Former NFL player Chris Borland grew up Catholic in Dayton. He talks with host Sacha Pfeiffer about his call for the church to take a stronger stand for gun control and against white supremacy.

SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:

Chris Borland is another athlete who’s taking a stand, and he’s asking other athletes to join him. He’s a former NFL player who grew up in Kettering, Ohio, a suburb of Dayton. After the mass shootings there and in El Paso and in Gilroy, Calif., he wrote an open letter to the archbishop of Cincinnati urging the Catholic Church to, quote, “lead as Christ would.” I asked Borland why he wanted to single out the Catholic Church…

CHRIS BORLAND: It’s what I know, and I grew up within the church. And I see a concerning lack of assertiveness in addressing what’s going on in our country. And to have, you know, what happened in Dayton be met with what I’d consider just the minimal reaction thoughts and prayers to me isn’t enough.

PFEIFFER: What exactly do you want the church to do?

BORLAND: To firstly name and condemn white supremacy – two of the three terrorist attacks were carried out in the name of white supremacy. Secondly, to frame gun control for what it is, a pro-life stance. And thirdly, to hold accountable politicians who are parishioners who use the lord’s name and talk about God in Christ to get elected and then don’t act once in office and embody those values.

PFEIFFER: Last week, the archbishop of San Antonio, Texas, on Twitter was critical of President Trump. He said to him, stop your hatred. And he got heavily criticized for that – the archbishop did – kind of had to backtrack a little. If the archbishop and a part of the country that’s been right at the center of both the crisis on the border and now this attack can’t come out strongly and explicitly call out people that he thinks are promoting racism and violence, do you think it’s realistic to expect other Catholic leaders to do the same?

BORLAND: I don’t know that it’s realistic. This may be entirely naive. I’ve emailed and called and left messages to the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, you know, a half dozen or more over the past few days, and have gotten minimal response. So we do have a lot of power in the voice and the numbers of athletes that have competed in the greater Catholic League and we’re going to start there. Maybe it falls on deaf ears, but I think it’s better than doing nothing.

PFEIFFER: You mentioned that you’re trying to build a coalition in a sense of other athletes with prominent public platforms to speak out and join you. Have you been able to get other professional athletes to join you in calling out the Catholic Church?

BORLAND: It’s starting. We’ve had a few, you know, retweet and like the tweets that I put out a couple days ago. You know, there’s a handful of text conversations between men and women that have played at a high-level and email chains. And we’re figuring out the best way to do that. But the sad nature of gun violence in America and of hatred is that if you wait very long, there’s likely be another atrocity. So although it’s imperfect right now, we want to act and figure this out as we go. But, you know, when it happens in your backyard, you have to do something.

PFEIFFER: That’s Chris Borland, a former NFL linebacker who grew up in Dayton. We reached out to the Cincinnati Archdiocese for comment on Borland’s letter, and we were told that the archbishop has read it but hasn’t yet sent Borland a formal response.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Sports commentator Mike Pesca wonders whether Major League Baseball will modernize to attract a young audience, and how it will keep them for life.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Major League Baseball is on track to set a record for home runs in a season, but the games are taking as long as ever. Sports commentator Mike Pesca says if baseball doesn’t get a little more sprightly, it could start losing some audience.

MIKE PESCA, BYLINE: The following parts of a baseball game are boring – pitching changes, stepping out of the batter’s box, stepping off the pitching rubber, looking the runner back, adjusting the equipment, most foul balls called strikes not resulting in a strikeout and balls not resulting in a walk. You can find a baseball purist to argue that called balls and strikes aren’t boring, but you know how I’d describe that conversation? Boring.

Now, I just described most of a baseball game as being boring, which leads me to believe that baseball is mostly boring. I love it, but it is. To work your way around this fact demands you use words like contemplative, pastoral or timeless, but it’s not timeless. A poet or documentarian may wish to convince you that the clock of a baseball game is something like three outs per inning, but look up there on the scoreboard or on your wrist or on the phone in your pocket. There is an actual clock. And guess what. Major League Baseball games are taking more time than they ever have. Three hours eight minutes – that’s 13 minutes longer than “The Godfather.” Of the 28 shows on Broadway right now, none runs longer than three hours. Of all the videos on Snapchat – yeah, never mind on that one.

