sports nonfiction books i read in 2025
Jan. 26th, 2026 01:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhodochrositeso I neglected to recap 13 months of reading in which I actually did not read that much but I did start reading sports bios/autobios for various canon review purposes late last year, which was probably the first time I have read nonfiction for leisure since I was like eight years old. here is a quick review post, not including the books that i read by ctrl f'ing to "vettel" "seb" etc. tennis and f1 below:
changeover – giri nathan
a bit unfortunate that this book was the first sports journalism i ever read because it set the bar unrealistically high. like i'm not even kidding even aside from the yaoibait that i obviously took this shit is genuinely breathtaking bro ao3 needs you!!! op is so good at conveying really precise and characterisationful images of jannik and carlos as people, as well as their tennis styles and their relationships with tennis, with their teams, and ofc with each other. jannik: reserved, inwardly focused, perfectionist, unflashy, brutally and efficiently powerful, stable output. carlos: outgoing, sunny, virtuosic, thrives on attention, unpredictable, improvisational, higher highs and lower lows. jannik & carlos: perfectly diametrically opposed, each other's kryptonite, coworkers equivalent of rivals, friendly but not the closest, bound together forever by their own narrative and by virtue of being by far and away the best players of their cohort so there really is nobody else except each other in this arranged rivalrymarriage of all time. the winner will be me but if it isn't me i hope it's you because you are the only person who deserves to take it from me.
i think op largely manages to sidestep the pit trap of shoehorning sincaraz into a hard work vs talent narrative and other false dichotomies when it's obvious both of them are massively hardworking and massively talented and also voraciously pursuing self-improvement which necessitates becoming more well-rounded players ie taking on each other's traits, while at the same time highlighting the extremely satisfying ways they are perfect foils and rivals to each other. obviously sincaraz have continued to develop as people and players and this book does unfortunately end before the hall of fame absolute cinema Greatest Of All Time matches that were rg25 finals and wimby25 finals (which i would dieeee to see op cover), but i think the portraits painted are still fairly accurate.
the main things that have changed are 1) sincaraz indulging in full honeymoon fujobait pr boyfriends skinshipmaxxing mode 2) jannik becoming a bit fixated on Adding Variety to his play and doggedly pursuing carlos-style tweeners/drop shots/net play manoeuvres etc even though his rate of success with them is uhhhh. well i am glad he is having fun :) although it does give me heart attacks every time and i of course think it is very romantic of jannik to aim to become more like carlos (and vice versa) 3) jannik being a greedy capitalist who uniquely locks in when there's a fat exho cheque on the line has been a running joke among sinneristas especially since six kings 25 in contrast to his I Don't Even Care About The Money sentiment which is recounted (with some skepticism to be fair) in this book.
i wish all sports bios paid this much attention to interiority and narrative as well as the actual sports results, but i think it is especially important for tennis considering the asteroid impact of the big 3 on men's tennis and how every player that came after them has had to compete either in their shadow or the crater they left. the Gentlemen A Short View To The Past opening chapter recapping the big 3 era and its aftermath is fantastic and i even love the medvedev tangent chapter in the middle, i think it provides valuable context for the sincaraz era as an example of a failed nextgen successor to the big3 and also medvedev really was just randomly there trapped in the middle of the big3 rock/new2 hard place eras.
it's kind of hard for me to pinpoint what i liked in particular about this book because it is just legitimately excellent across the board on prose and technical detail and characterisation. generally a fantastic and fairly accessible read, i don't think any particular knowledge of tennis is required and it genuinely inspires heartfluttering shoujo romance feelings in me at parts. my book of the year for 2025. 10/10.
separate post for notable lines here.
unstoppable: the ultimate biography of max verstappen – mark hughes
lightning did kind of strike twice for me on my second sports journalism experience because this is also a really lovely and interesting read that contributed greatly to max soaring up my bias rankings to current grid 2pick (biggest contributor is of course the legendary and iconic maneater.mp4 edit series which legit changed the trajectory of my life forever). loved the analysis of max’s driving style and what makes him such a generationally gifted driver. like try not to say goat challenge: impossible.
really like that a lot of attention is paid to max's blunt personality and the difference between his on-track extreme aggressive intensity and his off-track easygoing sanguineness like that's my racing machineeeee my goat my child soldier created in a lab to extract victory from any circumstance. max the inevitable the dragon the evil and intimidating bull the teammate eater the winner who wins. max who inherited his pleasant to be around when not in car personality and his immense racing skill from his mother. max whose entire identity is built around Car. max whose every character trait is traceable to some specific circumstance of his upbringing.
