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You said a moth-ful

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 16:09:34 +0000

You said a moth-ful Rachel Sauer Wed, 06/04/2025 - 10:09

Ryan St Laurent

It’s miller moth season in Colorado—an entomologist explains why they’re important and where they’re headed

It is spring on the Front Range of Colorado, which means before long the region will receive an influx of many, many moths.

Colorado is home to thousands of species of moths, many of which are hatching out from a winter of hibernation, known as diapause.

At night, porch lights, stadium lights and street lamps are regularly visited by moths, a collective term for most of the nocturnal members of the insect order called Lepidoptera. Butterflies are also part of this order, but they are mostly diurnal, or active during the day. Butterflies are actually just a subset of moths, so all butterflies are moths, but not all moths are butterflies.

Ryan St Laurent is a CU Boulder assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and CU Museum curator of entomology.

The Front Range lies on the path of a springtime migration of a particularly familiar species of moth, usually referred to in this part of the country, including Colorado and neighboring states, as “miller moths.” Miller moth caterpillars are often called the “army cutworm,” a whimsical name referring to the caterpillars’ tendency to reach large numbers that march across fields and roads to find food. Both the moths and their caterpillars are rather drab and brown in color, though the moths are variable in patterning.

Many people find miller moths to be a nuisance, and the caterpillars can be a pest. But miller moths are a native species to Colorado and play important roles across the plains and up into the high country.

I am an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology as well as the curator of the entomology collection at the University of Colorado’s Natural History Museum in Boulder. I study moths from around the world. I have a particular fascination for the large moth group known as Noctuoidea, the superfamily to which miller moths and their relatives belong.

As an entomologist, I crisscross the state looking for moths for my ongoing evolutionary, classification and life history studies. During miller moth migrations, they may swarm my moth traps, which are made up of a bright light in front of a white sheet. The crush of miller moths makes finding the less common species that I am looking for all the more challenging in a sea of dusty brown.

What makes miller moths so unique?

In temperate regions like most of North America, most moth species hibernate in the cold winter months. During this time, they are in a dormant pupal stage. Some species spin cocoons. They then hatch into adult moths, mate, lay eggs, and those caterpillars grow during the spring and summer. Come fall, the cycle starts over.

While miller moths also have a hibernation period, it is not like that of most moths. Miller moths instead spend their winters on the plains of eastern Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska and nearby states as partially grown caterpillars, rather than a pupa, having gotten a head start on feeding in the late summer. This puts the caterpillars at an advantage. As soon as the weather warms and low-lying crops like wheat and alfalfa produce new, nutrient-rich foliage during the early spring, the caterpillars are right there ready to feast and may cause serious damage to the crops in outbreak years.

Pupation then occurs later in the spring, and unlike in most Lepidoptera, the adult moths hatch without an extended pupal diapause, and instead begin to migrate west. They travel more than 100 miles (roughly 160 kilometers) toward higher elevations to seek out flowering plants, feeding on nectar and pollinating as they go.

To spot and trap moths, entomologists set up bright lights in front of a white background. (Photo: Ryan St Laurent)

This migration is where folks on the Front Range become all too familiar with these weary travelers, who seek out narrow spaces to rest, often crawling into gaps in cars and homes. Inside a home, miller moths don’t feed, reproduce or lay eggs. Sudden agitation of the resting moths may cause them to fly about to seek out a new spot to hide – that is, if your house cat doesn’t see them first. If they do make their way inside, they can be easily swept into a cup or jar and let outside.

People on the Front Range experience a second run-in with these moths after they finish their summer of feeding in the mountains and head back to the plains to lay their eggs in the fields from August to September.

The call of the night

The importance of pollinators is familiar to many Coloradans. The state offers many resources and groups to help create spaces to attract butterflies and bees, including an initiative that designated Interstate Highway 76 as the “Colorado Pollinator Highway.”

But pollination does not stop when the sun goes down. In fact, moths make up the largest percentage of pollinators in terms of number of species globally – more than bees and butterflies combined. But scientists have yet to figure out which plants miller moths pollinate.

Despite the importance of moths as pollinators to agriculture and ecology, by comparison to bees, for example, we know exceedingly little about nocturnal pollinators. Of the thousands of moth species in Colorado, many hundreds remain unknown to science. One of the reasons scientists study moths is to literally shed a light on these insects in the environment to see what they are doing.

My work aims to understand what certain moths eat in their caterpillar stage, but other researchers, and my colleague Dr. Julian Resasco, at the ��Ƶ, study what plants the adults are feeding on as they pollinate.

Colorado moths

Moths are among the primary airborne insects at night, playing a significant, and perhaps leading, role in insect-feeding bat diets. During their migration to the mountains, there are so many miller moths that they are a substantial protein- and fat-rich meal for animals as large as bears.

Considering that we still know so little about moths, it’s important to realize that light pollution, habitat loss and agricultural chemicals are all impacting moth numbers, resulting in annual declines in these insects globally.

So, the next time you see a miller moth in Colorado, or any moth at a light anywhere on Earth, remember that it’s working the night shift. Turn out that light so it can go about its way.

Ryan St Laurent is an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and CU Museum curator of entomology the at the ��Ƶ.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It’s miller moth season in Colorado—an entomologist explains why they’re important and where they’re headed.

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When passion flares, a freedom and duty to speak

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 29 May 2025 21:07:13 +0000

When passion flares, a freedom and duty to speak Rachel Sauer Thu, 05/29/2025 - 15:07

Clint Talbott

The pursuit and sharing of knowledge should be shielded from the brute force of public opinion, and when public pressure spikes, history shows, the choices of individual people really matter

Like a metronome, Albert A. Bartlett ticked off a steady beat of bad news, methodically outlining the truth and consequences of exponential human population growth. Then, he noted that the methods to reduce population are generally undesirable: for instance, pandemic, famine, war.

Rhetorically, Bartlett asked the classroom full of young people, “Who wants more war?”

A testosterone-addled boy sitting nearby roared: “War! Yeah!”

Clint Talbott is assistant dean for communications in the CU Boulder College of Arts and Sciences and a former journalist.

Unfazed, Bartlett replied:

“Anyone who cheers for war has never lived through one.”

Having thus silenced the would-be warrior, Bartlett continued to explain the exponential function and its implications for humankind.

This was 1979, and I didn’t immediately grasp the symbolism of this brief exchange. It encapsulated core functions of academe—the pursuit and sharing of knowledge, careful and critical thinking, respectful and open debate.

Truth, logic and debate would become the foundation of my career, first in journalism, then as a communicator for the university.

But as a high-school sophomore from Montrose, Colorado, my perspective was constrained; I was just a kid on a recruiting tour of the ��Ƶ. I met professors, toured facilities and spent a few days at CU because, unusually, I’d gotten decent grades in Algebra II.

A so-so student at the age of 17, I had no intention of going to college, let alone the state’s top university. I planned to attend vo-tech school and become an auto mechanic. Two things stood in my way: One, I was a bad mechanic, and two, I took a journalism course as a high-school senior and was immediately hooked.

It was compelling—intoxicating, really—to set up shop in the marketplace of ideas. Learning, discussing and debating ideas made them, and me, come alive. I was part of something bigger than myself. Work had Meaning.

Over time, I saw the extent to which public discourse was refined and distilled in academe. Discussions that occurred nationally also happened on campus, but often in more concentrated, more rigorous, sometimes more contentious forms.

Speech on matters of critical public concern should be “robust, uninhibited and wide-open,” former U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan famously wrote. Discourse can reach peak vibrancy on campus, partly because of universities’ commitment to free speech and academic freedom.

Intellectual vigor is one reason, perhaps, that academe has long drawn criticism. By design, it protects unpopular ideas and unwelcome lines of inquiry. Why? Because the pursuit of knowledge should be shielded from the brutish whimsy of public opinion.

History teaches us this. Galileo committed heresy by reporting what was empirically true and what is now utterly uncontroversial.

Professor Bartlett campaigned for population control for decades. He gave the talk I observed more than 1,742 times before he died in 2013. It’s been viewed on YouTube more than 5.2 million times.

The late Professor Al Bartlett, who worked on the Manhattan Project as a young scientist, used his scientific acumen to pursue growth control both globally and locally.

Bartlett, who worked on the Manhattan Project as a young scientist, used his scientific acumen to pursue growth control both globally and locally. In Boulder, for instance, he spearheaded the “blue line” initiative, which prevented the city from delivering treated water above about 5,750 in elevation in the foothills. Without water, real-estate development shrivels.

Today, Bartlett’s legacy is, literally, easy to see.

“Albert Bartlett’s influence is unmistakable in the foothills surrounding Boulder. With few exceptions, one sees trees, grasses and rock,” the Daily Camera wrote in 2006 as it gave him a lifetime-achievement award.

Advocating for population control—and controlled growth generally—can be controversial. But as a university professor, he had wide latitude to take such positions. The Boulder Valley and society at large are the better for full academic freedom and freedom of speech.

Critics have long argued otherwise. Again and again, higher education generally, and the University of Colorado in particular, have attracted strong public criticism and furtive government scrutiny. Some such episodes seem relevant today.

The feds are watching, and so are the people

The late Howard Higman, who was a professor of sociology and founder of the CU Conference on World Affairs, hit the FBI’s radar—and later Time magazine’s—in 1960.

