Sports fans had such a thrilling 2016 – with the NBA finals and World Series both ending in dramatic victories for teams who had waited decades for a title – that as sports editor, I feared 2017 would be an anticlimax. I was wrong. It started with the New England Patriots’ mind-bending comeback win in one of the greatest Super Bowls of all time before we were treated to the spectacle/freakshow that was Floyd Mayweather v Conor McGregor.

But the most influential athlete of the year barely made it on to the field. (In fact, his first and last appearance came on New Year’s Day.) Colin Kaepernick’s protest against racial inequality started last year but caught fire this NFL season, soon dragging in players, coaches, fans, owners … and the president of the United States.

Will McGregor-Mayweather save boxing – or bury it?

Our liveblog of the fight between former boxing world champion Floyd Mayweather and UFC star Conor McGregor ended up being the most read sports story in Guardian history. But what does it say about the health of US boxing that its biggest event in years was a contest headlined by fighter well past his prime? Bryan Graham looked at how the fight might affect the sport.

“You’d never know that boxing was dying from one glance inside the Morris Park Boxing Club in the Van Nest neighborhood of the Bronx on a simmering August weekday afternoon, amid the thwap-thwap of gloves on punching bags, the faint whistle of jump ropes, the smell of leather and sweat. Thousands of young professional and amateur fighters come through the gym since it opened shop in 1977, among them homegrown world champions like Davis and Lou Del Valle.

“But a quarter-century ago, an estimated 150 gyms were scattered throughout the five boroughs. Today there are fewer than 10. Boxing gyms have struggled to keep their doors open as business declines, while rents escalate and gentrification encroaches.

“The famed spaces of yesteryear are all gone: Gramercy Gym, owned by Cus D’Amato, trainer of world champions Floyd Patterson, Jose Torres and Mike Tyson, has become a PC Richards store near Union Square. Grupp’s is a Food Bank For New York City. Others have been converted to storefronts for Jamba Juice or Urban Outfitters. Many gyms, like Gleason’s and the Church Street Boxing Gym, now primarily cater not to aspiring fighters but to white-collar clients, who may want a rigorous workout but aren’t looking to boxing for a livelihood.”

The NFL stood by African American players … until its money was threatened

The biggest sports story of the year has happened off the field – or at least on the sidelines. A war has rumbled between Donald Trump and NFL players who have knelt during the national anthem to highlight racial inequality. At first the NFL supported the players but, as Les Carpenter explains, as ratings and sponsorship have been hit so the league’s position on the protests has become more ambiguous.

“The business of being an NFL owner is such a good one that no man or woman who holds a team among their possessions dares do anything to kill their golden goose. A decade ago, the league’s most valuable team – the Dallas Cowboys – was estimated by Forbes to be worth $1.6bn, and a third of the teams had values below $1bn. Today, the least valuable franchise is worth $1.6bn while Dallas’s worth has soared to nearly $5bn.

“This is, of course, phony wealth, claimed only on the open market. The figures are buttressed with stadium palaces built on the backs of taxpayers, huge television deals and private marketing agreements sold against the logos of the teams themselves. With the teams’ outlandish values tied to an image the owners do everything to protect, it’s no wonder Dallas’s Jerry Jones said on Sunday he will bench any player who ‘disrespects the flag’ by kneeling during the anthem.

“There was good PR in standing against Trump two weeks ago, but the more the president turned his fire on the NFL – and as TV ratings slid – the more those bars wobbled on the value charts. Whether she meant to or not ESPN’s Jemele Hill drilled straight into the NFL’s most-sensitive nerve this week when she tweeted the best way to get to Jones was through the advertisers.”

How to disappear completely: will Hope Solo return – and does she even want to?

Much has been made of the failure of the US men’s national team to qualify for next summer’s World Cup. But the women’s team – the reigning World Cup champions – have problems of their own. They went out limply at last year’s Olympics and are not the unstoppable force they once were. It was in Rio that one of the team’s biggest stars, Hope Solo, sparked her exile from the game. Beau Dure looked at a long and eventful career.

“For months, the question was simple. Where is Hope Solo?

