1984 Olympic Men’s Skating Champion Scott Hamilton told PEOPLE that he experienced a miracle. The tumor that he had contracted in August of 2016 had shrunk in size, without treatment.
“The nature of them is to grow, and without treatment, they have no reason to shrink,” Hamilton, 58, told PEOPLE. “So I was the recipient of a spectacular miracle. I’m keeping an eye on it, and there’s no treatment needed at this time.”
In October, Hamilton announced that he had a benign pituitary tumor and said he was at peace with whatever God had in store for him. This was the third different brain tumor that had come his way. The gold medalist previously beat testicular cancer in 1997 and two benign brain tumors in 2004 and 2010 before he was diagnosed with his latest in August 2016.
Hamilton’s faith is strong and he told People that he read his Bible and drew close to God during the time after his latest tumor diagnosis.
“I kind of heard a little voice when I first got the news, to get strong, so I decided to do that,” he says. “So I just decided to give up sugar. That was the end of August, and I went back at the end of November, and they scanned it again, and it hadn’t grown at all. So I stayed with the program, eliminated all the unhealthy stuff — have been getting strong — and have been pouring myself into the word, and I really tried to draw as close to the Lord as possible. I went back Feb. 10, I checked in, got my MRI done, and it actually shrunk.”
In 2011, Scott shared with I Am Second how his faith journey grew and the circumstances surrounding the moment where he put his trust in Jesus Christ.
“I understand that through a strong relationship with Jesus, you can endure anything. God is there to guide you through the tough spots. God was there every single time.”
Left to right: Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, Steph Curry, Coco Gauff, Scottie Scheffler, Anna Hall. (AP Photos)
With 2024 coming to a close, Sports Spectrum is highlighting our most-viewed stories of the year.
It’s always fun to learn about new athletes — and sometimes even new sports — every four years when the Summer Olympics come around. There are many athletes who enter the Games already well known, but many more who do not. This past summer in Paris was no different.
For followers of Christ, it’s also exciting to learn about new athletes who share the same faith. For every Scottie Scheffler, the No. 1 golfer in the world who’s shared about his faith in Jesus on numerous occasions, there’s an Aaron Brooks, a four-time NCAA-champion wrestler making his Olympic debut while praising the Lord the whole way. For every Sydney McLaughlin, the world-record-breaking gold medalist who boldly expresses her faith often, there’s a Maggie Malone Hardin, a javelin thrower who’s kept her identity in Christ and not in her Olympic results.
“I would take my love for Christ and that relationship over a gold medal any day,” McLaughlin told Sports Spectrum this year.
Prior to the 2024 Olympics, Sports Spectrum took the time to compile a list of Christ-following U.S. Olympians — some well known, some not, but all professing faith in Christ. Nearly 600 U.S. athletes competed in Paris, so there was no way we could know the faith of all of them, nor list all who claim to be Christians, but we listed 20 to watch for in Paris.
It would appear that many folks watching the Olympics were curious about Christians competing in the Games, as our list received a steady flow of traffic through the duration of the Olympics. It ends the year ranked No. 4 among our most-viewed stories in 2024:
THIS IS THE SPORTS SPECTRUM PODCAST WITH MATT FORTE & JASON ROMANO, FEATURING TALIYAH BROOKS
Taliyah Brooks is a track and field athlete with Team USA. She competed in the heptathlon at the 2024 Summer Olympics, and finished 11th overall with 6,258 points. She qualified for the Paris Games by placing third at the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials, where she posted a career-best 6,408 points in the seven-event competition.
In college at Arkansas, Brooks won the pentathlon at the 2018 NCAA Championships.
Today on the podcast, we talk to Taliyah Brooks about her trademark red hair, finding an identity in God, how she has grown amidst athletic disappointment, and her favorite Summer Olympics experience.
Mallory Swanson of the U.S. celebrates after scoring during the women's soccer gold medal match, Aug. 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard)
It had been too long for the most successful women’s national soccer team. Not since 2012 in London had the United States captured a gold medal in women’s soccer at the Olympics.
