Sports are an escape from the real world, but they’re also a reflection of it. Throughout 2022, sports were another front in the cultural battles erupting across America and the world. Yes, sports brought us immense joy, but sports also brought us frustrating new ways of fighting the same old battles. Here’s a look — in alphabetical order — at the sports stories that defined 2022 and shaped how we’ll view and discuss sports for years to come.
Amazon takes over Thursday Night Football: When the Chiefs met the Chargers in Week 2, Amazon became the first streaming provider to nab an exclusive, weekly NFL game. No Amazon Prime subscription? No chance to watch Thursday night games. The days of broadcast TV’s dominance have been over for years, and now cable’s preeminence is ending, too.
College Football’s revolution: No sport saw as much upheaval in 2022 as college football, from every angle. Teams leaped conferences in a frantic, tradition-upending land grab; Name, Image and Likeness funds funneled millions of dollars into the pockets of players; and the transfer portal turned every year into a fantasy football draft; and finally, the announcement of the 12-team college playoff signaled the final death of the sport’s old bowl-driven championship format.
Novak Djokovic’s anti-COVID vaccine stance: The world’s No. 1 tennis player became an unlikely but effective symbol for anti- COVID vaccine advocates after he gave up the chance to play in both the Australian and U.S. Opens because of the tournaments’ vaccine mandates.
Brittney Griner’s detention and release: No sports story in 2022 better captured the divided national mood than the saga of Brittney Griner, the WNBA star arrested in Russia in February for carrying trace amounts of cannabis oil. The arrest, detention and subsequent nine-year prison sentence made it clear Griner was being held as a political hostage by a nation enmeshed in an ugly war, and that’s exactly how the story played out. The Biden administration agreed to trade Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer imprisoned in America, for Griner, a controversial move that drew both relief and outrage.
Aaron Judge’s home run chase: Aaron Judge, the mammoth Yankees first baseman, recaptured the tune-in-every-night joy of that era as he hammered pitch after pitch into orbit. In the greatest contract-year performance in sports history, he ended his season with 62 home runs, eclipsing the American League record held by fellow Yankee Roger Maris, enshrining himself as a Yankee immortal, and bringing America’s eyes back to its former national pastime.
LIV Golf: Imagine if Aaron Rodgers, Christian McCaffrey, Russell Wilson and Tyreek Hill decided to leave the NFL en masse and join a rival football league playing only on YouTube. That’s effectively what happened in golf this year, as many of the sport’s biggest names — including Masters winners like Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson and reigning British Open champion Cam Smith — abandoned the PGA Tour to join the upstart LIV Golf tour. Lured by the promise of phenomenal riches — in some cases, nine-figure signing bonuses — marquee players turned a willful blind eye to the source of the money: the Saudi government’s controversial, and virtually bottomless, Public Investment Fund.
Retirements: This was the year icons left the stage, and several of them even stayed there. Roger Federer acknowledged the inevitable crush of injuries with a tearful retirement alongside his longtime rival Rafael Nadal. Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski brought the curtain down on a career remarkable for its longevity, victory and ever-changing strategy. Sue Bird, WNBA and Olympic champion, wrapped up one of the most decorated careers of any American athlete ever. Shaun White finished his fifth Olympics having redefined the sport of snowboarding. Serena Williams bade farewell at the U.S. Open … and then hinted she might not be done after all. Tom Brady retired in February, and stayed retired for all of a month and a half, coming back for at least one more season, possibly at the cost of his family tranquility.
Lia Thomas’ battle for transgender athletes’ rights: A former swimmer for the University of Pennsylvania, Lia Thomas became the focal point of a nationwide discussion on the rights of transgender athletes. After competing as a man early in her collegiate career, Thomas began transitioning using hormone replacement therapy in 2019. After meeting the NCAA’s gender policies, she swam for Penn’s women’s team in the 2021-22 season. She became the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I championship in any sport when she won the 500-yard freestyle event in March 2022.
Kamila Valieva’s devastating Olympic skating: Nothing illustrated the vast gap between Olympic ideals and Olympic reality like Kamila Valieva, a 15-year-old Russian figure skater predicted to take gold at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. When test results from a prior event suggested that Valieva may have been using a banned substance, she became the focal point of worldwide scorn, a symbol of Russia’s well-earned and well-deserved reputation for cheating on the international stage. In her solo event, Valieva cracked under the pressure, finishing fourth, and the cold scorn of her coach only added to the disgust the world felt at the wretched scene.
Deshaun Watson’s big return: Once pegged as one of the NFL’s elite quarterbacks of the future, Deshaun Watson spent the entire 2021 season sidelined by the Houston Texans following dozens of allegations of sexual assault from multiple massage therapists. The Texans dealt Watson to the Cleveland Browns in March, and Cleveland signed Watson to the largest and most-guaranteed contract in NFL history — a move that drew widespread condemnation given the fact that the legal action against Watson remained unresolved. The Watson story served as a referendum on how the NFL and its teams balance the concerns and allegations of women against the potential for on-field success … and it’s no surprise that the year ended with Watson in uniform and starting.
World Cup: The year ended on a perfect, conflicted note: One of the greatest games in all of sports history capped off a five-week World Cup run built on one of the most grim foundations in sports history. Argentina’s Lionel Messi won his long-awaited World Cup while France’s Kylian Mbappe established himself as an international superstar — but they did so in Qatar, a nation whose bone-deep corruption built the World Cup on the backs of effectively enslaved migrant workers. The transcendent joy of the match on the pitch came at the cost of immense human suffering beyond it — the perfect encapsulation of the contradiction of being a sports fan in 2022.
