Rings Roundup, Day 8: America wins in GUNS, GOATS, AND BEEFY BOYS.
Simone and Katie won more golds and Team USA pulled the shot gun/shot put double. Plus, the Windward Islands had their greatest Olympic day ever.
We are a nation of spectacular versatility. Saturday began with 4-foot-8 Simone Biles’s coronation on vault, as she threw down her Yurchenko double pike even cleaner than she did in the team and individual all-around finals.
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Then, later in the day, 6-foot-7, 320-pound Ryan Crouser won his third straight gold medal in the shot put.
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In 2028, I’d like to propose a combined Shot Vault event, where each country’s best shot putter throws their best gymnast into the air. Crouser and Biles would dominate.
Saturday was probably the most fun day at the Olympics so far. I initially intended to write about Belgium’s Remco Evenepoel becoming the first time trial-road race double medalist DESPITE HIS BICYCLE BREAKING IN THE LAST MILES, or the guy who knocked himself out of the pole vault with his massive flopping penis, but didn’t get around to it. (More like the Schlong Jump!)
It’s true that Team USA missed out on some medals Saturday, some in excruciating fashion. But the more I cover the Olympics, the more I think about how every medal—gold, sil-er, bronze, expected, unexpected, whatever—is something to be cherished. Let’s start with something that reminded me of that.
7 Rings: The WINdward Islands
Something more special than any world record is the first time a nation wins a medal at the Olympics. It’s an event which, barring a massive reset of the world’s geopolitics (not out of the question!) can only happen a maximum of 60 more times.
Saturday, it happened twice. In the span of 30 minutes. To two nations about 100 miles apart from each other. And both medals were golds, in two storied events which have been a part of every modern Olympic Games. It was surely the greatest hour in the history of small nations at the Olympics.
At 3:27 ET yesterday, St. Lucia’s Julien Alfred won the women’s 100 meter dash—perhaps a shock to Americans eager to see Sha’Carri Richardson win gold, but Alfred posted the fastest time in the semis and won this year’s indoor sprint world championship, the 60-meter dash. At 3:46 p.m., the triple jump concluded with Dominica’s Thea Lafond getting gold.
I’m a big Saint Lucia fan—I honeymooned there! (It’s very common to do this!) It’s a gorgeous tropical volcano soaring out of the ocean, and every week they turn one of their few “cities” into a massive town-wide party. I bet they did it again on Saturday—here’s a clip of them watching Alfred shine in the capital, Castries:
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Dominica doesn’t really have any cities, and the triple jump is a bit tougher to watch in large groups, so you’ll have to settle for a video of their delegation in Paris partying.
Fully one-third of the 208 nations that send teams to the Olympics have never won a medal, let alone gold. Most do not qualify athletes for the Olympics via the athletic standards in place, but simply fill the “universality” spots that allow countries with no other Olympians to enter whoever they want in events like the 100-meter dash. They’re simply picking out opening ceremony outfits and sending over MP3s of their national anthem to the IOC, never to be used.
That list of medal-less nations is filled with Caribbean islands: Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, St Kitts and Nevis, and until Saturday, Dominica and St. Lucia. It makes sense: There’s no other archipelago on the planet split into so many distinct political units. (There are a bunch of tiny Pacific island nations, but these are generally hundreds if not thousands of miles apart from one another.) Just about every volcanic dot jutting out of the Caribbean is its own country, with the same international legal status as the continent-wide United States and hypothetically expected to compete with them in sporting events. St. Lucia has a population of 170,000, and Dominica about 70,000, so if you added them up you’d get Spokane, Washington. It makes sense that in cricket, the biggest sport in the region, all the islands are grouped together to play as the West Indies. How is a population the size of a Tier 3 American city living on a dormant volcano supposed to be the best in the world? (Apologies to Spokane! I got my oil changed there in November.)
On Saturday, they were. Two women born on those beautiful rocks jutting out of the sea proved themselves better than anybody else on the planet. That’s worth marveling at. In America, we’re big enough to take golden glory for granted, and for good reason—I had nothing to do with Team USA’s Olympic golds, outside of watching them on TV. But in a country with 100,000 people, it’s not unrealistic to imagine a large part of the island contributed in some way.
In a big nation, our athletes win golds that get forgotten by the week’s end. But on an island, a moment like this can remind a nation for decades that their people are capable of greatness. They’re gonna build statues and name schools after Alfred and Lafond, and rightfully so. Let’s take that energy into every gold, even if we do happen to win more often than Dominica.