In the middle of a sociology lecture at CU, “the most conspicuous member of the class,” Marilyn Van Derbur, then 22, Miss America of 1958, asked Higman to comment on Masters of Deceit, a book by J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the FBI.

Time characterized the episode this way: “The professor obliged by launching into a denunciation of the FBI, and for two days, embattled factions of the 190-student class, led by Marilyn and the professor, argued the reputation of the FBI. Proving Marilyn’s point that the FBI is always on the spot, Author Hoover sent Marilyn an autographed copy of Masters of Deceit with the message: ‘Your actions in confronting error with truth are in keeping with the highest traditions of academic freedom.’”

Higman said, “I smelled a plot coming, but it is not my habit to duck questions.” The Van Derbur report became one of many that the FBI carefully recorded in its thick file on Higman.

The late Howard Higman, a CU Boulder professor of sociology and founder of the CU Conference on World Affairs, hit the FBI’s radar—and later Time magazine’s—in 1960.

That file was publicly revealed via the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which helps to ensure that people can see how the government spends public money conducting the people’s business.

It so happens that one key architect of FOIA was Samuel J. Archibald, a CU alumnus who served as chief of staff of the Government Information Subcommittee in the U.S. House of Representatives. Archibald led the investigation of government secrecy that paved the way to the passage of FOIA in 1966. And, in a later chapter of his life, Archibald was my journalism professor at CU Boulder.

FOIA and its state counterpart, the Colorado Open Records Act (CORA), help us understand, more accurately and fully, what happened during key junctures of our history. In the Higman case, federal law enforcement spent decades monitoring a professor who was suspected of no crime.

This happened repeatedly. Folsom Field is named after a once-famous CU football coach, Frederick Folsom. His son, the late Franklin Folsom, a CU alumnus and longtime Boulder resident, was executive secretary to the League of American Writers from 1937 through 1942.

That job, and his activism for peace, drew the interest of the FBI, which recorded that several anonymous informants said Franklin Folsom was known by aliases. Those allegations were false. Secret informants also reported that his wife, Mary Elting, spent years working in a job she never held.

As Franklin Folsom noted in a 1981 Denver Post guest opinion, the FBI did get his home address and phone number right. “How much this information cost the taxpayer, no one will ever know,” he wrote.

Similarly, there was Kenneth E. Boulding, who was a distinguished professor of economics at CU. The 1993 New York Times obituary marking Boulding’s death called him a “much honored but unorthodox economist, philosopher and poet.”

As the Times noted, his textbook Economic Analysis “blended Keynesian and neoclassical economic theory into a coherent synthesis.”

But Boulding was also against war. He was, after all, a Quaker. His advocacy for peace drew the attention of the FBI, as one of my FOIA requests revealed. Starting in 1942, the government launched an investigation of Boulding. The files on him noted, for instance, that Boulding complained about “the downtrodden Negro and constantly protested that he should have equal rights with the whites.”

The FBI also noted that Boulding once advocated for the elimination of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). In no case did the activities of Higman, Folsom or Boulding amount to “subversion,” much less a crime.

In these cases, warrantless (and unconstitutional) spying seemed not to have hindered the subjects’ lives. But national panic and illegal spying on citizens can and does harm people. As we have seen.

The late Kenneth E. Boulding, a distinguished professor of economics at CU Boulder, was described in his 1993 New York Times obituary as a “much honored but unorthodox economist, philosopher and poet.”

Red scare

On Dec. 28, 1950, The Denver Post’s banner headline was “CU Prof Reveals Red Link.” The story reported that David Hawkins, CU philosophy professor, had been called to testify before HUAC.

Hawkins admitted that he had joined the Communist Party as a 25-year-old graduate student in California in 1938 but that he’d resigned and stopped paying dues in 1943. Some historians speculate that HUAC summoned Hawkins in an attempt to tie J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project, to communism.

The Post’s editorial board argued that CU must determine Hawkins’ loyalty to “American stands of life and to the American ideal of free and honest education.”

State legislators, including Boulder Rep. A.W. Hewett, proposed legislation that would have cut off Communists from any source of state money. As a centennial history of CU noted, Hewett claimed there were “all shades of Reds” at the university.

Colorado’s attorney general ruled that professors should be forced to sign a loyalty oath that was originally enacted in 1921, during an earlier red scare. Eager to quell the rising public concern and possibly to discourage state lawmakers from doing the same, the CU Board of Regents launched an investigation of Communist or otherwise “subversive” influences on campus.

The regents hired two former FBI agents to conduct the investigation. Their report and its recommendations were kept secret—so secret that the report itself was stored in a safe deposit box in the First National Bank of Boulder, and a regent could review the report only upon a majority vote of the board.

After the former FBI men completed their secret probe, the regents voted to retain Hawkins, stating that his actions (which were protected by the First Amendment) were not a firing offense.

But the university did fire Irving Goodman, an assistant professor of chemistry who won Guggenheim fellowships in 1949 and 1950. The regents said Goodman had been a Communist during part of his service at the university and that Goodman had lied about this.

Goodman called those charges “calumny” and said he’d honestly answered all questions about his politics when CU President Robert Stearns quizzed him in 1947.

It wasn’t divulged, at that time, whether the regents’ secret investigation found more damning material.

Similarly, philosophy instructor Morris Judd was fired in late 1951. The stated reason was incompetence and “pedestrian” teaching.

At the time, Judd revealed that he’d been interviewed by the former FBI agents. They asked him if he were a member of the communist party. He said he was not. They asked if he’d ever been a member. He declined to answer, as was his First Amendment right.

Once fired, Judd left academe, never to teach again.

The late CU philosophy instructor Morris Judd (right) declined to answer, per his First Amendment right, when asked by FBI agents if he'd ever been a member of the communist party.

Opening the safe deposit box

But questions remained, even in 2002, when I was working as a columnist for the Boulder Daily Camera. Paul Levitt, a professor of English, was a CU student during the McCarthy era and suggested that I file a Colorado Open Records Act request for the report.

I did this. The university declined to release the report, arguing that it contained legal advice and private information. To its credit, the Camera sued for the report’s release.

In an initial court hearing, the Boulder County judge who was reviewing the secret report said that if it indeed contained legal advice, it was subtle. The judge, who seemed skeptical of the university’s arguments, said she’d issue a ruling within a week.

Before the judge ruled, however, the regents voted to release the report in full. After 51 years, the report finally revealed that Judd was not, in fact, fired for incompetence; he was fired because he was merely suspected—with no compelling evidence—of being “subversive.”

The allegations were insubstantial. One unnamed source told the private investigators that Judd was “90 percent or better a probable Communist” in 1946. Another anonymous accuser said he was “of the opinion” that a “subversive” group had met at Judd’s Boulder home in 1947.

None of this proved that Judd was (or had been) a Communist. Nor did it yield any meaningful data on Judd’s fitness to teach philosophy. The only empirical measure of Judd’s abilities—the assessment of his fellow faculty members—found him more than fit to teach. In fact, his colleagues judged him the best young teacher in his department.

Politics can circumscribe academic freedom. Stearns himself revealed this in a now-declassified interview conducted at the Pentagon in 1954 (released via my FOIA request). Stearns admitted that he had fired “leftist or pinkish” faculty members, including Judd.

Stearns also told the Pentagon official that he’d kept tabs on the alleged subversives after their firing: “My connections … have always been close with the military and with the FBI, particularly, and I have kept them informed on each of these men, so they know well what they are doing and where they have gone,” Stearns said.

The late David Hawkins, a CU philosophy professor, was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1950 and admitted that he had joined the Communist Party as a 25-year-old graduate student in California in 1938 but that he’d resigned and stopped paying dues in 1943.

That is a startling admission. If we take his words at face value, it’s hard to fathom why Stearns did not fire tenured professors against whom there was stronger evidence of Communist Party affiliation. Instead, he targeted non-tenured instructors whom he might have seen as expendable.

As some have suggested, that might have been a stratagem designed to protect core faculty members from rabidly red-baiting lawmakers. Stearns might have believed he’d chosen the lesser of two evils, sacrificing non-tenured faculty to protect those with tenure.

All of that was moot to Goodman and Judd, who sustained permanent damage. Goodman later reported falling into poverty. Judd’s experience was similar.

“I suffered the loss of my academic career. This investigation was a horrendous violation not only of my rights, but of the tradition of academic freedom,” Judd said when the university honored him in 2002, adding:

“That secret and unwarranted procedure has been compounded by the years of secrecy in withholding the report from the public.”

The red scare episode was both a crucible and a parable. When the fuller account of what happened emerged in 2002, people debated how to reconcile this newly released information—firing faculty without due cause or process—with the ideals they held dear.

Some said the university made the right choice, arguing that making a public show of firing two junior faculty surely prevented the state Legislature from launching an investigation that could have unjustly destroyed even more careers. Such an investigation had, indeed, been threatened.

Others argued that contemporary observers can’t fully appreciate the pressures of 1951. One authoritative voice emphasizing that point was Albert Bartlett, who made a lasting—and positive—impression on me in 1979.

As public records from the university, the FBI, the Pentagon and other agencies provided compelling evidence that Judd, Goodman and others were sacrificed for the sake of a perceived greater good, English Professor Paul Levitt and others urged that the university rename the Stearns Award, the university’s highest faculty award.

