Category: Sports

At the Summer Olympics, the critical moments that decide who wins or loses often flash by in the blink of an eye. In the men’s gold-medal table tennis match, above, China’s Fan Zhendong scores on Sweden’s Truls Moregardh with a quick shot to the corner. Below, we revisit some of the most visually stunning scenes captured by New York Times journalists, frame by frame.

“When I was a kid and getting S.I., you didn’t have that immediate 24-hour news cycle just hitting you over the head,” said Nate Gordon, a former picture editor at Sports Illustrated who is now the head of content at The Players’ Tribune. “You would get that cover and you’d be like: ‘Man, this is what happened last week. That’s so cool.’”

“We plan to focus even more directly on distinctive, high-impact news and enterprise journalism about how sports intersect with money, power, culture, politics and society at large,” the editors wrote in an email to The Times’s newsroom on Monday morning. “At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.”

Whether it’s AP photographers, Getty Image contributors or freelance photographers covering the Olympic Games for the first time, there are already a ton of photos from this year’s big event making their way around the Twittersphere.

North Korea’s football team has been shamed in a six-hour public inquisition and the team’s coach has been accused of “betraying” the reclusive leader’s heir apparent following their failure at the World Cup, according to reports.