6 Rings: SKEET GOD (look, what am I supposed to call him)
Saturday saw Katie Ledecky won her fourth consecutive gold medal in the 800-meter freestyle, putting her in the rare air of supremely dominant Olympians who have won four gold medals in the same event. It’s a club with only seven members, total, and she’s the first woman through the door.
Katie deserves her flowers, and I’ve given her plenty on here…. but I just want to point out that Katie was not even the only American athlete to enter this impossibly rare and specific club on Saturday!
Team USA’s Vincent Hancock won his fourth gold medal in skeet shooting, hitting 58 of 60 targets—honestly a poor performance from him, he can hit all 60.
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He beat another American—a 24-year old named Conner Prince who Hancock coaches. Nobody else has even won two gold medals in skeet, and Hancock has four. Hancock should keep shooting, because age isn’t really a thing in this sport, but regardless, it looks like America’s skeet dynasty will continue.
5 Rings: The Olympic Price is Right Competition
I am so glad I went long on Teddy Riner yesterday. (And on TikTok, too! If you wanna follow me there……) Because if that gave even a single person the context to properly enjoy yesterday’s mixed team judo event—perhaps the single most bonkers, preposterously dramatic, poorly designed sporting event I have ever witnessed—I will feel like I have done my job.
Riner is the Judo GOAT, a title he helped secure with this third gold medal in the super-heavyweight class on Friday. But on Saturday was the mixed team event… but unlike tennis or track or even archery, there’s no real good way to do “team judo.” The event is just six bouts between judokas from six weight classes (three male, three female) in a best-of-six series. But hold up—there’s no such thing as a “best-of-six” series! It needs to be either five or seven! Everybody knows that!
The tiebreaker procedure is unreal. In the case of a 3-3 tie—and lots of the matchups go to a 3-3 tie—they pick one of the weight classes at random to participate in a sudden-death single-score decider. I can think of dozens of ways to decide the seventh weight class: flipping a coin and having the coin flip-winner pick a class; building a fun little roulette wheel, throwing a dart at a board, I’m just going off the top o fmy head here. But the judo organizers have picked the least whimsical, most questionable method possible: Putting all the weight classes up on the big screen and cycling through them like the Price is Right wheel until it slows down and stops on the chosen weight class. It’s unclear whether they use some sort of randomizer or simply press play on a pre-determined animation or what.
After I devoted a full paragraph to describing the tiebreakers, you can probably guess what happened. Japan took a 3-1 lead, but Steph’ed it. France won back-to-back bouts in sudden death golden score overtime, which brought up the Virtual Wheel of Fortune.
When I realized the gold medal match was coming down to a randomly chosen fighter, my brain immediately thought one thing: OMG IT HAS TO PUT TEDDY BACK OUT ON THE MAT TO WIN ONE MORE GOLD IN THE MOST DRAMATIC FASHION. The unsubtle scriptwriters of these France were not subtle. The Virtual Wheel slowed down and stopped on the heavyweight class. The crowd went feral when they realized it Teddy was going for gold. If I was Japan, I would’ve immediately called for an investigation into the clearly rigged scoreboard graphic, but they let it go.
Riner looked exhausted—he’d fought in eight bouts in two days, including the most recent one, and at 330 pounds, all that fighting can’t be easy. The match went on for six grueling minutes, but it ended the way everybody expected: He picked his opponent up and threw him to the ground. I thought that Riner had already concluded his career in the most perfect way possible. But the wheel had other ideas.
4x4 Rings: Super Bol CCCC
Saturday was the day of mixed-gender team events, with the judo final, Team USA’s gold medal victory in the 4x100 mixed medley in the pool, and the 4x400 mixed relay in track. The events are an awesome addition to the games—they often feature teams making up huge aps and emphasize that men’s sports and women’s sports are both sports, and should be treated equally.
But the track event didn’t end so well for the United States because of a legendary performance from Dutch legend Femke Bol. She started the anchor leg in fourth place because the Dutch men slower than Team USA’s, but walked down runners in the bronze, silver, and then gold positions, beating Team USA by .31 seconds at the line.
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(No relation to Manute, btw.)
This is what Femke Bol does. She did basically the same thing at the 2023 world championships in the 4x400 women’s race, entering the home stretch in third but switching into warp speed to beat Jamaica.
