Rings Roundup, Day 16: A sprint to the end

The Olympics are a marathon. Let's hit the finish line at top speed like Sifan Hassan did.

Over the last decade or so, I’ve had my doubts about the whether The Olympics would ever re-attain the importance they had in past decades. Our sports-watching habits, and, more broadly, our entertainment options have changed. We don’t just watch Whatever’s On TV anymore—we have the power to branch out and pay attention to whatever personally excites us.

For me, these niche sports have always been something that personally excite me—but I questioned whether the world would ever get hooked by a once-every-4-years event anchored by athletes the mainstream public has never heard of in sports the mainstream public doesn’t care about.

But folks: The Paris games did it. The Olympics, as a concept, are back. Paris delivered, with beautiful backgrounds and massive engaged crowds at basically every event. (I watched modern pentathlon yesterday—the sport that famously, nobody cares about, or even knows how to watch—and the stands were PACKED.) Everybody I know, both IRL and online, spent two weeks gushing over these games. They were filled with thrilling outcomes, main characters, and memes.

Needless to say, I’m grateful to the thousands of you who have come here every day to read my recaps. But for now, let’s give out some rings.

26.2 Rings: Sifan Hassan

Sometimes it’s tough to ID why the Olympics are particularly special. What makes the high jump at the Olympics more prestigious than the high jump at a world championship? What makes the Olympic marathon, often held on a new, untested course, a bigger deal than the major marathons held every year?

But Dutch distance runner Sifan Hassan has used the scope and format of the Olympics to demonstrate the depth and breadth of her talents. At two straight Olympics, she has made history by attempting a shocking array of events back-to-back-to-back—and what she pulled off in Paris will go down in history.

In Tokyo, Hassan won double-gold in the 5,000 meter and the 10,000-meter while taking bronze in the 1,500—the first person to ever win medals in all three at the same games. While the same group of athletes often contend for the 5k and 10k, the 1,500 is a middle-distance race whose runners are more likely to cross over to the 800. That Hassan was able to have the speed for the mile but the stamina for distance was a tremendous feat of versatility.

But in between Olympics, Hassan set her sights on longer races. She made her marathon debut the 2023 London Marathon—and won the damn thing. She committed to a shocking Olympic triple, attempting to defend her 5k and 10k golds. The issue here was no longer just one of versatility, but also logistics. How the hell do you run 38 competitive miles in a week? Emil Zatopek achieved legend status when he won gold in all three in 1952—attempting the marathon on a whim after already winning the two other golds—but, well, that was 1952.

Hassan won bronze in the 5k on Monday, then another bronze in the 10k on Friday. Then Sunday she took to the streets of Paris and ran the marathon—and won.

@nbcolympicsAfter 26 miles of racing, the women’s marathon came down to a four-way clash to decide the three Olympic medals! 🤯 #ParisOlympics #paris2024 #paris #running #marathon #sifanhassan #helenobiri #olympics

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She got the gold with a flat-out sprint to the finish, boxing out world record-holder Tigst Assefa. How did she have the energy for that sort of speed after 26.1 miles? How did she have that sort of energy AFTER WINNING MEDALS IN TWO OTHER DISTANCE RACES BEFORE RUNNING 26 MILES???

Hassan is the first person with medals in the 1,500, 5,000, 10,000, and marathon—but it’s the way she did them which makes her an all-timer. It’s one thing to win those races over the course of a career, dipping in and out of distances with specific training regimens to maximize performance in specific races. But to be versatile enough to compete in them all without truly focusing on each? To have the energy to thrive in all these races mere days apart? It would only be possible at an event as strange as the Olympics, where every sport on earth has its Super Bowl in a span of two weeks. Hassan chose to answer that ridiculous call, and she’ll go down in history for it.

