Domination (Paris 2024)

“Do you really think professional athletes should compete in the Olympics?” a friend asked me. If you are of a certain age, you remember when they didn’t, and perhaps wax nostalgic that somehow the Olympics were better for it.

Hogwash.

She meant, of course, USA Basketball, USA Men’s Basketball. I can guarantee she has no problem with the women’s team, the WNBA players, earning their eighth consecutive gold medal. This question does come up every four years, and while I can appreciate a brief moment of nostalgia over the concept, I say: Hogwash, for two reasons. First, the mythical ideal of unpaid athletes competing against each other globally and at the highest level has never existed. And, secondly, limiting the Olympics to unpaid athletes would not make the Games better. Also, by the way, the ancient Greeks were paid.

My response was to wonder if that exclusion applies to the Norwegian cross country team. And let’s add to that, Katie Ledecky or Simone Biles. Should we allow domination to happen? Let’s ask Mikkel Hansen, Paola Egonu, Serbian water polo players, South Korean female archers, Teddy Riner, Jarja Garnbret, and Isabell Werth.

Framing the Question

Is it about the men being paid? They are paid ridiculous sums of money to bounce a ball around a varnished floor, but that pay comes because we watch them do it. What athletes get, especially American athletes, is a share of the TV money pie. When they do it at home, they are paid to entertain us. But other athletes who compete in the Games are paid, too.

Danish handball legend Mikkel Hansen is paid 2.5 million euros a year. He just “ended his international” career leading Denmark to a gold in Paris. Patriotic tears seeing the red and white flag raised. Italian volleyball star Paola Egonu makes around 400 thousand euros. Egonu’s volleyball stars only lost one game in their thrashing of opponents in Paris as they earned Italy’s first gold in women’s volleyball.

If the argument is that the US men are paid a lot more than that, then is there a number that is too much to play in the Games? Golfer John Rahm earned some $215 million; that’s right, golf is still an Olympic sport. Novak Djokovic has some $150 million in career earnings; he just took another gold in tennis. Tennis was one of the original Olympic sports, with women represented particularly well by Helen Wills and Suzanne Lenglen. Because of the bar on being paid, tennis had to leave in 1924 because the athletes couldn’t compete for three years without getting paid, then just show up and be phenomenal. Should we go back to excluding all tennis? Tennis is literally the sport that broke the professional barrier back in 1988.

Babe Didrickson had a salaried fake job at an insurance company. Paavo Nurmi, the “Flying Finn,” took money under the table for racing appearances, and he was suspended for a while for doing so. But how was he supposed to eat? The Soviets and Eastern Europeans paid cash prizes, listed in their newspapers, even while they told the IOC that of course they weren’t paid. Jim Thorpe was paid for doing other sports, and he still had his medals taken away for a while. Taken by the guy who he beat, FYI (Thorpe beat Avery Brundage in the decathlon in 1912, and Brundage refused to budge on returning his medals; Congress reinstated them after Brundage died.)

Athletes not being paid was a myth. It never existed except as an ideal, created by the same folks who believed that women should only do diving and gymnastics and that non-Europeans were racially inferior. Has all of the competition suffered since professional athletes stopped being harassed for being paid? I would argue not.

Simply the Best

Is it about the USA men’s basketball team being relatively better than most of their opponents? Is it unseemly for one country’s team to “beat up” every other country, and is that what USA basketball is doing? Is it somehow unfair for an athlete at the Olympics to win every time they compete, so that no one else has a chance? Is it about Americans thinking they want to be the best and believing they are the best but not quite rubbing it in everyone’s noses all the time, even though we are the best (shhhh… we’re #1)?

One of the great things the Olympics does is expose us to other sports and other countries. Americans believe the universe revolves around the things we care about, but it turns out it doesn’t. The giant sport in Serbia is water polo–bigger than basketball, even though they are good at basketball. The Serbian men’s water polo team just won their third consecutive gold medal. The South Korean women’s archery team just won their tenth consecutive gold medal. America, if you’re puffing out your chest over the basketball team, you’ll need to up your game for a few more years.

