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The ‘Propaganda Peloton’ paper

The rare Saturday post here coincides with the second and final day of the International Association of Communication and Sport’s summit in Dublin, Ireland. I spent almost the entire night finishing up the slides and notes for my presentation today.

I did get about two hours of sleep, and arrived at the conference just in time to see a morning session that included a presentation by one of our former professors, and also her daughter, who is a law student at Syracuse. I have photos of that young woman as a very little girl, and have now watched her give research for a few years. She’s been studying Name, Image, and Likeness in the NCAA and I’ve been trying to make the case that she could graduate from law school and carve herself a substantial niche in that brand new area. Whatever she does, she’ll be brilliant at it, just like her mother.

Later I gave my last presentation of the conference. This was actually inspired by someone else’s paper from last year. I sat in a conference room in Chicago and jotted notes last March and thinking I could do a similar, but different work. I had a topic that no one researches, one only barely discussed in the popular media.

And, then, last September, la Vuelta a España took place. There, and in the months to follow, we had an instance where sportswashing most decidedly did not work. So I talked to one of our friends and Sports CaM colleagues, Dr. Julia Richmond. I knew the story, but she knows propaganda. We batted it around, and she figured out precisely the way we should frame the work.

This version of the research was titled “Propaganda peloton: Sportswashing in professional cycling.”

If you need a citation: Smith, K.D. & Richmond, J. C. (2026, March 13-14). “Propaganda peloton: Sportswashing in professional cycling. [Conference presentation].” IACS 2026 Summit, Dublin, Ireland.

So today I gave our little example of how and when and why sportswashing didn’t actually work. (It usually does.) All it took was the specific circumstances of the sport of road cycling, like the lack of liminal space between fans and athletes, a history of protest, a route through the Basque country and one other thing …

I’m presenting this paper at #IACS26 in a few moments on behalf of @rowanuniversity.bsky.social and The Center for Sports Communication and Social Impact.

If you were here you could hear how the story turns out.

If you are here, it’s in room E206.

[image or embed]

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) March 14, 2026 at 9:43 AM

Usually, sportswashing can be successful in road cycling. There are a lot of multinational petrochemical sponsors now. There are nation-states sponsoring teams. (Indeed, I used one of those to make a point in this presentation about budget disparities.) And while it can work in those other cases it didn’t work here because of genocide. By November, the Israel Premier Tech team was being denied entry into other races, riders were breaking contracts or outright retiring, IPT stepped away as the sponsor of the team in question a year early. Their owner also parted ways with the team.

And wouldn’t you know it, in the audience for this presentation was someone who knows all about this, and another scholar who has a friend that, until last year, drove for Premier Tech. But it’s interesting, and it worked because of what Richmond did to make it happen. I hope someone in the room knows her and tells her how I was bragging on her. She couldn’t be there, because she had to attend a wedding in the Caribbean.

He said jealously, in Dublin.

That’s two years in a row I’ve presented cycling research at this conference. I’m going to develop a reputation for doing that if I keep this up.

The IACS conference ended today. I attended a bunch of great sessions, met some lovely new people and saw some friends for all too short a period of time. Some of them we’ll see at next year’s conference. Others we won’t see until the conference goes abroad once again.

My lovely bride, who is the executive director of IACS, helped put on a great conference. Their largest ever attendance, despite this dumb new war in the Middle East keeping about four percent of the participants from attending. It was also their first hybrid conference with the people from Sport and Discrimination. And everyone seemed to have a good conference. Some of the board members celebrated at Il Corvo, a little four-star Italian restaurant just across the street. Because I know people, I was invited for this little dinner. I had the carbonara, which is a good litmus test for an Italian restaurant. If it’s good, you can be comfortable ordering other things on the menu. The carbonara was good. I guess we’ll have to come back again.

Poor me.

More on Monday, when we’ll be spring breaking.

cycling / Monday / photo / Rowan / site — Comments Off
2
Mar 26

The month of lions and lambs

Happy Monday, and happy March! We have survived the brutal months. Now, the month that makes the difference. All of the snow has mostly melted. Spring, overdue, has been promised. It has not yet been received here. It will be received with great interest when it shows up. And we’re getting close. We’ve had some mild temperatures. We’ve had sunny days, like this weekend. Now we just need to put it all together … and we will … and then keep it that way, until late November or so.