40 Rings: WE’RE (technically) NUMBER ONE

For the second straight Olympics, the gold medal count was decided by an American women’s squad winning the very last gold given out to secure a slim victory over China. At the Tokyo Olympics, the women’s volleyball team beat China in the gold medal game to break a tie and give Team USA 39 golds as opposed to China’s 38. In Paris, the women’s basketball team beat France in a nail-biter to even the gold count at 40—but Team USA had way more silver and bronze medals, which are generally accepted as a tiebreaker. It’s the fourth straight Olympics in which Team USA won the most golds—China dominated at their home Olympics in 2008.

Watching the back-and-forth over the last 24 hours or so was awesome. At one point, China had a 4-gold lead. When you looked at the remaining events, it was clear that Team USA could wipe most of those out, as heavy favorites in the two 4x400 track events and two basketball gold medal finals.

Entering Sunday morning, Team USA needed to find an additional gold in one of three events: The women’s volleyball final, the final wrestling match of the Olympics, and the omnium cycling competition. Italy straight-setted Team USA in volleyball, and while I was pumped about wrestler Kennedy Blades after she literally suplexed an opponent on Saturday, she lost to world champion Yuka Kagami.

That left cycling, where Jennifer Valente was the defending champion in the omnium, a multi-race event which uses a complex scoring system to determine the best track cyclist over a large swath of contests. Entering the final race, she had a lead, and I was scrambling to to figure out exactly how many Cycling Points she needed to accumulate to secure that gold.

She did it! No cool highlight of an exciting finish—as a true OmniumHead who looked up the rules during the competition, she already had enough Cycling Points to win without crossing the finish line first.

@nbcolympicsJennifer Valente successfully defends her gold medal in the women's omnium at the #ParisOlympics! 🥇👏

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Team USA women’s basketball finished the job, and Team USA finished a remarkable Olympics: Most golds, most silvers, most bronzes, most total medals.

Of course, this doesn’t really matter, and is in some ways offensive to the entire concept of the Olympics. There’s no official contest to “Win The Olympics.” And a gold medal shouldn’t be reduced to a mere number—it’s a tremendous achievement in its own sport and context which should be celebrated for its own merits, not a notch in some larger Sports Battle.

But I locked the hell in on omnium cycling in a way I might not have if THE FATE OF THE ENTIRE OLYMPICS was in the balance. That’s gotta be a good thing, right?

Anyway, this was fun, but hopefully that Home Olympics Bump puts 2028 out of range before the last moments of the Olympics.

8 Rings: USA Women’s Hoops

Team USA continued their dominance in women’s basketball with a gold medal win over France, their 61st consecutive win in Olympic play and eighth straight gold medal… and we absolutely do not need to think about the details of the game ever again.

They did not beat France so much as they survived France. A’ja Wilson had 21 points, 13 boards, and four emphatic blocks, but Team USA simply couldn’t get it going offensively and trailed by as much as 10. Luckily, they had French locked up in the Bastille on D and squeaked ahead in the fourth quarter. In the closing moments with Team USA up three, Gabby Williams hit a buzzer-beater… that only counted for two points, because her foot was on the line.

Ahhh, les pauvres Français. Deux jeux excellentes, deux medailles d’argent. Quelle dommage. It’s the type of thing which makes you want to watch a silent movie about a balloon floating away.

In an Olympics filled with gold medal photo finishes, shootoffs, and other impossibly close finishes, this was the last competitive moment—a game that would’ve gone to overtime if the shot had been taken a human’s foot farther away.

0 Rings: A Bad Rule Enforced Poorly

I know I’m probably not the most reliable source because I’ve been so eager to criticize literally any rule which harms an American athlete on here—I’m The Boy Who Cried “Volleyball Should Be Scored via Total Points Rather Than Sets.” But the series of rulings that may lead to Jordan Chiles having to return the bronze medal she won in the women’s floor routine is a Sports Travesty.

