Rings Roundup, Day 1: AHHHHH THE OLYMPICS STARTED
Gold Zone is the star of the Olympics, France has a rugby superhero, and THE SWIM WAR WITH AUSTRALIA IS ON
The smell of the grass on MLB opening day—fine. The sound of popping pads and the first “your running back scored a touchdown” notification on a fantasy app in Week of football season—incredible. But nothing compares to the first time you get over-invested in a sport you don’t typically watch on Day 1 of the Olympics.
For me, it was handball. (But you probably already knew it would be handball if you’ve been reading this.) In one of the first games of the tournament, Japan took a 6-goal second-half lead on Croatia as massive underdogs, but Croatia’s Ivan Martinovic scored the winning goal with three seconds left on a last-gasp attempt with his body carrying him away from the goal.
Maybe you had a different Day 1 hook. Team USA won their first gold medal of the Olympics in the men’s 4x100 freestyle relay. There was a double-overtime gold medal match in fencing, with Hong Kong’s Vivian Kong erasing a huge deficit to just the third Olympic gold in her country’s history. (And the first by someone with the same last name as the country—still no medals for any Americans named STATES.) There were close matches in badminton and volleyball and rugby and look: The Olympics rule.
I’m going to write this recap every day and schedule the newsletter to show up in your email inbox at 7:30 a.m. every day. It came out later today because every Olympics requires an adjustment period—by the middle of the first week your sleep schedule will adjust, but it’s not gonna be there on Day 1.
I probably pay closer attention to the Olympics than anybody not employed by NBC, and I’m hoping to make this the best damn Olympic wrap-up anybody is making. So go ahead and subscribe.
I’m gonna rank the previous day’s events by how many Olympic rings they deserve. Some days there may be five rings, most days there will be more.
Six Rings: Gold Zone
We’ll get to the actual sports in a second. The most exciting part of Day 1 of the Olympics was Scott Hanson talking about the great Handball GOAT Debate between Denmark’s Mikkel Hansen and France’s Nikola Karabatic. (Do you think he read our preview?)
I put on the Gold Zone channel on Peacock yesterday at 7 a.m. to see whether it would follow through on its promise to deliver an NFL RedZone-styled show whipping around to various Olympic events. I left it on until 5 p.m., and will probably do so every day for the next two weeks. The Olympics are too big to follow on your own. There are too many sports and too many things happening. You need a guide, and now you have one.
Gold Zone lives up to the billing. It feels like it works for the two major categories of Olympic watchers: Sickos like me who are so excited by everything that they don’t want to miss a single gold, and casual drop-ins who just want to watch a variety of unique sports. Scott Hanson really will make sure you don’t miss out on the exciting double-overtime end to a gold medal fencing match while all the biggest events of the Olympics are happening. (It does occasionally delay events by a few minutes, so don’t look at Twitter too closely if there’s something you really care about.) It’s not perfect—Gold Zone tends to leave events too quickly, and I still wonder why I have to watch so many commercials on a streaming platform I pay for. But it gets the job done.
Gold Zone is not the first attempt at this—NBC has used that name on various projects as far back as 2014—but it’s definitely the most effective attempt. They brought in Hanson and Andrew Siciliano from the two RedZone broadcasts, and while the two football guys clearly didn’t understand every aspect of every sport, they did a great job quickly setting the stakes for each event and making the whole day feel important.
Gold Zone marks a massive philosophical shift from NBC, whose relationship with the Olympics is easily the strangest in sports media. The network has been the sole exclusive broadcaster of the Olympics for decades, with a massive contract making up so much of the IOC’s total revenue that the organization would surely collapse if NBC vanished. And it enforces that exclusivity so aggressively that ESPN can’t even use Olympics highlights on SportsCenter. (And I can’t embed videos of Olympic events in this newsletter!) The way NBC covers the games makes or breaks our ability to experience it—and often, it has left a lot to be desired. NBC’s primary goal has generally been to convince people to tune into their nightly primetime broadcasts featuring tape-delayed events and an endless flow of human interest stories. They have often ignored the things sports fans want the most, including the ability to watch events live.