I better not be writing paragraphs like that very much longer.

It was a productive weekend, all spent right here at my desk. I did the monthly cleaning of the computer, updated the monthly spreadsheets, created new subdirectories and updated some boilerplate code. I put the February page of my master assignment calendar behind me. (I have several task-specific calendars running and when the stress of things hits my move is to make another calendar. Late last month I made the master panic calendar, filled it out through May, noticed almost every moment between then and March 28th was spoken for and then set about marking things off the list. Nowhere on that calendar is there a note to make another calendar. Five is sufficiently silly.)

I settled on two new documentaries for class. One of them will be a midterm, and I finished writing that today. The other we’ll watch in class. I’ve had it on my radar for some time, wanted to watch it, want to write something about it. About 14 minutes in I knew it was going into my Criticism class, too. I’ll pretend like this was all by design, because it should fit perfectly.

Also, I finished the draft of that work packet. Presently the thing clocks in at 29 pages, with all of the appendices to go. I wrote the service and research and professional development sections last week. I detailed the teaching section, filling up the maximum seven pages. I have two years of classes, peer observation, student reviews and subtle notes about the future to get into just seven pages. It took some doing to make it fit. Happily, all of the scores from my teaching evaluations are good. The lowest score I’ve registered in the last two years was about the difficulty of a class. Message received: that class will be more demanding and challenging if I get to offer it again.

I’m taking today off from that packet. It’s time for a break from thinking about myself. Besides, I have to think about tomorrow’s classes. Tomorrow evening I’ll do a dead tree edit of the packet, and then send it to a colleague who has generously offered to make sure I’m not omitting anything. After that, final corrections, final assembly, PDF the thing, and send it in. All of which takes place by mid-March. Not the longest thing I’ve ever written. Not the most tedious thing I’ve ever written. But it is a lot of me. Call it … maybe 60 or so pages? I can’t say yet. The checklist, though, tells me I have to have TWO tables of content. That’s always a signal.

On to more important things. We need to do the weekly check=in on the kitties. Phoebe would like you to know that she is not on the table. She is on the runner. And nowhere in the contract does it say she can’t be on the table runner.

Poseidon, himself no slouch when it comes to jailhouse cat lawyering, finds the argument a bit tiresome. Though you can be comfortably certain he’ll be doing much the same thing tomorrow.

So the cats are doing great. Lots of cuddles and big purrs over the weekend. Everyone is doing great.

I did manage a few quick rides. On Saturday, I was in Switzerland! This is just to the northeast of Zurich. I rode up and out from the small rural, forested village of Mosnang and over to the equally small and wonderfully charming Kollbrun. This route was part of one stage of the Tour De Suisse in 2024 and, while I did not see that particular race, I can see why.

I only wish that the person who recorded that route had done so on a brighter day. Switzerland is stunning most everywhere you look. Beautiful lakes, mountains a plenty, gorgeous values, and a huge array of glorious architecture. You can see ancient Roman, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical, Art Nouveau. But there’s just a little too much Modern and Post Modern architecture, some of which is bordering on Brutalist. Much better to be among the trees and the hills and the rivers and streams. Even if it’s just my basement.

Anyway, here’s that route.

And this evening I rode in Corsica. (But still my basement.)

The last four rides have felt really nice on the trainer. This is notable because everything prior to that, since November, has felt bad or worse. I was getting demoralized. Now, though, I want to see what kind of trouble I can get into riding uphill on Rouvy. I did that tonight. I found myself a little Cat-2 climb that let me climb 1,110+ feet over 3.82 miles. Saying I rode in Switzerland on Saturday, and tonight in both Corsica or Mallorca, where I powered up that hill, is nice, but I’d also like to go outside. I’m ready to not be in the basement.

If for nothing else because I’m kicking myself by how little I’ve done down there this winter.

