Rings Roundup, Day 15: Well it's not called the Tie Jump
Steph Curry went hero mode and the race to have the most gold medals in Paris got tight.
By the time this post goes up, the Olympics will be almost over—events on the last day tend to be skewed towards the morning so nobody is sweaty when the closing ceremonies roll around. The gold medal count has come down to the last day, and it’s looking good for Team USA at the time I’m writing this, although it might be looking good for China by the time I hit publish. Let’s talk about that tomorrow.
Saturday was a spectacular Olympic day—it feels like we’ve been getting a lot of those. Team USA swept the men’s and women’s 4x400 meter relays—turns out it’s easier to hand off the batons when you’re not in a dead sprint. The women’s 4x4 was particularly stunning, Sidney McLaughlin-Levrone’s status as one of America’s all-time track and field legends.
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It turns out breaking is pretty awesome when it’s not being performed by Raygun, and there were finals in just about every team sport, including Team USA gold medal wins in two of our favorites: Women’s soccer and men’s basketball. Let’s give out some rings.
30 Rings: A Chef cooks in Paris
I’ve always felt Steph Curry deserves a larger stake in the GOAT conversation. He won four NBA championships, is the undisputed greatest shooter of all time, and forever changed the way the sport will be played. Isn’t that worth a third-party candidate vote share here? Can’t we get Ross Perot numbers for Steph?
Here’s a new entry in his argument: In the closing minutes of an all-time gold medal Olympic basketball game, with a combined six MVPs on his team and 20,000 angry French people cheering against him, everybody stood back and watched as he did this.
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In the final three minutes of the game, Steph hit four increasingly ridiculous threes with no misses. The last one was a stepback over two French defenders who did not even consider for a second that Curry might pass or drive, wholeheartedly committing to making sure his eventual three-pointer was off-balance and uncomfortable. He threw that ball into the air at a 70 degree angle and a few minutes later, it swished through that damn hoop. It may have been the best moment of Steph’s entire career—and he’s had a lot!
It ended with Team USA getting the gold, and we’ll remember this one for a while. As many people noted, LeBron’s Lakers and Steph’s Warriors are not exactly set up to contend in the next few years, so this was probably the last meaningful moment in their stellar careers. And it’s hard to imagine how it could’ve been better. It was thrilling to see them as teammates, and thrilling that teams like Serbia and France demanded their best. It’s so entertaining watching these stars playing together that you almost wish this was the sport’s primary showcase rather than the NBA—but then moments like this wouldn’t be so special.
9 Rings: Naeher
I am always drawn to goalkeepers, so my USWNT fave is Alyssa Naeher. Unlike her goalscoring teammates, she isn’t the star of any ad campaigns and looks physically pained when asked to smile. But she is a damn ROCK in the net, and has been since her crucial penalty save in the semis of the 2019 World Cup.
This Olympic gold was her masterpiece, with two bailout saves to preserve Team USA leads. Her leaping kick-save against Germany probably saved that game, and in the 94th minute of the gold medal match against Brazil, she made another brilliant reflex save against a defender clean through on goal to preserve Team USA’s lead.
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The USWNT only scored three games in the knockout stages… and won them 1-0 over Japan, 1-0 over Germany, and 1-0 over Brazil. (A a far cry from the team which put up five goals on Japan in the 2015 World Cup final.) They’re the first team ever to go through the entire knockout stages without allowing a goal—and that includes back when the knockout stages were just two games. They only allowed two goals in the entire tournament and never trailed. Naeher gets a gold medal and golden gloves.
5 Rings: We jump high, no ties, you know this
Athletes dream of being the best in the world and winning a gold medal at the Olympics—but are those always the same thing?
Saturday, Team USA’s Shelby McEwen and New Zealand’s Hamish Kerr tied in the high jump after failing to clear 2.36 meters. The same thing happened at the Tokyo Olympics when Italy’s Gianmarco Tamberi and Qatar’s Mutaz Essa Barshim both failed to clear 2.37 meters. (It might be hard to believe after the last two Olympics, but these ties are pretty rare—the jump-off/split medal is the third tiebreaker, and the athletes only get that far if they missed the exact same number of jumps across the whole competition. It had never happened before in the Olympics, although it did happen with Team USA’s Katie Moon in the pole vault world championship last year.)
Tamberi and Barshim created an Olympic moment that will be celebrated for generations by agreeing to each take gold medals rather than proceeding to a jump-off that would relegate one to silver. The split gold was the culmination of a years-long friendship between two athletes from very different parts of the world who had bonded through injuries on the competitive high jump circuit.
After the widespread adulation Barshim and Tamberi received for their sportsmanship—not to mention their gold medals—it seemed like McEwen and Kerr would also go for the split golds. But McEwen and Kerr don’t have a cool backstory. And they both decided the best thing would be to see who the better jumper was.
On the broadcast, it seemed like McEwen had unilaterally declined Kerr’s request for a jump-off, but both athletes talked to the press, it became clear that the decision was mutual. “We just looked at each other and it was pretty simple," Kerr said. "We both just nodded and off we went." I feel bad for having a viral tweet about McEwen declining the split gold—if the split wasn’t an option, McEwen catching more heat than he deserves.
Unfortunately, jump-offs tend to stink. By the time the athletes have gone through an entire competition and run out of jumps, their legs don’t have much bounce remaining. After Kerr and McEwen missed the final six jumps of regulation, they missed the first five jumps of the tiebreaker. After the bar had been lowered back to 2.34 meters, the height that eliminated the fifth-place jumper, Kerr finally mustered enough energy to get over the bar and seal gold for New Zealand.
