This is the waves. This is the waves. This is the waves. This is the waves. This is the waves.

This is the waves. Welcome to the waves, Slate's Podcast about Gender, Feminism and Spectacular Sporting

Events involving people who literally know no fear.

Every episode you get a new pair of women

to talk about the things we can't get off our minds.

And today you've got me June Thomas,

one of the hosts of Working Slate Slates Podcast about the Creative Process.

And me, Amira Rose Davis, a history professor and co-host of the Feminist Sports Podcast,

Burn It All Down, over on Blue Wire.

This week we're going to talk about the Winter Olympics,

a huge international sporting event featuring

the best athletes in the world that's being hosted by an autocratic government currently conducting genocide against the Uyghur population of Xinjiang province in the middle of a worldwide pandemic causing environmental damage by hosting skiing and

snowboarding events in a place that doesn't usually have snow put together by a

corrupt organizing committee amid some very basic sexism. All that's true, these

games are a total shit show, but they're also one of the rare occasions when female

athletes dominate R TV sets and the national

conversation and when some pretty obscure sports in the United States at least get

a moment in the spotlight.

Amira as someone who is both a sports nut and an unabashed advocate for the rights of athletes.

How do you feel about these games?

Should they even be happening?

Yeah, this is a topic I can't stop thinking about

...