From the Couch: the 2024 Summer Olympics in Review

After succeeding in her first attempt of the women’s high jump competition, Australian Nicola Olyslangers sat down, opened a journal, and started writing. This, the television announcers explained, was what she did after every jump in every competition, giving herself a grade of 1-10 and more importantly, writing down what she felt in the moment so she could reflect on it later. Every Olympics is a jam-packed sensory experience, yet even on that inherent level, Paris 2024 was filled to overflowing with feats of strength, a sensation enhanced in the States by NBC’s Peacock streaming app finally living up to the nature of the games as a virtual kaleidoscope. And so, I thought, maybe Olyslangers had it right, that the only way to make sense of such a spectacle was to open a journal, to write down everything I felt, to hold it and remember it so I could reflect on it. I also assigned a grade. Paris 2024: A+++++, on into infinity.  

Free of an authoritarian host and dystopian pandemic restrictions that necessarily plagued Beijing and Tokyo, Paris 2024 effused joie de vivre. That is not to suggest there were no geopolitics (there always are), or the host city taking insidious quasi-civic advantage (they always do), or that COVID was gone (it wasn’t, and it isn’t), or even that mendacious cultural warriors abstained from combing through the event schedule to locate chum (such charlatans can always be counted upon). But if a lot of b.s. happens at the Olympics, to paraphrase Team USA men’s basketball player Kevin Durant discussing the nation he represented, a lot of great things happen too. Indeed, if the realist in me holds the ills of the Olympics in one hand, the romantic in me holds holy in the other the idea of the athletes as the central actors in this quadrennial gathering. And like Australia’s Jessica Fox mastering the elements in a canoe on whitewater, or America’s Steph Curry at the end of the gold medal men’s basketball game obliterating a fortnight of commentary about his struggles by honoring Zeus with four immaculate three-point thunderbolts that momentarily transformed every spectator into a wide-eyed child, it was as hard to deny that the athletes were ever better than in Paris 2024 as it was any host ever providing a grander setting for them than the city of lights.

More than any Olympics I can recall, Paris integrated the city into its experience, events and architecture so often all but inseparable, creating myriad breathtaking stages worthy of the competitors. Beach volleyball might have been more appropriate dispatched to the south of France, but then again, as one of the game’s most exalted practitioners Karch Kiraly once noted, it’s a lifestyle sport. And Paris is a lifestyle city, and the Eiffel Tower is the symbol of Paris, and setting that manmade beach down in the iron lady’s shadow proved perfect. The women and men’s road cycling time trials did not just take riders on a tour of the city by weaving through it, they were beholden to omnipresent precipitation which made conditions taxing but also, in their way, brought to life the adage that Paris looks just as beautiful in the rain.

No sport was as seamlessly or resplendently interwoven into its venue as fencing which took place at the Grand Palais. If laypersons like me have always dreamed of Olympic fencing being a little more like Errol Flynn squaring off with Basil Rathbone, Paris would make that dream come true by having fencers descend the grand staircase, blades in hand, before settling matters in the nave beneath the magnificent, vaulted glass roof that low-angled TV shots rendered truly cinematic. France’s Yannick Borel won silver, not gold, but his 12-11 quarterfinal comeback against Japan’s Masaru Yamada that ended in sudden death when one touch with the épée would win really did feel like Hollywood. Then again, when Ukraine’s Olga Kharlan, who was nearly banned from the Olympics by the sport’s pissant governing body in the wake of her refusing to shake hands with a Russian rival at the World Fencing Championships last year, won bronze with a remarkable comeback of her own and fell to her knees weeping, it might have looked like a movie. But Kharlan dedicating the medal to Ukranian athletes killed by Russia reminded you this was very much real life.

Not every event took place in Paris, though, or even in France. After debuting in Tokyo, surfing returned and was contested almost 10,000 miles away off the coast of Teahupo’o on the island of Tahiti in French Polynesia. Camerapeople bobbed in the water to provide spectacular shots of massive waves forming from below, and cameras in the air provided views of the awe-inspiring backdrop of lush green mountains. In some ways, surfing was the sport most like Paris, or I should say, the most like sitting at a Parisian café, competitors having to wait until a wave came along, asking, nay, demanding your patience, to just sit and watch the world go by. When one aerial view showed two surfers as two tiny specks in the ocean, it felt less frightening than serene. I jotted down what I felt, but snapped a picture of my TV too, so I could return to it, like Jamie Foxx’s postcard of the Maldives in “Collateral.”

