Rings Roundup, Day 13: An Olympic hoops classic

THERE'S TOO MUCH OLYMPIC THINGS AT THIS POINT TO WRITE ABOUT IN ONE POST

We’ve gotten to the point in the Olympics where there’s just too much stuff to write about. Like, I’m not even going to get to Morocco winning the men’s soccer semifinal 6-0, Grant Holloway winning the 100m hurdles, or Team USA winning THE MOST ELECTRIC VOLLEYBALL MATCH POSSIBLE in the semis over Brazil:

@nbcolympicsThe United States is headed BACK to the gold medal game to defend their title! 🇺🇸 #ParisOlympics #usavolleyball #volleyball #teamusa #olympics

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Let’s get going:

100 Rings: LEBRON. STEPH. KD. BALD EAGLES. PATRIOTISM. AMERICA.

I was a little worried about the state of men’s basketball at the Olympics after the 2020 Olympics. No offense to Keldon Johnson and Javale McGee, but Team USA sent Keldon Johnson and Javale McGee, and won the gold medal easily. It’s thrilling to watch American superstars combine their efforts to defeat the world, and it’s fascinating to watch opposing teams become good enough to beat NBA talent, and watching Team USA skate to gold with a b-team felt like we’d never get either again.

But Thursday, the American men’s hoops team needed every ounce of excellence from some of our greatest hoopers ever in one of the best Olympic basketball games of all time. Led by two-time NBA MVP Nikola Jokic, Serbia led for most of the semifinal matchup with Team USA, including an 11-point lead in the fourth quarter. But Steph Curry, LeBron James, and Kevin Durant, Team USA rallied back and won, 95-91. LeBron tied the game, Steph hit a go-ahead three, and KD hit the shot which sealed it Team USA for Team USA. They combined for the final 13 points.

@nbcolympicsThere’s only one word to describe Team USA’s men’s basketball semifinal win over Serbia: ELECTRIC. NBC Olympics | @Kia America

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Steph had 36. LeBron had a triple double. There have been a lot of spectacular American moments in these Olympics… but man, I felt something watching these all-time superstars who have been rivals for so long uniting (like the states!) and giving everything they had to squeeze out this win. Do handball fans feel this way watching all the world’s best handball players finally united on the same team?

@nbcolympicsCLUTCH DOWN THE STRETCH. Relive Team USA’s incredible comeback against Serbia to advance to the gold medal game. #ParisOlympics #usa #basketball #comeback

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This is what Olympic basketball should be. The rest of the world is good enough to push Team USA—and when Team USA is pushed, there isn’t really anything in sports like it.

99 Rings: Sydney chases herself

The track events in Paris have been full of upsets, comebacks, and photo finishes—and then there was Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, pulling away from the world in the 400-meter hurdles.

There was minor worry about whether she’d face a challenge from Dutch runner Femke Bol, who won last year’s World Championships and chased down Team USA in the 4x400 mixed relay. But McLaughlin had already caught up to Bol by the end of the first turn. She ended up running a 50.37—a full three-tenths of a second faster than the world record she set in 2022. With that time, she would’ve nearly qualified for this year’s 400m finals without hurdles—or won every Olympic women’s 400m until 1976.

@nbcolympicsSydney McLaughlin-Levrone breaks the world record and wins back-to-back golds in the women’s 400m hurdles for team USA! 🥇#ParisOlympics #USATF #TeamUSA

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Sometimes, we talk about the things McLaughlin doesn’t do. She’s also America’s best 400m runner, and will run the anchor leg in the 4x4 relay—why doesn’t she take a run at that world record? I got a little mad at her for not running in the mixed 4x4 Team USA lost to Bol. But then you watch her doing the thing she’s best at—the thing she’s the best of all time at—and it’s hard to be mad at her for chasing perfection in a sport where there’s nobody else for her to chase.

6 Rings: The Triple Jump Double

Team USA’s Tara Davis-Woodhall recaptured American dominance in the women’s long jump, leading the contest wire-to-wire over reigning Olympic champion Malaika Mihambo from Germany. Davis-Woodhall is just the best—she was undoubtedly the star of my dumb little videos about asking Olympic athletes about their events, and when I went to watch track at the New York Grand Prix a couple of months ago, she finished her event and spent the rest of the meet cheering for other events and bouncing from fan to fan with a massive smile while other athletes couldn’t be bothered. So I’m glad she got the gold.

