Rings Roundup, Day 11: The GOAT of GOATS
Mijaín López won his fifth straight Olympic gold in Greco-Roman wrestling, the first-ever to do so—Summer or Winter, male or female.
The star of Tuesday at the Olympics was Team USA’s Gabby Thomas in the women’s 200 meter, the first American champion since 2012 in an event Team USA traditionally dominates. She pulled away on the curve and won by a quarter-second:
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Honestly, Gabby has left me nothing to work with. She’s the best in the world in one of the Olympics’ premier events and she studied neurobiology at Harvard before getting a Master’s in epidemiology from Texas. Nothing to make fun of, nothing to latch onto. Sickening!
5 Rings: El Chivo (indirect translation)
Everybody who wins a gold medal at the Olympics is, definitionally, the best in the world. But watching the Olympics long enough, you learn there are levels to greatness. There are people who simply happen to be the best on a particular day; people who are the best for years and years and get crowned at the Olympics, and people who are the best of their generation and win multiple Olympic titles.
And then there is Cuban Greco-Roman wrestler Mijaín López, the GOAT of GOATs. López ended his Olympic career with complete domination on Tuesday, winning fifth consecutive gold medal in the superheavyweight weight class. He won in Beijing, London, Rio, Tokyo, and now Paris. The combined score of his 16 Olympic victories: 97-5.
(López did finish fifth at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, but I think he’s done enough that we can overlook that.)
López is the first-ever person with five straight gold medals in the same individual event in the modern Olympics. That includes the summer games and the winter games, male athletes and female athletes. When I tweeted this but forgot the word “modern,” somebody replied that no, actually, Milo of Croton won five straight wrestling golds from 532 BC to 516 BC. But I feel like if something hasn’t been done in TWO THOUSAND, FIVE HUNDRED AND FORTY YEARS, it’s not much of a wellactually. (Sorry for disrespecting Milo of Croton.)
There was an open question about whether the 42-year old López could win a fifth title. He hadn’t competed in any event since his fourth gold medal in 2021, trying to preserve every ounce of energy left in his body as he heads into his 40s, so nobody could be certain that he was still the best in the world. But in the end, his final gold medal match was a testament to his greatness. His opponent, Yasmani Acosta, was born in Cuba and trained against López for years and had won gold medals at the Pan-American championships. But eventually, he got tired of waiting behind López, who got Cuba’s spot in the Olympics every time, defecting to Chile.
Acosta spent years learning López’s tendencies in practice, but it didn’t matter: He couldn’t move the massive man. He didn’t register a single point on the Cuban GOAT, the fourth time in five gold medal matches that Mijaín prevented his opponent from scoring. (In 2008, he won the gold medal match 6-1.)
For my money, Mijaín’s accomplishment is even more impressive than that of Michael Phelps, who racked up 23 gold medals over the course of four Olympics because there are so many damn swimming medals. (And I’m not just saying that because my dad is from Cuba!) (Surprising, I know.) Other people have won more than four golds in team events—Diana Taurasi is trying to win her sixth—and Dutch speedskater Ireen Wust won individual golds at five Olympics, but couldn’t sweep the same category five times in a row. Team USA’s Katie Ledecky will have a chance to catch López at LA 2028, if she remains active, and Vince Hancock will have a chance to win his fifth medal in skeet shooting, but it’s not five consecutive because he lost in 2016.
López won’t push it to six in a row. After the match, he left his shoes in the middle of the ring to signify his retirement. He leaves the Olympics unbeaten, unmoved, unrivaled. They’ll be talking about him, too, in 2,500 years.
4 Rings: Cole World
There aren’t a lot of upsets at the Olympics. There are superhumans out there who have won five Olympic gold medals in a row. You can shock a basketball team by hitting a bunch of threes, or shock a football team with a Hail Mary—but what is the underdog strategy in events with goals like “who is the strongest person?” or “who can jump the highest?” But Tuesday, the world’s best milers got so caught up with defeating each other that they entirely forgot anybody else had a chance.
The 1500 meter was supposed to come down to Norway’s Jakob Ingebrigtsen, the defending Olympic champion, and Great Britain’s Josh Kerr, the world champion. Ingebrigtsen and Kerr have been locked in a randomly fierce feud, calling each other out in the press while acknowledging they’ve never spoken to each other, which has to be kinda hard when traveling around the world competing in the same event over and ove. The anticipation for the race was massive.
