The second weekend of the Paris Olympics, roughly halfway through the Games, was a good time to sit down, in peace and quiet, and to ruminate on all that we have seen. Or, at least, it would have been a good time, except that the men’s kayak cross was scheduled for Sunday, August 4th, at half past nine in the morning, Eastern Time, and no one, obviously, would want to miss that. A new event, hitherto untried at the Olympics? Four paddlers, borne simultaneously through treacherous rapids, and required by the rules to flip over, beneath a horizontal bar, and dunk themselves head first? To hell with rumination.
The fact that the Olympics appear to exist in perpetual motion is both magnificent and frustrating. As you settle down in front of your TV to follow a favored event, a small voice of conscience murmurs in your ear that you are thereby missing other sports in which you have previously shown no interest whatsoever but which, if you were to watch them now, might consume you utterly. On August 1st, for example, the second run in the quarterfinals of the women’s BMX racing—craziness guaranteed—began exactly four minutes before the quarterfinal of the women’s fifty-four-kilogram boxing got under way. How to choose between such rare delights? For the purposes of economy, perhaps, could the organizers not have combined the two disciplines, with boxers on bikes punching one another’s lights out as they rounded a high bend?
This kind of problem was especially acute on the opening Sunday, when the overlap of table tennis, soccer, volleyball (beach and non-beach), and hockey made the afternoon sessions, in Paris, impossible to plan for. There was archery, too, with a gold medal up for grabs between the women’s teams, but you could always skip that live and catch up with it later, secure in the knowledge that the Koreans would almost certainly win. They did. In the end, I blew off all the other sports in favor of skateboarding—the women’s street final, or, as aficionados would refer to it, Kids Falling Over onto Concrete. Again and again the contestants, all of them in their teens, attempted to slide sideways down a railing, and again and again they tumbled and spilled. What marked them out as Olympians was their preternatural ability to find these pratfalls hilarious. Poe Pinson, the great American hope, was laughing toward the crowd before she even started her run. In a white T-shirt, and with no helmet to constrain her loose blond hair, let alone to protect her brain, she accelerated, zoomed up a curving wall, foundered, flopped, lay flat on her back, and carried on laughing. Eventually, she came fifth, with victory going to the fourteen-year-old Coco Yoshizawa, of Japan, but I reckon that Pinson deserved her own medal for adding to the sum of human gaiety. Where you or I would be bruised and woebegone at the spectacle of public failure, she and her rivals simply sailed on through the crashes, confident of nailing their tricks next time. Dude, where’s my board? Whoa, be gone! Party on!
Such joie de vivre was all the more gratifying because, two days earlier, any kind of joie had been in grave danger of being swamped. The opening ceremony of the Olympics, on Friday, July 26th, took place in a deluge so unrelenting that some of the equestrian squads may, for all we know, have considered setting aside two horses for loading onto an ark. The skies wept as if in tribute to a nameless grief, and the expression on the face of President Emmanuel Macron was that of a man who wished he had nipped over to Tahiti, where the surfing competition was being held, in order to support his national team. The whole ceremony, along the banks of the Seine, was so rich in low points that it’s hard to nominate a winner, but, in the end, there was something about the guy playing Ravel’s “Jeux d’Eau”—what else?—in the open air, while his grand piano took a hammering from a downpour, that struck many observers as unbeatably sad. As for the scene in which unchaperoned children were lured onto a boat by a masked stranger, in a rat-infested sewer, I still don’t quite understand how it signalled “Welcome to France.”