Like Levitt, Bartlett was on campus during the red scare, which he called “one of the very dark periods in American history and the history of the University of Colorado.”

But Bartlett argued against stripping the Stearns name from the faculty award. Writing in the Camera in 2002, Bartlett recalled that one of his first letters to the editor of that newspaper concerned Sen. Joseph McCarthy, pointing out that “a specific allegation made by McCarthy was known by me to be a lie.”

“After the letter was published, someone counseled me about such writing,” Bartlett recalled. “I was untenured and uncertain, but the message was clear. So I turned my back to tend to my own business.”

Bartlett pointed out that in 1951, faculty groups did not condemn the firings of junior faculty members. Some professors, including Jacob Van Ek, then dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, did object. But many were silent. Most turned their backs, tending to their own business.

As Bartlett noted, if the “faculty governance bodies of 50 years ago failed to stop these tragic firings, then the faculty of 2002 can apologize for failing to speak out against the injustice” in 1951.

And again, Bartlett faced a contentious moment with cool reason, verifiable facts and respectful debate. In so doing, he offered a lesson that we must heed:

In times of national hysteria, when reason fails and madness prevails, good citizens are obliged to stand and speak.

Clint Talbott is a 1985 journalism graduate of CU Boulder. He spent 14 years working at the now-defunct Colorado Daily and 10 years at the Daily Camera and was a 1998 Pulitzer Prize finalist for editorial writing. He has worked for the College of Arts and Sciences since 2008.

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The pursuit and sharing of knowledge should be shielded from the brute force of public opinion, and when public pressure spikes, history shows, the choices of individual people really matter.

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How Wheaties became ‘the breakfast of champions’

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 21 May 2025 20:03:14 +0000

How Wheaties became ‘the breakfast of champions’ Rachel Sauer Wed, 05/21/2025 - 14:03

Jared Bahir Browsh

Recently featured in Marvel blockbuster The Thunderbolts*—and with the Thunderbolts featured on a tie-in box—Wheaties has been the go-to champion breakfast for 100 years and counting

The cereal that would become Wheaties was accidentally invented in 1921 when a clinician for the Washburn Crosby Company spilled wheat bran onto a hot stove. After several dozen attempts to fortify the cereal to withstand shipping, Washburn's Gold Medal Whole Wheat Flakes were released in November 1924. An employee contest led to the name Wheaties—beating out other options like Nutties—and within a few years, promotion of the new cereal was revolutionizing product advertising.

On Christmas Eve 1926, Wheaties was featured in the first prerecorded jingle on Minneapolis radio station WCCO (named for Washburn-Crosby Company). “Have You Tried Wheaties” was sung to the tune of “Jazz Baby.”

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

Washburn-Crosby merged with three other mills and was renamed General Mills in 1928. After General Mills debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in November of 1928, the company increased advertising for Wheaties and released the jingle nationwide.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Wheaties established what would become a long association with sports when the cereal was featured on a billboard in the stadium for the Minneapolis Millers and was the main advertiser for the minor league baseball team’s broadcasts on the now General Mills-owned WCCO. Knox Reeves, a Minnesota advertising executive, created a mock-up for a billboard in the Millers’ stadium featuring a box of the cereal with the tagline “The Breakfast of Champions.”

Throughout the 1930s, the cereal continued to expand its reach nationally, sponsoring sporting and cultural events on more than 100 radio stations. Wheaties’ closest association was with baseball, and in 1934 Yankees legend Lou Gehrig became the first athlete featured on a box of Wheaties, a tradition that continues today.

The honor of appearing on a Wheaties box was not exclusive to athletes, or men; aviator Elinor Smith was featured on the box in 1934. The following year, groundbreaking athlete Babe Didrikson, who won three medals at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, appeared on the box. After his record-breaking four gold medal performance at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Jesse Owens was the first African American to appear on the box.

In 1937, Wheaties held a contest for the top play-by-play announcer in the country. The winner was a sports broadcaster from Des Moines, Iowa, who recreated Chicago Cubs games through transcribed telegraphs. The broadcaster won a trip to the Cubs Spring Training in California, and while there, it was recommended that he take part in a screen test for Warner Bros. Ronald Reagan began a film career that led to pursuing a career in politics, becoming the governor of California and the 40th President of the United States.

The breakfast of champions in the world of tomorrow

Wheaties continued to set milestones in advertising when NBC featured the Brooklyn Dodgers and Cincinnati Reds in the first televised baseball game on August 29, 1939. The broadcast was a part of the World’s Fair taking place in Queens in 1939 and 1940. Although the FCC did not authorize full commercial television until July 1, 1941, the commission gave special permission for live commercials during the game that was available to the 500 television set owners in New York City. Hall of Fame broadcaster Red Barber poured Wheaties and milk or cream into a bowl, announcing, "Now that's the breakfast of champions."

In 1986, Walter Payton was the first African American featured on the front of a Wheaties box. (Photo: General Mills)

By the 1940s, Wheaties had cemented its association with sports, even earning a mention in the song “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio” produced by Les Brown and his orchestra in the midst of DiMaggio’s record-breaking 56-game hitting streak. As television took off after World War II, advertising costs rose, leading Wheaties to pull back from its focus on sponsorships, instead using testimonials in commercial spots to advertise the cereal—an approach that was less expensive than sponsorship, but also less effective in promoting the brand.

As Wheaties declined in visibility, General Mills turned its attention to children’s programming, a strategy that helped Cheerios become one of the top cereals after General Mills rebranded “Cheerioats” following Quaker Oats claiming ownership of the word “oats.”

This was not Wheaties’ first foray into entertainment programming; it had previously sponsored radio programs like “Jack Armstrong: All-American Boy.” Jack Armstrong was the first character to appear on a Wheaties box, in 1933, preceding Lou Gehrig by a year. He was created by General Mills’ Vice President Samuel Chester Gale to sell Wheaties. Gale went on to create Betty Crocker and lead the Advertising Council from 1950 to 1951.

General Mills even featured a mascot, Champy the Lion, created by puppeteer Bil Baird and voiced by Thurl Ravenscroft, who also voiced another cereal spokes-feline, Tony the Tiger. Its sponsorships of children’s television shows like The Mickey Mouse Club backfired as adults began to avoid cereals associated with children, and children’s increased cereal consumption did not offset the loss of older consumers.

By the late 1950s, General Mills reinitiated Wheaties’ relationship with sports, hiring Olympic pole vaulter Bob Richards as its first spokesperson. Before Richards, athletes appeared on the back of the Wheaties box, but the Olympian was the first to appear on the front of the box in 1958, and athletes have remained on the front ever since.

As a part of his contract, Richards led the Wheaties Sports Federation that promoted physical fitness, Olympic sports and athletic education and published instructional books. They also advertised through sporting events again as one of the first brands to sponsor pregame and postgame shows.

Honored on the orange box

Similar to the cover of the magazine Sports Illustrated or the video game series Madden, an athlete—or, recently, superheroes—being chosen to appear on a Wheaties box represented mainstream stardom. Mary Lou Retton’s iconic 1984 box was the first time a female medal winner appeared on the front, and two years later Walter Payton was the first African American to be featured on the front of the box. By the end of the 1980s, fans could pay to have a Wheaties box made with their picture.

In 1987, the Minnesota Twins were the first team to appear on a Wheaties box in 1987 after the team, from the same city in which Wheaties was created, won the World Series. In 1992, to celebrate the Chicago Bulls’ back-to-back championships, Wheaties produced a red and black box, the first time it broke with the iconic orange color. Bulls legend Michael Jordan was signed as a spokesperson for the cereal in 1988, appearing on the box a record 19 times, followed by Tiger Woods with 14 appearances.

In recent decades, the cereal industry has seen a dramatic decline, and Wheaties has not been immune to this downturn. With many more breakfast options, and the younger generations consuming less milk, cereal now occupies less space in the breakfast pantry. In spite of the public’s turn away from cereal toward healthier options, Wheaties remains an iconic brand, evidenced by its partnership with the blockbuster film set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

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Recently featured in Marvel blockbuster The Thunderbolts*—and with the Thunderbolts featured on a tie-in box—Wheaties has been the go-to champion breakfast for 100 years and counting.

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How Asian American became a racial grouping

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 20 May 2025 23:21:45 +0000

How Asian American became a racial grouping Rachel Sauer Tue, 05/20/2025 - 17:21

Jennifer Ho

And why many with Asian roots don’t identify with the term these days

For the first time, in 1990, May was officially designated as a month honoring Asian American and Pacific Islander heritage. Though the current U.S. administration recently withdrew federal recognition, the month continues to be celebrated by a wide array of people from diverse cultural backgrounds.

People from the Pacific Islands have their own distinct histories and issues, delineated in part by a specific geography. Yet when we refer to the even broader category of Asian Americans, a concept with a deep yet often unknown history, who exactly are we referring to?

There are nearly 25 million people of Asian descent who live in the United States, but the term Asian American remains shrouded by cultural misunderstanding and contested as a term among Asians themselves.

Jennifer Ho is a professor of Asian American studies in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies and director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts.

As a professor of Asian American studies, I believe it is important to understand how the label came into being.

A long history of Asian people in America

The arrival of people from Asia to the U.S. long predates the country’s founding in 1776.

After visits to modern-day America that began in the late 16th century, Filipino sailors formed – as early as 1763 – what is believed to be the first Asian settlement in St. Malo, Louisiana.

