Track’s New Money Is Running Into Old Problems
In case you missed it, Sports Illustrated crowned its “Sportsperson of the Year” this week: Simone Biles.
Nothing wrong with that choice. Biles had an incredible year: four more medals in Paris, bringing her total to 11 Olympic medals. At Paris she became the oldest woman to compete for Team USA in gymnastics in more than 70 years, and the most decorated gymnast in history. And back in August, after the Olympics wrapped, it probably looked like no one would have a bigger year than Biles.
But if you ask me right now which athlete defined the year in sports more than anyone else, it was Caitlin Clark, no question, not even close.
She drove the WNBA to its biggest year ever: Attendance was up 48% and viewership was up 170% on ESPN. Yes, yes, it wasn’t just Clark, it was A’ja Wilson and Angel Reese and Breanna Stewart and Sabrina Ionescu and other stars. But Clark was the dominant driving force and the face of the league’s Cambrian explosion. Of the 31 most-watched WNBA games, 22 featured Clark.
Look at her effect on the college game, too (which was also in 2024!): She led Iowa to a second straight NCAA women’s final, which was watched by more people than any NBA or MLB game televised in all of 2024, and after the loss, South Carolina coach Dawn Staley personally thanked Clark “for lifting up our sport.”
She showed up everywhere across sports in 2024, including as an investor in a bid for Cincinnati to get an NWSL team—another women’s league that exploded this year. NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman called it an “honor” to have Clark involved. Atlanta Dream co-owner Renee Montgomery fittingly called her “box office.”
Time chose Clark for its “Athlete of the Year” honor, which it announced Dec. 10. Maybe SI wanted Clark, too, but felt Time beat them to it. Of course, a lot goes on behind the scenes with selecting magazine cover stars. The decision often has to be made many months in advance to lock in a photo shoot and ensure the athlete will cooperate with an interview.
Last year, infamously, SI gave its honor to Deion Sanders, who coached the Colorado Buffaloes to a 4–8 season. The magazine got roundly roasted.
It’s interesting to look at the replies to the official SI and Time tweets of their honors. Most of the top replies to SI are people outraged that it didn’t pick Clark—plus some legitimate comments addressing that criticism, like this one: “Caitlin Clark excelled in a US league, but Simone Biles dominated on the world stage against the best.” None of the replies to Time question the choice, though many of them scream at Clark over some of her quotes in the accompanying profile.
These magazine lists, rankings, and superlatives are easy to criticize and second-guess from afar. They’re also fleeting: They give the brand a momentary social media pop, then are forgotten. Off the top of your head, can you name any of the honorees from the last few years? Going backward from 2023 to 2020, SI chose: Sanders, Steph Curry, Tom Brady, and in 2020 a group of athletes who stood up for social justice issues or helped people during the COVID-19 pandemic (LeBron James, Patrick Mahomes, Naomi Osaka, Breanna Stewart, and Laurent Duvernay-Tardif); Time chose Lionel Messi, Aaron Judge, Biles, and LeBron.
My colleague Eric Fisher, who covered every moment of a huge year for Major League Baseball that ended in a big World Series, remarked, “All the respect in the world for Biles, but not sure what else Shohei Ohtani would have to do to get this.” He’s right that Ohtani had an absolutely jaw-dropping year and is basically this era’s Babe Ruth.
But this year in sports was about women. From the WNBA’s biggest season ever to the flood of new investment into the NWSL and that league’s supercharged expansion. Even in the NFL, arguably the biggest cultural storyline all year was about women: Taylor Swift and the new fans she brought to the Chiefs.
That’s my clearest takeaway from these two editorial choices: the rise of women’s sports defined 2024. The athlete of the year was the female athlete.