“The former – and perhaps future – US women’s goalkeeper, who parlayed her fame into an appearance on Dancing With The Stars and legions of social media followers, had pulled a reverse DB Cooper, leaving Washington state and disappearing into an area defined by her management only as “rural North Carolina”.

“Now she’s tiptoeing back into the spotlight. She’s making a handful of media and public appearances, all on her own terms. Over the weekend, she was in Philadelphia as an ambassador for Street Soccer USA, which hosted a youth event and announced teams for the Homeless World Cup. She’s doing neither of the things for which she’s famous – playing soccer and stirring up controversy.

“Those who know Solo still aren’t ready to talk about her and what she may do in the future. Among those who declined or didn’t respond to requests for comment from the Guardian for this story: Solo’s lawyers, the US women’s players union and a number of former team-mates.

“So now the question is more complex: who is Hope Solo? And who will she be when she’s healthy enough to play again?”

How Dennis Rodman came to stand between the world and nuclear war

As the tension between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un heated up in September, nuclear war didn’t seem a completely far-fetched possibility. To add to the general terror was the news that the only person with a personal relationship with both men – and perhaps the only man standing between us and annihilation – was former NBA star Dennis Rodman. Yep, that one – the one who once married himself.



“Rodman stood out on the court with his dyed hair and numerous piercings. Off the court, he moved from controversy to controversy, fueled by a near-limitless need for attention. Rodman dated several celebrities, most famously Madonna and Carmen Electra, appeared in terrible action movies, posed in wedding dresses and coffins to promote his tell-all books and became a tabloid fixture thanks to his self-destructive behavior. He was once even a candidate on Celebrity Apprentice, where Trump fired him for misspelling the name of the future first lady.

“Because of his history, few took his “basketball diplomacy” trip to North Korea very seriously. If they did, it was to criticize Rodman for participating in what was, at least partially, propaganda meant to humanize one of the world’s most notorious dictators. When Rodman proclaimed that he and Kim were “friends for life”, one wondered whether he had put any thought of the people his new best friend had imprisoned or executed.”

Baseball no longer a supergiant but it is still the most American of sports

There has been much talk the decline of baseball, but for the second season in a row the World Series turned into a classic. David Roth told us why baseball fans have reasons to be cheerful.



“Baseball is still fantastically profitable – MLB revenue came in at around $10bn in 2016, the 14th consecutive year of growth – but its ratings and self-presentation and downcast broader vibe suggest that it is in decline. In baseball’s tendency to discuss the present as a pale echo or sad perversion of baseball’s past, there is the unmistakable whiff of a codger done wrong (its obsession with a period in history in which African Americans were brutalized under Jim Crow laws may, as Chris Rock has suggested, have something to do with baseball’s lack of black fans).



“Some of this is a specific tic inherent to baseball’s discourse, but there is also something to it: the game is no longer the dominant American sport, and seems to view its future with a weird wariness. This has long been baseball’s way, and it’s still plain to see in the grudging half-measures that the league has taken to deal with glaring problems: longer games are blamed for putting off younger fans, while there has been a steep decline in the number of African American players in the big leagues. Until their bottom lines are bloodied a bit, baseball’s power elite have traditionally been disinclined to change.

“There’s something very American about this refusal to change, and also something very much of this particular reactionary, sour, Trump-stained moment in the nation’s history. But there is promise, here, albeit of a kind that baseball, for its own peculiar reasons, may be reluctant to acknowledge. For all its cultural backwardness, baseball has routinely been ahead of the nation as a whole in important ways, if not always for the most enlightened reasons. While American politics are seized by one party’s attempt to stop history in its tracks, baseball is already modeling the polyglot, diverse future that Trump was elected by promising to prevent. As opposed to the NFL, where the overwhelming majority of players are American, the best teams to have featured in this season’s postseason are dizzyingly diverse – nine nations were represented on the defending champion Chicago Cubs’ 40-man roster, and that diversity is something they have in common with such American League powerhouses as the Cleveland Indians and Houston Astros. The future is coming for baseball, whether baseball likes it or not.”

Design by Sam Morris and Francisco Navas