@nbcolympicsPov: you run into Tara Davis-Woodhall after she just won the women’s long jump at the #ParisOlympics! 🤗

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But I’d also like to take a second to celebrate the bronze-medal winner, Team USA’s Jasmine Moore. Moore also got the bronze in the triple jump, making her just the second athlete—and the first woman—to medal in both at the same Olympics. (Technically, Tatyana Lebedeva did it in 2004, but the medals were stripped due to doping.)

The two events lend themselves to slightly different athletes—while the long jumper hits maximum speed and takes off, a triple jumper hits maximum speed, takes off, lands, powers up another jump, then lands and powers up another jump. It requires a bit more strength to handle the takeoffs and landings, and of course, an entirely different technique. Moore was the first American woman to even attempt both at the same Olympics, and she’s heading home as a double medalist.

5 Rings: FIELD HOCKEY BEEF

We love discovering new sports, and we love discovering new athletes… but what we really love is discovering people who hate the hell out of each other.

The men’s field hockey gold medal match went down to a penalty shootout. (By the way, men play field hockey in every other country on earth.) which functions roughly the same way as an ice hockey shootout—the shooters get to dribble the ball up to the net and try to deke the goalie. Both goalies stood tall, saving the first five shots of the shootout. But eventually, the Netherlands broke through. When Dutch forward Duco Telgenkamp scored the winning goal, he got in the face of German goalie Jean Dannenberg.

Yeah! Get his ass! The Germans took offense to this and the two teams got in each other’s faces afterwards… so it’s just like ice hockey!

4 Rings: The most important Olympic event for 2 billion-ish people

South Asia is woefully underrepresented by Olympic success. India is the most populous nation on earth, and has won fewer Olympic gold and total medals all-time than Team USA has won in the Paris games. Pakistan is fifth in the world in population, and has won fewer Olympic gold and total medals all-time than New Zealand has won at the Paris games. And despite their near-total lack of Olympic success, the two nations have each produced a rare medal contender superstar in the exact same iconic Olympic event—and they went head-to-head Sunday in the biggest Olympic event in the history of the subcontinent.

India’s Nareej Chopra won the javelin competition at the Tokyo Olympics, only the second individual gold medal in the nation’s history and the first medal of any color in track and field. Chopra followed that up with a gold at the 2023 world champs, and right behind him on the podium by a Pakistani, Arshad Nadeem. On Thursdaay, Nadeem roared past Chopra with a stunning 92.97-meter throw, smashing the Olympic record and beating the silver medalist Chopra by over three meters.. As a result, Pakistan won its first-ever gold medal in an individual Olympic event (they’d won three field hockey gold medals, none since 1984) and India will likely go home from Paris without any gold medals.

Although the relationship between India and Pakistan can range from “big cricket rivals” to “we should go to nuclear war,” Chopra and Nadeem are clearly friendly and have reignited the Olympic flame in a part of the world which doesn’t care much about the games. With Grenada’s Anderson Peters rounding out the javelin podium, I’ve gotta wonder: Is there some sort of connection between the run-up and arm strength required to bowl a cricket ball and the run-up and arm strength required to hurl the javelin?

3 Rings: A world record and a bronze

Are you ready for another edition of “Rodger complains about the format of an Olympic sport the moment it negatively affects an American athlete?” You’d better be!

In my Olympic climbing preview, I wrote about American Sam Watson, the world record holder—and the fact that he set the world record (twice, in fact) in an event which he failed to win because of the bracket competition format, in which speed climbers go head-to-head on side-by-side walls with the winner advancing to the next round. I speculated that maybe such a thing could happen again.

Well, butts. Watson broke his own world record from a few months ago with a 4.75-second climb in the round of 16, but struggled with a hold in the semifinals and lost to China’s Wu Peng. In the bronze medal match, Watson then re-broke his own world record from earlier in the competition with a 4.74-second climb, securing the bronze. Indonesia’s Veddriq Leonardo won the gold medal, the first non-badminton gold in Indonesian history—to be fair, he hit a 4.75, so he’s not exactly lagging minutes behind Watson.

