Caitlin Clark had a hell of a year.
Photo: Ron Hoskins/NBAE/Getty Images
Measured by sheer number of viewers, this might have been the most popular sports year in American history. More people watched the Super Bowl than ever before; the World Series had its highest ratings in a decade; the Olympics drew nearly double the number of viewers the Tokyo Games did in 2021; women’s sports have grown so dramatically that, in basketball, women are getting better numbers than the men. But I can’t help but wonder if all these successes constitute something of a blip — one we’ll look back at as a zenith rather than the start of an unstoppable upward trajectory. 2024 was a lot of things — boy, was it — but more than anything else, it was a year when the need for escapism was paramount, and people needed a place to hide their heads in the sand, if just for a little while.
There aren’t many better places to do that than in the world of sports, for better or, mostly, worse. Just ask the Kamala Harris campaign:
Sports were huge this year in part because they weren’t wrapped up with politics, for the most part not even tangentially. What actually happened on the field wasn’t nearly as dramatic or momentous as we’ve seen in past years, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t serve as a vital distraction anyway. We may need the distraction even more in the next four years, but I wonder how long the current dynamic can last. All those political controversies that engulfed the sports world during the Trump era? They’re going to return with a vengeance.
In the first of two pieces wrapping up the year — we’ll look at the ten biggest stories next week — here are the most important sports figures of 2024. Some were crowned champions, some just wouldn’t stop trending, and some were at the center of every conversation whether they wanted to be or not.
In 2023, Biles returned to the top of her sport and established herself as perhaps the greatest gymnast of all time. She had only one more hurdle to climb: an Olympics performance that would erase, or at least rewrite, the summer of 2021, when she dropped out of the 2021 Tokyo Games. Biles leapt — and twisted, and spun, and landed perfectly — over that hurdle, winning four more medals, three golds and a silver, and serving as the face of a USA Olympic team that won all-around gold after falling short in 2021 (and that has been through a nightmarish decade). The lasting image of Biles may not be one of her many individual victories, but the joy she consistently had for her teammates, past and present — women who have been through some of the most harrowing circumstances imaginable and have come through it all as champions. You never know: Biles might do it again in 2028.
Clark began the year as one of the most popular athletes in the country, a transformative figure for a sport that was already expanding rapidly before she ascended to superstardom. As tends to happen for anyone who reaches the fame stratosphere, she found herself getting dragged into controversies she wanted nothing to do with. All she did was shut up, try to learn everything a rookie in a new league needs to learn, and, eventually, dominate. It was only then that she commented on all that was swirling around her, and did so in a way that revealed her to be an empathetic, thoughtful human being as well as a fierce competitor, alienating only those who were never interested in what made her so great in the first place. Clark is a transcendent American athlete who has already changed so much about our sporting culture. And she is, to remind, just getting started.
With venerated lions Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal leaving the sport and ever-divisive Novak Djokovic possibly approaching retirement himself, the future of men’s tennis has felt a bit up in the air. For a while, it seemed the young Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz was the only real heir apparent to the Big Three. That’s why 23-year-old Jannik Sinner, the first-ever Italian to reach No. 1, is such a lifesaver. Sinner had his breakthrough year in 2024, soaring to the top of the rankings with dominant performances at the Australian Open, U.S. Open, and many places in between. (Alcaraz won the year’s other two majors.) He has also done so in a way that’s actually refreshing in this day and age: Sinner stays off social media and keeps his private life private, and the only real topic he delves into is the importance of mental health. There was a doping scandal to complicate things, but Sinner has been cleared of wrongdoing, even if not everyone is convinced. Tennis needs new stars and new rivalries, and Sinner delivers on both counts.
Whether it’s performing at halftime of the Super Bowl or trying to sell you T-Mobile phones, Snoop Dogg is uniquely talented at being incredibly appealing on television. That’s why it made so much sense for NBC to make him a centerpiece of its Summer Olympics coverage this summer in what turned out to be the most purely enjoyable Games in decades. It helped greatly that NBC finally figured out how to broadcast them — primarily by using the NFL RedZone model of jumping around from sport to sport, the perfect way to experience something as disparate and random as the Olympics. But Snoop Dogg’s presence was key, too. Other than Biles, he was the face of the proceedings, just flitting from event to event and looking as if he was having the time of his life. The Olympics are a grand global event, but they are also rather silly to casual viewers. Snoop Dogg represented this high-low mix perfectly. That he is the new Bob Costas says something about the long arc of American life.
Harbaugh is an avatar for what college football has become: relentlessly mercenary, image-obsessed, maniacal, lacking in self-awareness; increasingly bizarre; and undeniably, irresistibly entertaining. Harbaugh — who, it should be said, was quite funny on The Detroiters — was suspended for half of Michigan’s football season in 2023 but returned in time to guide his alma mater to its first national championship since 1988. He then returned to the NFL (where he once coached the 49ers to the Super Bowl) as coach of the L.A. Chargers. The man is a total lunatic, but what about college football isn’t anymore?
He ended 2023 by signing the biggest contract in baseball history — an achievement that wouldn’t even last a year — and rounded out 2024 by winning his first World Series. But a lot happened in between. What was meant to be a glorious Dodgers launch in South Korea turned scandalous when it was revealed that Ohtani’s interpreter had lost millions of dollars gambling. This raised alarms that Ohtani himself might have gotten caught up somehow, mostly because, for all his fame, we didn’t really know him. Ohtani changed that this year: He had an MVP season at the plate, but he also finally seemed to be enjoying himself, leading the Dodgers to a title with joy, awe, and a very cute new dog. Ohtani had the best year of his career, on and off the field, and remember: He didn’t throw a single pitch. He’ll be ready to do that again in 2025.
On Tuesday night, Enigma, a self-produced documentary series about Aaron Rodgers, will premiere on Netflix. It was filmed before the 2024 season, his first real one with the Jets after an Achilles injury cost him all but a few plays in 2023. That’s an important distinction, because Rodgers’s 2024 season was a total disaster, ayahuasca or not. Rodgers was a constant divisive presence off the field — ultimately pushing out his coach — and even worse on it, looking old, slow, and exhausted. Rodgers’s self-importance has long run aside his athletic brilliance, but this year, it very much surpassed it. Now he’s just an old, washed-up athlete. I can’t put it any better than I did the week after the election: “Last week, it looked like a narcissistic, past-his-prime, science-denying, self-aggrandizing serial liar might finally get the public comeuppance he so obviously deserved. Okay, so it didn’t happen in politics, to the country’s detriment. But at least it is happening — albeit on a much smaller, less consequential scale — in sports.” It’s okay to point and laugh. He deserves it.
