Quincy Hall’s come-from-behind win in the men’s 400-meters race was a Paris highlight.
Photo: Christian Petersen/Getty Images
One of the refrains you hear every Olympics is some variation of, “all of you loving [name of sport], let’s channel that fandom into watching [name of sport] year-round. This isn’t just an every-four-years sport!” With all due respect to these athletes and the staggering amount of work they put in to reach the absolute apex of their chosen field, this notion misunderstands the entire point of the Olympics. For two weeks, these sports are riveting, hypnotic, emotional and even transcendent; we cheer and scream and cry and invest portions of our very soul into watching them. Then those two weeks end and we commence forgetting all about them. This is baked into the Games themselves. The Olympics are popular because you don’t have to dedicate yourself to them; they captivate us for a fortnight, and then they go away. By the time they return, you’ll be ready and eager to watch them again. (The next Games, Milan’s Winter Olympics, won’t arrive until February 2026, and who knows where the hell we’ll all be by then?) Just don’t expect to remember what happened at the last one. That is, after all, the whole point.
But a day after closing ceremonies at the spectacular Paris Olympics, memories from the last fortnight are still fresh. Here are seven takeaways from the first real Summer Games since Rio de Janeiro in 2016.
It really cannot be emphasized enough how much these Olympics were elevated by their location. It’s Paris. There is nothing quite like watching a beach volleyball match and realizing that, every time a player takes a break and looks away, they’re staring at the Eiffel Tower. It’s kind of amazing that the square where Marie Antionette was beheaded, the Place de la Concorde, was the backdrop for a “breaking” competition. (That seems like as positive a sign of human progress as I can come up with.) After the antiseptic Covid games in Tokyo, Paris lent the entire two weeks an opened-up, joyous quality. You got the feeling that the athletes kept realizing, oh shit we’re in Paris right now! The difference between having the games in a just-here-because-they-have-adequate-venues city like Sochi or Pyeongchang, or a real world capital like Paris (or, previously, London or Barcelona) is dramatic. The Olympics should always take place in a city you would want to visit even if the Olympics weren’t there. No city meets that qualification more than this one.
NBC, and previous Olympic broadcasters, have struggled with the challenge of how to adequately convey the sheer breadth of events at a Summer Olympics. Failed experiments like the TripleCast and The Olympic Channel are in the rearview mirror, and there’s been decades to figure out tape-delayed primetime broadcasts. But having a streaming service that works — and thus treating the Games like they were a 24-hour cable news channel — turned out to be the magical fix. For the first time ever in Olympic television, not only could you watch everything, it felt like you could watch it precisely the way you wanted to: live, delayed, in bits and chunks or all at once. The Gold Zone Channel, which just cut back and forth between highlights (including a Gold Medal Alert in the top right hand corner when the stakes were particularly high), has received most of the plaudits, and well-earned ones. But it shouldn’t be overlooked that, as you were enjoying that channel, you had the option to click a button in the bottom right hand corner to watch the entirety of the particular event it happened to be highlighting…and then come back right where you just were afterward. NBC has never quite figured out the right way to direct the Olympics. This year they nailed it, simply by letting us do it. Every Olympics from now on will be shown like this, and they will all benefit from it.
There were two big, very stupid, very American controversies at this Olympics. The first involved the supposed “mockery” of The Last Supper at the Opening Ceremonies (the scene in question was not in fact about The Last Supper, not that it stopped supposedly Christian people from inundating a French DJ with death threats). The second was the backlash to Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who was accused of being trans (she wasn’t) because, well, because she punched too hard, I guess. (She punched hard enough to win a Gold Medal, actually.) These incidents had two things in common: They inspired the sort of faux outrage on social media we regularly see from these culture war soccer floppers, and they were done in such bad faith that they were in fact entirely and purposefully ignorant of what was actually happening. (It wasn’t about The Last Supper. She isn’t trans. Facts! They’re your friends!) None of the people trying to stoke these controversies care about boxing, or the Olympics, in the slightest. They’re just trying to rile you — and, really, themselves—up. And the Olympics, as established, are about not getting riled up: They’re about enjoying silly sports we’ll happily forget about for the next four years. These people do not actually give a shit about any of these sports! Stop letting them hijack the fun.
I mean, you can still get Covid, obviously. You might have it right now! But if American sprinter Noah Lyles had tested positive for Covid-19 right before his 200 meter race four years ago, not only would he have been immediately isolated, they would have cleared the stadium and canceled the event, perhaps permanently. This time? They just went ahead and let Lyles race. And he won a Bronze Medal! (They did make him wear a mask on the medal podium, which I guess is something.) Obviously, a lot has changed since the Tokyo Games. But it is still quite striking—and telling, in what is ultimately a very positive way—to see an athlete test positive for a communicative disease that shut the world down for two years go ahead and compete in a race while running right next to a bunch of other competitors … and no one, including the competitors, really cares. I’m not sure there’s a more “Covid is over” moment than that.