Gold Zone shows that NBC is interested in treating the Olympics less like a special edition of The Today Show with occasional cameos from athletes and more like the largest, most complex, and most fascinating sporting event on the planet. Which is what they are!
Five Rings: Aussie Beef (Lamb?)
The first big showdown of the Olympics was the women’s 400 meter freestyle final between America’s Katie Ledecky and Australia’s Ariarne Titmus. Ledecky won the 2016 gold medal, Titmus won the 2020 gold, and Ledecky seemed primed to compete after posting the fastest time in prelims.
But Titmus pulled away while Ledecky finished in third—her 11th Olympic medal, but first-ever bronze.
The Olympics are set for a weeklong water war between the swimming forces of the United States and Australia. It’s the best type of international sports rivalry: one with no absolutely no geopolitical implications. (Seriously, what’s our biggest diplomatic disagreement with Australia? Is it the fact that they can’t call Burger King “Burger King?” Do we consider Vegemite to be chemical warfare?)
The beef has been sizzling, with 4-time gold medalist Cate Campbell going off about how annoying she finds American swimmers. It’s basically Kendrick-Drake, by swimming standards. (“Certified butterfly? Certified paddle-phile!!!!)
Team USA has won the most golds and most total medals at the last eight Olympics, dating all the way back to 1988, when East Germany topped the table. (Reunification actually made the Germans much worse at swimming. I wonder why!) But Australia is always close, since virtually all Australians grow up swimming—and they’re gaining on us. In Tokyo, USA won just two more golds than Australia, and Australia won nearly twice as many golds at the World Aquatics Championships last year. It’s an open question who will swim away from Paris as the best in the pool: SwimSwam projected 11 golds to Australia and 10 to America, although the USA is still expected to win more overall medals.
I’m so here for this naval battle. Not to sound spoiled, but the Olympics become spiceless when Americans simply win everything. Somebody needs to push back. Not only does the USA-Australia swim feud highlight big-ticket events like Ledecky-Titmus, it raises the stakes on basically every event in the pool. When Germany’s Lukas Maertens won gold over Australia’s Sam Short and Elijah Winnington on Saturday, that wasn’t just Germany’s win—it made America’s chances of winning the most swimming golds more likely, and pushed us closer to defeating the marsupial horde from down under.
(More like Elijah LOSEington!) (sorry, that was uncalled for.)
Four Rings: Antoine DuPont
I spent my whole rugby preview writing about the differences between standard rugby and rugby sevens, and how it allowed Fiji to win back to back Olympic golds. TERRIBLE preview. WAY off. Sorry.
I was rooting for the Flying Fijians, who tricked and trucked their way to the gold medal game with beautiful passing and physical dominance. Then they went up against France, a team without a long history of rugby sevens success. They lost in the quarterfinals of the 2016 Olympic tournament and failed to qualify for Tokyo.
But this time they were playing at home—and they had Antoine Dupont. Dupont has been the star of France’s 15-a-side rugby team for years, winning World Player of the Year in 2021. He converted to sevens specifically for the Olympics, joining France for the 2023-24 Sevens Series… and France won the Sevens Series for the first time ever.
In the Olympics, he generally came on in the second halves of games to keep him fresh in a game heavily based on non-stop sprinting. The gold medal match was tied at the half when Dupont came in, and on his very first touch he blew through the Fijian defense and dropped the ball off to a teammate for the go-ahead score. He was responsible for single score in the second half, scoring two and assisting on another as France pulled away 28-7, securing their first gold of the Olympics in front of a packed Stade de France.
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It’s true that sevens is different than full rugby—but France’s triumphant gold proved it doesn’t matter how many players are on the field when one of them is the best player on the planet.
Three Rings: COOK ‘N’ BACON
China wins just about every diving event, every time. They won seven of eight golds at the last Olympics, and are gunning for a sweep in Paris. Everybody is playing for second.