Well, you might say, what if baseball is dazzling customers with exciting plays and scintillating feats of heroism between the pitcher stepping off the rubber and batter stepping out of the box? What if this time is well spent on the most exciting play in the game? Here’s the really scary thing for baseball. It is. The home run, decidedly not on the boring list, is ascendant. More than ascendant, it’s out of here. Baseball is on a pace to set a record for home runs by a lot. But this is not delighting and captivating fans. Attendance is on a pace to be the lowest in the last 15 years.

Baseball knows it’s lagging. The league has tried to nibble off a few seconds of downtime here and there by, say, lopping off five seconds between innings. They’ve changed the rule so that an intentional walk needn’t require four actual pitches outside the strike zone. That laudable tinkering has been largely counteracted by the emerging trend of baseball teams no longer issuing intentional walks. Oh, well.

The league has done nothing to dissuade players from languidly wandering in and out of the batter’s box like 5-year-olds examining shells at the beach. But mostly blame goes to the trend of every at-bat requiring so many pitches to get a result – ball, adjust gloves, strike, step off the rubber, ball, adjust gloves, look runner over, look runner over. At this point, Snapchat is looking good. The other huge problem for the game, one that is out of step with our celebrity culture, is that it’s very hard to follow individual players. If a football fan loves a quarterback, he handles the ball in every offensive snap. Watching a great NBA player even without the ball, Steph Curry as he curls around the screen, is a thing to behold. But if you’re there to watch a particular player, realize 17 out of every 18 batters aren’t him.

Baseball still has a wonderful sense of history. There is so much intricacy and skill to mastering a knuckle curve or turning a double play. Ballparks have more personality than ever, and generations can bond over the shared love of team. But if the game itself doesn’t realize that it is in – I’ll say it – a crisis of boredom, then we may lose an entire generation of fans. And that lost generation will be the last.

GREENE: He’s never boring. Commentator Mike Pesca hosts the Slate podcast “The Gist.”

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NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Scott Simon talks with Howard Bryant about the Red Sox and the Yankees battling this weekend, the Astros, and the death of an NFL great that’s renewing concern about concussions.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

And now it’s time for sports.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

SIMON: The Bo Sox and the Yankees this weekend – great rivals wherever they sit in the standings – and the loss of a football great brings back concern over concussions. ESPN’s Howard Bryant joins us. Good morning, Howard.

HOWARD BRYANT: Good morning, Scott. How are you?

SIMON: I’m fine. Thanks, my friend.

BRYANT: (Laughter).

SIMON: Yeah – Cubs 6-2 in case you wondered – OK…

BRYANT: (Laughter).

SIMON: …Over Milwaukee yesterday. Yanks won 4-2 last night – doubleheader today. These two great teams are in the same division but, this, year kind of in different leagues, aren’t they?

BRYANT: Yeah. This one’s getting away from the Red Sox pretty quickly. They’re the defending champions. And they lost again last night. They lost their fifth in a row. They haven’t lost five in a row since 2015 July. And so you’re looking at a team right now that is going in the wrong direction, if you want to be a champion or even have a chance to to make the playoffs. You don’t want to get too far ahead of yourself in the first week of August because you’ve got two wildcard spots now. In the old days, they – 13 games out of first place in the lost column, and they would be over. But with two wild card spots, they can still make a run. But as Yogi Berra would say, it’s getting late early around here for the Red Sox.

SIMON: Major League trade deadline was Wednesday. And I want to know, coming up on an election year, why hasn’t the U.S. Congress passed a law to prevent the Houston Astros from acquiring yet another great starting pitcher?

