The archive of decisive moments
Basil D'Oliveira was born in Cape Town and barred from first-class cricket there. In 1968 his selection for an England tour of South Africa became a crisis the apartheid government could not manage.
Read the storyEach section reads sport through a different measure: the moment, the number, the consequence.
Where sport meets law, politics, money and public life, and what happens on both sides of that contact. Rulings, boycotts, statutes and the results they produced.
Records, streaks and statistical milestones — how they were set, why they have held, and what the numbers genuinely support. Conditions and caveats are stated, not…
Single contests and moments that changed the direction of a sport, a career, or something well outside sport. Each entry works from the decisive quantity outward:…
The newest entries in the archive, with the figure each one turns on.
The torch relay, the opening-ceremony spectacle and most of modern sports camerawork were all designed for one Games — and designed as…
Title IX does not mention athletics anywhere in its text. It is one sentence long, and it changed participation in American sport…
Wilt Chamberlain scored a hundred points in an NBA game on 2 March 1962. There is no known film of it, and…
Bob Beamon improved the world long jump record by fifty-five centimetres in a single attempt. The optical device on the runway rail…
No one has come within twelve games of it in eighty years. Statisticians who have modelled the whole history of baseball keep…
George Foreman was twenty-five, undefeated, and had flattened both men who had beaten Muhammad Ali. Ali was thirty-two and, by consensus, finished.
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