But it wasn’t until the 1849 California Gold Rush that Asian immigration to the U.S.—from China—began on a mass scale. That was bolstered in the 1860s by Chinese laborers recruited to build the western portion of the Transcontinental Railroad.

Starting toward the end of the 19th century, Japanese immigration steadily picked up, so that by 1910 the U.S. Census records a similar number for both communities – just over 70,000. Likewise, a small number of South Asian immigrants began arriving in the early 1900s.

An exclusionary backlash

Yet after coming to the U.S. in search of economic and political opportunities, Asian laborers in America were met by a surge of white nativist hostility and violence. That reaction was codified in civil society groups and government laws, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.

By 1924, federal law had expanded into a virtual ban on all Asian immigration, and through the first half of the 20th century, a multitude of anti-Asian laws targeted areas including naturalization, marriage and housing, among others.

From the start, people from Asian countries in the U.S. were generally identified broadly with identifiers such as “Oriental,” a common term at the time mostly for those from China, Japan and Korea.

As more Asians came to the U.S, other terms were used to denigrate and demean these new immigrants, whose physical appearance, language and cultural norms were distinctly different from their Euro-American neighbors.

‘Asian American’ and the birth of a movement

Chinese railroad workers (left to right) Wong Fook, Lee Chao and Ging Cui with a parade float in Ogden, Utah, during a 1919 parade celebrating the 50th anniversary of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. (Photo: San Francisco Public Library)

The desire to claim America was one of the drivers for activists in the 1960s to create the concept of Asian American that we know today.

The movement began in the charged political context of anti-Vietnam War protests and the Civil Rights Movement for Black equality. Students of Asian heritage at San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley were organizing for the establishment of ethnic studies classes, specifically those that centered on the histories of Asians in the U.S.

Rejecting the term “oriental” as too limiting and exotic, since oriental literally means “from the East,” the student activists wanted a term of empowerment that would include the Filipino, Chinese, Korean and Japanese students at the heart of this organizing. Graduate students Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka came up with “Asian American” as a way to bring activists under one radical organizing umbrella, forming the Asian American Political Alliance in 1968.

A contested term

Today, the Asian American label has moved beyond its activist roots. The term might literally refer to anyone who traces their lineage from the whole of the Asian continent. This could include people from South Asian countries such as India, Pakistan or Sri Lanka to parts of West Asia like Syria, Lebanon or Iran.

Yet not all people who identify as Asian actually use the words Asian American, since it is a term that flattens ethnic specificity and lumps together people with as disparate of backgrounds as Hmong or Bangladeshi, for example.

A 2023 Pew Research Center survey of self-identified Asian adults living in the U.S. revealed that only 16% of people polled said they identified as “Asian American,” with a majority—52%—preferring ethnic Asian labels, either alone or in tandem with “American.”

Moreover, unlike the student activists who worked together through their shared Asian American identity, the majority of people of Asian descent living in the U.S. came after the 1965 Immigration Act was passed, which ended all prior anti-Asian immigration laws. This, combined with a subsequent wave of Asian immigration from parts of Asia not represented in the past—including Vietnam, Taiwan and Pakistan—means that most Asian Americans alive today are either immigrants or one generation removed from immigrants.

As a largely immigrant and recently Americanized group, many Asians therefore may not relate to the struggles of an earlier history of Asians in the U.S. That may contribute to why many don’t connect with the term “Asian American.” Korean immigrants, for instance, may not see their history connected with third-generation Japanese Americans, particularly when considering their homelands have been in conflict for decades.

For some, Asian American is too broad a term to capture the complexity of Asian-heritage Americans.

Indeed, Asian Americans come from over 30 countries with different languages, diverse cultures, and histories that have often been in conflict with other Asian nations. Within such a broad grouping as “Asian American,” a wide range of political, socioeconomic, religious and other differences emerge that greatly complicate this racial label.

Even though the term remains contested, many Asians still see value in the concept. Much like the activists who first created the label in the 1960s, many believe it signifies a sense of solidarity and community among people who—despite their many differences—have been treated like outsiders to the American experience, regardless of how American their roots are.

Jennifer Ho is a professor of Asian American studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the ��Ƶ.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

And why many with Asian roots don’t identify with the term these days.

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Top image: Children performing a traditional Korean dance to celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. (Photo: Viorel Florescu/AP)

Where are today’s Newton and Einstein?

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 14 May 2025 20:25:08 +0000

Where are today’s Newton and Einstein? Rachel Sauer Wed, 05/14/2025 - 14:25

Iskra Fileva

CU Boulder philosopher Iskra Fileva argues that the present time is one of great achievements without outstanding achievers

We produce nothing if not academic papers. There are millions of academics in the world, and every year, they publish millions of articles. Some of the new work is good—and some, very good. Yet it is difficult to point to anyone after Einstein who has done something outstanding, something likely to be remembered for centuries. I am not the first to observe that our time can boast no Darwins, Newtons or Galileos. It is as though humanity, somehow and for some reason, can no longer birth great minds. But why? Did our talent well run dry?

It may be supposed that in lamenting the current state of affairs, we compare, unfairly, the output of the last several decades to that of the rest of history. If you pick at random a past 70-year period and look at who the important thinkers were, chances are you won’t find anyone you have already heard of. Why should the last 70 years be any different?

Iskra Fileva is a CU Boulder associate professor of philosophy who specializes in moral psychology and issues at the intersection of philosophy, psychology and psychiatry.

My answer is that the relevant comparison is not between achievements produced over periods of equal duration but between achievements produced by equal numbers of scientists and other thinkers. While human history goes back centuries, according to current estimates, 90% of all scientists who ever lived are alive today. The fact that all the great ones may come from the ranks of the deceased 10% calls for an explanation.

Perhaps the answer is that greatness is staring us in the face, and we don’t see it. Or we refuse to see it. Marcel Proust suggested once that we are loath to call living people “great.” The reason he gave was cynical, but one that rings at least partially true: We don’t envy the dead, and it is easier to put on a pedestal those you don’t envy. I would add that the dead are not competition for awards and recognition.

There may also be a legend-like aspect to the idea of greatness, and legends require exaggeration and idealization unlikely to survive a reality check. Death helps mythmaking, here and elsewhere.

But some people in the past became living legends (think of Einstein), and at any rate, many scientists have passed away in the last several decades, yet it is difficult to think of someone who joined humanity’s Great Hall of Fame during that period.

Short attention spans

Let’s consider an alternative explanation of what seems like an intellectual-giants drought, an explanation that has to do not with envy but with desire for amusement. It is possible that our attention span has become too short for anyone’s rise to prominence to endure. We may not want to spend much time on a serious author, either. That’s a problem, because greatness status cannot be attained in a single day. Thinkers from the distant past benefit from having had generations of less-distractable people study their works. How well would the great of old fare if they came back to life?

That’s a fair question. Interestingly, Robert Musil, in his remarkable 1930s novel The Man Without Qualities, suggested that distractibility and desire for novelty would have made it impossible for people in his day and age to pay attention to Plato for more than a short period of time. If Plato walked into an editor’s office today, Musil writes, he would become an overnight sensation and receive multiple lucrative offers from news outlets. Perhaps one of his older works would be turned into a film. But the shiny new thing would lose its luster before long, even if that thing happens to be Plato. Musil writes:

“The moment his return had ceased to be news, however, and Mr. Plato tried to put into practice one of his well-known ideas, which had never quite come into their own, the editor in chief would ask him to submit only a nice little column on the subject now and then for the Life and Leisure section (but in the easiest and most lively style possible, not heavy: remember the readers), and the features editor would add that he was sorry, but he could use such a contribution only once a month or so, because there were so many other good writers to be considered.”

This prescient passage may capture the spirit of our time better than it captured Musil’s own. Yet I can’t help but think that Plato would continue to be seen as great if he came back now. His return would just, inevitably, cease to be news.

The puzzles are too difficult

Another possibility is sometimes suggested: Progress has become too difficult. The low-hanging fruit has been picked, and the remaining puzzles outmatch human cognitive capacities.

"Would any one person living today have come up with Newton’s Laws of Motion? With Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection? It is not clear," notes Iskra Fileva, CU Boulder associate professor of philosophy. (Charles Darwin seen here in an 1881 portrait. Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

But I don’t find this hypothesis compelling either, though there is something to it. Whatever is known tends to seem easier to discover than that which is not yet known. Would any one person living today have come up with Newton’s Laws of Motion? With Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection? It is not clear.

What, then?

I wish to suggest that we simply work differently from people in the past, and our modus operandi militates against individual greatness. We live in an age of collective incrementalism. We absorb—often thoroughly—the preceding tradition. As a consequence, the work we produce lacks the independence of thought and the unity that continue to impress us in Newton’s and Darwin’s work centuries later.

In addition, we collaborate. There are hundreds of people working together on particle accelerators, brain tissues and large language models or who jointly carry out experiments (and who team up with other groups running closely related experiments). Together, we could have come up with the Laws of Motion or the theory of evolution. It is just that no one is likely to have done it singlehandedly. If there are no lone geniuses, this is likely because no one is working alone.

But work is getting done. I suspect that while future generations may not know the names and legacies of anyone living today, the achievements of our time will attain intellectual immortality, just in a different way. Since new developments are likely to continue to absorb the preceding tradition, the future will contain the present. Our ideas will survive in the work of our descendants, but they will lose their contours. Future people will turn them into fertilizer for their own thoughts.