BRYANT: Isn’t that great that we can actually talk about the Houston Astros having an embarrassment of riches considering that they hadn’t been a great team for about 45 years? And all of a sudden, the last few years, they have really done it the right way. They went out a couple of years ago and got Justin Verlander and won the World Series. And now this year, they may go out and get Zack Greinke. And so they’ve got the best pitching staff in baseball right now. They’ve got the best record in the American League. They’re right with the Dodgers with the best record in baseball. We might get a rematch of the 2017 World Series with the Dodgers and the Astros. You’ve got Verlander. You’ve got Gerrit Cole. And now you’ve got Zack Greinke. And there’s not a whole lot of pitching in the game right now anyway, as we know.

SIMON: Yeah.

BRYANT: So to have those three starters go up against anybody…

SIMON: I half-expect them to sign Sandy Koufax.

BRYANT: (Laughter) I bet you Sandy can still throw as well…

SIMON: Yeah.

BRYANT: …Because he always could. And it’s incredible, too, when you watch some of these teams, whether you’re looking at the Dodgers or the Red Sox or even the Yankees, these hundred-million-dollar teams, $200-million teams that didn’t make any moves. And then you see the Astros who just seem to have a way about them when it comes to going to the trade deadline. They went for it. And they’re going for another World Series.

SIMON: And we’ll note, they hit six home runs last night – 10-2 over Seattle. Nick Buoniconti died this week. He was 78, middle linebacker on two Super Bowl Miami Dolphin teams. He became a lawyer when he left football, an activist for medical research after his son Mark suffered a spinal cord injury playing college football. Nick Buoniconti was a smart, honorable good man. And he suffered dementia in recent years and said it was because he’d taken – and he estimated it – 520,000 hits to his head.

BRYANT: Yeah. And as a linebacker, when I heard that number, I was surprised that it was that low. You’re looking at every single play you’re making contact with your head. Every single play in football whether you’re looking at it from the pro level all the way down – this is the conversation, Scott, that we’ve been having for a really long time on this program, that the problem with football is football. And we keep talking about whether it’s possible to make it safer. You think about these end of life – the quality of life that these players have at a very – you know, 78’s a good run, obviously. But it’s not 80s or 90s. And so you’re looking at the price that a lot of the players are paying. I’m actually reading a book right now called “Brain Damage.” And it’s all about the price that parents have paid for the kids that they’ve lost playing football in some of these contact sports. And when you look at it, at some point, you do have to look at a – there’s a lawsuit with Pop Warner coming up next year.

SIMON: Yeah.

BRYANT: And at some point, football is sort of having a conversation about whether or not this sport can last.

SIMON: Howard Bryant, thanks so much – talk to you soon.

BRYANT: Thank you.

(SOUNDBITE OF TANGERINE DREAM’S “STRATOSFEAR”)

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

It took nearly two years, and plenty of bad results, but Fort William FC, perhaps the worst soccer team in the United Kingdom, finally won a match.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

Fort William is a small town in the western Scottish Highlands. It’s got breathtaking scenery and the ugliest soccer in Britain.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

The Fort William Football Club had not won in nearly two years. That’s 73 matches in total. Iain Ferguson is a local journalist who’s covered the team since 1996.

IAIN FERGUSON: In fact, last season was an all-time low when they were beaten, I think, 15 or 14-0 by one of the teams, which is really quite a lot in football terms.

CORNISH: Actually, that score was 16-0, but the low point in a season full of them was when Fort William was penalized nine points in the standings for using ineligible players.

SHAPIRO: To explain, in a league where you get three points for a win and one point for a draw, Fort William finished with negative seven points.

CORNISH: So the worst soccer team in Britain shocked pretty much everyone when it finally won a match last night. Iain Ferguson says even the fans were stunned Fort William took the lead.

FERGUSON: Fort William, in the match last night, drew first blood. In a remarkably short period of time – in only a few minutes, they were one ahead, which I think took absolutely everybody by surprise because there was, first of all, a stunned silence. And then everyone realized what happened and all started cheering.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECODING)

UNIDENTIFIED FANS: (Cheering, unintelligible).

SHAPIRO: The Fort William fans kept on cheering as their team beat Nairn County 5-2.

CORNISH: After the match, the scene inside the locker room was joyous insanity.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED SOCCER PLAYERS: (Chanting, unintelligible).