We wrote the other day about the rules involved in the inquiry which adjusted Chiles’ difficulty score, an objective metric which officials initially misjudged. However, days after her performance, the Romanian federation disputed the inquiry—not because they believed Chiles’ score was too high, but because they felt the American coaches had taken too long to issue a protest. The rules state they have a minute to request a re-score, but they believed the coaches took a minute and four seconds. The Court of Arbitration for Sport agreed with them, and Chiles has been asked to return her medal. However, USA Gymnastics has now counter-appealed with evidence they believe shows the coaches submitted their inquiry in time.

This is an example of a bad rule enforced poorly. I accept the need for some time limit on video review requests—most sports have one. But in gymnastics, the usual time limit is four minutes. But with the last performer in each rotation, that limit is dropped to one minute, to avoid delays at the end of competition. I don’t get why one performer should be at such a disadvantage due to something out of their control, just for the sake of moving things along. And there should be some sort of visible timer available, which apparently there isn’t.

But worse than the rule itself is the way Chiles is being treated. She should get the bronze! Using correct scoring, it’s what she deserves. But she’s being asked to return it because officials screwed up twice—first giving her the wrong score, then failing to realize that their arbitrarily short time limit had expired. Let’s hope they actually screwed up three times, and Chiles gets to keep her medal.

If not… let’s hope Chiles “loses her luggage on the plane back from Paris” and simply cannot return the medal for reasons beyond her control."

4 Rings: A Handball Beatdown

I’ve posted a lot about all the buzzer-beaters and photo finishes at the Olympics, but you know what else is great? The best team in the world kicking the living crap out of the supposed two best teams in the world. .

Denmark won the men’s handball gold medal game over Germany 39-26. The 39 goals and 13-goal margin of victory were both gold medal game records. Six of the other seven games in the knockout stages were decided by a single goal—and then the final was won by THIRTEEN, a larger margin of victory than every other game in the bracket combined.

It was the final career game for Danish handball icon Mikkel Hansen, which of course leaves the door open for Team USA to dominate at the World Championships in January. We’re all hooked and we’ll all be watching.

3 Rings: Breaking

I wanted to circle back to breaking after The Raygun Incident. There’s a reason I think it’s a major bummer that breaking won’t be in the Olympics again, and that’s because I think it genuinely brings something to the table that other sports don’t in terms of competitive creativity.

I wanted to highlight this moment from the semifinals, where eventual gold medalist Phil Wizard predicted the move his opponent, Japan’s Shigekix, would do to end his routine and performed it simultaneously with his opponent:

It’s a killer dunk. Phil showed the judges that his opponent wasn’t really improvising, and that anybody who watched him enough would know the moves that were coming. And he also showed that his opponents’ closing wasn’t particularly difficult. It’s like if Simone Biles got to go out and do the toughest pass of her opponent’s floor routine, look over at her judges, and do a little wanking gesture while rolling her eyes.

That head-to-head antagonism just doesn’t exist in other Olympic judged sports, and was a really fun dynamic. I hope enough people were able to look past the memes and appreciate the skill and joy involved in first (and probably last) Olympic breaking competition.

∞ Rings: You guys

The Olympics are over, and that means no more daily recaps. They have been a lot of work, and although the writing has not always been great due to the quick turnaround—guys, I am TIRED—I’m proud of the work.

I’m going to take a little bit of time off after accomplishing my goal of posting 16 thorough Olympics recaps in 16 days—I hope you understand that! But I have some Paralympics coverage planned, and will have a steady weekly schedule throughout football season. I think it’s clear people are interested in quality writing that explains what’s interesting and exciting about sports which don’t normally get mainstream coverage. I’ll try to deliver that outside of the two-week bubble of the Olympics.

The response to my project here has been overwhelming. Since the start of the Olympics, I’ve doubled my subscriber count, on here and they sent me an email saying I’m officially a “Substack Bestseller”—especially remarkable because I’ve been putting out this stuff for free, and hundreds of you have decided to pay me for it anyway.

That means a lot. I started this newsletter hoping that if I wrote whatever I want about whatever I wanted, people would show up. I was a little nervous about that idea… until now.

Thanks for reading—I hope you’ll stick around. See you in Milan in two years.