It seems like there’s a rift between the athletes of the world and the couch-sitters like me. The split gold seems like the obvious option to me—you get the gold medal you’ve been striving for your whole life with no risk! It’s not “settling for a tie” if you both are considered the winners, right? It’s like the prisoner’s dilemma, but without the dilemma!
But athletes disagree. McEwen seems at peace with the way things went, speaking about how he won silver rather than lost gold. Barshim, who won this year’s bronze medal, praised Kerr and McEwen’s decision, saying the split medal was a one-time choice specific to his relationship with Tamberi, and that he wouldn’t choose a split gold again. And Moon, who split gold at last year’s world champs, hit me with a quote tweet dunk. (Brutal look for your boy Rodg.)
There’s something innate in the athlete’s spirit about needing to be the best: It’s what drives them day after day after day and molds them into the champions—or silver medalists—that they are. I’m bummed that Team USA missed out on gold, especially with the tight medal count with China. But McEwen is at peace with his choice. He said he’d rather have silver knowing he gave it his all than share gold. I clearly wouldn’t feel the same way—but maybe that mindset is why he won silver and we didn’t. (That and the fact that he is good at jumping high.)
.01 Rings: Photo finishes
On Saturday, Team USA’s Masai Russell won a thrilling gold in the 100-meter hurdles in a finish so close that the official photo finish image looks like one of those AI images that accidentally gives people 14 fingers and weird snake legs.
In case you can’t dissect what’s happening there: Russell beat France’s Cyréna Samba-Mayela by .01 seconds and Puerto Rico’s Jasmine Camacho-Quinn by .03 seconds. GOLD FOR TEAM USA, DOESN’T MATTER HOW MUCH YOU WIN BY!
But on the same day, Team USA’s Nevin Harrison lost the 200-meter canoe sprint to Canada’s Katie Vincent, also with a photo finish. I honestly can’t tell who’s first. Can we get a zoom lens here?
Harrison is the paddler at the finish line closer to the bottom of the screen—as you can see, she’s mid-stroke while the Canadian rower had just completed a stroke. That was the difference.
I don’t remember whether American athletes won more photo finishes than we lost in Paris. I think in the end, it worked out pretty evenly, so I’ll just be happy about the good sports.
2.06 Rings: Winning the marathon, surprisingly easy
Running a marathon is famously something you don’t have to train for at all. You can just show up and do it! It’s easy! Anybody telling you they’re “training for a marathon” is probably wasting their time! Just ask Tamirat Tola, who didn’t know he was going to be running the Olympic marathon until the opening ceremony and ended up winning.
Tola was Ethiopia’s alternate, which seems pretty harsh considering he won the 2022 world championships marathon and the 2023 New York City marathon. But Ethiopia are the world’s distance-running kings, and their squad was deep with marathon champs—like Kenenisa Bekele, who once won the Paris marathon, and Deresa Geleta, who ran the 20th-fastest marathon of all time a few months ago in Spain. So when 2024 Boston Marathon winner Sisay Lemma, backed out with an injury two weeks ago, they had the depth to pop Tola in.
The Paris course was notably hilly, forcing reigning champ Eilud Kipchoge to DNF for the first time in his career. (A great Olympic moment: When Kipchoge was slowed to a walk, a large crowd of Parisian fans decided to walk with him.) But Tola took it, no problem. He ended up setting an Olympic record 2:06:26, despite the alleged difficulty of the course.
1 Ring: China sweeps the boards
Team USA’s Olympic victories are broad, not deep. We won medals in 33 of the 48 disciplines contested at the Olympics (potentially 34, depending on how the men’s water polo team does.)
China, however, picks its spots and crushes them. They all five table tennis golds for the second straight Olympics, and are likely to win five weightlifting medals after the number of lifters per country was capped at six.
But their greatest accomplishment in Paris is clearly what happened on the diving boards: The Chinese call their diving squad the Dream Team, and this year’s version went 8-for-8, completing Paris perfection Saturday with a second-straight win by Cao Yuan on the 10-meter platform.
They’d won seven of eight medals at the last two Olympics, kept from a clean sweep each time by British teams in synchronized events. But this time, they were untouchable—of the 48 rounds combined across the eight events, a Chinese diver or team led after 46 of them.
The sweep also allowed China to pass Team USA all-time in diving golds—they have 50, while we’ve been stuck on 49 since 2012. At the Tokyo Olympics, diver Xie Siyi noted that their success was borne from extreme tedium: “Every day we go from the dormitory to the training center, then we go back to eat, then we go back to training, then we go back to sleep again. It's very boring and we do it every day the same.” And every four years, it pays off with an extremely boring run of Chinese diving brilliance.
0 rings: A Water polo collapse
OK the dynasty actually is dead. Team USA’s dominant women’s water polo squad didn’t just fall short of a fourth straight gold—they fell all the way off the podium after blowing a big lead in the bronze medal match.
Team USA led 10-7 with four minutes left, which means they should’ve had the bronze locked up—they’d allowed about a goal every four minutes over the course of the tournament. But sure enough, the Netherlands scored three goals in three minutes, and Sabrina van der Sloot (a mashup of the New York Liberty’s backcourt!) scored the game-winner with under a second left.
So that’s three straight gold medals before Flavor Flav became the official mascot of USA Water Polo, and a fourth-place finish after he got involved. I’m just reporting the facts.
STEPH CURRY FOR THREE!!!
Wow. Amazing. Boom.
Bravo for this nugget:
“Sabrina van der Sloot (a mashup of the New York Liberty’s backcourt!)”