I’ve asked students in the class to produce a blog about their sport media diet. How do they get their sport information? Has it changed? What would they change if they could?

My own sport consumption diet has changed dramatically, even in the past year during COVID-19. With few live sports to watch (and no ability to attend sport myself) I have found pockets of sport fan communities to interact with on the Internet, particularly on Reddit.

I moved to Virginia from Winnipeg, Manitoba, where I worked for 15 years in the media. I was in a news reporting and producing position at two different media outlets, The Winnipeg Sun and the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., but I continually pestered the sport desk for opportunities to marry my work and my passion – sports!

That led to the most unique opportunity of my journalism career, when a story I wrote became the center of international intrigue!

Students in this class may have learned about late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro only in history class. However, when Winnipeg, my hometown, hosted the Pan American Games in 1999, Fidel Castro was very much still a figure with a strong international profile.

The Pan American Games are the Olympics for the Western Hemisphere, which includes Cuba. In 1999, Cuba was (and still is) largely cut off from the West as it was under Communist rule. So my city editor Glenn Johnson asked me one day how a Cuban athlete would go about defecting. So I called Canada’s immigration office. They gave me some information and passed me on to a contact at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Two telephone interviews and a few hours later, I had a story written for the Winnipeg Sun, speaking hypothetically about the process a Cuban athlete would follow if they wanted to defect to the West.

The story appeared in the paper the next day. A few hours later, two Cuban athletes defected.

There is no indication that my two-interview story was what the athletes used to flee from their athletic delegation. But do you know who believed there was a connection? Fidel Castro.

The next day, in an hours-long address to the nation, Castro decried Winnipeg media providing a “guide to help his athletes defect.” I had inadvertently touched off an international incident.

Political diplomacy was for politicians. We had newspapers to sell. The next day, the Winnipeg Sun published the details to its “Count the Defectors” contest – a cheeky competition where readers could guess how many Cuban athletes would defect during the Games. The winner won a trip for two to Cuba. (The final number was six)

That tweaking of Fidel Castro so tickled the fanatically anti-Castro media in Florida so much that they flew a television crew to Winnipeg to do a story about the contest, interviewing me (which they then dubbed into Spanish).

Ultimately, Castro stayed in power (until dying a few years later) and the incident didn’t cause a lasting diplomatic row between Canada and Cuba. But it was, for me, an example of the power of sport communication to get wide attention, quickly. And that was before our story ran on the Internet.