[Sport] In 2020, Sports Was About Staying Safe and Speaking Out

[Shyloo]

In 2020, Sports Was About Staying Safe and Speaking Out

 

The troubled, truncated 2020 sports season will be remembered as the Year of the Bubble. As a pandemic raged and protests of systemic racism rocked the United States, athletes played on. Those who competed in the controlled environment of a bubble had the most success over the novel coronavirus. Science, for the win.

But 2020 was about more than finding a way to play. For the W.N.B.A. and the N.B.A. in Florida, the bubble didn’t just protect. It projected the voices of the players in support of the Black Lives Matter movement after the fatal shootings of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd.

Then there was another shooting. After the police critically wounded Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis., the Milwaukee Bucks decided not to play a playoff game, the first domino to fall in a wave of disruption across sports.

Unfolding in a feverish few days, the team’s action inspired work stoppages in the W.N.B.A., Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, Major League Soccer and the N.F.L. The tennis star Naomi Osaka said she would withdraw from the Western & Southern Open before officials postponed play.

 

The momentum carried to the English Premier League, Formula 1, cricket and rugby. Players in the Premier League wore Black Lives Matter patches and the motto on the back of their jerseys when play resumed. Teams in the Bundesliga, La Liga and Serie A knelt at the start of games as European football grappled with racism in their sport. They took their cue from how U.S. basketball players responded to the death of Floyd.

YEAR IN SPORTS
Times reporters on their memorable moments from 2020.
Social activism and the pandemic dominated the sports world.
“The bubble plus corona pushed everything at the same time,” said Louis Moore, an associate history professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. “What it did was put everybody in the spotlight, and there was no being on the fence.

“They managed this balance between playing and social activism at a time when the rest of the country was in a 1960-ish summer mode.”

 

But when the pandemic subsides, what will endure from 2020 in sports?

Amira Rose Davis, an assistant professor of history at Penn State and one of the hosts of the “Burn it All Down” sports podcast, cautioned against romanticizing athletic activism.

“There is such energy that makes it hard to go back to what it was,” Davis said. “But it’s not going to be without ownership or corporate sponsors trying — not to put it exactly back in the box — but to draw a new box. As if to say, ‘What are we OK with on a corporate level?’

“There’s absolutely merit in pausing to celebrate what’s happened,” she said. “The trick is to not get so comfortable facing backwards that you get stuck.”

 

There were virtual and cardboard fans in baseball and the Bundesliga, and the Covid-positive Justin Turner posing on the field after his Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series. The pandemic shuffled calendars: the Tour de France to September; the French Open to October, with Rafael Nadal reliably winning his 13th there; and the Masters to November without azaleas. College football was stumbling and fumbling, the Vanderbilt soccer goalie Sarah Fuller kicked for the football team, Kim Ng became the first female general manager in baseball, and the Denver Broncos lost all their quarterbacks to coronavirus carelessness.

Phew. Good luck rhyming that. Throughout it all, the bubble was the refrain.

“We all had the understanding that the season was for something,” Nneka Ogwumike, the president of the W.N.B.A. Players Association and a Los Angeles Sparks forward, said in an interview. At the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla., 144 players from 12 teams sequestered for a shortened 22-game regular season, concluding with a Seattle Storm title in October.

“Even to make it to the end was an incredible feat, emotionally and physically,” Ogwumike said. “We were able to impact our communities and fans and the sports world in a way that we had hoped to.”