in the field: sydney bauer, independent sports journalist

"Being queer, you kind of get shoved into doing queer stories. I would love to just write about the basketball game from last night."

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I have left X completely but you can find me on Bluesky, if that’s your thing.

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I am so excited to bring you this interview with my good friend, Sydney Bauer. Sydney and I have been talking about doing this forever and it was meant to be a post-Olympics reflection. However, life happens. The election happened. And so here we are.

Sydney is a freelance journalist who has covered the Olympics for over a decade. She is also the person that I text all the time to bounce story ideas off of, or when I want to just be a hater (Virgo and Cancer placements unite!). Sydney is probably my best friend in this industry and I will tell you that it’s pretty great to have someone who works on the same beat as you but you never feel like you need to be competitive with. Like, truly, I just want us both to succeed. We have both passed along assignments to the other person. We have shared sources. Last month, we finally met in person for the first time and I regret to inform you that I forgot to take a photo of us together.

Okay, enough mushy stuff. Because Sydney is also a brilliant journalist who yes, covers the Olympics, but can also tackle nearly any topic she’s given. She’s a generalist in the truest sense, the kind of writer that I really feel is a dying breed in this industry. Also, she’s one of the funniest people I know.

Sydney has written about how elite trans women athletes have been impacted by restrictive policies for Cosmo, as well as publishing this detailed look at the gymnastics controversy centered on Jordan Chiles with

Dvora Meyers

for The Verge. She reviewed Michael Waters’s book The Other Olympians for Foreign Policy.

Most recently, she wrote for The Nation about why trans people should not be scapegoated for the failures of the Democratic Party.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You can follow Sydney on Bluesky. But I must warn you—she is a huge Mets fan.

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Out of Your League: For people who are not familiar with your work, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and your experience in the field?

Sydney Bauer: I got my start at a small trade publication that covered the business of the Olympics in 2012. I got to work in a very small but dedicated newsroom, and essentially got to be a beat reporter right out of college. I had to learn on the job. I didn't go to school for journalism. I had always dreamed of being a writer. I didn't think it was available to someone with a political science degree. 

I was pretty much trained to go work at a think tank, but I didn't actually want to do that, and then I got lucky and worked at this outlet. I worked there for seven years, working up from essentially being an intern to being a full-time beat reporter covering four full Olympic projects from start to almost finish. I left just before Tokyo 2020 was supposed to happen. I spent close to 18 months living in Rio de Janeiro covering the last year of preparations there as a one-person bureau, kind of a mix between a general assignment reporter and a beat reporter. I think that allowed me to see all sides—reporter, editor, assignment editor, quasi-managing editor. I got to work so many different jobs in a small newsroom. 

It was tough to find an outlet to take that jump from because you're doing a lot of different things, and you're not an expert in anything. There just aren't a lot of traditional Olympic sports reporter jobs these days. So I realized my career was stalling, and took some other comms jobs to pay the bill while freelancing. It was around that time that I came out [as trans] and was honest with myself about my identity and who I was. Being queer, you kind of get shoved into doing queer stories. So I've been doing a ton of queer sports stories since then, and I would love to just write about the basketball game from last night but it's kind of hard to sell that when you're not on staff somewhere. And queer stories these days, they sell because there aren't many queer staff writers and freelancers have to fill the coverage. We have to fight and we have to claw to get these stories out there.

OOYL: I know who you are because of your Olympics reporting. As you know, before I was a writer, I was an anti-Olympics activist working to oppose the 2024 bid in Boston. I first came across your work during that time, and then, obviously as I moved into sports writing. I will say, it was funny when you were mid-transition, because you made a new Twitter account for Sydney, but were still operating your old account for a while. There was a point when I was talking to you on both accounts, but I didn't know that you were the same person because you had befriended me as Sydney. And then I spoke to your old account for professional reasons occasionally. I remember being blown away when you finally told me you were one and the same.

SB: I was not out outside of my close circle of friends and family. So I had socially transitioned, but I wasn't out at my [comms] job yet. People there knew that I was a reporter in my spare time, so I had to keep that pretense going. And it was really weird, selling stories under my dead name and then trying to rebuild my career, stealthily selling stories under my actual name. At one point I was doing stories on a lot of state legislature bans in the U.S. as Sydney, while also helping some people in Tokyo plan coverage for the delayed Tokyo Olympics and writing preview stories about that under my dead name. It was a weird time.

OOYL: I think it's always interesting, because there’s no real blueprint for transitioning mid-career. I have had a different path in that, but at the same time, my book is out there under my old name, and so is the first half of my career. And it's a very weird thing.

SB: It doesn't bother me, but it's jarring because all my old stories from where I worked at that trade publication—the CMS that we used was literally just typing in HTML. You would type your byline in with the HTML code, with ‘mail to’ your email so someone could click and email you. It was essentially an email signature we put at the bottom of a story. So they can't go back and change my name, because it was typed individually into every single story. So there are thousands of stories online with my dead name, and they can never be changed. And it just is what it is.

