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By Pete Usher Final sword match (foil) at the 1896 Olympics. Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Sports and politics don’t mix. Eric Heiden, US Olympic Speedskater Although Eric Heiden is most commonly credited with the sentiment that sport and politics don’t mix, it is a common cry whenever any political matter (or perceived political matter) has even the most marginal interaction with sporting events. In the last few years, sports response to Black Lives Matter, sportswash

By Pete Usher The smallest trophy in world team sports. Michael Vaughan holding The Ashes after victory in 2005. Picture courtesy ESPN. August 7th 2005 was the 70th anniversary of the invention of the metallic drinks can and the conclusion of the greatest test match of all time. Warwickshire CCC website. Of all sports, it is possible that Test cricket offers more potential for points of divergence than any other single sporting event. A full five-day test could have 2700 indi

By Pete Usher Possibly the most famous of them all. The Munich air disaster. Picture courtesy Sky News. The first part of this article series, on sport in AH, can be found Here . ***** “And that spells disaster for Scotland” – Archie McPherson (probably) Sporting commentary has a tendency to the hyperbolic, with the results, and individual events within contests, being described as triumphs, disasters, and so on. But the reality is that, in a world filled with international c

By Pete Usher. Gordon Banks making the iconic, impossible save from Pele in the 1970 World Cup. “ If that had gone in, it would have been a goal. ” David Coleman. The role of sport in Alternate History is much smaller than one might expect, given the near ubiquitous nature of sport in modern society – it fills regular portions of our daily news, pages of mainstream newspapers, and individual competitions and events are multi-billion pound concerns. And yet, even in the most w

By Colin Salt The Green Bay Packers in their throwback navy blue uniforms in 2010. Photo by Mike Morbeck and shared under the CC BY-SA 2.0 licence. Green Bay, Wisconsin, has a population of only around 100,000 people. Yet it somehow has a National Football League team that has thrived throughout the years. In the not-too-distant past, there was a time when Green Bay had an NFL franchise play in it but Los Angeles did not. The Packers are an oddball in everything from location

By Alexander Wallace There’s something about alternate historians and baseball. Harry Turtledove loves the sport, having written one novel, The House of Daniel , about the sport in an America filled with the supernatural. SLP writer Colin Salt is another such example. Here, we shall discuss another example: Alan Smale’s and Rick Wilber’s short novel The Wandering Warriors. The novel begins in 1946, on a bus loaded with a minor league baseball team en route to a game in southe

By Alexander Wallace I have the somewhat unpopular opinion in alternate history circles that Harry Turtledove remains perhaps my favorite author ever. It is he, more than any other individual author, who got me into the genre of alternate history and into speculative fiction more broadly (I read a good deal of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke and Jerry Pournelle in my youth, but none have had the influence that Turtledove has had). I think that, at his best, he is very good

By Colin Salt There are many legendary championship teams in sports history. The 1927 Yankees. The 1996 Chicago Bulls, and many more. But there are also the bad champions, the ones that squeaked into a title. The 1987 Twins and 2006 Cardinals are baseball’s most-cited examples. Of course, any viable pro player is better than 99.9999% of the population at that sport, and no team capable of the steps necessary to win a championship can truly be considered “bad”. But it’s a fact

By Colin Salt Success or failure? Circumstance and point of view can define either - in one timeline, a sportsman or woman can be deemed a "failure"; in another, a definite "success" - without their own performance changing. Sam Bowie is a perfect example. In the 1984 NBA draft, the Houston Rockets selected Hakeem Olajuwon with the top pick. Olajuwon would go on to win two championships with them and be considered one of the best “big men” of all time, alongside such legend