phase, three times t…
• Russian president indicates there are ‘reasons to appeal’• Country has 21 days to respond to proposed sanctionsRussian president Vladimir Putin has said his country have ’reason to appeal’ against the four-year ban imposed by the World Anti-Doping Ag…
Caveats and compromises in the small print mean there is a good chance Russian athletes and footballers will appear at the 2020 Olympics and the 2022 World CupIt makes for an alluring headline: Russia finally banned from international sport for four ye…
