Sean Gregory
Sean Gregory is a senior sports correspondent at TIME whose work focuses on how athletes and sports institutions wield influence far beyond the field. He writes deeply reported cover stories and longform profiles that connect performance, business, politics, and culture across global sport. With more than two decades on the sports beat at the magazine, he covers everything from Olympic spectacle to emerging tennis stars and World Cup logistics.
Influence and Power in Modern Sports
Gregory’s defining thread is the way he uses individual athletes and sports leaders to explore power and influence in contemporary life. He helps shape TIME’s coverage of the 100 most influential people in sports, writing and co-anchoring pieces that explain why figures like LeBron James and other global names matter well beyond their stat lines.
These stories mix exclusive interviews, career retrospectives, and reporting on activism, media, and business, positioning athletes as central actors in culture and politics. His profile of Dana White and the UFC traces the organization’s journey from fringe fight promotion to a presence at the White House, using one executive to examine the crossover between combat sports, branding, and political access.
Gregory often writes about athlete activism and voice, from Colin Kaepernick’s continued refusal to stand for the national anthem to Megan Rapinoe’s retirement and legacy.
These pieces tend to combine personal narrative, policy context, and the business realities around endorsements and leagues, framing activism as part of an athlete’s modern job description. His work on TIME’s Athlete of the Year and related honors further extends this theme, treating awards not as lists alone but as opportunities to explain how specific performances and campaigns reshape expectations in their sports.
Global Events and Olympic Narratives
Gregory is a go-to writer for major international events, with long experience covering the Olympics for the magazine. He reports on the Games as global stories rather than isolated competitions, writing about everything from the rebuilding of Iraq’s Olympic team to the drama of championship runs in U.S. professional sports. Recent coverage of the Winter Olympics highlights memorable moments and cross-cutting themes such as national identity, athlete pressure, and the economics of hosting mega-events.
His event pieces often move between arenas and boardrooms, paying attention to how organizers, sponsors, and broadcasters shape what fans ultimately see.
In these stories Gregory favors clear explanatory structure and scene-driven reporting. He will place readers inside a specific competition or ceremony, then step back to outline the historical stakes and what distinguishes the current generation from past eras. He draws on a broad backlog of work that spans basketball, baseball, and global tournaments, giving him a deep archive to reference when he situates a new performance or controversy in context.
Tennis, Golf and Emerging Talent
Tennis and golf are recurring beats where Gregory tracks emerging stars and shifting power structures.
Recent pieces profile players like Aryna Sabalenka, Ben Shelton, and Elena Rybakina, asking why they have become compelling forces in their sport and what their rise says about tennis today. He looks at on-court tactics and psychology, but also at sponsorships, fan appeal, and the changing norms around celebration and restraint.
In earlier work he has examined marketing efforts in the golf and tennis industries, showing how tours and brands try to grow audiences and reposition traditional sports.
These features often mix match analysis, practice or tournament access, and interviews with athletes and coaches. Gregory pays attention to style and demeanor - how a player carries themselves during pressure moments - and connects those observations to broader narratives about generational change, gender, and global reach.
He also moves between rising names and legends, writing about figures such as Serena Williams and others when their careers intersect with new rivals or milestones.
Soccer, World Cup and Fan Experience
Soccer and the World Cup are another core strand of Gregory’s coverage, especially in recent years. He wrote a pop-up newsletter around the 2023 Women’s World Cup, using Megan Rapinoe’s retirement and the U.S. team’s journey to explore issues of pay equity, visibility, and the evolution of women’s soccer. His writing on the U.S. women’s team and other football stories treats matches as one part of a larger fight over resources, respect, and the global perception of the sport.
Gregory also experiments with reported essays that foreground the fan experience, such as his piece walking from New York City to MetLife Stadium to attend World Cup matches.
In that story he tests whether it is practical and cost-effective to reach the stadium on foot, documenting travel time, expenses, and barriers like security rules that prevent fans from walking the final stretch. The format blends personal participation with data points and logistical detail, yielding a practical look at access and infrastructure around one of the world’s biggest sporting events.
When he ranks the best and worst Super Bowls or revisits classic games, he applies a similar eye for atmosphere and context, weighing not just scores but narratives, broadcast spectacle, and cultural resonance.
Across beats, Gregory’s work is recognized for its depth and craft; his stories have been cited multiple times in Best American Sports Writing and have earned awards from sports and medical organizations as well as nominations for reporting honors. He operates at the intersection of athlete profile, event coverage, and institutional analysis, making him a key voice on how sport reflects and shapes wider social currents.
4 more sports journalists.
Adair Reid
Adair Reid is a sports columnist for The Cavalier Daily who covers Virginia men’s programs with a blunt, fan-aware voice that treats them as long-term projects rather than one-off games. He focuses on trajectory, legacy and risk, using opinion columns to question coaching decisions and program strategy while grounding his arguments in recent results, records, tournament performance and roster realities. Men’s lacrosse is a recurring subject, and his work on the program’s coaching change shows how he uses a single decision to examine overall health, standards and competitive standing. He frames games in terms of stakes, identity and institutional expectations, emphasizing postseason implications, recruiting, national perception and alignment with a championship standard. He writes mostly in the first person only when needed, keeps the spotlight on institutional choices and brings analysis-first, evidence-based judgment to Virginia’s flagship men’s teams.
Adam Stern
Adam Stern covers the business of motorsports and combat sports at Sports Business Journal, focusing on how sponsorships, media deals and new events reshape racing and fighting. His beat includes NASCAR, IndyCar, Formula 1, NHRA, rallycross, UFC and boxing. He tracks brands, broadcasters, manufacturers, promoters and streaming platforms, with reporting on sponsorship strategy, rights deals, original content, series growth, team projects and technical regulations. He examines how Cadillac’s Formula 1 entry supports broader marketing aims, how F1 Academy builds commercial momentum and whether new MMA promotions can challenge UFC. His work includes short speed reads on deals and longer features on multi-party investments. He reports on the money and strategy behind the action, treating motorsports and combat sports as connected marketplaces shaped by branding, dealmaking and media innovation.
Albert Burneko
Albert Burneko writes about how systems of power bear down on ordinary people, using sports, politics, technology, food, and domestic life as entry points. He is an assignment editor and writer at Defector and part of its founding ownership group. His politics and capital reporting examines how policy, policing, and public rhetoric turn into harm for specific people, centering victims and vulnerable people. He also covers artificial intelligence, media criticism, and technology’s effects, asking who benefits and who absorbs the costs. His domestic writing focuses on parenting, bodily discomfort, and everyday frustration. His recurring Chefector column turns cooking failures into comic studies of impatience, ego, and routine. He writes sharp reported essays, first-person dispatches, mock explainers, and sports-adjacent guides. His work combines moral seriousness, comic voice, close attention to ordinary life, and a focus on how people live under larger systems.
Albert Samaha
Albert Samaha is a sports investigative reporter who uses games to examine how power, money and culture shape players, workers, fans and communities. He works in The Washington Post sports section, covering global tournaments, migration, fan culture, sports betting, match-fixing, ownership, NIL money, football safety, participation gaps and the changing culture of women’s basketball. His reporting connects events on the field to decisions in boardrooms, betting markets, government offices and law enforcement. He previously reported for BuzzFeed News and wrote for the Village Voice, San Francisco Weekly and the Riverfront Times. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The New York Times and The Paris Review. He writes long, deeply reported stories that combine narrative scenes, data analysis, public records, medical records and other documents.