Isabell Werth just leapt to the top of the Olympic best of list by winning her eighth gold medal, 14 in total, out of 7 Games. She competes in two events, individual and team dressage. Has won 100% medals when she competed, which is now decades. Kevin Durant only has four team gold medals. Diana Taurasi (now) only has six gold medals. Isabell says call me when you get to eight.

Sport climbing has only been in the Olympics twice, but Slovenia’s Janja Garnbret has won the gold both times and is now the most successful Slovenian Olympic athlete. In the qualification round, as one woman after another tried their hand at climbing the boulders, a few made some headway, a couple completed one or two of the problems. Garnbret, seeded last, then went right up each one, systematically, to show the world how it was done. She is the GOAT of sport climbing. The Olympics is better off for all of us to watch her, in awe.

Summoning Your Best as the Clock Ticks

Teddy Riner lit the torch for France. As France’s premiere judoka, he has competed for two decades in one of France’s favorite sports. At one point, he won 154 matches in a row.

But Teddy’s getting old. He was old in Tokyo, when he won his third gold medal, and at 31 he may have wanted to stop. Yet the Games were coming to his house, to Paris. He had to compete. He is now only ranked seventh in the world, and in the gold medal match, he was up against the world’s best, South Korea’s Kim Min-jong. That made his golden score (sudden death overtime) win all the sweeter.

In the mixed team finals, which pitted France against Japan, Teddy won his match to lead the team to a tie. There was a spin of the wheel to pick the final teams, and, of course, the heavyweight category came up. Of course Teddy had to compete again. Of course it went to overtime and then another five minutes until, exhausted, Teddy won another gold, for France, for his team, at home, in front a crowd “La Marseillaising” for joy.

Domination has a time limit. Katie Ledecky may not make it to LA, and, if she does, someone might have beaten her. Or she will have to fight like Riner to summon up the last bit of quality she has to win. No one can win forever, and the time stretch of the Games forces even the best to confront their mortality. That is part of the beauty of the competition.

Summoning the Best to Beat the Best

Then, there is the other thing. Not everyone in the world had seen Steph Curry play. I have, for eight years, since he plays on my home town Golden State Warriors team. I’ve seen him go off, get hot, do the shimmy, the night night. In the Bay, the announcers call it the Curry Flurry. But the world had not seen him do that in a game when it counted as Warriors fans have. Highlights don’t quite tell the tale of what he does when he gets that look in the eye.

The USA Men’s basketball team this year may all be future Hall-of-Famers; certainly the starting lineup is. My friend was asking her question about the unseemliness of USA’s dominance because, two weeks ago, Team USA beat Serbia by double digits. But the Serbian team itself has the three-time American league NBA, Nikola Jokic, as their captain. And in the semi-final, Serbia was up by 18, which led me to wonder whether the Serbians had been looking for weak U.S. spots in their earlier game to get to us in the inevitable rematch.

Then, master chef Steph Curry went off. Curry did the thing he does. He scored 36 points and led Team USA to a comeback against Serbia. In the final against France, in Paris, the French were down by only three with two minutes to go. The crowd was roaring “Seven Nation Army” in between “La Marseillaise.” There was a path to upending Team USA, at last.

Steph released another Curry Flurry. He sank four three-pointers to put the US back up, the second one over seven-foot four-Victor Wembayama’s gangly outstretched arm, and the last one off one foot, a high arcing shot over the two French defenders who were practically bear hugging him. They call those shots the Daggers. The Night Nights. The announcer said, “Have you ever seen anything like it?” Well, yeah, I’ve watched Steph Curry do that for eight years. However, because of injuries or timing of winning NBA championships playing in June, he’s never played in the Olympics. And he really wanted to.

Curry says this has been the fulfillment of a long-awaited goal to play for country instead of just for money. The world was better for seeing it.