If the 100-meter dash or the discus or the 200-meter backstroke used a bracket-style format, the eventual winner would probably skate through the bracket easily, because their speed or strength would win against most inferior opponents. But the speed climbing course is specifically filled with obstacles that are difficult to latch onto, leading to slips and falls. As a result, the bracket format creates flukey losses by the best climber. It feels like the climbing federation has prioritized a TV-friendly format where competitors battle side-by-side over one which could actually reward putting up the best times in a competition.

0 Rings: A Dynasty Goes Down

The men’s basketball team may be heading to the gold medal match, but another equally dominant American squad won’t be joining them. The women’s water polo team lost a shootout to Australia, 6-5, ending a streak of back-to-back-to-back gold medals.

I thought they’d perform better with soaring goalkeeper Ashleigh Johnson, widely considered the best goalkeeper on the planet or even the best overall player in the sport. But Australia scored six times on six attempts.

Quite frankly, there were signs the team was slipping a bit. They lost a group stage match against Spain, and after winning back-to-back-to-back-to-back world championships from 2015 to 2022, they lost in the quarterfinals at the 2023 world championships. Just the fact they were in a shootout was a bad sign—They hadn’t been in one during the entirety of their gold medal run. They’d won their last two gold medal games by nine and seven goals—nobody ever really got close to them. But they can still win bronze and they’re the defending World Cup and World Championships winners, so it’s not like they’re in the dumps.

-1 Rings: A Wrestling Buzzer-Beater

The good news is I have a Wrestling Buzzer-Beater to show you. The bad news is that it’s Team USA’s Aaron Brooks on the losing end, as he led Bulgaria’s Magomed Ramazanov with under five seconds to go, but couldn’t successfully stall until time ran out, as Ramazanov snagged Brooks’ leg and flipped him onto the mat for a go-ahead two-point score.

Brooks is the wrestler who upset defending gold medalist David Taylor at trials, a surprising result that left Team USA without any defending gold medalists in Paris. Part of me wonders whether Taylor might have gotten the gold here; part of me thinks Ramazanov was determined enough to get anybody on the planet off the mat in this situation.

-10 Rings: COVID dooms the double

After winning the 100-meter dash, Noah Lyles was the heavy favorite to win the 200m, his best event in which he’d won back-to-back-to-back world championships. But Lyles took the bronze, never really challenging Botswana’s Letsile Tebogo. (The first gold ever for Botswana!)

After the race, Lyles crumbled to the ground, asking for water and medical attention. He eventually was carted off the track in a wheelchair. Shortly after the race, it was reported that Lyles had tested positive for COVID two days earlier, which explained his poor performance and why he’d been shown walking around the stadium in a mask ahead of the 200 heats and semis. The Olympics had strict rules surrounding COVID testing, vaccination, and quarantines in Tokyo and Beijing, but allowed athletes to compete in Paris when testing positive. So Lyles made up his mind to try to pull the 100-200 double, but will likely skip of his remaining relay races. He says the disease “clearly affected his performance,” and that his girlfriend noticed him heavily coughing during his sleep. Lyles says he tried to avoid being near other athletes, but was also clearly competing and breathing in their presence. He didn’t tell other athletes about his positive test “because why would you give them an edge over you?”

Look, it’s 2024. Everybody has broadly made up their mind on the long-term public health effects of widespread COVID transmission, both in the “this is nothing” and the “this is killing people” categories.

So I’m going to talk about this from a sports perspective: Lyles discovered he had a highly transmissible sickness which made him feel like trash and clearly affected his performance. And at the biggest sporting event on earth, whose results will forever affect the lives of the competitors, Lyles chose to remain around other athlete. He doesn’t even seem to have quarantined from his girlfriend, Junelle Bromfield, who is scheduled to compete in the 4x400 relay for Jamaica. Wouldn’t we be furious if a track star was walking around the Olympics with Contagious Pulled Hamstring Disease?

We’ll remember Lyles’ Olympics for his iconic 100m win. This was an unfortunate way for it to end, and while it may have been a lot to ask him to drop out of his signature event, it also feels disrespectful to his fellow athletes to put them through something which clearly wreaked havoc on him.