Bobbing for Medals: 2024 Edition

We spend most of the day watching the Olympics, so you don’t have to.
 
I hope people heeded my admonition to watch at least the final two laps of the men’s 10,000m race – since it was so exciting that NBC Primetime led their broadcast with the final four laps!  It was that amazing.  Just all-out sprinting for the final lap after running for over six miles.  And once again, USA’s Grant Fisher won Bronze, only the second medal America has won in the race in 56 years.  And just the third…ever.
 
The Decathlon started on Friday with the early heats.  It’s interesting, though I find the Decathlon at its best later in the competition.  That’s because (to me), the Decathlon is sort of like a marathon where in the early part, the competitors are more jockeying for position.  They aren’t, but because they’re all trying to accumulate points, and finishing back in the pack during an event they aren’t strong might be okay if they get enough points in it, it’s the later events when the point totals have grown, and the medal positions come into sight, that I find the intensity of competition gets ratcheted up.  I will add that in the athlete introductions, the Decathletes seemed the most posturing, preening, arrogant of all those I’ve seen at the Games – and that includes the sprinters, which is saying a lot.  Anyway, all that aside, the Decathlon did get decided on Saturday with Markos Rooth of Norway winning.

And Katie Ledecky won again, this time the 800m freestyle again her one rival, Ariarne Titmus of Australia, who has won occasional races against her under 1500 meters.  This was Ledecky's fourth gold medal in the 800m, the first woman to win four Gold medals in the same event.  This harkens back to the great Al Oerter who won the discuss Gold medal four times.  One other thing I love when Katie Ledecky wins is how excited her family is in the stands, to the degree that it's like she's never won before, and they're almost surprised.  It's endearing.
 
By the way, the runner for the Netherlands for ran the spectacular final leg of the mixed 4x400 relay to come from far behind and beat the world record-holding Americans at the very end was Femke Bol.  She is the woman I wrote about yesterday who face-planted at the 2023 world championships, whose teammates call her “Bambi” because she is clumsy.  Clumsy or not, she ran incredibly.  (You can see that 2023 video here.) 
 
Individual disciplines in gymnastics began, and the first competition was the women’s vault.  Simon Biles won yet another vault, and wonderful too is that her teammate Jade Carey got Bronze, notable because she had a chance for Gold four years ago, but slipped on her run-up and ended up out of the medals.  In the men’s pommel horse, Ireland won the Gold, but USA’s Stephen Nedoroscik got the Bronze in his specialty.  (The funniest part was when they later showed his girlfriend in the stands – also a gymnast – maniacally screaming her head off during his turn.) 
 
Of course, when mentioning women’s vault, it’s almost impossible to not remember perhaps the most famous moment in U.S. women’s gymnastics, this from the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta –

​I bring that up, though, because it’s difficult for me to remember that vault and not tie it together with one of the best Saturday Night Live Olympic sketches done shortly after  It may be my favorite thing Chris Kattan did on the show.  He also wrote the piece along with Robert Smigel, whose best-known character is Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog.  What impresses me most about the sketch, though, is that Kerri Strug was game for doing it.

​By the way, Simone Biles had a surprising and superb political slam that she posted after winning the All Around Gold medal.  She sent out a post on social media, embedding a photo of herself in action, and wrote, “I love my Black job.”
 
Before going to the BMX bike racing event (one of the disciplines that come from the X-Games world), the studio host described it as being “like NASCAR, but on wheels.”  Oh, spare us.  It is absolutely nothing like NASCAR – unless NASCAR decided to have races that, instead of being 400 miles, were only a single time around an irregularly-curved track warped with hills, little bumps and valleys, that send the cars flying in the air.  That aside, the French swept the men’s event – the country’s first sweep in any event since 1924, one-hundred years ago.
 
As I noted at the beginning of the Olympics, the IOC would be holding a special ceremony presenting Gold and Silver medals to the United States and Japan for Team Figure Skating at the last Winter Olympics.  That’s because the Russian team, that had finished first, had later gotten disqualified when one of their members was disqualified for illegal drug use.  For reasons I don’t fully understand, there will be no medal presented to Canada who had finished in fourth place.  There was a challenge, which was not allowed.  But an official date and time has been set now for the ceremony – August 7 at 5 PM Paris time.  I have to believe that NBC will cover it.

Let the Games continue...