Gymnastics:
- What’s more exciting–utter domination or the slimmest of margins among competitors? BOTH, of course. Unsurprisingly, Simone Biles utterly dominated the women’s all-around final, but her male counterpart, Kohei, was part of a men’s all-around that managed simultaneous total domination–from 1. Kohei, winning his second Olympic all-around gold (he also won silver AA when he was 19 in Beijing) and capping off eight years of beating everyone all of the time, to 2. Oleg Vernaiev absolutely catching up to him in ability, difficulty, and execution, and finishing in silver only .1 behind King Kohei. The competition came down to the final two high bar routines and was determined only by Oleg’s large hop on the landing of his dismount. Otherwise, he would have dethroned Kohei.
- Vernaiev has event final chances, especially on parallel bars, and I hope he wins gold there. Kohei has team and AA gold and now it’s time for other gymnasts’ brilliance. On the women’s side, though, I can’t help but continue to want 5 golds in total for Simone, which would mean she would win the beam, vault, and floor event finals–because it’s hard to choose between slim margins and HISTORIC ACHIEVEMENTS.
- The battle for bronze among the men was also fantastic, with at least six guys having amazing competitions. For the women it was a little disappointing, with the 3rd and 4th place finishers having some significant flaws, and gold and silver were so far ahead they were foregone conclusions (but SIMONE!) Event finals should be more exciting, though in a few of them, the bronze medal will really be the only one most of the contending women have a shot at.
Track and Field:
- I really enjoy the contrast between the extreme sensitivity and technology of the touch pads that determine the winners of the swimming races vs. the low technology and seeming imprecision of the high jump bar.
- I like how the end of the high jump portion of the heptathlon is sort of reminiscent of the end of a spelling bee, when there are only two contestants left and they go back and forth. Not completely akin, because they don’t keep going if both jumpers miss (3x), but they do keep going as long as they’re both making it. High jump is also mesmerizing from a physics standpoint and also from a breaking-of-convention standpoint…I wish that I would one day see an Olympics in which someone defies the conventions of form the way Fosbury first did in high jump (perhaps in high jump we could see someone run straight at the bar instead of in a loping circle–or is that what they did before the Flop became standard?). Maybe Usain Bolt already does that with his running form.
In general:
- The Olympics: when you get to learn the adjectival endings used to describe people from every country of the world. The usual suspects like -ese, -an and -ian, -ish; the slightly less common -ine and -i; the handful of -ch/-nch/-tch; and the outliers like Greek, Lao, Malagasy.
- Commentators across the sports saying things like “the more better smoothness” and “the best highest dismount” and it not even necessarily sounding wrong because the Olympics are so impressive they require double comparatives and superlatives.