also on a narrativeshipping front enjoyed the foilage between the two goats on the current grid max who so completely embodies the sport and nothing else vs lewis who transcends the sport altogether, and between red bull's two 4x wdc golden boys max who puts the fries in the bag and drives vs seb who needs to know as much as possible about the car to drive it at his best. the bulls in the red bull logo in question <3 and i am me so i of course have to comment on the perfect 3316 propaganda enshrined in text of max racing charles more respectfully than he races other people:
"On the track, Verstappen makes everyone miserable, he's the boss, but when it's Charles with him, I have the impression that he gives him a little more respect anyway." - Isack Hadjar, 2025sondernfyvers_150516
made separate post for notable lines here.
life to the limit – jenson button
is this a particularly stunning or interesting read? no. did it give me a lot of insight into jenson's personality? also no. but i found it enjoyable as a guy who already likes jenson; i generally feel an incredibly disproportionate amount of goodwill towards jenson because 1) winner who wins 2) handsome young man 3) interacted nicely and semefully with many of my fav0urites (seb, nico, lewis) in the context of a sport that seems to be severely lacking in 1s for some reason 4) canada 2011 iconicity. so i simply pretend I Do Not See It when he is unfortunately british and speaks on either mclaren driver to prevent myself from getting ragebaited and then i redevelop eyes and ears when he says anything nice about george.
this is a useful book for learning about jenson's personal history/childhood and getting a crash course on a few key engineering concepts helpfully explained in layman's terms (guy who went in not even knowing what downforce was), and not so useful from a fujoshinvestigation perspective because jenson really only shares some of his views on his teammates (of primary interest to me ofc being lewis). like there is a suspicious lack of nico in this book when I know that jenson was down BAD for ms britney in a homophobically homosexual way like brother youuuu are the one who nicknamed nico after a woman you openly spoke about wanting to fuck. jenson also speaks warmly about mark and not that much about seb so a bit of a wash on the jenseb front, quite unfortunate for me as a guy who reads f1 books by first ctrl f'ing to vettel. however, jenson does share three vital insights for the discerning fujo scholars:
lines:
But that lap we stay in touch, confirming that everything is working; that our temperamental prima donna is happy.
There were no big goodbyes between us, but I look back on Lewis as one of the best and most challenging teammates I ever had. After all, he's a brilliant, mercurial driver. Of everybody on the grid, he's the guy who really has that 'gift'.
oscar piastri: the rookie – andrew van leeuwen
disappointingly mid. which is so frustrating because i love oscar dearly and think he deserves poignant and incisive scholarship that i am clearly flopping and failing to provide myself. almost every compelling part is a quote from someone else recounted without any further commentary or insight. op kind of doesn't have anything to say about oscar at all. the majority of the book is wikipedia summaries of the 2023 season and historical anecdotes about each of the gps for some reason. not that i don't love to read context and tangents (see eg changeover), but one would think that most of a biography would be about the person whose biography it is, why charles leclerc's generational suffering (as much as I love to see my onepick!) da bus driver etc. it is also an odd choice that this was published so early on in oscar's career after only his rookie year was completed so there isn't really that much material to discuss, which might be why op put in so much extra contextualising information about the races. i mean just two more years and you could've had an entire title fight to write about.
did really like the overview of oscar's childhood and pre-f1 racing career at the start, there was a much stronger sense of oscar as a person in that section that kind of fell to the wayside in favour of recounting the sequence of events in each race. not a single mention of lily was an interesting choice; now i am admittedly in wag business more than normal people but i think that an athlete's support network is an important part of the context they compete in especially in oscar's case as he's been with lily since high school and she deserves some credit and highlightisation alongside mark webber and oscar's family and friends. i think it's fair to expect lily to be at least namedropped since unstoppable references kelly and changeover references anna k. wag discourse pisses me off so all i'll say is that 1) everyone on both sides of the argument is annoying but people really need to watch how they talk about women 2) i can care about both the racing and the wags And also acknowledge that it's extremely belittling to market f1 to female fans via wags/fashion content at a corporate level 3) you don't even know the levels of wag yuri i'm on.
anyway maybe 3/10, I think I could do a better job of being an oscar historian tbh. I wish it was better!
lines:
'He was always much younger and smaller than the kids he was racing... always racing a class above where he should have been. He always thought everyone was his mate, and he'd get bullied, bullied off the road. So his results were never what they should have been, because he was batting above his level.'
