Articles by Dave Zirin

Source: The Nation

Colin Kaepernick is now the face of Nike, which raises questions we should not be afraid to ask.

On Sunday, shock waves went through the sports and marketing worlds when news broke that the quarterback blackballed by the NFL for kneeling during the anthem to protest police violence, Colin Kaepernick, would be the face of the 30th anniversary of Nike’s “Just Do It” ad campaign. The ad is an unairbrushed black-and-white close-up of Kaepernick’s face with the slogan “Believe in something even if it means sacrificing everything. ” read more

Source: The Nation

The Olympics are over, but they have set the stage for a wider social conflict over the future of the city.

“I am absolutely convinced that history will talk of the Rio de Janeiro before the Games and the much better Rio de Janeiro after the Olympic Games.” — Thomas Bach, President International Olympic Committee

Mr. Bach is delusional. But he is correct about one thing: people will talk about Rio as a city “before” and “after” the Olympics. It just won’t be the conversation of his fantasies conjured inside his Olympic-sized bubble. Now the real story starts in Rio. Now that the 2016 Summer Games have been completed, with the most discussed dramas being empty seats and the lies of an over-privileged swimmer, the real story begins: the story of how badly the Olympics will end up warping the city itself. read more

Source: The Nation

The administrators created a world in which universities revolve socially, politically, and economically around the exploited labor of football. Now let them reap what they sow.

In shocking news that comes in utter contradiction to a statement released just yesterday, University of Missouri President Tim Wolfe has announced his resignation.

The move comes after incidents of bigotry and racial vandalism that scarred the Columbia campus, followed by weeks of protest, a hunger strike by grad student Jonathan Butler, as well as the announcement that faculty members would not be showing up for work.

Yet the tipping point for Wolfe’s departure was the announcement Saturday night that the black football players at Mizzou would be refusing to practice or play until the school president was gone. Their announcement was followed the next day by a widely circulated photo of most of the team, including many white players, sitting with head coach Gary Pinkel, and the statement that the players had full support of the coaching staff in their efforts. Tim Wolfe makes $459,000 a year and the school would have to forfeit $1 million just for missing this weekend’s game against BYU. In other words, math was not on Tim Wolfe’s side and he was as good as gone. read more

Source: In These Times

Excerpted from Dave Zirin’s Brazil’s Dance With the Devil: The World Cup, The Olympics and the Fight for Democracy (May 2014, Haymarket Books).

When Brazil won its bid to host the 2016 Olympics, the country was heralded as a capitalist success story, with the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other organs of the 1% engorged over a nation whose stock market, Bovespa, had grown at a rate of 523 percent over the previous decade. For so many in Brazil, this was long overdue. Hosting these sporting events was about international recognition that Brazil’s day had come. read more