OOYL: Well, my name will never be changed with the New York Times, so.

SB: I am weirdly grateful that I never had a byline at a place with a trans policy like that. 

via Bluesky

OOYL: Okay, so one question I want to ask you, as someone who covered the Olympics for a long time: When you began covering the Olympics, what was your feeling on ‘the Olympic project’ as a whole? I assume you were a sports fan, but did you know much about the Olympics as this bigger thing?

SB: I have always been fascinated by the Olympics as a political project, and that's probably because I went to school for political science. One of the things that I believed, really thought was true, was that the Olympics as a political project could generate political will to do projects that governments can't do under normal circumstances. Because the conditions the Olympics create are that they cut across political coalitions, in a sense, so you can get support for projects that fit your political agenda, when, in reality, fighting in coalition governments, you're not going to be able to get that. 

And that was a core belief of mine from college, from studying how coalitions are made, studying the nuts and bolts of how politics is done. That was something I truly believed in, and it's one of those things where, within a year, it was completely fundamentally shaken and completely undone. You realize how true and not true it is.

Like in Brazil, the attempted cleanup of Guanabara Bay was something that they would debate in Congress forever and money was earmarked for it because of Rio 2016 but it never actually got done, and then they just quietly dropped it.¹ So the conditions were created, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything's going to get done. The one thing I learned is how much privatization of public services and sports come because of the Olympics. This project—the Olympic project— is for real estate developers. It's for the IOC, it's for people who have invested money in sports. I could tell you 10 different Olympics where positive change was brought, but it's like, at what cost was it made? And does it actually do what the politicians were telling you in the beginning? That's where, very quickly, I realized the gap exists and everything I thought I knew about the Olympics was just marketing spin. So I became disillusioned pretty quick. 

OOYL: I will say I had a similar experience when Boston was aiming for the 2024 bid. I didn't know anything about the Olympics aside from what people want the general public to know, the spectacle of it all. At the time, I was doing other kinds of community organizing basically focused around gender-based violence and, specifically, creating safe public space. We were approached as the local organization who was doing safe public space advocacy to get involved in anti-Olympics work, and I didn't understand why. And then it very, very quickly became apparent why.

I learned a lot about the Olympics in that time, not just about how my work as a gender-based violence advocate came into play, but also about, as you said, these events being for real estate developers. At the time, our mayor was this former union guy, Marty Walsh.² He had all of these ties to the construction industry and that was why this bid was happening—literally because he was the mayor of our city and he wanted to get his builder friends jobs. The guy in charge of the bid, John Fish, was a huge real estate developer.

SB: The problem is, in America, we don't build housing at the levels we should. So, for a community, if you sell to me on the idea that, ‘Okay, we're gonna cut through red tape, we're gonna build all these apartment buildings [and] after [the Olympics] they can pledge to make them market rate cost or below,’ who knows if it actually happens. That's where the issue comes in. That's where the expectations versus reality gap of the Olympics happens.

OOYL: Having just finished this Olympic cycle and having the Games in Paris, what do you think are the biggest stories that we came away from these Games with?

SB: Paris was very interesting. For me, the stories were how it was broadcast and how it was consumed. I'm loathe to give a lot of people unabashed credit about the Olympics, but the IOC and NBC, they knocked it out of the park. As a spectator, I rediscovered my love of Olympic sport watching this, because for so long, you just see the cynical side, like the doping scandals and everything. But it was fun to watch, and they finally figured out how to use streaming correctly. You had to buy a certain dedicated streaming platform to do it, but that's the way every sports league in America has gone. The quality that they delivered was actually fantastic. 

Another story of Paris was that you didn't have the operational failures that other cities did. And having the opening ceremony on the Seine River, to me was the greatest thing on earth. Because one of the things I loved doing in Rio while the Games were happening was to put myself 20 feet away and just remove myself from the Olympics completely. I would go out to my normal haunts with friends on nights off, and I would have no idea the Olympics are in town. They're very contained. So the notion that the general public and every part of the city is touching the Games is kind of a novel concept these days and Paris attempted it. I don't know how well they did it, I wasn't there. B the fact that they were willing to try spoke volumes to me. 

OOYL: It's pretty easy to be disillusioned with a lot of things about the Olympics. And then recently—I know that we're both sick of talking about it, but I think we have to add the trans stuff is another piece of this, right?

I have written in the past about how a lot of the problems that we're seeing in youth sports and lower levels of sport have trickled down from the way that the IOC has handled trans inclusion. In 2021 they tried to sort fix that but also made it a lot worse with their lack of real accountability in terms of what their role here is.³ But I'm curious to hear from you how you see the IOC’s role in the current landscape of trans inclusion in sport?

SB: There's no easy answer, and it's also one of those things where, if you don't know the world that this operates in, you're going to have some misconceptions about everything. I'm one of the few people that will go to bat for the [2021] IOC policy, because it's probably the only thing the IOC can do without changing how it operates. I don't think it's as flawed as a lot of people want to say it is.

