Six Olympic Podcasts To Get Ready for Paris 2024

Jul 19th

This article was first published on 19th July 2024 and updated with our reader recommendation on 2nd August 2024.

Sports podcasts are still one of the most popular podcast genres, with many listeners saying that they help them connect to their passion. With the Summer Olympics and Paralympics starting in Paris later this month, many people will be searching for a good listen to accompany their watching.

But the Olympics and Paralympics are always about more than the sport. As a global platform, they often highlight societal injustices, issues of representation, controversies fuelled by greed and the politics behind it all. From the Black Power protests at the 1968 Olympics, to the reasons behind the exclusion of men in Artistic Swimming until this year, there is always a hundred stories behind the final event.

We think the best Olympic podcasts dig into this kind of history, the social structures and the politics that we might not always see in the final event. Here are seven shows that will make you appreciate this summer’s games even more.

EQUAL TOO

This limited series was spearheaded by Harder Than You Think (the team behind the Netflix documentary Rising Phoenix) and explores Disability equality through the lens of sports and the Paralympics. Host Sophie Morgan starts by exploring the history and the legacy of the Paralympic movement, but the show heads into the rights of disabled people and explores topics like employment equality, representation in media and more. Guests include Michael Johnson, Jameela Jamil, RJ Mitte, and Sinéad Burke, and many members of the Production team have lived experience of disability so the authenticity of this show is palpable. Listen here.

Persephonica were recently hiring for a Producer to work on ‘a new Paralympics related podcast series alongside the team behind the Rising Phoenix documentary’, so there could well be a follow-on for this series in the works for Paris 2024…

VARIOUS EPISODES ABOUT YUSRA MARDINI

Rather than a single podcast, this recommendation is to explore the life and story of Yusra Mardini. A competitive swimmer and refugee of the Syrian civil war, Yusra was part of Refugee Olympic Team at the 2016 and 2020 events. Her story has also inspired several podcast episodes – in the BBC’s The Documentary you can hear about her journey across the Hungarian border and into Germany, where she and her sister claimed asylum. Frank Film Club discussed The Swimmers, which is a Netflix film based on her life and the crossing of the Aegean sea in a dinghy. Yusra’s autobiography, Butterfly: From Refugee to Olympian – My Story of Rescue, Hope, and Triumph, was recommended by Laura Whitman in Bookshelfie and her story was part of the Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls series. However, if you want to hear Yusra herself talk, check out her interview on the How To Fail podcast, which left host Elizabeth Day almost speechless.

MUM’S GONE CLIMBING

Sport climbing is one of the newer events in the Olympic line-up, making its debut in Tokyo in 2020. If you want to learn more about the sport we can highly recommend the Mum’s Gone Climbing podcast to get an idea of the fun it can be. The great thing about this show compared to other climbing podcasts is that it gets into some of the lesser explored difficulties and misconceptions, as well as the benefits and the fun, of climbing as a mum. The episode with Leah Crane – a coach and previous GB Bouldering champion with a great approach to the sport through play – is a great place to start.

Bonus recommendation from Francesca: “If you’re looking for a bit of an ‘in’ to climbing culture, I’ve been the naive host in round-tables on different aspects of the sport for On The Outside. We’ve spoken about the reaction when Olympian Shauna Coxsey climbed whilst pregnant and whether topless men should be banned in climbing gyms.”

THE LEGACY OF SPEED

When Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in protest at the 1968 Olympic Games, it showed how powerful activism in sport could be. Pushkin Industries looks at the path to this moment In Legacy of Speed, tracking how coach Bud Winter trained the sprinters. His “Relax and Win” methods were revolutionary at the time, as was Bud’s focus on recruiting Black athletes to a mostly white school. His training and belief in the runners helped make them fast enough to win, and brave enough to take a stand in front of the world. The story is fascinating, and the perfect example of the social constructs that are happening on the path to the podium. Listen here.

BELIEVED

Wherever there are positions of power, there are people who will abuse that trust, and the Olympics is no different. In 2017, Dr. Larry Nassar admitted in court that he sexually abused children and women on the US Olympic gymnastics team over a period of two decades. Believed from NPR was released in 2018, in the wake of the high-profile trial and media coverage surrounding Dr. Nassar’s conviction. It tries to understand how he was able to get away with it for so long, and opens with the premise that “serial predators don’t just get away because of sloppy police work or inept institutions, they get away because we let them”. It’s another uncomfortable example of how much onus is on survivors of sexual assault to empower themselves, when they should have been protected. Listen here. 