//
At the same time, a stint behind reigning world champion Max Verstappen, even as a lap down, was a wonderful opportunity to learn. 'I don't think there were any touches [with the walls], but some very, very close moments, especially on the slicks,' Piastri said. 'I think one time I keyed up on the radio to talk and almost put it on the wall, like, mid-sentence. I won't do that next time. I think having Max right in front of me was actually quite useful in some ways, because that was my first time on slicks on a rainy track in an F1 car and having Max there, I obviously knew that if there's going to be anyone that's probably going to be okay, it's probably gonna be him.'
That left Piastri in the box seat, but winning would require a flawless final few laps. Forget that there's a now three-time world champion chasing you down. You cannot make a single mistake.
Piastri, of course, didn't blink.
changeover – giri nathan
a bit unfortunate that this book was the first sports journalism i ever read because it set the bar unrealistically high. like i'm not even kidding even aside from the yaoibait that i obviously took this shit is genuinely breathtaking bro ao3 needs you!!! op is so good at conveying really precise and characterisationful images of jannik and carlos as people, as well as their tennis styles and their relationships with tennis, with their teams, and ofc with each other. jannik: reserved, inwardly focused, perfectionist, unflashy, brutally and efficiently powerful, stable output. carlos: outgoing, sunny, virtuosic, thrives on attention, unpredictable, improvisational, higher highs and lower lows. jannik & carlos: perfectly diametrically opposed, each other's kryptonite, coworkers equivalent of rivals, friendly but not the closest, bound together forever by their own narrative and by virtue of being by far and away the best players of their cohort so there really is nobody else except each other in this arranged rivalrymarriage of all time. the winner will be me but if it isn't me i hope it's you because you are the only person who deserves to take it from me.
i think op largely manages to sidestep the pit trap of shoehorning sincaraz into a hard work vs talent narrative and other false dichotomies when it's obvious both of them are massively hardworking and massively talented and also voraciously pursuing self-improvement which necessitates becoming more well-rounded players ie taking on each other's traits, while at the same time highlighting the extremely satisfying ways they are perfect foils and rivals to each other. obviously sincaraz have continued to develop as people and players and this book does unfortunately end before the hall of fame absolute cinema Greatest Of All Time matches that were rg25 finals and wimby25 finals (which i would dieeee to see op cover), but i think the portraits painted are still fairly accurate.
the main things that have changed are 1) sincaraz indulging in full honeymoon fujobait pr boyfriends skinshipmaxxing mode 2) jannik becoming a bit fixated on Adding Variety to his play and doggedly pursuing carlos-style tweeners/drop shots/net play manoeuvres etc even though his rate of success with them is uhhhh. well i am glad he is having fun :) although it does give me heart attacks every time and i of course think it is very romantic of jannik to aim to become more like carlos (and vice versa) 3) jannik being a greedy capitalist who uniquely locks in when there's a fat exho cheque on the line has been a running joke among sinneristas especially since six kings 25 in contrast to his I Don't Even Care About The Money sentiment which is recounted (with some skepticism to be fair) in this book.
i wish all sports bios paid this much attention to interiority and narrative as well as the actual sports results, but i think it is especially important for tennis considering the asteroid impact of the big 3 on men's tennis and how every player that came after them has had to compete either in their shadow or the crater they left. the Gentlemen A Short View To The Past opening chapter recapping the big 3 era and its aftermath is fantastic and i even love the medvedev tangent chapter in the middle, i think it provides valuable context for the sincaraz era as an example of a failed nextgen successor to the big3 and also medvedev really was just randomly there trapped in the middle of the big3 rock/new2 hard place eras.
it's kind of hard for me to pinpoint what i liked in particular about this book because it is just legitimately excellent across the board on prose and technical detail and characterisation. generally a fantastic and fairly accessible read, i don't think any particular knowledge of tennis is required and it genuinely inspires heartfluttering shoujo romance feelings in me at parts. my book of the year for 2025. 10/10.
separate post for notable lines here.
unstoppable: the ultimate biography of max verstappen – mark hughes
lightning did kind of strike twice for me on my second sports journalism experience because this is also a really lovely and interesting read that contributed greatly to max soaring up my bias rankings to current grid 2pick (biggest contributor is of course the legendary and iconic maneater.mp4 edit series which legit changed the trajectory of my life forever). loved the analysis of max’s driving style and what makes him such a generationally gifted driver. like try not to say goat challenge: impossible.