Life isn’t a movie script

Why would we want individual great minds anyhow? Perhaps we need to change the human psychological propensity to romanticize the idea of the lone genius (to which the Nobel Prize committee caters, insisting on giving the prize to individual scientists, not teams). Or maybe we can keep the idea but put it in its proper place. It is, after all, a trope that works well in certain kinds of fiction. We like legends and heroes. We just shouldn’t expect life to resemble a movie script.

I suspect, however, that when lamenting the perceived lack of great minds, we wish not simply for more intellectual giants but for more breakthroughs. We may relinquish the idea of the lone genius—or put it, as I suggest, in its place—but we cannot give up our desire for progress. And nor should we. What of that?

I note in response that the incrementalism of today is actually taking us farther faster than individual greatness would. There was hardly ever a time in human history when so much headway took place in a few decades as in the last few. The world we live in is vastly more advanced than the pre-internet world of my early childhood. (Ray Kurzweil went so far as to suggest that knowledge production doubles every 12 hours.)

One may thus invert the initial question and ask: How are we making progress so quickly if no one does anything outstanding? And the answer appears to be that a myriad of small steps counts for more than a few big leaps. It is a bit as though, instead of intellectual giants, we have something reminiscent of the sight gag involving three kids in a trench coat stacked on top of each other. What’s remarkable is that the trio advances more rapidly than the one tall adult. (Stephen J. Gould in Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin argues, relatedly, that while no baseball player today has Babe Ruth’s batting average, the league’s average is no worse, because the median player today is better than the median player in Babe Ruth’s time. What goes for baseball players may go for scientists.)

Slowing progress?

Still, some worry that progress has recently begun to slow down. This is the final point I wish to address. If the observation is true, don’t we, after all, need some more geniuses?

I will make two points in response. First, collective incrementalism creates a situation in which breakthroughs may be getting undercounted, because they don’t look like breakthroughs: They don’t happen all at once. Each begins as a 1.0 version and takes multiple attempts, so no new achievement goes very much further than the preceding ones.

Second, even if the rate of breakthroughs is slowing down, it is at best unclear that what we need to accelerate progress is more individual great minds. Perhaps what we need, instead, is better incrementalism and a better incentive structure for scientists, one that creates conditions that favor bigger leaps forward. Working on those conditions may be our best bet. It may also be our only bet since it is at best unclear how we may possibly go about creating the next Newton.

But that bet is good enough. This is my final thought. There are great achievements without outstanding achievers, achievements behind which stand multiple people that are simply pretty darn good.

This essay was reproduced with permission from the Fake Nous Substack. Iskra Fileva is a ��Ƶ associate professor of philosophy and hosts the Philosopher's Diaries blog at Psychology Today.

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CU Boulder philosopher Iskra Fileva argues that the present time is one of great achievements without outstanding achievers.

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This summer, where there's smoke there's probably fire

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 21:01:58 +0000

This summer, where there's smoke there's probably fire Rachel Sauer Wed, 04/23/2025 - 15:01

Laura Dee

Controlled burns reduce wildfire risk, but they require trained staff and funding—this could be a rough year

Red skies in August, longer fire seasons and checking air quality before taking my toddler to the park. This has become the new norm in the western United States as wildfires become more frequent, larger and more catastrophic.

As an ecologist at the ��Ƶ, I know that fires are part of the natural processes that forests need to stay healthy. But the combined effects of a warmer and drier climate, more people living in fire-prone areas and vegetation and debris built up over years of fire suppression are leading to more severe fires that spread faster. And that’s putting humans, ecosystems and economies at risk.

To help prevent catastrophic fires, the U.S. Forest Service issued a 10-year strategy in 2022 that includes scaling up the use of controlled burns and other techniques to remove excess plant growth and dry, dead materials that fuel wildfires.

CU Boulder researcher Laura Dee is an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.

However, the Forest Service’s wildfire management activities have been thrown into turmoil in 2025 with funding cuts and disruptions and uncertainty from the federal government.

The planet just saw its hottest year on record. If spring and summer 2025 are also dry and hot, conditions could be prime for severe fires again.

More severe fires harm forest recovery and people

Today’s severe wildfires have been pushing societies, emergency response systems and forests beyond what they have evolved to handle.

Extreme fires have burned into cities, including destroying thousands of homes in the Los Angeles area in 2025 and near Boulder, Colorado, in 2021. They threaten downstream public drinking water by increasing sediments and contaminants in water supplies, as well as infrastructure, air quality and rural economies. They also increase the risk of flooding and mudslides from soil erosion. And they undermine efforts to mitigate climate change by releasing carbon stored in these ecosystems.

In some cases, fires burned so hot and deep into the soil that the forests are not growing back.

While many species are adapted to survive low-level fires, severe blazes can damage the seeds and cones needed for forests to regrow. My team has seen this trend outside of Fort Collins, Colorado, where four years after the Cameron Peak fire, forests have still not come back the way ecologists would expect them to under past, less severe fires. Returning to a strategy of fire suppression − or trying to “go toe-to-toe with every fire” − will make these cases more common.

Proactive wildfire management can help reduce the risk to forests and property.

Measures such as prescribed burns have proven to be effective for maintaining healthy forests and reducing the severity of subsequent wildfires. A recent review found that selective thinning followed by prescribed fire reduced subsequent fire severity by 72% on average, and prescribed fire on its own reduced severity by 62%.

But managing forests well requires knowing how forests are changing, where trees are dying and where undergrowth has built up and increased fire hazards. And, for federal lands, these are some of the jobs that are being targeted by the Trump administration.

Parts of Cameron Peak in north-central Colorado that burned in a severe fire in 2020 showed scant evidence of recovery four years later, when this photo was taken. (Photo: Bella Olesky/CU Boulder)

Some of the Forest Service staff who were fired or put in limbo by the Trump administration are those who do research or collect and communicate critical data about forests and fire risk. Other fired staff provided support so crews could clear flammable debris and carry out fuel treatments such as prescribed burns, thinning forests and building fire breaks.

Losing people in these roles is like firing all primary care doctors and leaving only EMTs. Both are clearly needed. As many people know from emergency room bills, preventing emergencies is less costly than dealing with the damage later.

Logging is not a long-term fire solution

The Trump administration cited “wildfire risk reduction” when it issued an emergency order to increase logging in national forests by 25%.

But private − unregulated − forest management looks a lot different than managing forests to prevent destructive fires.

Logging, depending on the practice, can involve clear-cutting trees and other techniques that compromise soils. Exposing a forest’s soils and dead vegetation to more sunlight also dries them out, which can increase fire risk in the near term.

In general, logging that focuses on extracting the highest-value trees leaves thinner trees that are more vulnerable to fires. A study in the Pacific Northwest found that replanting logged land with the same age and size of trees can lead to more severe fires in the future.

Research and data are essential

For many people in the western U.S., these risks hit close to home.

I’ve seen neighborhoods burn and friends and family displaced, and I have contended with regular air quality warnings and red flag days signaling a high fire risk. I’ve also seen beloved landscapes, such as those on Cameron Peak, transform when conifers that once made up the forest have not regrown.

My scientific research group and collaborations with other scientists have been helping to identify cost-effective solutions. That includes which fuel-treatment methods are most effective, which types of forests and conditions they work best in and how often they are needed. We’re also planning research projects to better understand which forests are at greatest risk of not recovering after fires.

This sort of research is what robust, cost-effective land management is based on.

When careful, evidence-based forest management is replaced with a heavy emphasis on suppressing every fire or clear-cutting forests, I worry that human lives, property and economies, as well as the natural legacy of public lands left to every American, are at risk.

Laura Dee is an associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Controlled burns reduce wildfire risk, but they require trained staff and funding—this could be a rough year.

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Top image: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Embracing all the joy in Mudville

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 17:16:36 +0000

Embracing all the joy in Mudville Rachel Sauer Thu, 04/03/2025 - 11:16

Jared Bahir Browsh

Even though Major League Baseball faces an uncertain future entering its 150th season, Opening Day still holds a special place in the culture and fans’ hearts

As Rockies fans make their way to Denver for the team's 33rd home opener Friday, we are reminded of the excitement and hope that accompanies every team starting the season and looking toward the World Series. Why does opening day mean so much to so many?

For many, spring and summer are marked by the cracking of bats and the camaraderie of the tailgate as fan hope is renewed and the losses of seasons past are replaced by visions of the World Series. Even as baseball faces a less-than-certain future, with viewership down and ticket prices way, way up, Opening Day remains deeply rooted in our collective memories. Why?

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

This tradition has been nearly 150 years in the making, with the first National League Opening Day occurring on April 22, 1876, in Philadelphia, with the Athletics defeating the Boston Red Caps. Since that first opener, the tradition and pageantry has only grown, with cities recognizing the day with parades and fans awakening from their winter hibernation to celebrate what has become an unofficial holiday in many cities.

One city where this tradition is strongly rooted is Cincinnati, home of the first recognized all-professional team in baseball, the Red Stockings. Manager John Joyce, who organized the original team in 1866, updated the Cincinnati franchise in 1875, and the team then joined the newly established National League (NL) in 1876.

