FOXBORO — In his bid to become the Patriots’ next great cornerback, Christian Gonzalez is taking pointers from one of his superstar predecessors.

Gonzalez said Thursday that former New England standout Stephon Gilmore has been a valuable resource for him as he enters his second NFL season.

“It’s real cool to be able to talk to somebody like that,” Gonzalez said after Day 2 of Patriots training camp. “(I can) talk to him any time that I need to and just want to talk about ball.”

The two never overlapped in Foxboro, but they’ve been connected since the earliest days of Gonzalez’s pro career. In a follow-up conversation with the Herald, the 22-year-old said Gilmore contacted him shortly after the Patriots selected him 17th overall in last year’s NFL draft.

Gilmore, who made two All-Pro first teams, won a Super Bowl and was the 2019 NFL Defensive Player of the Year during his four seasons with the Patriots, placed that call despite being under contract with the Dallas Cowboys at the time. He currently is a free agent.

“As soon as I got drafted last year, he reached out to me and talked to me,” Gonzalez told the Herald. “All the coaches, they tell me Steph is somebody you can look up to and somebody you can talk to. He lives out in the area that I’m from (in the Dallas area), so we pass by each other and see each other and just talk about ball.”

Gonzalez takes cues from Gilmore in the film room, too. Though the latter hasn’t played for the Patriots since his messy breakup with the franchise in 2021, coaches routinely reference him when instructing New England’s current corners.

“That’s Steph Gilmore,” Gonzalez said. “You’re definitely going to bring up a Hall of Famer, for sure.”

Gonzalez called Gilmore “one of the best to ever do it” and said he tries to “mimic things” he does on the field. It’s easy to draw a connection between the two soft-spoken cover men, as fellow cornerback Jonathan Jones did earlier this week.

“He comes in, doesn’t say much,” said Jones, who’s been with the Patriots since 2016. “He kind of reminds me of Gilmore in the sense that he doesn’t really say much but when they step onto the field they’re playmakers. So, it’s exciting to see him back coming off of an injury, I think it’s going to be good for him.”

Whether Gonzalez can become a Gilmore-level difference-maker for New England’s defense remains to be seen, but he showed All-Pro potential during his abbreviated rookie year. The Oregon product earned Defensive Rookie of the Month honors for September after a string of strong outings against A.J. Brown, Tyreek Hill and Garrett Wilson, only to suffer a shoulder injury in Week 4 that ended his season.

Now healthy, Gonzalez has looked like the Patriots’ clear No. 1 corner in training camp and is impressing his veteran teammates. Jones, the favorite to start opposite Gonzalez, trumpeted the youngster’s talents during spring practice, saying Gonzalez “has every attribute that you want in a corner” and is “going to be one of the best players in the game.”

The Patriots will need Gonzalez to live up to that hype as they prepare for a schedule stocked with high-caliber pass-catching threats, beginning with Cincinnati’s Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins in Week 1.

Originally Published: July 25, 2024 at 2:18 p.m.

The Boston Red Sox have multiple holes on the roster to fill with just a few days to do so before the 2024 Major League Baseball trade deadline.

Boston will be buyers ahead of the deadline despite a slow start to the second half of the season. Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow made it known that Boston is open for business and wants to add and now there are just five days to go until the deadline.

The Red Sox’s biggest needs are another starting pitcher, a right-handed bat, and possibly one more reliever. It will be tough to fill all three of these holes, but it always could happen.

One player the Red Sox should consider to help in the bullpen is former top prospect Michael Kopech. He currently pitches for the Chicago White Sox but is expected to be moved, according to The Athletic’s Aaron Gleeman and Tim Britton.

“It’s just not going to happen for Michael Kopech in Chicago, but surely some team is convinced it can fix a former top-20 prospect with a triple-digit fastball and 12 strikeouts per nine innings,” Gleeman and Britton said. “Whether starting or relieving, he’s been doomed by too many homers and walks, but Kopech is an obvious buy-low candidate with another full season of team control remaining.”

Kopech doesn’t have great numbers this year, but when you have one of the best fastballs in baseball, you should be considered. Red Sox pitching coach Andrew Bailey has done wonders with Boston’s pitching this year, imagine what he could do with Kopech?

They could keep him in the bullpen for the rest of the season to help provide more depth and maybe even move him back to the starting rotation heading into 2025. He has stuff you can’t teach. If Bailey could put him in a position to succeed, he could be a sneaky great option.

More MLB: Red Sox Urged To Make Deadline Swap With A.L. Team Nearing Firesale

For a fleeting flash, Boston looked like a bona fide contender to host the 2024 Summer Games. The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee chose the city as its candidate, but then, armed with facts, gumption, and a penchant for democracy, an unlikely alliance of two anti-Games groups teamed up to torpedo the bid, forcing the USOC to hand the role to Los Angeles instead. In truth, Bostonians dodged disaster, and they have a plucky band of political activists to thank for it.