But spring is coming in now. That’s what the top of this post told me, anyway.

adventures / cycling / photo / Rowan / sports / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
24
Feb 26

We can at least agree that the Aggie War Hymn is an ear worm

I had the weirdest dream this morning. But no one cares about your dreams. If you’re writing a blog, or someplace that’s not your own dream journal, or the Journal of Altered Conscious Mental, Emotional, and Sensory Experiences, no one will. This should be a lesson to you. Don’t write it out for others, because no one is reading about your dreams (and Freud isn’t coming along to analyze you in the comments.)

Simply do this instead. Point out you had a dream or dreams. This signals that you have not only slept recently, but done so to the extent that you could enter REM sleep. And then, share that you, too, are dismissive of the dreams, that you know that no one cares. And then, by definition, you are hip.

Not only are you hip, but you, my friend, are a dreamer.

And this is the sort of thing I normally charge $84.95 for down at the airport Ramada, where the lonely, bored, and vaguely motivated will fall all over themselves to see my latest slide decks.

No one cares about your slide decks. All the above? You can apply that to your presentations, too. Oh, sure, you put in a lot of work and they’re interesting, noteworthy, sometimes even compelling. But, and this is the key, they are those things in the moment, not in the re-telling.

Pick your spots.

No one cares about your spots.

Except for infectious disease specialists. Tell them everything. Do not charge them Ramada rates.

Here’s the view from the 6th floor almost-corner office. Not bad out there. Most of the streets on the way in were in great shape. Just one, screen by trees and hills and houses, looked a bit rough. At least for our commute. Quite a few people didn’t make it in today. Not everyone has the same snow experience. You can also see that, below, just by carefully observing which people have shoveled their sidewalks 48-plus hours after the snow stopped and who hasn’t.

In my Rituals and Traditions class today I tried to frame things so that we start thinking of these things more like a team, a league or a school, and not like a fan. I presented them with some research on rituals from a marketing perspective. (Rituals have staying power and create conditions where highly identified fans want to come back, take part, and come back again. Also, most of them spend more money on other stuff at the venue than the ticket price itself.) The lecture got us through about a decade of marketing of fandom research and a few more years on sports fan sociology. Also, I showed them the Aggie War Hymn at weddings, with which I made a point about things in, and out, of context.

And then I explained the song. It’s a song about hating your rivals. I explained the history of the song. J.V. “Pinky” Wilson wrote the song in a trench in France during World War I. He came home to College Station, finished his degree, and sang the song in a quarter. Some of the A&M yell leaders heard it, and convinced him to enter it into a campus song contest. It won, and since 1920 it has been an integral part of Texas A&M fandom. I mean, they sing it at weddings.

At which point I paused, and deadpanned, “White people weddings, man.”

Then I said, there are a lot of these videos on YouTube.

We also considered the shared affiliation of rituals, as in the example of the running of the Gumps. Look at that zeal! And the footspeed!

And then we considered what it means to be a part of 61,000 people singing to your favorite team.

I was also able to cite to them a study that told us some 98 percent of fans engage in sports rituals. Most of them have to do with wearing the team gear and colors, but that study broke out 15 other criteria, and quite a few make the cut for people.

On Thursday, my students’ surveys will be completed. We’re asking questions of our study body. Hopefully some of the information will be help to our class as we try to help find and or develop things our athletic department might work on.

In Criticism, we discussed baseball, beginning with this story about one of the Phillies recent relievers. As a young man he caused a terrible car accident that killed one man, badly injured a teenager and almost derailed his own life. But then one of the truly selfless and remarkable things about humanity happens. It’s a terrific story.

I asked the group what they would like to know at the end of the story. What’s not here that’d you like to see in a followup. Someone said they’d like to see what happened if the pitcher and the family met. Just you wait for Thursday.

We also talked about a museum piece — meaning copy from the Smithsonian — about Jackie Robinson. It didn’t really fit the bill, but we were able to discuss why, and also story curation and, again, what’s not in this piece. What wasn’t there was what Robinson did after he walked away from baseball, and that’s every bit, or more as important, as his time with the Dodgers.

In the evening, as the day is getting later everything felt sunny and cheery, even if it was cold, and it looks like Hoth.

We’re right at the point where 12 hours of the day is in daylight. Right at the point where it seems we might make it once again. Right at the moment that should have happened two weeks ago, but will take place three or four weeks from now: it’ll finally feel like winter is behind us.

