In Episode 90 of the Tennis Abstract Podcast, Jeff and Carl welcome Joshua Robinson (@joshrobinson23), European sports reporter for the Wall Street Journal and co-author of the book The Club: How the English Premier League Became the Wildest, Richest, Most Disruptive Force in Sports. Josh first joined me for an episode about 17 years ago, back in December 2019, and it’s great to get another round of his insights. If you haven’t read his book, I highly recommend it, even if you’re not a soccer fan.
In this episode, we run the gamut of Covid-in-sports topics, including the fate of the 2020/21 Tokyo Olympics, the outlook for athletes who want to jump the vaccine queue, the miraculously completed Tour de France, how Wimbledon’s response to the pandemic might have been the best of all, and what to expect in international sports once vaccines are widely available. Josh has written about most of these subjects, and I encourage you to browse his archives at the WSJ website.
We also touch on a few non-Covid questions, like what Slovenian sports can teach the rest of the world, and the role of the underhand serve. We close with a few words about our late friend and colleague, Tom Perrotta.
Thanks for listening!
Also, one last reminder: Next week we’ll be talking about our first book club pick, A Handful of Summers by Gordon Forbes. Let us know if you have thoughts about the book, questions for us to discuss on the show, or suggestions for future book club selections.
Fans of the TA podcast will also want to check out Dangerous Exponents, the new Covid-19 podcast that Carl and I are doing. Today we released episode 8, about issues with the global vaccine rollout.
(Note: this week’s episode is about 59 minutes long; in some browsers the audio player may display a different length. Sorry about that!)
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