SHAPIRO: Fort William may still be the worst soccer team in Britain, but maybe it won’t take them another 73 matches to win again.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

NPR’s Audie Cornish speaks with Rachel Bachman, senior sports reporter for the Wall Street Journal, about the dispute between the U.S. Soccer Federation and the U.S. Women’s Team over pay inequality.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

There’s been controversy for years about how the women’s U.S. soccer players get paid less than the men. This is despite the fact that the women are World Cup champions and the men didn’t even qualify last time around. The women’s team sued the U.S. Soccer Federation over this pay gap in March of this year. And now the U.S. Soccer president, Carlos Cordeiro, released a letter yesterday saying that, in recent years, the federation paid the U.S. women’s players more than the men. Now, to talk about this, we’re joined by Rachel Bachman. She’s a senior sports reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

Welcome to the program.

RACHEL BACHMAN: Thanks so much, Audie, great to be here.

CORNISH: So before we get to the new information from the head of U.S. Soccer, why do the women believe they’re being paid less?

BACHMAN: What they’re mainly looking at is what the U.S. Soccer Federation pays to them for playing in national team games. They’re saying that U.S. Soccer pays us significantly less for playing in those games than it pays the men’s national team.

CORNISH: So now this letter, which was released by the U.S. Soccer president, Carlos Cordeiro, he’s saying that, hey, actually, the federation pays the women players more. What’s his claim?

BACHMAN: What U.S. Soccer is doing in this letter is it’s including the salaries that it pays the women to play in the professional league. Now, this is separate from these players’ play for the women’s national team. And the players are saying, look, you’re making an apples to oranges comparison. Our playing in the professional league is separate from what we get or should get from playing on the women’s national team. And U.S. Soccer is saying, no, we’re including everything we spend on you. And that’s the fair way to account for it.

CORNISH: You report that the men’s team has weighed in. What do they say?

BACHMAN: The men’s team has issued a statement today in support of the women saying that they’re fighting for fair compensation and they support them in that fight.

CORNISH: The timing of this is just before the mediation is supposed to begin over the pay discrimination lawsuit. Is the timing important? What’s next with this dispute?

BACHMAN: I think the timing is important, and you could say that U.S. Soccer is trying to defend itself against what’s been months of talk in the public about the U.S. women, certainly the public, many of them falling in love with the women watching them play and win the World Cup.

CORNISH: Right, chants of equal pay echoing through the stadium – right? – when they won.

BACHMAN: Yes and again in New York City during the ticker tape parade held to celebrate their victory. So I have no doubt that U.S. Soccer got sort of frustrated by seeing this groundswell feeling like their views weren’t represented. So I think this letter was partly their argument that, hey, our accounting should matter and this is the way we see things.

CORNISH: Is this a sign that U.S. Soccer is not willing to give up without a fight, that despite this kind of very public support that the women have embraced, U.S. Soccer still thinks it has a chance to make an argument here?

BACHMAN: Yes. And we know because Carlos Cordeiro, the federation president, emailed the players yesterday saying, look, we’re getting a lot of heat from our sponsors, from Congress, about this issue. And so we know they’re under extreme pressure, but at the same time, they don’t show signs that they’re going to, you know, shut up and go away. I think that they feel like these issues need to be debated and settled.

CORNISH: That’s Rachel Bachman of The Wall Street Journal.

Thank you so much for your reporting.

BACHMAN: Thank you, Audie, appreciate it.

CORNISH: And one more piece of news about the women’s team today – coach Jill Ellis announced she’s stepping down in October. In a statement, she said, quote, “the timing is right to move on.” She also thanked the federation for its support and investment in the program.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

NPR’s Steve Inskeep talks to Caley Fretz, editor-in-chief of Cycling Tips, about this year’s Tour de France. It is the first time that a cyclist from Colombia has won the race.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

For the first time in the history of the Tour de France, a Colombian cyclist has won. His name is Egan Bernal, and he is also the youngest rider to win the Tour in more than a century. In Bernal’s home country, thousands of people gathered to celebrate. Here is Colombian broadcaster Alfredo Castro.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ALFREDO CASTRO: (Speaking Spanish).