Though beer has become a baseball tradition, in 1880 the Cincinnati Reds were kicked out of the NL for selling beer and playing on Sundays. Previous to that, William Hulbert, who had overseen the organization of the league after the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (NA) disbanded, took several of the financially successful teams from the NA and established the NL with a number of strict rules, including a ban on alcohol sales and a ban on Sunday games, to address the negative reputation of baseball at the time—which included drinking, gambling and debauchery. The Cincinnati franchise ignored these rules, partly as an effort to attract German immigrants to the game, and was expelled, leading the team to go bankrupt and fold.

In spite of these challenges, professional baseball continued in Cincinnati, with Opening Day growing in prominence. The Reds have played almost every opening day at home since 1876, a tradition most likely rooted in their position as one of the southernmost charter members in the NL. The newly re-established Cincinnati Reds played in the American Association before joining the NL again in 1890 with the Brooklyn Bridegrooms (now Dodgers), expanding the NL to eight teams. Reds’ business manager Frank Bancroft began to intensely market Opening Day after he joined the team in 1892, establishing a tradition for not only the Queen City, but baseball as a whole, which just so happened to be the same year the NL allowed beer sales and games on Sunday.

Snow on Opening Day

An illustration of Opening Day at New York's Polo Grounds on April 29, 1886. (Illustration: Greater Hartford Twilight Baseball League)

The Opening Day tradition continued to grow after the turn of the 20th century, although weather, and sometimes even the fans, did not always cooperate. After the New York Giants went down 3-0 in their Opening Day game against the Philadelphia Phillies at the historic Polo Grounds in 1907, Giants fans threw snowballs on the field—including one that hit the home plate umpire, leading him to call the game in favor of the Phillies.

Attention on Opening Day increased when baseball fan President William Howard Taft threw out the ceremonial first pitch for the Washington Senators in their home opener in 1910. Twelve presidents have thrown out the ceremonial first pitch of the season, and many franchises have invited team legends and celebrities to welcome in the new season.

In 1920, the tradition of the Findlay Market Parade began in Cincinnati to celebrate Opening Day after the team won the 1919 World Series in spite of rumors that the Chicago White Sox had fixed the series—rumors that were later confirmed. Other teams built their own Opening Day traditions over time, like the Anheuser-Busch Clydesdale circling the field in St. Louis.

Opening Day continued despite two world wars and the Great Depression, with a number of milestones being established by the unofficial holiday. In the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Opening Day game on April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson broke the color line in baseball, scoring the winning run against the Boston Braves. In 1974, while playing for the same Braves—who had relocated from Milwaukee to Atlanta in 1966—Hank Aaron tied Babe Ruth’s home run record at 714. The following season, Frank Robinson debuted as the first African American manager in baseball history.

Major League Baseball has maintained the tradition of Opening Day, even creating a unique logo in 2001, in spite of changes in the schedule. ESPN began broadcasting “opening games” the night before the official Opening Day in 1994, further establishing the noteworthy aspects of the day. On Opening Day in 1999, the first regular-season game outside of the United States was played in Monterrey, Mexico, with the Rockies beating the San Diego Padres 8-2.

The Colorado Rockies will play their 2025 home opener Friday at Coors Field in Denver. (Photo: Visit Denver)

The first regular season to open outside of North America occurred the next year in Tokyo; however, the games between the New York Mets and Chicago Cubs were scheduled the week before the official Opening Day, establishing the precedent that these early season international opening games would not be considered Opening Day games. The 2025 Tokyo Series took place between the Dodgers and Cubs on March 18 and 19, following several exhibition games in Japan—more than a week before the officially recognized Opening Day.

Opening Day traditionally took place on a Monday through the 2011 season, when MLB split the Opening Days of its 30 teams across two days to the last Thursday and Friday of March to avoid the World Series extending into November, as it had the previous two seasons. After returning to a Monday start in 2013, the league made the change to start the season on a Thursday permanent in 2018, with all 30 teams scheduled to play on Thursday, March 29.

As Major League Baseball begins its 150th season, many questions remain regarding the future of the sport. Two teams are playing in minor league stadiums due to the pending relocation of the Athletics and the Tampa Bay Rays, and MLB and ESPN will end their media rights deal following the 2025 season, after the network tried to reduce its rights payments from $550 million to $200 million.

MLB continues to try to make games more attractive to younger fans by speeding up pace of play and by highlighting top stars like the L.A. Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani and the Mets’ Juan Soto. In spite of this transitional period for the sport, however, one thing remains constant: the hope and excitement that Opening Day inspires.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

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Even though Major League Baseball faces an uncertain future entering its 150th season, Opening Day still holds a special place in the culture and fans’ hearts.

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How March went mad … for basketball

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 17:12:17 +0000

How March went mad … for basketball Rachel Sauer Wed, 03/19/2025 - 11:12

Jared Bahir Browsh

The big business of the annual college basketball tournament, continuing with the second day of First Four games today, has been more than a century in the making

Every year, as the seasons shift from winter to spring, college basketball fans throughout the country prepare to watch 136 men’s and women’s basketball teams battle for their respective national championships.

Although the tournament starts with the “First Four” games for the men’s and women’s tournaments, respectively, the first two rounds that are played during the first weekend of the tournament have become an unofficial holiday marked by billions of dollars in decreased productivity as fans watch the first 48 games played in each tournament—during which teams vie to extend their seasons another week into the “Sweet 16.”

In the modern media age, this has become a tradition in our sports calendar, but it took several developments over the last half century for March to truly become mad.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

Basketball’s roots grew out of the college game, with James Naismith inventing the game in December 1891 to keep young men at the YMCA International Training School, which is now Springfield College, fit and occupied in the winter months. The game was soon introduced to women at Smith College, and by 1893 colleges and universities began forming teams—first playing against local amateur clubs before intercollegiate games began in 1894.

During this time, teams played under different rules, with some games featuring as many as nine players per side. By the turn of the 20th century, five-on-five became standard for men’s games, whereas women played six-on-six through most of the 1960s, with the last high school six-on-six tournament occurring in 1995 in Oklahoma.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) was formed in 1906 as the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (IAAUS) before taking its current name in 1910. The NCAA was formed in response to the prevalence of injuries in college football; President Theodore Roosevelt called for two conferences comprising top college football programs to address the injuries and deaths occurring in the game. The establishment of the NCAA led to a decades-long power struggle with the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) for control of intercollegiate sports.

As the NCAA wrested control over football from the AAU, basketball continued to be loosely organized under the AAU, which organized the first tournament in 1898. Although the tournament did not happen annually until after World War I, the AAU did organize several tournaments for the 1904 Olympics, during which basketball debuted as a demonstration sport. There was an amateur tournament, a separate college tournament and several tournaments for high school and elementary school players.

A battle for control

The battle for control between the AAU and NCAA continued through the early 1900s, although the latter’s commitment to basketball was questionable through the 1930s. However, the NCAA did begin organizing rules committees and established its first championship, in track and field, for the 1921 season.

The first annual college basketball tournaments were organized in successive years with the NAIA tournament, organized by Naismith, starting in 1937, the National Invitation Tournament (NIT) in 1938 and the NCAA tournament in 1939. Coincidentally, the term “March Madness” was coined by Henry V. Porter, a noted coach and inventor of basketball equipment, in reference to the Illinois high school basketball tournament the same year as the first NCAA tournament. Sports commentator Brent Musburger first used the term in reference to the men’s tournament in 1982.

The NIT, which took place at Madison Square Garden, was seen as the premiere tournament through the 1940s due to the national media presence in New York City. Temple University defeated the University of Colorado in the first NIT championship, with the Buffaloes returning to the championship and winning in 1940 over Duquesne University. Because the NIT occurred before the NCAA tournament, Colorado and Duquesne competed in both.

Clemson players celebrate a win over Arizona in the Sweet 16 round of the 2024 NCAA Tournament. (Photo: TigerNet.com)

The early 1950s featured two developments that further isolated each tournament, both involving the City College of New York (CCNY). CCNY became the first team to win both tournaments in the same year, with the championships of both tournaments occurring in Madison Square Garden in 1950. This double win led the NCAA to ban teams from competing in both tournaments in the same year.

Soon after, that CCNY team was implicated in a wide-ranging point shaving scandal, which involved bribery and match fixing. The school’s presence in New York provided bettors easier access to bookies and bookies greater access to players.

The NCAA held its finals in New York all but one year between 1943 and 1950, but after the scandal the championship never returned to Madison Square Garden, even as the NIT continued to call New York City home.

A growing NCAA

The next big developments occurred in the late 1960s and 1970s as the NCAA further established its control over the basketball postseason. In 1968, UCLA and Houston played in the “Game of the Century” in front of more than 52,000 fans in the Houston Astrodome. This game was a follow-up to the previous year’s semifinal matchup between the two teams, which pitted star players Lew Alcindor (now known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), who was recovering from an eye injury, and Elvin Hayes. The game was nationally televised and accelerated college basketball’s transition from a regional to a national sport.

In 1970, Marquette declined an invitation to the NCAA tournament after it was placed in the Midwest Region, where games were played in Fort Worth, Texas, rather than the Mideast Region, where games were played in Dayton, Ohio—significantly closer to Marquette’s campus in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 1971, the NCAA declared that any team that is offered a bid to the NCAA tournament could not accept a bid to any other postseason tournament.

