Editors’ Note
Issue 18: Sports
JULY 9, 2024
As thousands of athletes descend on Paris and the world comes down with Olympics fever, this month’s issue is dedicated to stories of competition, rivalry and endurance.
At a former Olympic stadium outside London, Imogen West-Knights attends a baseball game where reveling in an atmosphere of transplanted “Americanness” seems to matter more than the final score.
In “The Deserter,” a short story from Kurdish poet and writer Farhad Pirba, a soldier must go in search of his lost leg as he prepares to be sent back to the trenches. And in an extract from the essay collection “Hot” by Luna Miguel, translated from Spanish by Ellen Jones, the author’s heartbreak prompts an exploration of the boundaries between physical pleasure and pain.
In this issue, we also ask: what if you are competing not for glory or a medal, but for a better life, for your dignity?
Lisa de Bode tells the story of two young Afghan men seeking asylum in Belgium, where winning your case increasingly rests on being able to convince judges you have become too “Westernized” to return. The situation is “absurd,” a lawyer tells Lisa. “A legal question — ‘does someone still have a future in Afghanistan?’ — has changed into a cynical game, a lottery.”
In Paris, Phineas Ruckert reports on the French authorities’ efforts to sanitize the city ahead of the Olympic Games and speaks to people displaced by the dismantling of squats and shelters for the comfort of visiting tourists.
Back in the UK, Lauren Kelly investigates the legitimacy of property competitions that claim to offer a way out of the country’s escalating housing crisis but more often than not result in dashed hopes and small cash prizes.
And finally, we’re delighted to publish an extract from Ayşegül Savaş’ new novel The Anthropologists, in which a young couple invents a new life in a foreign city and explores the rituals and the people that will structure their days. “Manu and I had been a little stiff on our first visits, careful about what we did with our limbs, how we held our cups. But we soon relaxed. We pulled up our feet on the sofa, served ourselves from the kitchen. We realized that Tereza didn’t keep track of manners; what mattered to her was conversation.”
– The Editors
✺ Published in “Issue 18: Sports” of The Dial