The men’s Olympic surfing gold medal was won by Kauli Vaast of the host country, though he is a native of French Polynesia itself, where he first surfed when he was eight years old. Upon winning, he noted the locals’ relationship with the surf, saying “we call it the ‘mana,’ and in this contest I felt it the whole time.” If mana undoubtedly exists in a place like a Teahupo’o, it might be harder to fathom in a place like the Paris Aquatic Centre in the northern suburbs of Paris. On the other hand, it was only a half-hour from the Basilica of Saint Denis, named for a patron saint of France, and so maybe there was mana in the pool where Léon Marchand became hero of France in winning four golds after all. None were as thrilling as his victory in the 200m butterfly. Well, thrilling is not quite the right word. If Marchand trailed Hungary’s Kristof Milak for the first 150meters, upon making the turn for home, he closed the gap so mercilessly underwater that when he emerged, he was suddenly, nearly neck-and-neck with Milak, and the word that popped into my head was terrifying. The way Marchand surfaced; it was terrifying. Indeed, it must have looked like a horror movie to all of Hungary as the Frenchman surged ahead to win. As much as any moment in Paris, it maybe was not one upon which to reflect, just to let course through your bones.

What I tend to love about the 100meters is the pointed lack of reflection. For all the build-up of the race, and bravado of the sprinters, the end is clear-cut in the clock and the finish line. Either you crossed the line first, or you didn’t; either your time was fastest, or it wasn’t. The starting gun sounds, the earth turns, and it’s over. Except, in Paris, just as the runners reached the finish line in the men’s 100m final and the moment of exhilarative clarity beckoned, what transpired instead was a bewildering photo finish as the most bigheaded of all athletes were laid bare, just staring up at the scoreboard like everyone else in the stadium, trying to see who won. To the naked eye, or at least, to my naked eye, it appeared to be Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson, so much so that I had failed to notice America’s Noah Lyles, in last place with 60 meters to go, hitting the gas and pushing past Thompson at the finish line by the slimmest of margins. In watching the replay, I realized NBC didn’t mention Lyles once during the race, mimicking my own lack of vision. It felt like one of those Cool Papa Bell anecdotes, the fanciful kind old Negro Leaguers would tell to try and capture the centerfielder’s fabled speed: Lyles was so fast, I didn’t even see him win. Technically, he recorded the same time as Thompson, 9.79, but broke down, he won by five-thousandths of a second. Whether it was the most sensational 100m final of my life, or the most surreal, or both, or something else altogether, I can’t say. It might take five thousand years of reflecting.

The clarity I sought in the men’s 100m was instead revealed in the 4x400 mixed relay when Femke Bol received the baton for Team Netherlands on the anchor leg in fourth place and manifested that famous line from “Chariots of Fire,” taking on each runner ahead of her one-by-one and running them off their feet. Because this is present-day Earth, she went viral less for her feat of strength than her voice in a post-race interview, an unexpected sort of squeak, Mickey Mouse-like, as many faux comedians noted. Well, if she was Mickey Mouse, then she was the sorcerer in “Fantasia,” the horizontal rather than vertical way she held the baton rendering it as her magic wand. In winning the men’s 400meter race by also coming from behind, America’s Quincy Hall was her aesthetic opposite. If Bol effected the illusion of pulling back the runners in front of her bit by bit on an invisible rope, Hall looked like a mountain climber on crampons digging his way past them. The late Kenny Moore, paragon of track writers, once noted that “the essence of the quarter (mile is) holding on,” but Hall reconfigured that essence into something else: going and taking it. 

In winning the 400meter hurdles, meanwhile, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, WGA (world’s greatest athlete), of the U.S. once again made the arduous look easy. She was so far ahead by the end, that she mirrored the photo snapped by Richard Heathcoate for Getty Images (see below), appearing to exist on a plain all by herself, in breaking her own world record for a sixth time, an athletics explorer continuing to push on, alone, to new frontiers. If I close my eyes, I can still see myself standing in the vaulted two-story living room of a friend’s relative’s Aurora, CO home when I watched Michael Johnson run 19.32 in Atlanta in 1996 and now, I will never forget sitting in a brewery in Asheville, NC on a rainy afternoon watching McLaughlin-Levrone run 50.37 in Paris in 2024 with My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife lovingly telling me not to make a scene in public. 

