It’s been a big year. Here’s a rundown of how it went for me.

I started off 2022 with a nice interview on Deutsche Welle about the lack of sustainability at the Beijing Olympics. It was filmed from my living room office at home, still under lockdown from Covid-19. I remember being particularly grateful for them giving me a decent amount of space for nuanced discussion. This is not always the case with media interviews, unfortunately. DW one stood out as a happy exception.

The beginning of the year was marked by academic instability for me, as I was still in limbo regarding my next post. My contract at the University of Lausanne was due to expire in August 2022, but I was very fortunate to be granted a three-month extension due to Covid. Still, there was lots to worry about. I submitted a sports-related Ambizione project to the Swiss National Science Foundation at the end of 2021, but competition is strong and odds of acceptance aren’t high. I also applied for a short-term fellowship at the University of Zurich, oriented on the urban geopolitics of eastern Ukraine.

The big thing of course was the Russian war on Ukraine. Words fail. My family and friends are deeply implicated in this disaster. I was, and remain heartsick. I tried to write about it in March, but it felt and still feels odd, and hollow. I accepted an invitation to lecture about it in April, but only after speaking to my Ukrainian friends. “If you don’t talk about it, someone else will take that space,” a good friend told me, “and who knows what they’ll say.” I’m glad I did the lecture, and it felt important, but I am still very uncomfortable at the idea of speaking publicly on all this, especially when there are people who need the platform so much more.

In May, I was invited to appear on Germany’s wonderful Sportschau, to talk about the implications of the war and how the global sport community was responding and should respond. It was a very good interview, and I think the program was excellently done. Sensitive and nuanced but without losing moral clarity. It was an honor to appear. I also was invited to the second round for my Ambizione project, which was very exciting. It meant that I had a real chance.

I went to Paris in June and spoke at a number of different events organized by protesters and by academics, all regarding the upcoming 2024 Summer Olympics. This was a fruitful and wonderful trip, and I felt like I started coming back to life after the shock of the full-scale invasion. It’s hard to hold all these feelings at the same time. The trip was full of good research too, and afterwards I finally started working on long-overdue papers that had been languishing due to Covid delays.

By July I was in full academic touring mode again, and flew to Denmark for my first Play the Game conference. It was a challenge at first to tone down the theory in my presentation and conversation, and instead focus on more relevant policy impacts. But once I figured out the rhythm, this turned into a fabulous experience. Except that I came back with Covid, but thanks to the vaccines it wasn’t too terrible. Don’t fancy repeating it, of course.

I got the news that my short-term fellowship at UZH was accepted in August. This was a tremendous relief for me and my family, because it meant that we wouldn’t have to pack up and leave the country – at least not immediately. Obviously, the war changed the research questions and methods of the project, but I feel grateful that I’m now able to focus on Ukraine full-time, and by now I feel more confident about working academically on this nightmare.

September and October were full of good news for me. A chapter I wrote on the Swiss Covid response was published, and I was invited to give a keynote at a symposium on illiberal nation projection through sport at the University of Manchester. It was a great event. Also, I got the extremely good news that my Ambizione project was accepted! Huge relief all around. I accepted both posts, so I started at UZH in December, and then in July 2023 I’ll move to the ETH Zurich for the Ambizione project. I’m really excited about both, and deeply grateful that I was trusted to bring them to life. Plus, it eliminates some of the precarity we’ve been feeling…

And in November, I finally got the good news that a piece I wrote on Olympic reform and the Paris 2024 Olympics was published in Environment and Planning C. It was a great end to the year.

Looking back, 2022 was a tough one – though obviously I know many people had it much worse than me. But in the end, I’m coming out of the year wiser and, hopefully, better than when I went in. And what else can you wish for, when you really get down to it.

I hope you all had a good 2022 and I wish you an even better 2023.