In 1975, after several top-ranked teams missed out on bids due to not winning their conferences, the tournament expanded from 25 teams to 32 teams to accommodate at-large bids from conferences, establishing a selection process and the anxiety of the “bubble.”

UCLA player Lew Alcindor (now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), right, snags a rebound as Houston’s Elvin Hayes (44) makes a leaping rebound attempt in what was called the “Game of the Century.” (Photo: Associated Press)

Four years later, in 1979, the tournament expanded to 40 teams but conferences were still limited to two total teams in the tournament. The 1979 tournament championship pitted Magic Johnson’s Michigan State team and Larry Bird’s Indiana State team and is still the most-viewed championship in tournament history.

The tournament continued to grow in 1980, adding eight teams and removing the conference limits. At the time, the Big Ten, Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), Pac-10 and Southeastern Conference (SEC) were college basketball’s power conferences, with teams in the Northeast and New England playing in the amorphous Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference (ECAC), which operated four regional tournaments between 1975 and 1981.

Providence coach Dave Gavitt saw an opportunity to organize a new conference with teams connected to major media markets, leveraging the growth of television through cable and syndication to form the original Big East. As the Big East began play in the fall of 1979, a small Connecticut network—the fledgling ESPN—began broadcasting nationally; soon the conference and ESPN became partners in each other's growth. As ESPN sought programming, it also began airing the early rounds of the tournament, which previously aired only locally as national broadcasters refused to pre-empt their regular programming for the early-round games.

The Big East increased college basketball’s media visibility on cable television, particularly during the week in prime time, and aided in recruiting as it became one of the top conferences in college basketball. When the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985, three of the Final Four teams were from the Big East, with the eighth-seeded Villanova University defeating defending champion Georgetown University in the championship game.

Expanding tournaments

The first NCAA-sponsored women’s tournament occurred in 1982, with 32 teams facing off. Previously, the Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (CIAW) had established the first tournament in 1969, when women’s games were still under six-player rules. The last CIAW tournament featured five-on-five rules before the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) took control of the tournament in 1971. Title IX, passed in 1972, accelerated the growth of women’s college sports well before the NCAA finally recognized the profitability of women’s basketball—10 years after the educational amendment was passed.

Kamilla Cardoso was named the NCAA Tournament Most Outstanding Player in 2024 after helping lead South Carolina to an 87-75 victory over Iowa, clinching the championship title. (Photo: Erik Drost/Wikimedia Commons)

Throughout the rest of the 1980s and 1990s, the men’s tournament remained fairly static even as the NCAA continued to evolve. After the 1984 Supreme Court decision NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, which found that the NCAA’s television plans violated antitrust laws, the NCAA was no longer able to limit how often football teams could appear on television, ultimately allowing conferences to sign their own media contracts with broadcasters and leading to a massive conference realignment that continues today. This, in turn, led to the NCAA basketball tournament becoming the most valuable media property overseen by the association.

The women’s tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1994, and the last men’s Final Four to take place in a basketball venue was played in 1996; subsequent events have taken place in domed football stadiums. The tournament expanded to 65 teams in 2001 to accommodate the Mountain West Conference receiving an automatic bid reintroducing play-in games to the tournament.

A century of madness

As the tournament approached the new millennium, fans were offered new ways to watch it. In 1999, DirecTV offered a premium package allowing fans to watch all the games through the satellite service, a feature previously only available in sports bars. The same year, CBS broadcast the Final Four in high definition for the first time.

In 2003, work productivity took another hit as CBS partnered with Yahoo! to stream tournament games for the first time through the latter’s platinum service. CBS launched its own March Madness OnDemand Service the following year, giving fans access to games outside of the CBS broadcast for $9.95.

Seven years later, in 2010, the NCAA announced it was exploring expanding the tournament, even announcing it wanted to expand to 96 teams. At the same time, the NCAA began negotiations with several media networks on a new media deal. The association settled on expanding to 68 teams, establishing the “First Four” games in which the four lowest-ranked teams that earned automatic bids and the four lowest at-large teams facing off in play-in games. This accompanied a new combined television deal in which CBS and Turner Sports agreed to broadcast all games on CBS, TNT, TBS and TruTV.

In 2021, after Texas Christian University center Sedona Prince, who at the time was playing for the University of Oregon, posted pictures on social media highlighting the disparity between the fitness facilities for the women’s tournament compared to the men’s, the NCAA conducted a gender equality review. This led to the women’s tournament expanding to 68 teams and the March Madness branding being extended to the women’s tournament. Many still feel the women’s tournament is undervalued, especially after the 2024 Women’s Championship earned higher ratings than its male counterpart.

So, every March hope springs eternal for 136 teams, but for dedicated fans, the madness has been more than a century in the making.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

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The big business of the annual college basketball tournament, continuing with the second day of First Four games today, has been more than a century in the making.

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Communities working together for better air

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 19:32:50 +0000

Communities working together for better air Rachel Sauer Thu, 03/06/2025 - 12:32

Jenni Shearston

Colorado is tackling air pollution in vulnerable neighborhoods by regulating five air toxics

The Globeville, Elyria-Swansea and Commerce City communities in metro Denver are choked by air pollution from nearby highways, an oil refinery and a Superfund site.

While these neighborhoods have long suffered from air pollution, they’re not the only ones in Colorado.

Now, Colorado is taking a major step to protect people from air pollutants that cause cancer or other major health problems, called “air toxics.” For the first time, the state is developing its own state-level air toxic health standards.

CU Boulder researcher Jenni Shearston studies chemical exposure and health, measuring and evaluating the impact of air pollution on people’s well-being.

In January 2025 Colorado identified five air toxics as “priority” chemicals: benzene, ethylene oxide, formaldehyde, hexavalent chromium compounds and hydrogen sulfide.

The state is in the process of setting health-based standards that will limit the amount of each chemical allowed in the air. Importantly, the standards will be designed to protect people exposed to the chemicals long term, such as those living near emission sources. Exposure to even low amounts of some chemicals, such as benzene, may lead to cancer.

As a researcher studying chemical exposure and health, I measure and evaluate the impact of air pollution on people’s well-being.

Colorado’s new regulations will draw on expert knowledge and community input to protect people’s health.

Communities know what needs regulation

In your own community, is there a highway that runs near your house or a factory with a bad odor? Maybe a gas station right around the corner? You likely already know many of the places that release air pollution near you.

When state or local regulators work with community members to find out what air pollution sources communities are worried about, the partnership can lead to a system that better serves the public and reduces injustice.

For example, partnerships between community advocates, scientists and regulators in heavily polluted and marginalized neighborhoods in New York and Boston have had big benefits. These partnerships resulted in both better scientific knowledge about how air pollution is connected to asthma and the placement of air monitors in neighborhoods impacted the most.

In Colorado, the process to choose the five priority air toxics included consulting with multiple stakeholders. A technical working group provided input on which five chemicals should be prioritized from the larger list of 477 toxic air contaminants.

The working group includes academics, members of nongovernmental organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund – local government and regulated industries, such as the American Petroleum Institute.

There were also opportunities for community participation during public meetings.

At public hearings, community groups like GreenLatinos argued that formaldehyde, instead of acrolein, should be one of the prioritized air toxics because it can cause cancer.

Additionally, formaldehyde is emitted in some Colorado communities that are predominantly people of color, according to advocates for those communities. These communities are already disproportionately impacted by high rates of respiratory disease and cancer.

Other members of the community also weighed in.

“One of my patients is a 16-year-old boy who tried to get a summer job working outside, but had to quit because air pollution made his asthma so bad that he could barely breathe,” wrote Logan Harper, a Denver-area family physician and advocate for Healthy Air and Water Colorado.

How is air quality protected?

At the national level, the Clean Air Act requires that six common air pollutants, such as ozone and carbon monoxide, are kept below specific levels. The act also regulates 188 hazardous air pollutants.

Individual states are free to develop their own regulations, and several, including California and Minnesota, already have. States can set standards that are more health-protective than those in place nationally.

Four of the five chemicals prioritized by Colorado are regulated federally. The fifth chemical, hydrogen sulfide, is not included on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s hazardous air pollutant list, but Colorado has decided to regulate it as an air toxic.

State-level regulation is important because states can focus on air toxics specific to their state to make sure that the communities most exposed to air pollution are protected. One way to do this is to place air pollution monitors in the communities experiencing the worst air pollution.

For example, Colorado is placing six new air quality monitors in locations around the state to measure concentrations of the five priority air toxics. It will also use an existing monitor in Grand Junction to measure air toxics. Two of the new monitors, located in Commerce City and La Salle, began operating in January 2024. The remainder will start monitoring the air by July 2025.

When Colorado chose the sites, it prioritized communities that are overly impacted by social and environmental hazards. To do this, officials used indexes like the Colorado EnviroScreen, which combines information about pollution, health and economic factors to identify communities that are overly burdened by hazards.

The Commerce City monitor is located in Adams City, a neighborhood that has some of the worst pollution in the state. The site has air toxics emissions that are worse than 95% of communities in Colorado.

Air toxics and health

The five air toxics that Colorado selected all have negative impacts on health. Four are known to cause cancer.

When state or local regulators work with community members to find out what air pollution sources communities are worried about, the partnership can lead to a system that better serves the public and reduces injustice.