INSKEEP: I hardly need translation there. But he’s saying, “the Colombian victory – Egan Bernal. Extraordinary what has happened today. My voice escapes me; my heart is exploding.” Maybe not the most unbiased journalism ever, but you get the point.

Caley Fretz is editor-in-chief of CyclingTips, and he was watching the Tour de France. He’s in Paris. Welcome to the program.

CALEY FRETZ: Thanks for having me.

INSKEEP: What was it like to be watching this event?

FRETZ: Oh, it was incredible. It was a fantastic, fantastic Tour of France for a whole bunch of reasons, not least the fact that it was capped by a victory I guess unlike we’ve seen in a very long time. Twenty-two-year-old Egan Bernal, as you said, took his first win at the Tour de France, sort of took the torch, so to speak, from his own teammate Geraint Thomas, who won it last year. And we had this whole story wrapped around French champion Julian Alaphilippe, who kept us all on the edge of our seats until the very end of the Tour de France.

INSKEEP: You know, it’s not unheard of to have a superstar athlete who’s 22 in some other sports. But it sounds like it’s pretty rare in cycling. Is there something about cycling that normally you need a little more maturity to win a race like this?

FRETZ: Yeah, and in particular the Tour de France because this is – it’s a three-week race. It’s 21 stages. They ride 3,500 kilometers over the course of those three weeks. It just takes a bit longer to kind of get the kilometers in your legs, the miles in your legs. So it is very unusual to have an athlete this good this young. It’s not unheard of. Laurent Fignon, one of the most recent French winners of the Tour de France, he won it at 23. So…

INSKEEP: OK.

FRETZ: …It’s not impossible.

INSKEEP: Got you. Now, there was an unusual event in the course of this race. As I understand it, the stage in which Bernal took over as the overall leader, they actually had to stop the race at one point. What happened?

FRETZ: Yeah. So we’re up in the Alps. And as often happens in the mountains, some storms came through. And we got about – I don’t know – 3 or 4 inches of hail in a very small area on the…

INSKEEP: Wow.

FRETZ: …Back of the Col de l’Iseran. And that caused massive flooding and a landslide. And so Egan Bernal was actually off the front already in the race. He was descending off the back of this climb and had about – I think a minute gap or so. And they had to shut down the race and take the time from the top of the climb. It was kind of the only option. There was absolutely no way for the Tour de France to get through.

INSKEEP: Landslides, flooding and hail – that’s pretty intense if you’re on a bike. I have to ask because there were allegations of doping over the years in the Tour de France. Does it seem like this was a clean race so far as anybody knows?

FRETZ: Oh, that’s a very difficult question. It is – it felt cleaner – it’s felt cleaner for quite some time. Cycling is – among international sport, I think it’s one of the best in terms of its antidoping efforts at this point. It’s been on the biological passport for a very long time. I do firmly believe that the sport is as clean as it’s ever been right now. But you never really know. It’s still international sport. I think we all – well, we all know what happens in international sport (laughter).

INSKEEP: I guess you learn…

FRETZ: So I’d like to believe, I would.

INSKEEP: You learn more things over time. But what we know now is that Egan Bernal, at the age of 22, is the winner – the champion of the Tour de France.

Mr. Fretz, thanks so much.

FRETZ: You’re welcome.

INSKEEP: Caley Fretz is the editor-in-chief of CyclingTips and joined us from Paris.

(SOUNDBITE OF TOTORRO’S “MOTTE-ROCK”)

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Two boxing deaths in one week, a preview of Olympic swimming, and a check-in about the WNBA: Host Scott Simon gets an update from NPR sports correspondent Tom Goldman.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

And now it’s time for sports.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

SIMON: Swim records fall in Korea. The WNBA season reaches its halfway mark with today’s All-Star Game. And twin tragedies in the grisly business of boxing. NPR’s Tom Goldman joins us. Tom, thanks for being with us.

TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: Thank you, Scott.

SIMON: Not one, even, but two boxing deaths this week.