But guess what, Everybody Besides China. Yesterday, Team USA got second, which is gold in the non-China category. WE’RE NUMBER TWO! WE’RE NUMBER TWO!
The silver went to Sarah Bacon and Kassidy Cook. They lost by 23 points, a massive margin, but also the closest anybody has gotten to beating China in this event since 2008. It was Team USA’s first medal of the Olympics, because COOK ‘N’ BACON is a perfect way to wake up. Their friends made adorable COOK N BACON shirts, and some dressed up as bacon.)
They were in a close contest for silver with an Australian team, but on the final dive, Australia’s Anabelle Smith slipped on the board and flew off to the right, completely out of sync with her partner. “I screamed underwater,” said Smith, realizing she’d ruined her chances of medaling (and her partner’s chances of medaling) with a foolish mistake in the most pivotal moment. You’re allowed to feel bad—we’re only at Water War with Australia in the pool, not slightly above it.
Two Rings: Surfing Ass
So far, most of the coverage of the Olympic surfing event in Tahiti has focused on the vibes. Like how Germany’s Tim Elter has turned the cruise ship the Olympic surfers are using as a “floating Olympic village” into a non-stop dance party.
But they didn’t put the surfing in Tahiti just because of the vibes. They put it there because Teahupo’o has one of the most powerful waves on the planet. And sometimes it knocks you off your board and rips your pants off, broadcasting your bare butt to the entire planet.
That ass belongs to Elter, who is well down the world rankings and was a surprise qualifier for the Olympics. He was one of many surfers who got knocked silly by the Tahitian wave, but the only one who got pantsed by nature. (Honestly, I always thought the surfing outfit was one piece.) He had the lowest score of any of the 24 competitors in Tahiti and will enter the elimination bracket.
One Ring: Rainy Cycling
It was a rainy day for the cycling time trial, which is a sentence that can only end in disaster. Time trials are the shortest road cycling event, and therefore the one where riders are trying to bike at the highest speeds, and the Paris course was completely flat and filled with tight corners. The bikers never stood a chance.
Just about every other rider seemed take a spill, finishing the race with torn uniforms and visible cuts. I saw one rider fall, damaging his bike, then the assistant providing him with a second bike fell bringing over the replacement.
Both gold medal favorites, Great Britain’s Josh Tarling and Team USA’s Chloe Dygert, hit the asphalt. Dygert missed the silver medal by less than a second, ending up with bronze.
Zero Rings: Gianmarco Tamberi
The most Italian Olympian is high jumper Gianmarco Tamberi, a man with longer legs and more emotions than anybody should have. He’s responsible for the iconic Olympic moment where he and Qatari jumper Mutaz Essa Barshim accepted a tie for an Olympic gold rather than proceeding to a jump-off that would relegate one to silver, with Tamberi exploding into the most athletic hug you’ll ever see.
Tamberi was selected to be the flagbearer for Italy, and in the rainy, chaotic opening ceremony, his wedding ring fell off his finger and fell into the Seine. “Losing a wedding ring” is traditionally considered a sign that a guy is careless or unromantic. But Tamberi wrote THIS on Instagram.
But if it really had to happen, if I really had to lose this faith, I couldn't imagine a better place. It will remain forever in the riverbed of the city of love, flown away while I was trying to raise the Italian tricolor as high as possible during the opening ceremony of the most important sporting event in the world. If I had to invent an excuse I would never have been so imaginative.
I think there could be a huge poetic side behind yesterday's misdeed and if you want we will also throw yours into that river so that they will be together forever and we will have one more excuse to, as you always asked me, renew our vows and get married again.
Between this and the split gold medal, this dude makes me so emotional about the concept of getting identical pieces of jewelry with someone.
Ugh, the commercials on Peacock. They go to commercial in the middle of the action, even in the last minute of a basketball game.
Thanks for this ..it's dope! But yeah your sleep schedule will be trash! 🤣🤣