really like that a lot of attention is paid to max's blunt personality and the difference between his on-track extreme aggressive intensity and his off-track easygoing sanguineness like that's my racing machineeeee my goat my child soldier created in a lab to extract victory from any circumstance. max the inevitable the dragon the evil and intimidating bull the teammate eater the winner who wins. max who inherited his pleasant to be around when not in car personality and his immense racing skill from his mother. max whose entire identity is built around Car. max whose every character trait is traceable to some specific circumstance of his upbringing.
also on a narrativeshipping front enjoyed the foilage between the two goats on the current grid max who so completely embodies the sport and nothing else vs lewis who transcends the sport altogether, and between red bull's two 4x wdc golden boys max who puts the fries in the bag and drives vs seb who needs to know as much as possible about the car to drive it at his best. the bulls in the red bull logo in question <3 and i am me so i of course have to comment on the perfect 3316 propaganda enshrined in text of max racing charles more respectfully than he races other people:
What was noticeable about his thrillingly close dices with Leclerc in both Bahrain and Saudi was that there were none of the ruthless, zero-compromise moves he'd so often used against Hamilton. He denied there was any difference, but others saw it.serious sports journalist saying it not just delusional 3316 fujos on twitter!! let me take a quick detour to compile some observations of this phenomenon which i have seen so far:
"On the track, Verstappen makes everyone miserable, he's the boss, but when it's Charles with him, I have the impression that he gives him a little more respect anyway." - Isack Hadjar, 2025
- WHY DID HE SAY IT LIKE THIS LMAO
sondernfy- "Yup, but Charles still races extremely fairly most times, good if it can make others doubt making a move on him a bit more." - vroumvrouming
- "Verstappen doesn't fight Leclerc differently I think, he's still hard (Austria 2019). They just know how to race each other without complaining like the other ones even when it can go beyond the limit" - jeremy1heinrich
- he's still hard you say…
vers_150516- "Curious about the two drivers" - simplylovelymax
- "Probably Ham and Lec" - sugarfreekr69
- "DING DING DING!!! Lewis because he tends to lose his head easier than with the others and Charles is at the other end of the spectrum where he tends to be more thoughtful/careful with his manoeuvres racing him" - vers_150516
- "DING DING DING!!! Lewis because he tends to lose his head easier than with the others and Charles is at the other end of the spectrum where he tends to be more thoughtful/careful with his manoeuvres racing him" -
- "Lec with more respect, Hamilton with terrorist intentions" - speedlapse
- "Probably Ham and Lec" -
made separate post for notable lines here.
life to the limit – jenson button
is this a particularly stunning or interesting read? no. did it give me a lot of insight into jenson's personality? also no. but i found it enjoyable as a guy who already likes jenson; i generally feel an incredibly disproportionate amount of goodwill towards jenson because 1) winner who wins 2) handsome young man 3) interacted nicely and semefully with many of my fav0urites (seb, nico, lewis) in the context of a sport that seems to be severely lacking in 1s for some reason 4) canada 2011 iconicity. so i simply pretend I Do Not See It when he is unfortunately british and speaks on either mclaren driver to prevent myself from getting ragebaited and then i redevelop eyes and ears when he says anything nice about george.
this is a useful book for learning about jenson's personal history/childhood and getting a crash course on a few key engineering concepts helpfully explained in layman's terms (guy who went in not even knowing what downforce was), and not so useful from a fujoshinvestigation perspective because jenson really only shares some of his views on his teammates (of primary interest to me ofc being lewis). like there is a suspicious lack of nico in this book when I know that jenson was down BAD for ms britney in a homophobically homosexual way like brother youuuu are the one who nicknamed nico after a woman you openly spoke about wanting to fuck. jenson also speaks warmly about mark and not that much about seb so a bit of a wash on the jenseb front, quite unfortunate for me as a guy who reads f1 books by first ctrl f'ing to vettel. however, jenson does share three vital insights for the discerning fujo scholars:
- iconic princesscake meet ugly where teen jenson was talking to world champion keke rosberg and here come this annoying little kid trying to pull his dad away from jenson. little did jenson know…….
