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Impolitic with John Heilemann

Sally Jenkins: The Bad Bunny Bowl, Quad God Olympics, & WaPo Sports Section (R.I.P.)

Impolitic with John Heilemann

Audacy | Puck

News, Politics

4.84.5K Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2026

⏱️ 75 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

John welcomes acclaimed sportswriter and bestselling author Sally Jenkins to discuss the twin mega-stories this week where politics, culture, and elite athletics invariably come crashing together: the Super Bowl and Winter Olympics. Jenkins also weighs in on the heedless obliteration of the Washington Post’s vaunted sports desk, where Jenkins worked for three decades before joining The Atlantic last year. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Instagram teen accounts default teens into automatic protections for who can contact them and the content they can see.

0:09.5

Explore teen accounts and all of our ongoing work to protect teens online at Instagram.com slash teen accounts.

0:26.8

Aloha. Namaste everyone and welcome and welcome Tim Politic with John Hilemon, a puck and Odyssey Joint,

0:31.5

featuring lively in-depth conversations with the people who cruise the corridors of power in America,

0:34.8

sculpting and shaping the ebb and flow of our politics and culture.

0:39.7

Over the past 30-plus years, Sally Jenkins has established a well-deserved reputation as one of the best and best-known sports writers of our time.

0:43.4

For almost all of those years, Sally was a fixture, a mainstay, one of the brightest stars

0:48.4

on the Washington Post Sports Desk.

0:50.9

First is a reporter that is a columnist and a feature writer.

0:53.5

She did it all the washington

0:55.6

sports desk of course a justifiably legendary place of business for people in the sports

1:02.7

journalism game that as of just a couple weeks ago no longer exists no small part due to the

1:09.4

mismanagement misjudgment incompet, incompetence, and just plain and

1:12.5

simple idiocy of the paper's owner, Jeff Bezos, and his handpicked CEO and publisher Will

1:17.4

Lewis, who is, praised Jebus, no longer in that job after the fallout from some of the giant

1:25.7

job cuts that happened at the post just a couple weeks ago.

1:29.7

It was Sally's moving and righteously incandescently furious piece on the destruction of the post sports desk for the Atlantic,

1:36.1

her new employer as of last September, that made me want to get Sally on the pod's stat and with the Super Bowl having just taken place and the Winter Olympics still

1:45.5

ongoing, the timing to have her on this week seemed irresistible.

1:50.8

Not surprisingly, we talked about both of those topics, about which Sally has penned a number of

1:56.0

unsurprisingly superb pieces from why and how the Seattle Seahawks were able to win at the Super Bowl

2:03.2

to the controversy over the comments made by two American freestyle skiers about the difficulties

...

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