Since it isn’t, I rode in the basement this evening. I’ve been suffering through the little riding I’ve done of late. Everything got out of whack around the holidays and my cardio slipped and nothing has helped and it just felt like a big chore — a big painful chore.

But this brief ride, for the first time in a long while, things finally felt good. I don’t know why it seemed to click back into place, physically or mentally, but it was about time. Also, Spain. And I went up a hill prominent enough that it got its own little graphic in the heads up display.

I’m sure that’s useful for climbers, so that they might time their exertion to perfection. But it does something else for the rest of us.

Anyway, 30-some minutes over a lumpy area of Tossa de Mar, with two little Cat 5 climbs according to the profile, way off in the northeast of Spain. I hope I get a few more rides in a row that feel as decent as this one.

There’s a lot of riding to do.

And a lot of work to do. So … back at it.

cycling / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off
2
Feb 26

When you rebrand the weather, I am over the weather

Monday. February. Groundhog’s Day and all of that. Still snow and ice on the ground. Hasn’t budged a micro, hasn’t melted a gram. In a group chat the other day I pointed out that none of my friends back home could say anything to me about their weather until we’d been above freezing for two days in a row. As it happens, tomorrow might be the second day. It did hit 32 today. We are promised 35 for tomorrow. And so, now, another post about how the weather has impacted everything. (This snow fell 10 days ago. I’ve not had too many snows in my life where the stuff just … stayed around. I can think of two. And, quite frankly, it has lost its appeal.

Saturday around midday I was out trying to widen the driveway a bit. We’d carved out a path last week just wide enough for a vehicle and, somehow, it was only just wide enough. Well, finally I got tired of that and so I gripped the shovel firmly and determinedly, and went to work. In that time I dug out the spot behind where my car is parked in the garage, and what I estimate the space necessary behind it to do the back and turn maneuver. I also tried to chip away at a few other places that were troubling. Working up a sweat in a long-sleeved t-shirt, I used our biggest shovel to bend the ice to my will for an hour. Until, that is, my back was bent against my will.

About that time my lovely bride returned home from her morning activities and midday grocery run. We did the grocery system. She carries in an arm full of groceries and I try to carry everything else in, so she can pretend to fuss at me. In the kitchen, with all of the bags on the island, I hand her things for the refrigerator. And then I hand her the things going into the freezer. And then I hand her the things going in the pantry. Finally, I stack up the bags and put them back out in the garage for her car. There’s nothing to it, but we do this every week and it’s also important.

Speaking of the kitchen island, I happened to be in just the right place to catch this bit of anarchistic artistry.

It was how Poseidon brought the spatula to the floor, looked around and walked off. Usually, when he does cat stuff like this, he owns it. He will sit by the thing he has knocked over or broken and wait until you see it, and him with it. It’s admirable, even as it is frustrating. But, here, he just walked off. Maybe it was because a rubber spatula can’t shatter, and there’s nothing to leak.

Somehow, we both managed to stifle our laughter until he’d left the scene of the his vandalism. We wouldn’t want him to feel he was being praised for all of this, after all.

To get away from the snow and the ice — snowcrete they are calling it — I went to Tokyo for an hour or so. Saturday night, I renamed the basement “Tokyo.”

The thing about Rouvy I haven’t figured out yet is everything. This was a flat route, according to the ride profile I saw before I started pedaling. There were was a tiny bit of climbing, but nothing to write home about. The profile I saw after the ride was … lumpy.

It was 26 miles through the various parts of Tokyo. Whoever recorded this most have done so in the very early morning. There was almost no one on the roads, as you can see from that image. Also, there were a lot of red lights, and the video seemed to catch them all. It is not at all demoralizing to be pedaling your little heart out, to see your avatar pedaling his little digital heart out, but you’re not going anywhere.

Anyway, it was a good sweat. I just have to do it more. Someone motivate me.

The weather is absolutely not motivating me. It is not motivating me precisely when it should be. One day this weather will not be our weather. One day we’ll emerge from the ice age. It will not be this day, for we are still solidly, firmly, in the Pleistocene Epoch.