The issue is not the policy, it's the way the sports world is set up. The policy was the first attempt of the IOC to say, ‘We're looking at this backwards. We need to reimagine from the bottom up. But we can't do that because we control everything from the top down.’ So those two ideas are at fundamental tension with each other, which is why you have these convoluted policies from 2015 which established the baseline testosterone level as a consensus. It wasn't, ‘This is what you should do.’ It was a consensus statement, which is, ‘This is what we can ask of you to do, but you should do your own stuff on top of it.’ 

I think putting it in writing that testosterone doesn't drive athletic performance, and that we should want to have inclusion in sports coming from the IOC is powerful. It has enabled National Governing Bodies (NGBs) that are in countries that have a lot more civil rights for trans people to back them across sports. It's fascinating to see that, for so many well-meaning people, I am a woman in every aspect of society, but the second I get on a sports field, because people identified me as a man in the past, that has to stay. Nowhere else in society would it be like that if people were as well-meaning as they thought.

sydney.bauer4

A post shared by @sydney.bauer4

OOYL: You said at the beginning of our call that you have a lot of thoughts on the world of sports journalism. I know you do, because you and I text pretty much all day, every day, but it feels like it's been especially rough lately. I think I would ask you, as a freelancer who I assume wants to work full-time in the industry again, where do you see a role for someone like you in this field right now?

SB: That's a big question. The industry is so narrow these days. I don't remember the last time I've gotten interviewed for a journalism job. I think it's like three years ago at this point and the only reason I had that interview is because I was a perma-lancer for them on the side. It wasn't because I applied for a position had a good cover letter and an editor was like, ‘Oh, let's bring them in for an interview.’ It's like, no, they told me to apply because they were considering me, because I was already writing for them regularly.

I've been a general assignment reporter my entire career. I'll write about anything. I don't think a journalist needs to have a specific beat to be good at it. Newspapers used to move their reporters around all the time to keep them fresh, keep them bringing new perspectives, keep them bringing new ideas to a different field. I know sports writers who got their start in fashion or covering trends, there are tons of skills that are cross collaborative.

I will literally take any writing job. I just love to write. And I feel like a lot of people these days have come to understand that to be a journalist in 2024, you kind of have to have your own brand associated with you. And I don't know if I have the right brand for anyone, and that's a weird place to be, because I feel like I've seen so much. I actually compete in sports in 2024 at a personal level. I have skin in the game whenever I report on sports. And I don't think that's needed, but I don't see that anymore. I see people who have taken sports coverage and moved it towards entertainment coverage. And I think that's a good thing, inherently, because sports are not just about the sport. 

But we all treat sports leagues like a soap opera these days, and that's cool because they are a business. But I don't see much coverage of what's going on on the court. Like, in NBA journalism, for example. Every off-season, so many players are moving and people understand the minutia of the salary cap in a way that I think takes away from understanding why a player moves, not studying how a player could move. And I think that's been a net detriment to my understanding of the sport. I don't even realize why a player is good fit anymore—I know what asset he was traded for. I'm someone who loves the minutia of sports, like I used to get into heated arguments with people on sports forums about the NHL salary cap in 2007 and that was weird, it was compulsive behavior. But now that is just the default of how someone looks at a player, we've taken away their humanity and also created characters out of them to the extremes.

OOYL: Is there anything else that I haven't asked you about that you want to share?

SB: Unfortunately being a trans person in 2024 feels like a radical act, and intersecting that with coverage of sports, which is something I've always loved, but has become kind of a lightning rod issue, is baffling to me. For the most part, the people who are the loudest about my gender identity are not the people that are actually doing much in the industry besides creating noise. 

I love bringing my identity and how I view things into what I write about, because I think that offers a perspective that no one else can get. But honestly, there are days I just prefer to watch sports and debate whether or not umpires need a robot telling them what a ball and strike is, because they can't trust themselves. I don't need to think about, ‘what is the gender breakdown of front offices from this year compared to last year?’ That's the story editors want. But I think we're losing the soul of what it means to be entertained by the greatest athletes on Earth. And weirdly, Paris 2024 that brought me back that way.

OOYL: Way to bring it full circle.

You can follow Sydney on Bluesky.

1. For folks interested in reading more about the political ramifications of the Rio Olympics, I highly recommend the books Brazil’s Dance With the Devil by Dave Zirin and Dancing With the Devil in the City of God by Juliana Barbassa.

2. Marty Walsh managed to leverage his role as the Mayor of Boston during this bid into a short-lived job in the Biden administration, which he quite to become the head of the NHL Players Association, which is wild to me.

3. In 2021, the IOC released a new trans inclusion framework that advocated for full inclusion and a move away from testosterone-based policies, but that punted the ultimate decision-making to each sport’s International Federation. Almost immediately, IFs began passing bans on trans women competing in the women’s division of a variety of sports, including track and field, cycling, and swimming, among others.