GOLDMAN: Yeah. Russian Maxim Dadashev and Argentine Hugo Santillan both died from brain injuries a few days after their fights last weekend. Certainly not the first boxing deaths, but being so close together – just two days apart – that’s very dramatic and has the boxing world split once again between those calling for reform and those saying, it’s tragic, but it’s just part of the game.

SIMON: You and I have both reported on the human damage in boxing over the years, and I daresay it’s one of the reasons we don’t talk about it a lot here. We – you know, we both recoil at this sometimes really being called a sport, and you and I love sports. We often talk about what boxing should do. Is there something fans can do to make it less destructive?

GOLDMAN: You know, I suppose they can take their money out of the sport. As long as there’s demand, boxing will continue and not see a need to change. But if fans stop betting, if they stop buying pay-per-view, stop attending fights and let the powers that be know this is a protest, maybe that would spur the kind of reform that might help reducing the length of fights, zero tolerance of performance-enhancing drugs, which there isn’t now, ringside doctors with neurological and concussion training at all fights and ensuring boxers train safely. Brain injuries may happen initially in training and not be detected by the time they fight.

But, you know, Scott, even if meaningful reform happens, death happens too. You know, it’s the nature of a sport where the goal is to hit someone to the point of unconsciousness. And in the words of Hall of Fame boxing writer Nigel Collins, it’s up to each of us to face that reality and decide whether or not it’s worth the price.

SIMON: Yeah. Las Vegas this afternoon, the WNBA All-Star Game means the women’s basketball season’s halfway through. What teams have been most successful so far?

GOLDMAN: Well, it’s been a very competitive season so far, led by Connecticut and Las Vegas, both with 13 and six records, but not leading by much. Eight of the 12 WNBA teams go to the playoffs. And the eighth team, Minnesota, is only three and a half games out of first place. The contenders include defending champion Seattle, which lost league most valuable player Breanna Stewart and star Sue Bird before the season to injuries. There were predictions of doom, but the Storm have stayed together. They’ve played well, and they’re in the thick of the race right now.

SIMON: And, Tom, we’re a year out from the 2020 Olympics.

GOLDMAN: Yeah.

SIMON: The World Swimming Championships are – I know you’ve just begun to pack – World Swimming Championships are taking place in South Korea right now. What might we see in these championships that can help us look forward to next year in Tokyo?

GOLDMAN: Well, you know, it might be a good preview, although Americans hope not too much of a preview for super swimmer Katie Ledecky. She’s had a really tough time of it in South Korea. Illness forced her to drop out of two events. But just today, Scott…

SIMON: Yeah.

GOLDMAN: …Some redemption.

SIMON: I saw.

GOLDMAN: Yeah, she won the 800-meter freestyle for the fourth straight time, a four-peat, at the World Championships. And for those who love controversy, there’s been plenty of that related to China’s Sun Yang. There are strong doping suspicions about him. He served a drug ban five years ago. And fellow swimmers haven’t been shy about speaking or acting out.

Competitors who won medals in races he won refused to stand on the victory stand with him. And after he won the 200-meter freestyle, British swimmer Duncan Scott, who tied for third, wouldn’t have his picture taken with Sun as they left the stage. Sun turned around and called Scott a loser and said he, Sun, was a winner. Now, Scott, whether this all plays out at the Olympics depends on an upcoming hearing where Sun could get a lifetime…

SIMON: That – I mean, this is, like, really dramatic. Who wouldn’t watch this?

GOLDMAN: (Laughter) Well, he could get a lifetime ban, though, for a strange incident with drug testers who showed up to give him a drug test, but he reportedly destroyed blood samples with a hammer…

SIMON: Yeah.

GOLDMAN: …That he’d given to those testers. So we’ll see if that plays out in Tokyo.

SIMON: Well, that gets the job done. NPR’s Tom Goldman. Thanks.

GOLDMAN: (Laughter).

SIMON: What do you think we do with – they do with our interviews? NPR’s Tom Goldman, thanks so much.

GOLDMAN: (Laughter) You’re welcome.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.