Every Olympics I choose a country from one team sport and adopt them as my team for the ensuing fortnight, transferring all my enthusiasm typically reserved for Nebraska football, or Chicago Sky basketball. This Olympics, I chose the French Men’s Handball Team, partly because I’m a Francophile, and partly because their team nickname is Les Barjots, roughly translating to The Bananas. Perhaps feeling the pressure not only of playing at home but defending their gold medal from Tokyo 2020-in-2021, Les Barjots began the preliminaries 0-2 and in their third game, trailed Egypt by a single point with but a few seconds left. Needing to win or tie to stave off elimination, Ludovic Fabregas’s buzzer beating goal to knot the score 26-apiece was bananas, keeping them alive with a European version of an old college football headline, France Beats Egypt, 26-26. They succumbed in the quarterfinals to Germany when Renars Uscins connected on an even more improbable buzzer beater, an irony so brutal, I confess, it was beautiful.

I feel as I have been reflecting on the athletic exploits of American swimmer Katie Ledecky and gymnast Simone Biles forever. If both are permanently etched in the annals of the Olympics, each one is no way the same. In her last race, Ledecky was pushed, but also never really challenged, never subjecting herself to clichéd hosanas of an aging athlete’s grit and guile. No, in the end she still looked like someone who just loved swimming laps more than anybody else. Biles, however, bore all the scars of magnificence giving way to mental health struggles and back to magnificence, continuing to recalibrate the idea of excellence in a sport that demands it by pushing the boundaries with routines so difficult and mind-altering, that when it came to the judges, she could afford bobbles and wobbles and infractions. If she was great, nay, the greatest of all-time in winning the hallowed individual all-around, she was not perfect, echoing the same grace she allowed herself as a person. When she nailed her first tumbling passage in the climactic floor exercise, you could see the moment when stress gave way not just to relief but joy as she burst into a wide smile. I thought of Phillipe Petit in “Man on Wire” saying the moment he realized the wire strung between the twin towers he was walking on was secure: Now, he said, I’m going to perform.

Kristen Faulkner authored an equal story of dominance in the women’s cycling road race. Only gaining entry when her teammate bowed out, Faulkner narrowly missed a massive crash that wiped out several contenders, and then tracked the two leaders in tandem with a Belgian rider, the two functioning as temporary teammates. In the scenic nature of the course, they caught the leading duo as they pedaled through the Louvre courtyard, only underlining the virtual masterpiece that Faulkner was about to paint. Almost as soon as they merged into a quartet, Faulkner so emphatically broke away that the other three surrendered, watching her go, turning the finish into an improbable and awesome coronation in the shadow of the Tour Eiffel. It turned out that an Alaskan who rowed crew at Harvard, who had ditched a career in venture capital to pursue her dream of becoming a professional cyclist had now won gold? Was this real? It was and proved the most important lesson of all – no amount of VC money, kids, will make your real dreams come true.

Faulkner’s dream was only slightly less unlikely than the dream of America’s women’s rugby sevens team. I learned about and fell in love with rugby sevens during its 2016 debut in Rio and have since decided that if I ever move to Europe, it will have to be my sport because it’s the closest international one to college football in so much as it resembles flexbone military academy CFB teams going back and forth sans pesky TV timeouts. In other words, it’s awesome! Rugby sevens, though, as the US women’s team has outlined, is mostly limited to college club programs rather than NCAA-sanctioned ones, making it difficult to build up a national program a la rugby mad Australia who the stars and stripes just happened to square off against for the bronze. And America was in dire straits, losing 12-7 and a whopping 95 yards from paydirt, the clock with but a few seconds left when Alex “Spiff” Sedrick shook loose and ran, way out ahead of everybody. The run took so long, and the stakes were so high that you could sense the liminal space, at what was about to happen, but had not happened quite yet, all brought home when the camera switched to an angle from behind the goal toward which Sedrick was streaking and you could see her smiling. It was the best way to win, and it was the worst way to lose, and both those bore out in how each team in the play’s immediate aftermath spontaneously combusted into sobs, of ecstasy and of devastation. 

I couldn’t believe it, and I still kind of can’t believe it now, how in the space of Sedrick running, and running, and running, she seemed to embody the limitless expanse of an astonishing Olympics.