Confronting the Olympics is a classic David vs. Goliath battle that often pits raw economic power against scrappy people power. Boston’s bid for the 2024 Olympics was no exception. Games boosters included John Fish, the construction tycoon who served as the Boston 2024 chairman, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, Steve Pagliuca of Bain Capital, and then-Boston mayor Marty Walsh.

Opposing this formidable network were two groups: No Boston Olympics, largely comprised of 30-something white-collar professionals and up-and-coming policy makers, and No Boston 2024, made up mostly of grass-roots activists, some of whom participated in the Occupy Boston movement and felt comfortable frequenting radical political circles.

The orchestrated frenzy of the Olympics, that festival of sporting brilliance, arrives with serious, entrenched downsides for the host city. Anti-Olympic activists in Boston illuminated these pitfalls, drawing from social-science research. Looking at the evidence-driven claims of Boston’s Olympic critics as the Paris 2024 Games unfold helps us see with piercing clarity how right they were.

Olympic costs were a vital arrow in Boston’s anti-Games quiver. As No Boston Olympics cochair Chris Dempsey told me: “The financial argument for us was front and center.” Activist Reginald Mobley added, “The Olympics are deft at hiding behind sports,” but the numbers don’t lie. Indeed, the Games are a real-deal budget-buster: Going back to 1960, every single Olympics for which reliable data exist has gone over budget, according to research from Oxford University.

Researchers found Paris 2024′s current “cost overrun is 115% in real terms,” although “final cost and cost overrun may be higher.” The financial argument helped Boston activists nab the support of fiscal conservatives, thereby broadening their alliance. Activists also raised the opportunity-cost argument: Money spent on a two-and-a-half-week optional sports event would not be spent on schools, roads, or public health.

Another reason activists opposed the Boston bid was the Olympics’ history of turbocharging the displacement of poor and marginalized people. No Boston Olympics activist Claire Blechman told me she expressed concern that building an Olympic venue on Boston Common would have “affected the unhoused people that lived there” and impinged “freedom of movement around the Common,” as public space was converted into private space designed to be safe for profit-making. The city’s poor residents would have been swept aside.

This is precisely what has happened in Paris, where security officials have rounded up unhoused people and migrants and placed them on buses destined for distant French cities before foreign journalists arrive. Activists in Paris call it “nettoyage social,” or social cleansing. The Paris-based activist collective Le Revers de la Médaille (The Other Side of the Medal) carried out a study that revealed a marked uptick in evictions in the lead-up to the 2024 Games affecting more than 12,000 people.

Those opposing the Boston bid also explained how the Olympics intensify surveillance and policing. The state of exception that mega-events inevitably bring provides local and federal law enforcement agencies with an opportunity to secure special weapons, laws, and funding that would be difficult to obtain during normal political times. Crucially, these weapons and laws can remain in place after the Games, cohering into the new normal for policing.

Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts, said in an interview that “fundamental questions about what impact the Olympics could have on basic civil rights and civil liberties in Boston, not just during the Games or in the run up to the Games, but forever” were a massive red flag. As if on cue, the French National Assembly passed an Olympic Games Law in spring 2023 that green-lit the use of AI-driven video surveillance to police the Olympics, making France the first nation in the European Union to do so.

In challenging Boston’s Olympic bid, activists fully embraced democracy, organizing public meetings, engaging with local media, and filing a flurry of public records requests. Organizer Robin Jacks of No Boston 2024 explained, “We wanted all the transparency” while Olympic boosters “wanted zero.” Such engagement could galvanize vitriolic flak. But activist Jonathan Cohn told me, “I don’t mind attracting the hatred of people in power, because I feel that makes me stronger.”

When, back in 2015, activists in Boston stood shoulder to shoulder with concerned residents of all stripes to jettison the city’s Olympic bid, they sidestepped calamity. This was a complex “cacophony of dissent,” as No Boston Olympics cochair Kelley Gossett put it, not merely “10 people on Twitter,” as Walsh infamously quipped.

You can’t spell Olympics without an L, and Parisians are taking a big L in hosting the Games. They’re painfully aware of it, too: One recent poll found that a whopping 44 percent of locals believe the Games are a “bad idea.”

The sad truth is that the modern-day Olympics are both a glorious gala of sport and a massive albatross slung over the neck of the host city. No Boston 2024 activist Joel Fleming said he was “crossing my fingers for the people of Paris.” Paris might need more than that.

Jules Boykoff is a professor and chair of Department of Politics and Government at Pacific University in Oregon. He played professional soccer and represented the US U-23 Men’s Soccer Team in international competition.