The win belongs to Bol—but the Team USA failure rests on whoever put together the relay team. Not the runners themselves, who set a world record in the prelims, clearly gave 110 percent in the races, and won silver, but whoever was responsible for putting together the team.
Team USA did not send their best. The men included in the race were Vernon Norwood and Bryce Deadmon, who finished fourth and fifth at the Olympic trials. The women were Kaylyn Brown, the fourth-place finisher in the 400m at trials, and Shamier Little, who finished fourth in the 400m hurdles at trials and failed to make the final of the flat 400m. (Brown was one of the women in the Arkansas super-sweep in the 400m we wrote about a few months ago!) Meanwhile, Team USA has Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, whose best time this year is 1.38 seconds faster than Little’s, and a variety of male runners who could’ve improved on Norwood’s opening 44.5.
The only explanation is that either Team USA or the runners themselves don’t value this event as much as individual races and the single-gender relays later in the week. Participating in the mixed event requires running an extra 800 meters in an already-crowded race-week.
But aren’t Olympic golds all worth the same? Team USA had a gimme gold here, and let it slip to have a better chance of competing in more crowded fields later in the week. That seems like bad strat to me, especially since the gold medal race is a bit tighter than expected.
3 Rings: The Shot Put King and his Shot Put Prince
We talked about Ryan Crouser already. He’s a GOAT, and if you’ve been reading this newsletter since before the Olympics, you knew that already.
But I’d like to make sure everybody gives Joe Kovacs—the second-best shot putter of all time, unfortunate enough to live at the same time and be from the same country as the best shot putter of all time. In Rio, Crouser won gold and Kovacs won silver. In Tokyo, Crouser won gold and Kovacs won silver. Same at the 2022 world championships (although Kovacs did beat him in 2019.)
Kovacs wasn’t going to win gold yesterday. Crouser’s better. But he still did something magnificent. He entered the final round yesterday in fourth place, and seemed unlikely to break through because the rain picked up in Paris and made it tough for the competitors to get any traction. But on his final throw of the day, he busted out a 22.15—perfectly tied with Jamaica’s Rajindra Campbell, winning on countback because his second-best throw was longer than Campbell’s.
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A centimeter shorter, and the Crouser-Kovacs reign over the shot putting world has a weird ending.
Kovacs may be Cal Naughton to Crouser’s Ricky Bobby but hell, we’re still referencing Talladega Nights decades later. If you ain’t first… well, they give you a medal for that.
One Ring: IM DQ
It’s fundamentally absurd that the backstroke, butterfly, and breaststroke exist. Why’d we invent weirder, slower ways of moving in water, then award medals to them? If you were being chased by a shark, would you ever do the freaking butterfly?
Saturday, Team USA lost a medal because it turns out that there are Swim Refs who watch to make sure you’re doing the right stroke. (Ah well, I guess I have to trash my “just go do the freestyle during the breaststroke” idea.) American medley swimmer Alex Walsh, the silver medalist from Tokyo and former world champion in the 200 IM, led her only race of the Olympics after 150 meters, but lost the lead to Canada’s Summer McKeown and ended up with bronze. Then she found out she actually hadn’t won bronze at all—she’d been disqualified.
Walsh got caught on the infamous back-to-breast turn. In the IM, swimmers have a tendency to make turns into a grey area where they’re transitioning from one stroke to the next, potentially saving a bit of time in races often decided by hundredths of seconds. The rules specifically try to combat this to ensure that swimmers stay in each stroke for the entire lap. On the back-to-breast turn, they must stay on their back until they touch the wall, but swimmers like to start turning onto their belly early.
In last year’s world championships, Australia’s Kaylee McKeown was disqualified for doing the exact same thing… and some people thought Walsh also should’ve gotten DQ’ed on her way to silver . This year, Walsh got caught, knowing she needed every instant to potentially win gold. Instead, it cost her bronze, which she would’ve easily won….
… and instead, the medal went to McKeown. THOSE DAMN AUSTRALIANS! WHEN WILL THE MARSUPIAL MADNESS END?!?!?!?!
Re:Bol and mixed relay, don’t forget Bol fell 5 meters short in last year’s championship costing her team the gold. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r8AyMplnFVU
Sure seems like the US athletes aren’t interested in doing that mixed relay early in events.
Thanks for writing about the best Olympic event of Paris 2024 so far, mixed team Judo!