Though the sports we watch brought with them a façade of ‘back to normal’ as the pandemic-altered 2021 came to a close, a new reality took root this year: Every game, every practice, every season is a positive test or outbreak away from being postponed or compromised or cancelled.
Nobody can take any of this for granted anymore. Thatâs one of the many ways the Covid-19 pandemic carved away at the ‘old normal’ in 2021, a year in which sports came back from the total shutdown the coronavirus triggered in 2020 â but not quite in the way we remembered.
Take March Madness. After being scrubbed in 2020, the college hoops extravaganza returned. But even the term ‘March Madness’ lost a bit of its fun-loving insouciance when, thanks to a video posted on social media by Oregonâs Sedona Prince, the inequities between the menâs tournament, which used the moniker, and the womenâs, which did not, were spelled out in stark terms. That led to a gender-equity study that called for a number of changes â in how the NCAA budgets for the tournaments and, yes, in what it calls them. The ‘March Madness’ brand now belongs to the women, too.
In another change with roots in the pandemic, the days of elite athletes being judged solely on the titles they win, the points they score or the medals they bring home appear numbered â if not gone for good. The face of that movement was gymnast Simone Biles, who, like so many other Olympians, extended her training an additional 12 months, while also enduring a year more of scrutiny and pressure in the leadup to the delayed Tokyo Games.
Overwhelmed by it all, Biles stepped away in the middle of the gold-medal team competition, and in doing so, changed the conversation for the rest of the Olympics, and the rest of sports. The words shouldnât have needed saying, but they did. Combined with similar expressions from tennis champion Naomi Osaka, they slapped an exclamation point on a long-under-the-radar discussion about athletes and mental health. On the other hand, not every change or gain or loss in the 2021 return to sports had to do with Covid-19.