Ingebrigtsen led for most of the race, but on the backstretch, Kerr made a charge to pass Ingebrigtsen. In response, Ingebrigtsen moved outside to block Kerr. Ingebrigtsen, who has been criticized by Kerr for depending on others to pace races for him, was out of gas after leading the entire race.
And that’s when Team USA’s Cole Hocker burst through the inside hole vacated by Ingebrigtsen in an attempt to stop Kerr. Kerr must have timed his run past Ingebrigtsen too soon, and couldn’t keep up with the American. In the middle distance-running world’s version of the Kendrick-Drake feud, the winner was J. Cole Hocker.
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(Note: The pun-slash-analogy in the previous paragraph was not an endorsement of J. Cole.
Hocker had never won a major event before. He finished sixth at the Tokyo Olympics and seventh in last year’s world championships. He did win a silver at this year’s indoor world championships, but neither Ingebrigtsen or Kerr was in the field—he lost to a Kiwi named Geordie Beamish. But his win Tuesday wasn’t just due to poor strategy by the two dominant athletes in the sport—Hocker ran a personal best and set an Olympic record.
3 Rings: The next GOAT?
As one wrestling GOAT retired, we may have gotten a glimpse at the next one. Team USA’s Amit Elor coasted to a gold medal in the women’s 68kg category, outscoring her opposition 31-2 in four dominant wins.
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Elor is just 20 years old, and hasn’t lost since she was a 15-year old competing in a u17 event. She’s on a 5-year, 41-match win streak, and nobody is particularly close to challenging her—her 3-0 win in the gold medal match over Kyrgyzstan’s Meerim Zhumanazarova was her closest bout in two years.
The seeds are there for an absolutely incredible Olympic career. LA 2028 seems like a lock for the California native—she’ll be in position to tie Mijaín at the unannounced 2040 games when she’s 36.
2 Rings: America hammers it home
Ever since Mondo Duplantis set the world record in pole vault, I’ve been morose about how our great nation somehow let Cajun Swede Mondo Duplantis compete internationally for his mother’s homeland. How do you lose a 5-star recruit from Louisiana to SWEDEN? Couldn’t we have given him a Dodge Charger? But that pain was dulled a little bit on Tuesday afternoon, when Team USA won a medal because we flipped a prospect.
Hammer thrower Annette Echikunwoke was born in the Columbus suburbs and went to the University of Cincinnati but chose to compete internationally for her family’s homeland, Nigeria. It wasn’t an emotional decision so much as a competitive one: She was worried she couldn’t beat Team USA’s top throwers and would miss out on the Olympics, but was instantly the best thrower in Nigerian history. She qualified for the 2020 Olympics, but after arriving in Tokyo, Echikunwoke and nine other Nigerian athletes learned that due to a bureaucratic error by their federation, they had been disqualified from their events. They hadn’t been administered enough doping tests before the games and would have to go home without competing.
So Echikunwoke didn’t take chances this time. She changed her nationality to the United States, won the Team USA trials, went to Paris, and won the silver medal—the first American woman to medal in the hammer throw since it was introduced to the Olympics. So she wasn’t just good enough to make Team USA: She’s the best American ever.
1 Ring: USWNT does just enough
The USWNT is well on their way to setting an Olympic record for Most Nail-Biting. They have scored two goals in 240 minutes of knockout round play at the Olympics… and have advanced to the championship game on two impossibly tense wins.
On Saturday, they beat Japan 1-0 in the quarterfinals on a 105th-minute goal by Trinity Rodman. On Tuesday, they beat Germany 1-0 on a 95th-minute goal by Sophia Smith:
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The stars obviously are not the goalscorers, but Team USA’s tremendous defense, anchored by Naomi Girma and with Alyssa Naeher in net. Naeher made a miracle leaping kick save in the 119th minute to prevent a penalty shootout—I think she’s been studying up on the handball goalies in the Olympics. Technically, the German attackers were offsides, so it didn’t matter, but it kinda looked like they should have been ruled onside, so I think Naeher deserves the credit.
It hasn’t been pretty, but they’re in the Olympic gold medal match for the first time since 2012—a somewhat stunning drought for the 4-time Women’s World Cup winners. They’ll face Brazil, a squad powered by the collective desire to send the legendary Marta into international retirement with the country’s first gold medal ever. It should be a thrilling 1-0 victory.
Reading you is (almost) like being there.
The lady at the USWNT game with the massive Let's Go is my new hero