I essentially had the Olympics on in my office all day, every day, usually with the sound turned down, as I worked and listened to music. And what I noticed more than anything is that there was not a single sport in which the referees are not getting screamed at, always. I did not really understand the rules of most of these sports: It took me about three different rugby games to figure out scoring, and I’m not sure I’ve ever been more confused about who’s winning, and why, than I was watching fencing. But the one constant is that every competitor always thinks the referees are somehow screwing them. This transcends sports, cultures, genders, and language. It applies both to individual and team sports. Even the stakes of the contest in question are largely irrelevant. (People get just as angry at the refs in an early heat as they do in a Gold Medal race.) No matter what happens, no matter what sport they’re playing, no matter what nation they’re from: If someone does not get the result they want, it is always, always the ref’s fault. In case you were wondering what truly bonds us as a people.
To be fair, there is already a Basketball World Cup every four years; Germany won it in 2023. But, like almost every international basketball tournament ever played, including most Olympics, it didn’t feature the best players in the world: There was no LeBron James, no Stephen Curry, no Kevin Durant, no Nikola Jokic, no Victor Wembanyama. Traditionally, Team USA has alternated between dominating the Olympics in the rare years it features all its best players, and falling short when those best players get bored or decide they’ll sit out the Games to rest an injury or chill in Cabo for the summer. The Games have also felt separate from stars’ NBA career narratives: The stakes are always just considered so much lower. But now that several countries have raised their games to near the USA’s level, I suspect this dynamic is about to change.
Team USA won gold again this year, but not only did they have to scrape and claw to beat Jokic’s Serbia in the semifinals and Wembanyama’s France in the Gold Medal game, they did so in a way that will burnish the legends of everyone involved — and ensure that, moving forward, everybody’s going to want to be part of this tournament. The wild comeback against Serbia — capping off a game that may have made people respect Jokic even more than they already did — featured a fourth-quarter of basketball perfection from LeBron, Curry and Durant. Curry’s late-game blitz against France, a shooting barrage that no previous human has been capable of, may just lead his career highlight reel. Those three stars are highly unlikely to ever win another NBA title, so they played this tournament like it was their last chance at glory, a final punctuation mark on their careers. That will make future stars want to make the Olympics a final punctuation mark on their careers. And the Olympics became part of Wembanyama’s story and Jokic’s — the player who is the obvious future of the NBA and one who looked absolutely devastated that he was unable to win the gold in front of his countrymen. For Jokic, Wembanyama, and, I suspect, other non-Americans who are slowly taking over the NBA, winning a gold medal looks like it will be as important a milestone in their career as winning an NBA title, maybe even more so.
The NBA is a truly international sport now, and the Olympics are its true World Cup. This tournament is just going to get better and better every four years. One of these years, probably soon, Team USA is going to bring all its best players, and it’s going to get beat. It almost happened this year. For decades to come, as the NBA goes more and more international, we’re going to look back at this tournament in particular and see it as a pivot point: No one’s sitting out the Olympics again.
I’m not saying you weren’t cheering for Team USA in Beijing, or Tokyo, or Pyeongchang, or Rio de Janeiro. Cheering for your home country even when, uh, things aren’t going great in your home country is a core part of the Olympics experience. But, to borrow from the current political parlance, the USA vibes have been immaculate. Whether it was the likable trash-talking of Lyles (and the excellence of Team USA track in general), the women’s soccer team winning the gold and returning to their rightful place atop the sport, Katie Ledecky becoming the winningest woman athlete in Olympics history, the US men’s gymnastics team winning their first medal in 16 years or the forever inspirational nature of Simone Biles’ dominance, it felt downright good to be cheering for Americans in this Olympics. Maybe it’s this political moment, maybe it’s these particular athletes, maybe it’s just the overall grandeur of these Olympics, but it almost felt like patriotism has been cool for the last two weeks. Heck, I don’t remember cheering as loud in a long time as I did when the women’s rugby team came out of nowhere to win a bronze medal on this wild play:
I don’t know anything about rugby. I don’t know any of those players’ names. I won’t think about them, or their sport, for another four years. But that didn’t prevent me from yelling U-S-A any less loudly. That’s the Olympics, right there. How do you not love that? See you in two years in Milan. I can’t wait to care about luge again.
