I won

and I'm just as surprised as you are...

Welcome to Sports Politika, a media venture founded by investigative journalist and researcher Karim Zidan that strives to help you understand how sports and politics shape the world around us. My mission is to offer an independent platform for accessible journalism that raises awareness and empowers understanding.

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A few days ago, I received an email informing me that I had won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for my debut book, In the Shadow of the Cage.

The prestigious award, co-administered by Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, honors the best in American nonfiction book writing. The winners were chosen from 473 entries and selected by three teams of judges from across journalism, publishing, and academia.

Simply getting shortlisted for this award was a major achievement—one that I proudly shared with you all last month. I didn’t, however, expect to win. The competition was stiff and the other nominees were worthy selections authoring important works. I had come to view myself as a perennial runner up; someone recognized among top contenders but who always seems to stumble at the final hurdle. I was nominated for four consecutive MMA Journalist of the Year awards but lost it to the same person each year. Other nominations met similar fates.

Then came the email announcing I had won an award for the book I have poured my heart and soul into for the past year; pure, unrelenting joy. It wasn’t just because the judges—whom I had granted access to the drafts of several completed chapters—had recognized the book’s potential, they had recognized the importance of the work I had spent the past decade of my life shedding light on.

You can read the full announcement here but I wanted to highlight what the judges had to say:

In the Shadow of the Cage will be a vital and stylish work of reportage and memoir about mixed martial arts (MMA) and the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), especially in the age of Trump, whose alliance with UFC has helped mainstream, in Zidan's words, a ”brand of aggressive nationalism and anti-establishment rhetoric that has since bled into broader American politics.” Zidan’s work is an indispensable guide to a sport and culture not well known outside its fanbase, but which has, as his journalism has shown, links to neo-Nazis, Gulf autocrats, gendered propaganda, and much more. With deep sourcing and narrative command, Zidan’s story traces UFC from its outlaw origins—once denounced as ”human cockfighting” by Senator John McCain—to its emergence as a cultural arm of the MAGA movement, with its politics of dominance, spectacle, and grievance. He has a gift for illustrating these sweeping themes with intimate human stories, from a former UFC champion turned QAnon-peddling city councilman to the fighters who cheered Trump even while their own labor rights were gutted. Zidan, an award-winning, Cairo-born journalist, has reported on this beat for over a decade, despite bans, death threats, and the hostility of powerful institutions—demonstrating the same defiant persistence as the fighters he covers. The Lukas Prize will help him complete his ambitious reporting, which spans Russia, the Middle East, and the United States, all the way to the White House.

Writing this book has been one of the most challenging experiences of my professional career. And while I know there will be many more difficult days ahead, today—today is a good day.

Here’s to many more.

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