Introducing TIME100 Sports: How We Chose the 100 Most Influential People in Sports
· Time
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I first saw LeBron James play in person in July 2003 during a now defunct NBA Summer League. Some 2,500 people showed up each night for one of six games in what felt like a high school basketball gym on the campus of UMass Boston. Tickets were $15. “I remember the gym, the atmosphere,” James later said. “It was old-school and hot, and the fans, mostly Celtics fans, were right on top of you.” The year before, Sports Illustrated put James on the cover with the line the chosen one. We were there to see whether he was for real.
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We now know the answer. James is still on the cover of magazines, including TIME; now, as a member of our inaugural TIME100 Sports list, he is making his third appearance there. We call him the athlete of the century not solely because of his on-court achievements, but also because over his career, he has redefined what it means to be a professional athlete in public life. Through his political engagement and business efforts, James has set a new standard for the generations that follow, and for those who join him on the list, edited by Lori Fradkin, Cate Matthews, and Mark Selig.
That rising influence is why we have now brought the TIME100 to sports. In our increasingly fragmented media environment, sports remains one of the last realms in which massive global audiences gather together in real time. As a result, many industries have drawn closer to live sports, and athletes have continued to seize larger and larger platforms. That has never been more evident than this year, as the Olympics and the World Cup have brought the competitions to center stage and events like the Bad Bunny Super Bowl halftime show and the UFC fight at the White House have shown how sports can dominate the cultural conversation unlike anything else.
TIME100 Sports | See Everyone on the ListSports is playing a greater role at TIME too. We have invested in ambitious and award-winning sports journalism across breaking news, cover stories, and documentaries. Forty-three athletes have been on the cover in the past decade. In 2019, we named our first Athlete of the Year. In 2024, the TIME Studios documentary Under Pressure: The U.S. Women’s World Cup Team was nominated for an Emmy. Of course such figures have always had a place in TIME’s pages. TIME put an athlete on the cover twice in its first year: the horseman and polo champion Stephen “Laddie” Sanford and the boxer Jack Dempsey. Golfer Edith Cummings soon followed.
Longevity is a theme that runs through our story on James—and one that defines its author too. This marks the 50th cover written by senior sports correspondent Sean Gregory, who joined TIME in 2002 and covered his 10th Olympics for TIME in February. He has been a tremendous guide for our readers for nearly a quarter of a century. A former Division I basketball player, Gregory has also provided our audience with many lessons from elite athletes—sometimes literally, like in a shooting tutorial with a 30-year-old Kobe Bryant that has been watched 11 million times on YouTube.
Since 2024 alone, Gregory has written 15 cover stories about sports figures, including six who are on the TIME100 Sports list: Caitlin Clark, Erling Haaland, Lindsey Vonn, A’ja Wilson, Eileen Gu, and Dana White. A finalist for the Billie Jean King Award for Excellence in Women’s Sports Coverage, Gregory has chronicled female athletes with particular attention, and the rise of women’s sports has been a key storyline in these pages. It is beyond fitting that Gregory’s byline appears more than anyone else’s in this issue.