Could the following day, crammed with multiple fixtures, maintain the moisture level? Yes, it could. The American cyclist Chloé Dygert, a world champion in the women’s time trial, zipped sweetly along the streets at more than thirty miles an hour until she suddenly didn’t. What sent her careening off balance was not just a corner but a wet, cobbled corner to boot: a charming feature of le vieux Paris, malignly transformed into a hazard. Imagine breaking a tooth on a soufflé. Not until the evening, in fact, was the low prevailing mood compelled to lift. Rain or no rain, everything changed as the French men stormed into combat against Fiji, in the rugby sevens—a terrific sport, if you haven’t tried it, requiring little more than extreme pace, keen spatial awareness, delicate ball-handling skills, and the lung power of a Wagnerian baritone. France had its first gold medal. The players launched into a festive dance that seemed to have been choreographed in advance. (That’s morale for you.) One of them, Jean-Pascal Barraque, declared, “My spirit now is really amazing.” A little late, the Games were coming alive. A decent night’s sleep, a break in the clouds, and we could all bid farewell to the damp squib. The dry squib was ready to burn.
The star of the French rugby-sevens team was Antoine Dupont, aged twenty-seven, who toils under two particular burdens. First, he is regularly extolled as the finest rugby player in the world. Second, he is one of the sporting idols who were informally elected and expected—and, in truth, placed under obligation—to perform outstandingly at the Olympics this year. The miracle is that Dupont delivered the goods.
This application of high-pressure hope recurs at pretty much every Olympics. The host nation homes in on one or two of its most fancied participants and insists on pinning them to a pedestal, whether they like it or not, well ahead of the actual competition. Thus, in ridiculous retrospect, it looks like a matter of mere destiny that Carl Lewis should have been bedecked with gold—four medals in all, on the track and in the long jump—at the Los Angeles Games of 1984, or that Jessica Ennis (now Ennis-Hill) should have won the women’s heptathlon in the Olympics of 2012, in London. Ennis’s face had been on posters and magazine covers for weeks beforehand; in the public mind, which tilted past optimism toward insanity, all she had to do was don her spikes, strut her stuff, and collect her rightful gong. What that stuff involved, and the toll it could take, was rarely part of the conversation.
The most extraordinary Olympian, in this regard, may be Cathy Freeman, who, at the Sydney Games of 2000, was a double dream-bearer for Australia. She had both to trounce her challengers in the four hundred metres, and, in the process, to become the first Indigenous Australian athlete to be crowned as an Olympic champion in an individual sport. Oh, and one other thing: the lighting of the Olympic flame, at the opening ceremony, was also up to her. In short, Freeman would have been well within her rights to say, “Sorry, this is too much,” and to pull away. Instead, she did what was asked of her. I vividly recall her in the stadium, on the brink of the final, withdrawing into herself and blocking out the babel of anticipation. The hood of her green costume was pulled tight around her head and remained there for the duration of the race. Never have I seen someone, in sports or any other field of endeavor, more determined not to milk the surrounding mood.
In Paris, the focus was on Léon Marchand, fondly hailed by the French as the Baguette. He is a likable lad of twenty-two, and a junior at Arizona State. (What do people call him there? Supersub?) Marchand is armed with an easy smile, and, to judge by his deeds in the pool at the Paris La Défense Arena, buoyed by a working set of gills. If he was disconcerted to see his own head—magnified many times over and held aloft on a placard—being waved around by spectators, as he sluiced through the water, he didn’t show it. After a week’s effort, he had a handsome clutch of four gold medals to his name. Here, to all appearances, was the perfect local hero, modestly attuned to his newborn immortality and, no less important, to the technological doodads that bob in its wake. One innovation, throughout these Games, has been the podium selfie: as the three medallists huddle together, post-anthem, a helper hands a tiny smartphone to the winner of the bronze, who then musters the other two behind him, or her, and snaps a triptych of triumphant grins. One wonders what happened at the Paris Olympics a century ago, when art, believe it or not, was part of the competition. Maybe the bronze medallist was given an easel, a brush, and a palette ready-loaded with paints and invited to dash off an oil sketch.
Marchand made waves in Paris, to be sure, but he also did something more unusual. He caused a surge in sound waves. As is natural to any exponent of the breast stroke, he dipped his head below the water in time with his kicks, before rising to snatch a breath. Instinctively, the crowd caught onto this rhythm and responded with suitable fervor. Soon, we had a new routine, both funny and hypnotic: every time Marchand broke the surface and gulped for air, stroke after stroke, the people roared.
