Once again, friends, it is time for the Summer Olympic Games (officially the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad and officially branded as Paris 2024). It is held this year in Paris, marking the 100th anniversary since the last time it did so, in 1924.
In a break with tradition, the Olympics poohbahs chose not to do the typical thing of having each delegation of athletes parade into that year's Olympic stadium. For the opening ceremonies, which I am watching as I write, they made use of the whole city: the athletes are sailing into the city on boats on the Seine. Along the way are exhibits, dancers, musicians, performers (like Lady Gaga and French stars like Aya Nakamura).
I realize that I've commented on three previous Olympics summer games. Unfortunately, I cannot locate what I said on those past occasions, thanks to the miserable alleged "upgrade" from Ning 2.0 to Ning 3.0 that broke all the links to our old stuff. I know we were advised to save our content before the switch happened, but I was tied up on an urgent case of my own then and was unable to devote the time to do so.
Anyhoo, I'm glad to be back for the Olympics and say something here for the fourth time. The Olympics are must-see TV in my house.
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I'm back from my own urgent space mission, CK, and if you'll give me a few more nouns, I can probably find your earlier posts and provide links.
Probably.
Sure!
"Simone Biles"
"Gabrielle Douglas"
"Russian girl"
"... looking like somebody would shoot her grandmother if she failed." (In context, this makes sense.)
"... the queen of the Olympics"
"Tokyo"
"Steph Curry"
"Venus and Serena Williams"
That should get you started. Each time I did this, I quoted from my own past remarks so they are all nested together. That is, if you find the most recent group, you'll find the old ones below it in the same comment.
Also, "Anybody who says Simone Biles is a quitter can go piss up a rope."
As noted above, the Olympics are must-see TV in my house, and especially the Opening Cermonies, which were nothing short of dazzling this year.
My wife is particularly fond of the Opening Ceremonies because when our young man was in elementary school, we would watch the Parade of Nations and he would notice the flags from the different nations and relate them to his buddies in his class room: Diego from El Salvador, Viet-Ahn from Vietnam, Annick from Armenia, etc., and so forth.
Today? I asked him if he was going to watch the Opening Ceremonies and he said he wasn't because "It's always trash."
Then again, I did read in today's paper that 56 percent of people under 30 have no interest in the Games. C'est la vie.
Fortunately, this Olympics doesn't seem to be sold as "The Simone Biles Show, plus a few other people."
Simone Biles, it must be said, is a real-life superhero, who does things that other people can not find humanly possible. To wit: China's men's gymnastics team has 37 Olympics medals among the five of them; Simone Biles has 37 medals by herself.
She's making a big comeback, after pulling out of some gymnastics events at the Tokyo Games because she lost that mind-body connection that allows the mind to know what it intends to do and the body to execute it without thinking. God bless her that she was brave enough to do so, because she changed the whole conversation about what training should look like.
We went for years with the model of coaches from the U.S.S.R. who recruited teens and tweens and would bully them unmercifully, even in public, and the reaction was Oh, look at the artistry! Like last night, we saw Nadia Comaneci, the darling of the 1976 Games in Montreal who was the first to score a perfect 10 in her events and won three gold medals. Or 20 years later, when Kerri Strug won gold for the U.S. at the 1996 Games in Atlanta on a sprained ankle. Today, we would recognize pushing her out there to perform with that injury as child abuse. And that doesn't even get into the numerous acts of sexual abuse the trainers perpetrated that occurred behind the scenes that came to be revealed the past few years. Simone Biles made us understand that we don't need ANY of that to produce winners. And she has established a gym to train the next generation of competitors in a better way.
Now, how many Olympics Games does Simone Biles have left in her? I don't know. She's 27, which is, like, geriatric, in her sport, but I haven't heard her say this one will be her last hurrah.
Unfortunately, we didn't get one more go-round from Gabrielle Douglas, the previous U.S. gymnastics darling, who won the all-around gold at the 2012 Games in London. Douglas suffered an ankle injury in training for the U.S. Championships and pulled out of the Paris Olympics. She's 28, so it would have been wonderful to see her win something one more time, but it wasn't meant to be. Still, I hope she has happy memories of her triumph in London. Nobody took her seriously, not even her own team -- there was some other girl, a white girl, who was the anointed one, who was expected to win everything except she didn't even make the cut -- and Gabrielle Douglas stepped in and became the queen of the Olympics, God bless her.