- 'It is nice enjoying ziss podium viz you. It iz good.' now why was seb the only person whose accent jenson wrote out phonetically ðŸ˜
- oh my slagclarens… jenson's thoughts on lewis as his teammate at mclaren are pretty interesting, less for what they say about lewis and more for what they say about jenson. he confirms that they weren't particularly close and were mostly just cordial coworkers with a mostly friendly rivalryquaintance, which i already guessed, and he says also that lewis is fairly reserved and difficult to read under the polite and friendly exterior to the point where jenson feels that lewis comes off irrational sometimes / jenson can't follow lewis's trains of thought. first of all, capricorn pot meet capricorn kettle. second of all, jenson so clearly does not understand how lewis's experience in f1 as a black man might be informing his actions and responses to situations that jenson doesn't interpret as having racialised elements but lewis does. like brother it is literally the elephant in the room going ADDRESS ME. i can tell that jenson tries to be respectful and careful in how he talks about lewis—and he is appropriately complimentary of lewis's skills and accomplishments—but ultimately he comes off a bit I Don't See Race. jenson also candidly admits to feeling some jealousy towards lewis for stealing jenson's thunder as the hottest british driver commodity on the market but goes to some lengths to reassure us that there's no hard feelings and he did beat lewis during their tenure as teammates, two things which i am quite sure are linked lol. he sort of tries to build a talent vs hard work narrative between him and lewis, and i'm not sure how much of that is an objective observation and how much of that is jenson not really acknowledging the work that lewis put in even though he was very happy to give lewis's innate talents their flowers. i know also that they didn't really keep in contact after jenson retired, even though jenson is still working in f1 as a commentator, but jenson still seems to feel generally positive about lewis, although i am not sure how lewis feels about jenson. i hope they are on good terms. they looked so gorgeous together.
lines:
But that lap we stay in touch, confirming that everything is working; that our temperamental prima donna is happy.
- base layer of maslow's hierarchy: personification of cars
There were no big goodbyes between us, but I look back on Lewis as one of the best and most challenging teammates I ever had. After all, he's a brilliant, mercurial driver. Of everybody on the grid, he's the guy who really has that 'gift'.
oscar piastri: the rookie – andrew van leeuwen
disappointingly mid. which is so frustrating because i love oscar dearly and think he deserves poignant and incisive scholarship that i am clearly flopping and failing to provide myself. almost every compelling part is a quote from someone else recounted without any further commentary or insight. op kind of doesn't have anything to say about oscar at all. the majority of the book is wikipedia summaries of the 2023 season and historical anecdotes about each of the gps for some reason. not that i don't love to read context and tangents (see eg changeover), but one would think that most of a biography would be about the person whose biography it is, why charles leclerc's generational suffering (as much as I love to see my onepick!) da bus driver etc. it is also an odd choice that this was published so early on in oscar's career after only his rookie year was completed so there isn't really that much material to discuss, which might be why op put in so much extra contextualising information about the races. i mean just two more years and you could've had an entire title fight to write about.
did really like the overview of oscar's childhood and pre-f1 racing career at the start, there was a much stronger sense of oscar as a person in that section that kind of fell to the wayside in favour of recounting the sequence of events in each race. not a single mention of lily was an interesting choice; now i am admittedly in wag business more than normal people but i think that an athlete's support network is an important part of the context they compete in especially in oscar's case as he's been with lily since high school and she deserves some credit and highlightisation alongside mark webber and oscar's family and friends. i think it's fair to expect lily to be at least namedropped since unstoppable references kelly and changeover references anna k. wag discourse pisses me off so all i'll say is that 1) everyone on both sides of the argument is annoying but people really need to watch how they talk about women 2) i can care about both the racing and the wags And also acknowledge that it's extremely belittling to market f1 to female fans via wags/fashion content at a corporate level 3) you don't even know the levels of wag yuri i'm on.
anyway maybe 3/10, I think I could do a better job of being an oscar historian tbh. I wish it was better!
lines:
'He was always much younger and smaller than the kids he was racing... always racing a class above where he should have been. He always thought everyone was his mate, and he'd get bullied, bullied off the road. So his results were never what they should have been, because he was batting above his level.'
//
At the same time, a stint behind reigning world champion Max Verstappen, even as a lap down, was a wonderful opportunity to learn. 'I don't think there were any touches [with the walls], but some very, very close moments, especially on the slicks,' Piastri said. 'I think one time I keyed up on the radio to talk and almost put it on the wall, like, mid-sentence. I won't do that next time. I think having Max right in front of me was actually quite useful in some ways, because that was my first time on slicks on a rainy track in an F1 car and having Max there, I obviously knew that if there's going to be anyone that's probably going to be okay, it's probably gonna be him.'
- oscar looking up to max as the exemplar for performance <3 and "I won't do that next time" really is sooo oscar
That left Piastri in the box seat, but winning would require a flawless final few laps. Forget that there's a now three-time world champion chasing you down. You cannot make a single mistake.
Piastri, of course, didn't blink.