Customary though it is, indeed, to laud the sights and sounds of any Olympic Games, 2024 may mark the first occasion on which the sounds have kept pace with the sights. It is fitting that Paris should be the arena for this reset of the senses. On YouTube, you can summon the opening of “Love Me Tonight”—a Hollywood homage to Paris, starring, of course, Maurice Chevalier—which dates to 1932 and revels in the fresh creative opportunities that are afforded by a soundtrack. As the city awakes, we hear the clank of a road-mender’s sledgehammer, the snores of a drunk, the swoosh of a broom, the beating of a dusty rug, and so forth. Gradually, everyday noises begin to make beautiful music. And so it was, more than ninety years later, that we listened to the chorus of cries for Marchand, and to the splendid shrieks of ecstasy, reminiscent of the jungle at sunrise, that were emitted by, or perhaps at, a French TV commentator when Teddy Riner, a genial judoka whose status in the country verges on the divine, won his fourth Olympic gold medal. The shrieks were a new twist. By tradition, Riner’s admirers greet his signature moves with a collective shout of “Teddy Bam Bam!”
Then, there was the niche boo. This is a highly specialized outburst, which I would define as “the sound that arises from a mass of French persons when one of their cyclists has just been deprived of his proper success by an Englishman.” It was audible on July 29th, when the men’s cross-country mountain-bike race was thrillingly contested on the paths and rocks of Élancourt, to the west of Paris. After almost an hour and a half of bone-jolting action, it was still unclear, as the end neared, whether Tom Pidcock, representing Great Britain, or Victor Koretzky, of France, would gain the upper hand. The latter held a slender lead as they hurtled toward a stand of trees. Koretzky skirted it by dinking to the right. Pidcock went left. As they emerged, all but clashing pedals, it was Pidcock who nudged ahead and sped to the finish, there to bump into the boo. What made the encounter so memorable was the blend of pastoral backdrop and true grit. When did you last see a fight for supremacy in a sylvan grove? Ovid would have loved it.
Under Olympic rules, of course, the host nation holds no monopoly on the voicing of wild feelings. Having kept a rough tally of the week’s top yelps, in and around Paris, I have to commend the German slalom canoeist Elena Lilik, who, after negotiating the rapids in her white-water run (which earned her the silver medal), sat in her craft and gave vent to an elemental scream, smacking the water for extra splash. For a moment, she looked like an overtired four-year-old refusing to get out of the bath and put her pajamas on. What was contained, or uncontainable, in that singular sound? Exhilaration and relief, I suppose, touched with an atavistic pride in having proved one’s mastery: the warrior spirit, shorn of hostile intent. You could hear it again at the climax of the women’s triple jump, when Thea LaFond knelt beside the jumpers’ runway and unleashed the most jubilant of howls.
In LaFond’s case, the jubilation sprang from more than personal prowess. She hails from Dominica, one of the Windward Islands in the Caribbean, hitherto known for its volcanic terrain rather than for its record at the Olympics. “Representing a country with only seventy thousand people and being out here and getting their first medal, a gold, is an honor,” LaFond said later. “In all things, give thanks.” Amen to that. Universal recognition takes many forms, not always enviable; to the rest of the world, a place can be reputed as a battlefield, a beauty spot, or a disaster zone. Before August 3, 2024, when LaFond leaped farther than fifteen metres into a sandpit, the most celebrated figure to be born in Roseau, Dominica’s capital, was Jean Rhys, the author of “Wide Sargasso Sea.” Not long before she died, Rhys remarked that, “If I could choose, I would rather be happy than write.” (Amen to that.) It would, one hopes, have pleased her to learn that happiness, not to mention national glory, can be won in the blithest possible fashion—with a hop, a skip, and a jump. ♦