The drought ended in triumphant fashion on Saturday against Brazil in the final of the Paris Games, thanks to the heroics of Mallory Swanson in the 57th minute.
Swanson found a seam, received the pass from Korbin Albert and buried her breakaway goal in the back of the net to bust open what was a tense gold-medal match. Brazil never found an equalizer and, when the final whistle sounded, the Americans erupted in a celebration that had been building for 12 long years.
TEAM USA STRIKES FIRST—AND IT'S MALLORY SWANSON AGAIN!
“We’ve been playing with joy, and you can just see it on the field,” Swanson told NBC’s Mike Tirico after the match. “… I’m super thankful that I was able to play with this group.”
She continued later: “I obviously was very blessed to play with so many great players, and with a bunch of new teammates and everything coming in, I think it’s just been super fun.”
Meanwhile back in the United States, Swanson’s husband, Dansby Swanson of the Chicago Cubs, made history of his own on Saturday as he recorded his 1,000th career hit in the Cubs’ 3-1 victory against their crosstown rivals, the Chicago White Sox.
“In God’s beauty and brilliance, He can take something that’s so devastating and create something even more amazing than one could ever imagine,” Dansby said later that day, according to MLB.com. “It’s just a testament to [Mallory] and her gratitude, her joy, her love, grace — any positive attribute you can come up with — just how she’s handled every bit of this is amazing.”
Dansby was referring to his wife’s major setback, on April 8, 2023, in a USWNT match against Ireland, when she tore her left patella tendon. She faced an almost year-long recovery process, and a knee infection only complicated and lengthened it. As a result of her injury, she was forced to watch from home as the national team struggled to its worst-ever finish in the Women’s World Cup, when the Americans were bounced in the round of 16 by Sweden. Mallory also sat out of the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 due to inconsistent play and an injury that January.
Now that she’s back on the world stage and scoring goals in gold-medal matches, Dansby couldn’t be prouder, and he let social media know about it with a post on Instagram.
“God is so good. Always and forever,” Dansby captioned his post in part. “You are such an inspiration to so many, but more to me than anyone can ever fathom. Your faith in God’s plan, gratitude in life, the grace and joy in which you live and play, the perseverance to fight through whatever obstacles thrown your way. You are truly a gift from above, and you shine with that every day.”
In 2016, Mallory made her USWNT debut at just 17 years old, and later that summer after turning 18, she was the youngest player on the USWNT Olympic roster and became the youngest American to ever play and score in the Olympics. But she battled injuries and inconsistent play following the 2019 World Cup, and got to a point where she thought she might not ever play soccer again. She seriously considered retiring at 23.
“I just remember asking God, like, ‘Why is this happening?'” Mallory said in an interview for the Summer 2022 edition of Sports Spectrum Magazine. “I feel like you always ask ‘why.’ I look back at it now and I know exactly why it happened — because my faith in Him has grown immensely. Me getting injured and me missing the Olympics and me kind of finding myself on the field again, it really started because I found myself in Christ even more.”
In May 2022 when Mallory spoke to Sports Spectrum, she reflected on what she saw God doing during a turbulent time in her life.
“I feel like my identity was so wrapped up in soccer, and then when the game is kind of taken away from you, you start questioning,” she said. “Am I actually supposed to be doing this? And I feel like God, He took that away from me so I could go find Him and that I could have a deeper relationship with Him.”
Now playing out of a place of freedom in Christ, Mallory is back to her goal-scoring ways on one of soccer’s biggest stages. It’s been a long time coming for her, and a long time coming for the USWNT. She knows when she looks down on the long flight back from Paris, the gold medal hanging from her neck is a gift from her gracious Heavenly Father.
Women's 400m hurdles Olympic gold medalist Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone of the U.S., Aug. 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)
Expectations were as high for American runner Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone as for perhaps any other athlete entering the 2024 Paris Olympics. And after Thursday’s women’s 400-meter hurdles final, maybe those expectations weren’t high enough.
McLaughlin-Levrone pulled away while rounding the backstretch to blow away the field, win by more than a second, and set a new world record with an incredible run of 50.37 seconds. Anna Cockrell of the United States nabbed the silver while Femke Bol of the Netherlands took bronze.
