The Washington Post pulled the plug on its Winter Olympics coverage just two weeks before the opening ceremony. Layoffs are expected. And now, according to Puck’s Dylan Byers, rumors inside the newsroom suggest the sports desk itself could be on the chopping block, with the foreign desk also facing deep cuts.
The speculation comes as the Post continues hemorrhaging both money and talent. Friday’s decision to scrap its Milano Cortina coverage — after already spending more than $80,000 on housing — is just the latest example of a pattern that’s been accelerating for more than a year.
NEW: Massive layoffs coming to Washington Post… rumor inside Post is that sports desk could be shuttered entirely… foreign desk will be hit hard too
— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) January 25, 2026
On paper, it’s just another cost-cutting move at a struggling legacy outlet. In reality, it’s something heavier than that.
In the mid-1980s, you could walk through the sports department and find Shirley Povich still filing columns at 80 years old, Thomas Boswell writing baseball pieces that felt closer to literature than game recaps, and Tony Kornheiser turning the Redskins’ Super Bowl run into the Bandwagon phenomenon. A young Michael Wilbon was learning the trade. Christine Brennan became the first woman to cover the Redskins beat. John Feinstein was simultaneously filing for the paper and writing “A Season on the Brink.” Sally Jenkins arrived from the San Francisco Chronicle and would go on to become one of the most respected columnists in the country.
The Post‘s sports section once represented the standard for American sports journalism. That’s not where things are now.
Recent buyouts disproportionately hit longtime staffers, accelerating a brain drain across the newsroom and stripping away much of the institutional memory that once defined the paper. According to the Washington Post Guild, at least 60 journalists accepted buyouts in 2025, part of a broader exodus that has included prominent columnists and veteran reporters across multiple desks.
The turmoil is rooted in long-running financial trouble. When Will Lewis became publisher and CEO in late 2023, the Post was already losing money, a problem he acknowledged publicly in 2024 after revealing a $77 million loss the previous year. Subscriber cancellations surged following owner Jeff Bezos’ decision to block the paper’s 2024 presidential endorsement of Kamala Harris, and multiple rounds of layoffs have followed, cutting staff across both editorial and business sides.
If the sports desk does get shuttered, the Post would be following the New York Times, which closed its sports desk in July 2023 after purchasing The Athletic. The Times dispersed current sports staffers throughout the newsroom while relying on The Athletic for traditional sports coverage. No layoffs accompanied that move, though the decision effectively ended the Times‘s standalone sports journalism operation.
The Post doesn’t own a subscription sports site like The Athletic to absorb its coverage. What it does have is a storied sports section that produced some of the best sports writing in American journalism for decades, now reduced to pulling out of the Olympics two weeks before the opening ceremony because management decided it couldn’t afford to send journalists it had already credentialed and booked travel for.
What’s being lost isn’t just Olympic coverage, but the institutional competence and ambition that once made the Post’s sports section matter. And for a department built on authority and continuity, that loss of confidence may be the most damaging cut of all.