Right in the middle, I would assume.

Here’s the view of yesterday’s sunset from my office window.

I think I spent all day at my desk. I’m not sure what I did with all of that time. Some work was done. But there was more work to be done today. We’ll get into that tomorrow, though.

cycling / maps / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
28
Jan 26

I am so far ahead I can see tomorrow

Lovely day, if you like living at a pole, and the color white, and ice everywhere. I’ve been trying to count how many times I’ve experienced a snow that persisted — this snow came down Sunday and will be with us for at least another week. It is a small number of experiences. And now there’s talk of another snow system this weekend.

I’d like to just … not. I still have shovel shoulders from Sunday and Monday.

Productive day, today. Emails were fired off with abandon. I prepared two lectures. This was made all the trickier because we did not have classes on Tuesday, and because we are right at the beginning of the term, where I am trying to set up the definitions and paradigms we’ll be using throughout the semester.

For my Criticism class, where I told them I would lecture this week and they would see why the rest of the semester is conversation-based, I’ll have 75 minutes to try to make the points that should take up about two hours worth of material. Also, I am Frankensteining two lectures to do that. Duct tape and PowerPoint presentations will see me through. What could go wrong? In my Rituals and Traditions class I will combine a brief guest appearance with some further elaboration on the slides I sent them online on Tuesday. Again, two days in one, just to set the tone for the entire class. What could go wrong?

Students in my online class received the second of three notes they’ll get from me this week. This one was a 791-word, tightly written, well-edited walkthrough of a sequence of the course that amounts to 20 percent of their grade. I put a lot of time into that letter because I know how much students are inclined to read these days. And I’ve been working on it over the course of three semesters now. (Given my process for these messages, that means it’s gone through at least nine editing passes at this point.) It is a good letter. Helpful, expressive, detailed, precisely to the point at hand. I send it to their inbox and post it on our class CMS. Now I just have to hope they’ll give it a look.

Perhaps the most productive thing I did today, though, was lay out the rest of my week. The least productive thing I’ll do the rest of the week is ignore most of that plan.

The best thing I’ll do is highlight the kitties, because they’re famous and popular, just ask them. So let’s do that.

If you like belly rubs, raise your paw.

Phoebe really likes belly rubs. She held her paw up for a good long while … just so long as the belly rubs continued.

The birds are feasting at the feeder, because, I think, several of their food sources are under a lot of snow and ice.
And so BirbTV has been a big hit around here. So much so that Poseidon doesn’t even care what he’s standing on, so long as he gets a closer look.

The cats are doing just fine. Though they would also like it to be just a bit warmer.

I wonder how it registers when they look out of the windows and see how different things are with so much white stuff on the ground. Lately, though, I’ve noticed they’re not as keen on trying to get outside as normal. It feels like four below out as I write this.

This evening I got away from the cold and went to Torano, Italy, where it is somehow 30 degrees warmer than here. I’m not saying we’re packing up and moving, but this was a delightful little valley ride. You can see it here.

Rouvy puts you in a video that someone recorded, and layers your avatar over the footage. As you can see from this screengrab, I was riding in the Italian summer.

And look at that mountain up ahead, there’s still snow up there. Here’s a few of that same feature, a few miles farther along in my ride.

Those cyclists are not a part of my ride. They are real people that were captured on the video. If I rode this route again, I suspect I’d seem them at pretty much the same spot, no matter how slow or fast I’d gone. (I averaged about 24 miles per hour on this ride (it had some nice downhills), which is the best ride I’ve had in a while. I churned out almost 600 watts for a bit, and regretted it the rest of the way.) Same for the other two people I caught up to, who I caught at a left-hand turn. They put out their hands to signal the turn and it looked like they were waving at me as I went by. I’ll see them in that valley again, should I visit. Or so I suppose. And my avatar would catch the same red light in Grosotto, or Lovero, whichever little village I was breezing through. My avatar just disappeared for a moment, while the video (and the car or whatever was shooting the footage) worked through the stop. A blip that felt like a Twilight Zone moment, which would be fun, if everyday didn’t already have a hefty dose of them.

Tomorrow, we’ll go to campus. I wonder what the roads will be like.