Benzene, perhaps the most well known because of its ability to cause blood cancer, is one. But it also has a number of other health impacts, including dampening the ability of the immune system and impacting the reproductive system by decreasing sperm count. Benzene is in combustion-powered vehicle exhaust and is emitted during oil and gas production and refinement.

Ethylene oxide can cause cancer and irritates the nervous and respiratory systems. Symptoms of long-term exposure can include headaches, sore throat, shortness of breath and others. Ethylene oxide is used to sterilize medical equipment, and as of 2024, it was used by four facilities in Colorado.

Formaldehyde is also a cancer-causing agent, and exposure is associated with asthma in children. This air toxic is used in the manufacture of a number of products like household cleaners and building materials. It is also emitted by oil and gas sources, including during fracking.

Hexavalent chromium compounds can cause several types of cancer, as well as skin and lung diseases such as asthma and rhinitis. A major source of hexavalent chromium is coal-fired power plants, of which Colorado currently has six in operation, though these plants are scheduled to close in the next five years. Other sources of hexavalent chromium include chemical and other manufacturing.

Finally, long-term exposure to hydrogen sulfide can cause low blood pressure, headaches and a range of other symptoms, and has been associated with neurological impacts such as psychological disorders. Some sources of hydrogen sulfide include oil refineries and wastewater treatment plants.

Jenni Shearston is an assistant professor in the Department of Integrative Physiology.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Colorado is tackling air pollution in vulnerable neighborhoods by regulating five air toxics.

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Nationalism and diplomacy are inherent to international sporting events

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 17:48:23 +0000

Nationalism and diplomacy are inherent to international sporting events Rachel Sauer Fri, 02/21/2025 - 10:48

Jared Bahir Browsh

The International Cricket Council Champions Tournament, beginning this week, highlights how national rivalries and geopolitical tensions can meet on playing fields

Courses in the Critical Sports Studies program in the Department of Ethnic Studies often start with the Great Sports Myth, a term coined by Jay Coakley, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. The myth is that sports are inherently good, and most experiences in sports are positive and do not need to be studied critically.

In combating this myth, we examine sporting nationalism with the playing field serving as a symbolic battleground between nations. As Pakistan prepares to co-host the International Cricket Council (ICC) Champions Tournament beginning this week, the nation's nationalistic rivalry with India comes to the forefront and reminds us that the competition on the field is often reflective of political tensions off of it.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

India and Pakistan’s political tensions date back to the British partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, although ethnic and religious tensions predate the end of Britain’s colonization of the region. India has been a member of the ICC since 1926, with Pakistan joining the ICC soon after independence in 1952.

Sporting relations between the nations have faced a number of stoppages, while other countries have canceled test matches because of threats and actual violence against cricket teams, particularly in Pakistan.

The New Zealand cricket team canceled their remaining 2002 matches in Pakistan after a suicide bomb outside of their Karachi hotel, while other countries like Australia refused to tour due to similar concerns. In 2009, the Sri Lankan cricket team’s bus was fired on in Lahore during their test tour, which was scheduled after India pulled out of Pakistan following the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks. As a result, Pakistan lost the opportunity to co-host the 2011 ICC World Cup; the 2025 ICC Champions Tournament is the first international cricket tournament to be hosted by Pakistan since the 1996 ICC World Cup. India's refusal to play in Pakistan led to UAE being named as a co-host for India’s matches in the tournament, exemplifying continued tensions between the nations.

Yet diplomacy has been fostered through sport as well, including the peace initiatives of former Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, which led to the first matches between the nations in Pakistan in 15 years in 1999 and the Friendship Cups in Canada in the 1990s and 2000s.

Colonization and sporting tensions

Colonization has been at the core of sporting tensions between dozens of nations, including Britain and members of the Commonwealth like Ireland and Australia. Ireland in particular has used international sporting events as a forum for protest against Britain—most famously at the 1906 Intercalated Games in Athens, Greece. After being denied the gold medal in what many felt was a biased ruling by a judge from the United States, which followed the decision to force Irish athletes to compete on behalf of the United Kingdom, track and field athlete Peter O’Connor scaled a flag pole and unfurled an Erin Go Bragh flag, a symbol of the movement for Irish home rule.

The Olympics also have long been a nexus for sporting nationalism. One of the most distinct examples of this was at the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin. In spite of rising concerns over antisemitism under Hitler, the United States, led by USOC President Avery Brundage, and others agreed not to boycott the games in exchange for Nazi Germany suspending antisemitic messaging and the full enactment of the Nuremberg Laws until after the games.

Adolf Hitler saw the 1936 Summer Olympic Games as a forum to display Aryan supremacy through victory and spectacle, which included introducing the torch relay. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Hitler saw the games as a forum to display Aryan supremacy through victory and spectacle. Television was introduced at the games along with the torch relay and the opening ceremony as an ostentatious show. The entire games were a primary example of “sportwashing,” which uses sport to improve public opinion of a nation or group.

Much like the India-Pakistan rivalry, a number of other geopolitical tensions have played out on various sporting fields and courts around the world. George Orwell published “The Sporting Spirit” in December 1945, a few months after the end of World War II, warning of the use of sport to encourage hyper-nationalism. Orwell was particularly critical of the Stalin regime’s use of sport to exhibit the Soviet Union and communism’s “superiority” over capitalism after the soccer team FC Dynamo Moscow toured Britain.

In 1952, the Soviet Union participated in its first Summer Olympic Games, setting off decades of displays of Cold War sporting nationalism on both sides of the Iron Curtain, but particularly exemplified by the competition between the USSR and the United States.

The Olympics became the largest stage for nationalistic competition. Every four years, the Cold War rivalries played out on the global stage of the Summer and Winter Olympics. Some of the most famous moments in Olympic history include the controversial end of the 1972 Olympic basketball final, during which the Soviet Union beat the U.S. team by one point under questionable rule interpretations, and the 1980 Miracle on Ice in the semifinal of the ice hockey tournament, when amateur U.S. players defeated the Soviet Union.

Both events exemplified the rivalry between these superpowers. The 1972 Olympics also included the tragic terrorist attack by Black September militants, leading to the murder of 11 Israeli athletes—an example of how ethnic-nationalism, sport and violence can intersect.

Boycott and protest

Boycotting sporting events and protest actions during competition have also been responses to various forms of nationalism and political tensions. The pending boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow by the United States intensified the attention on the competition between the USSR and the United States in Lake Placid during the Winter Games that year.

Recently, hockey reemerged as a forum for nationalism as the United States and Canada faced off twice in the National Hockey League (NHL)-run 4 Nations Face-Off. The tournament was limited to NHL players, so the teams were not technically the national teams of the countries included in the tournament. It did feature four of the five countries with the largest representation in the NHL (Russia was excluded due to the invasion of Ukraine), with the league leveraging nationalistic feelings between Finland and Sweden and United States and Canada. The heightened tension between the North American teams was due, in part, to comments by U.S. President Donald Trump regarding the annexation our northern neighbors. This may serve as a preview of the heightened nationalism around the 2026 Olympic men’s and women’s ice hockey tournaments, especially if Russian athletes are permitted to compete.

U.S. sprinters Tommie Smith (first place) and John Carlos (third place) raised their fists to protest U.S. segregation and racism during the medical ceremony for the 200-meter sprint at the 1968 Summer Olympics; Australian sprinter Peter Norman (second place) wore a badge for the Olympic Project for Human Rights. (Photo: Angelo Cozzi/Mondadori Publishers)

The Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries in turn boycotted the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The 1980 boycott was triggered by the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

White nationalism and racial discrimination have also been a frequent motivator for protest and boycotts. The Olympic Project for Human Rights promoted a boycott of the 1968 games in Mexico City, with several athletes—including Kareem Abdul Jabbar—deciding not to go based on continuing discrimination of Blacks in the United States, lack of African American representation on the coaching staffs of Olympic teams, Muhammad Ali’s loss of his heavyweight championship due to his refusal to be drafted into the Vietnam War and apartheid policies in South Africa and Rhodesia.

Track and field athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos did decide to compete but famously raised their fists in protest after winning gold and bronze respectively in the 200 meters.

Apartheid policies also led to the South African Olympic Committee being expelled from the IOC in 1970. Prior to South Africa’s expulsion, several other organizations had banned the nation from hosting events as far back as 1934 due to their policies forbidding non-white participants to compete. After the New Zealand rugby team toured South Africa in 1976, 29 mostly African nations boycotted the Montreal Games that same year after the IOC refused to ban New Zealand.

This put pressure on Commonwealth countries to adopt the Gleneagles Agreement to expand the sporting boycott of South Africa. Taiwan also boycotted the 1976 games the day before the Opening Ceremony after the Canadian government’s refusal to recognize their nation as the Republic of China.

Sports like cricket and football are important cultural experiences in countries like Pakistan and India, but their presence is evidence of those countries’ colonial past and of nationalism emanating from the British Empire. Most British colonies around the world adopted the sport soon after occupation, serving as historical examples of cultural imperialism.

Since international competition started in the 19th century, sports like cricket and events like the World Cup can simultaneously bring people together and promote community while also inflaming nationalistic tensions. For over 70 years, the intense cricket rivalry between India and Pakistan has done both.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

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The International Cricket Council Champions Tournament, beginning this week, highlights how national rivalries and geopolitical tensions can meet on playing fields.

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National Bank Stadium in Karachi, Pakistan (Photo: Baseer Piracha/Wikimedia Commons)

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