BLIND LANDING

Blind Landing is an independent documentary podcast with an impressively in-depth exploration of a number of obscure Olympics controversies. Hosted by Ari Saperstein, the first series looks at how a mistake in the gymnastics set-up at the Sydney Olympics was very costly for a number of front-runners – and talks about how it could have been deadly. The analysis of in-house decisions following the mistake is fascinating, and you’ll soon find yourself invested in the controversy.

The second season ‘Out On The Ice’ focused on the way that figure skaters were forced to play into narrow gender stereotypes, leaving LGBTQ+ skaters feeling like they could not be themselves in the sport. Other one-off episodes explore important Olympic figures, such as Mabel Fairbanks (a Black figure skater in the 1940s), Ukrainian Gymnast Illia Kovtun and the Asian American figure skater, Kristi Yamaguchi. Listen here.

KEEP THE FLAME ALIVE

If you’re after a comprehensive Olympics and Paralympics podcast that gives you an insight to the events and competitors of today, Keep The Flame Alive is a great resource. Jill Jaracz and Alison Brown interview athletes across the range of disciplines, giving listeners some inspiration and insight to the life of an Olympian. If you want to learn more about some of the more obscure events, this is great. The episode on the American pool team speaks about the distance swimmers and divers, but also speaks to the Artistic Swimmers about synchronised swimming. If you want to learn more about how the Breaking competition will work, the episode with Ivan ‘Flipz’ Velez introduces listeners to the newest introduction to the line-up. The fact that the Paralympics and Olympic athletes are also integrated shouldn’t be novel, but is a lovely bit of curation.

FLASHPOINT

Flashpoint is a brand new show from Tenderfoot and iHeart Podcasts. Both these companies often delve into true crime documentaries, and this series explores the White-supremacist bombing that took place at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games held in Atlanta, and the following attacks on two abortion clinics and a gay nightclub. With archive audio, interviews with witnesses and a narration that is nicely contemplative narration there is a lot to find value in this show, but it is a difficult listen at times particularly with the sound design amplifying the interviews.  It’s nice to have a narrator connected to Atlanta as well, with the first episode giving small nods to his own experience of the city and interest in the bombing.  Listen here.

Listeners’ Suggestions:

EMBEDDED: TESTED

NPR’s Embedded series ‘unearths the stories behind the headlines’ and Tested is incredibly relevant to the Olympics 2024 headlines as I write this. It looks at the long history of gender testing in competitive sport, uncovering the deeply embedded belief that women need to fit into a box is.  This short series by Rose Eveleth has been several years in the making, and during that time they’ve been rejected because the story was ‘trans’  — but what is telling about this documentary is how many of the guests and people affected are cis, how many are women of colour, and how many of the rules come from men. Rose was told this story could only be made if it was approached as comedy, but it really is tragic listening. You can find out more about Rose’s struggle to get it created on Instagram @roseveleth and Podcast The Newsletter.  Listen here.

If you are interested in this topic, another recommendation on the same subject was The New Yorker Radio Hour episode  ‘The Trans Athletes Who Changed the Olympics – in 1936′. It features some of the same guests as Tested, and gives a good overview if you want a shorter listen,

OUTSIDE/IN

The Paris 2024 Olympics were at one time marketed as the most sustainable games in modern Olympic history, but a recent episode of Outside/In looked into the reality behind that claim. ‘Hot Olympic Summer: Is Paris Greenwashing the Games?’ speaks to experts who have analysed the carbon footprint of all modern games, looking at aspects such as public transport, construction and air conditioning. It’s not too surprising that the carbon-neutral Olympic caldron at this year’s games aren’t quite enough to make them sustainable, but there is a lot of interesting conversation in this. Listen here.

CIVICS 101

A lot of drama at the Olympics can focus on the individual athletes, but as a global event there is a lot of political drama connected to the games as well. ‘How Are Cities Chosen For The Olympics?’ is an interesting episode from Civics 101 that digs into some of the global politics behind the event. It comes hot out the blocks with a number of mic-drop comments, such as guest Jules Boykoff’s “if anybody tells you that the Olympics are not political, there is a very good chance that they are making their living off the Olympic Games…” before looking at some of the more obviously controversial games like Berlin 1936 (aka ‘Hitler’s games’) and Sochi 2014. This episode doesn’t purely focus on the controversial though, and there are nice nods to some progress such as North Korean athletes heading to the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea. Listen here.