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) August 9, 2024
After the race, as per usual, McLaughlin-Levrone directed all glory to her Heavenly Father.
“I credit all that I do to God,” she said in her post-race press conference. “He’s given me a gift, He’s given me a drive to just want to continue to improve upon myself, and I have a platform and I want to use it to glorify Him. So whenever I step on the track it’s always the prayer of, ‘God, let me be the vessel in which You’re glorified, whatever the result is — how I conduct myself, how I carry myself, not just how I perform.’ So it’s just freedom in knowing that regardless of what happens, He’s going to get the praise through me. That’s why I do what I do.”
McLaughlin-Levrone, who turned just 25 on Wednesday, already has three Olympic Games under her belt and now three Olympic gold medals to her name. She has now set a new world record six times in the 400m hurdles over the past five years, the most recent one before Thursday’s race coming less than two months ago at the U.S. Olympic Trials (50.65 seconds). She is widely considered one of the most popular female track stars in American history, and she’s a regular on national television commercials and one of the faces of Team USA.
She’s become an international superstar all while remaining a boldly yet gracefully unashamed follower of Christ.
After her semifinal run of the 400m hurdles in Paris, McLaughlin-Levrone talked about her trust in God in an interview with NBC’s Lewis Johnson.
“You work all year to get here, but what you’ve done is what keeps you here,” she said. “So it’s just about executing that, trusting the process, trusting the plan, and ultimately, trusting God.”
McLaughlin-Levrone also credited her husband, Andre Levrone Jr., for being “my best friend, my biggest supporter, my personal pastor. I love him more than life itself.” The couple married in May 2022.
McLaughlin-Levrone writes that she is “resting in Jesus’ grace” in her X bio, and she declares that “Jesus is Lord” on Instagram. She talks openly and often about her faith in Christ on both social media platforms.
“Let me start off by saying, what an honor it is to be able to represent not only my country, but also the kingdom of God,” she captioned an Instagram post after the Tokyo Olympics. “What I have in Christ is far greater than what I have or don’t have in life. I pray my journey may be a clear depiction of submission and obedience to God. Even when it doesn’t make sense, even when it doesn’t seem possible. He will make a way out of no way. Not for my own gratification, but for His glory.
“I have never seen God fail in my life. In anyone’s life for that matter. Just because I may not win every race, or receive every one of my heart’s desires, does not mean God had failed. His will is PERFECT. And He has prepared me for a moment such as this. That I may use the gifts He has given me to point all the attention back to Him.”
Away from the track, McLaughlin-Levrone wrote a book called “Far Beyond Gold: Running From Fear to Faith,” which was released in January. In the book, she shares her testimony and talks about how her relationship with Christ has helped her battle perfectionism and anxiety.
In addition to her numerous public comments about her faith, McLaughlin-Levrone was featured as the cover story in the Summer 2024 edition of Sports Spectrum Magazine and has been a guest on the Sports Spectrum Podcast multiple times, first in 2021 and again this past January.
“There’s been a lot of talk that I’ve received just about, you know, ‘You might not want to talk so much about [faith]. You might lose endorsements, you might lose deals, this, that, and the third,'” McLaughlin-Levrone said on the podcast in 2021. “But, I mean, I don’t live for the approval of people, so I don’t have to worry about any of those things. And even if an endorsement or something wants to leave, I know that God will provide for me in the way He sees fit. So I’m not going to compromise the truth just to make people feel more comfortable.
“… I continue to speak the truth because I know it’s what I’m called to do, and just grateful to have community around me and supports me through that even if all the people outside of that don’t.”
“In a sport where you’re literally chasing gold all the time, I would take my love for Christ and that relationship over a gold medal any day,” she said later in the podcast.
For the rest of her life, McLaughlin-Levrone will be known as one of the best track athletes in Olympic history. She’ll be known as a three-time gold medalist (with maybe more to come) and someone who held a world record. Still, she knows that all of it pales in comparison to her identity in Christ.
“For a long time, track was who I was,” she said on the podcast in 2021. “But now more than ever, first and foremost I’m a child of God, and track is not who I am, it’s what I do.”
