One of the most important things to remember about the Olympics is that they are most consumed by the people who least understand them. This is not a bad thing; it is, in fact, one of the unique charms of the Games, why they’re so fun even for people who otherwise don’t care that much for sports. The most popular sports at the Summer Olympics — gymnastics, swimming, volleyball, track and field — will be ignored by the general public for the next four years until we all hop onboard for Los Angeles 2028. To love the Olympics is to care about these events intensely while we’re watching them, then have them vanish from our brain entirely. It’s also a far saner way to be a sports fan than spending your entire life obsessing over your favorite baseball or basketball team. (Trust me on this.)
But this dynamic comes with its own problems. When you combine that just-popping-in intensity of the casual Olympics fan with the dogmatic bigotry of the terminally online, you get what we have seen with Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, which may be the single stupidest sports controversy I’ve seen in my several decades of covering stupid sports controversies (including Deflategate, the previous winner).
I’ll let my colleagues at Vulture sum up the whole saga for you if you’ve been fortunate enough to miss it, but I cannot think of a sports story in which people have been so willfully, stubbornly, even proudly uninterested in the actual facts of a situation. It would be one thing if people wanted to have yet another bad-faith conversation about trans athletes, but they’re not even doing that. People have just decided that Khelif — who, for the 4 millionth time, is not trans — is strong and looks to them a little bit “too manly” for their comfort. It got to the point that, after she earned a medal with a win over the weekend, she literally had to say the words “I am a woman” to the assorted press. The vitriol she has faced is the downside of the Olympics’ status as an event that everyone is talking about despite not knowing what they’re talking about. Ignorance can be fun, but it can also get really ugly.
Thankfully, toxic bullshit is far from the only storyline at these Olympics. As we head into the final week of events, here are another six notable takeaways from the Games so far.
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Despite a slow start, the Americans will end up winning more gold than anyone else again.
There has been considerable consternation about the United States’s standing on the medal boards so far — specifically that, until Sunday, they weren’t winning the most golds. Team USA is smoking everyone in total medals, but that’s to be expected: They’ve ended up first on this measure in every Summer Olympics since 1992. The U.S. has also captured the most golds in every Games since 2008, but this time around, it’s so far been a little hairy, thanks largely to an American downturn in swimming (Katie Ledecky aside). But they’re about to blitz everyone again, particularly in track and field.
Still, there has been a slight underperformance by Team USA in the golds so far. But c’mon: These are the Olympics, medals are medals, let’s not be so imperialist about this. To my eyes, other than Biles’s majesty, the U.S. highlight of these Olympics was the women’s rugby team winning the bronze — the team’s first medal in Olympic history — in the single most exciting clip of the whole Games:
Now that’s the Olympics right there: I don’t entirely understand what happened, but I know that it was awesome. Who cares that there wasn’t a gold medal at the end?
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Sha’Carri Richardson’s silver was a disappointment, but it obscured an even more exciting story.
Richardson, the 100-meter-dash star who was widely expected to breeze to gold after her unfortunate disqualification in Tokyo because of a positive marijuana test, ended up falling short over the weekend, a full .15 seconds behind winner Julien Alfred. (.15 seconds is actually a lot; it’s the biggest margin of victory in this event since 2008.) It’s a massive bummer for Richardson, one of the best sprinters of all time who now still doesn’t have a gold medal to her name (though she has another chance for one later this week in the relay). It also potentially sets up an even bigger story line for her in Los Angeles in four years; she’s only 24, after all.
But the coverage of Richardson’s loss overwhelmed what is otherwise one of the happiest stories of these Olympics: Alfred’s upset win. She is a former University of Texas star and has won two national championships, but was not considered a real challenger to Richardson despite finishing first in the semifinals. Richardson’s slow start opened the door for Alfred, who became the first ever medal winner from Saint Lucia, a Caribbean nation with a smaller population than Chattanooga. If you are looking to put yourself in a good mood, check out this clip of a watch party in the island nation as Alfred won the gold In fact, forget what I just said about that rugby clip above. This is what the Olympics is about:
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The internet makes underdog athletes even more fun than they used to be.
One of the most famous Olympic athletes of all time is a guy who didn’t medal at all, or even compete all that well: Eddie (the Eagle) Edwards — an English ski jumper who finished last in the event in 1988 but won the hearts of everyone watching. (He even got a not-bad movie made of his life.) Athletes who don’t act how we expect athletes to act are one of the true joys of the Olympics, and they’ve stuck out at these Games as well. Two especially: bespectacled American gymnast Stephen Nedoroscik and Turkish shooter Yusuf Dikec, who won a silver medal despite wearing almost no protective equipment in a sport that involves, well, shooting. Each has become a bigger Olympics star — on the internet at least — than anyone other than Biles. That is particularly true for Dikec, a 51-year-old veteran of the sport (this is actually his fifth Olympics) who has now been Photoshopped into more scenes than Sad Keanu.
The pop-up stars of the Olympics turn out to mesh perfectly with meme culture, an unknown person suddenly becoming an international celebrity despite spending decades honing their craft. Each of these men, I suspect, will become emblems of these Olympics in a way hardly anyone else could. I don’t know anyone who actually watched Dikec perform live, or who ever will. This seems likely to make him more immortal, not less.
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Get ready for breaking.
The new Olympic breakdancing event launches on Friday, August 9, and seems destined to launch a million memes of its own. It also feels like the perfect palate cleanser for the final weekend of the Games and the perfect sport to take us all home. Plus, it may be happening too late for all those people angry about Imane Khelif and the supposed Last Supper Opening Ceremonies bit (which was probably not about The Last Supper) to get mad about it.
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The USA basketball teams are going to romp.
The level of international basketball competition has risen dramatically over the years — you can make an argument that of the five current best men’s basketball players in Paris, maybe one of them plays for Team USA. And yet both the U.S. men’s and women’s teams are dominating all competition this year and seem very much well on their way to winning the gold. This shouldn’t be a surprise: The women’s team hasn’t lost since 1992 (that’s 58 wins in a row as of Monday). The men’s team has LeBron James, Stephen Curry, and Kevin Durant, with younger stars ready to take over: it has felt like the veterans are handing the baton to Anthony Edwards, who is giving off stronger Jordan vibes than even he might have ever thought possible. There’s always a chance of a wild upset — well, for the men anyway; nobody’s beating the women — but it sure looks like these basketball tournaments are turning out to be laughers.
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It’s still all about Simone Biles.
She won three gold medals and finished with four overall (she fell during her balance-beam routine on Monday, and couldn’t edge out an extremely deserving Rebecca Andrade in in the floor exercise, after which Biles and Justine Chiles showed Andrade their proper respects).
This was probably the last chance you had to see the greatest gymnast of all time in the Olympics. I hope you enjoyed it. Because it is just insane that a human being can do this.
