Hello, fellow Olympians! The Paris games are in full swing, with thousands of athletes from all over the world competing in 32 sports (29 of which you won't hear about until the next Olympics). I'm glued to the competition, with an equal appreciation for athletic excellence and random heroes like Bob the Cap Catcher who gained international acclaim for jumping into a pool to retrieve a swim cap. Here are some highlights, lowlights, ongoing drama, and random observations from the Paris Games.
The Seine is full of shit
Probably the biggest story of the 33rd Olympics is whether the Seine is too polluted for human safety. "Mon Dieu! The river, she is full of merde!" a French official (who I made up) said of the matter. It's a big deal, because you can't hold swimming races in a literal sewer.
Just hours before the scheduled start of the swimming portion of the Men's triathlon on Tuesday, officials were mulling whether the race would go ahead as scheduled, be postponed until later in the week, or be canceled altogether. Everything hinges on the results of water purity tests. The hope is that the levels of E. Coli in Paris's waterway will drop to "safe for humans," but since E. Coli rises when it rains, the race's future may depend on whether the storms scheduled for later this week materialize.
An official of the World Triathlon, the governing body for the sport, told CBS that the swimming portion of the triathlon could be dropped altogether. "Then it would be a biathlon," he added.
While canceling swimming might work for the triathlon (although triathletes who excel in swimming will be pissed), the marathon swim events scheduled for later in the games have no fallback position.
Why Olympic street skateboarding is terrible
Day three of the Olympics featured the finals of the street skateboarding competition. Japan's Yuto Horigome took home the gold medal, and Americans Jagger Eaton and Nyjah Huston won silver and bronze. But it was very stupid and bad because, as a concept, a "street skateboarding competition" is fatally flawed.
First, because of Olympic drug testing. Skateboarders who like to smoke cannabis are ineligible for Olympic competition, which narrows the field of athletes considerably. Step one to improving Olympic skateboarding is ending testing for weed.
But more importantly, street boarding, as it is practiced in reality, is nothing like the way it's "played" in the Olympics. Skaters don't compete by taking 45-second runs and scoring their best two tricks on scale of 0-100 points. Skaters compete by playing S.K.A.T.E.
In S.K.A.T.E, a skater does a trick, then his opponent has five tries to replicate it or lose a point. Then they switch places. This is practiced in schoolyards and random stairways all over the world, and would be a much more interesting way to decide who the best street skateboarder is. S.K.A.T.E. involves direct competition, and has an objective outcome that doesn't depend on judges' interpretation. And it comes from the sport itself, not from whatever Olympic governing body made up the fake-ass rules for Olympic street skating.
This is a great time to be into women's rugby
Why did no one ever tell me that rugby is so amazing? All these years I thought it was like cricket—some foreign game for people who can't handle real sports—but I've been glued to every game of Team USA's women's sevens rugby squad this Olympics, and it is badass. Plus, we are tearing shit up.
We beat Brazil a couple days ago, and on day three, Team USA waged war against our eternal rivals, and the villains of the world, Great Britain. People in Great Britain actually care about rugby—they invented the game, after all—but team USA crushed 'em, 17 to 7, and barely broke a sweat. Highlights included a clutch score from team captain Naya Tapper at the game's halfway point, Sammy Sullivan mean-mugging the camera after putting the game out of reach in the second half, and literally everything Ilona Maher does, both on the field and on TikTok.
This victory puts an American Rugby team into the Olympic semifinals for the first time ever. We're playing New Zealand on day four. They're very good, but I have faith in the mighty USA sevens.
USA Women's Basketball: the anti-underdogs
While the USA women's sevens rugby team are scrappy underdogs, our Olympic women's basketball team are not. We simply crush every competitor to the point that it's not even fun. Our victory against Japan adds a 56th game to USA's winning streak. The team hasn't lost a game since 1992. We play Belgium on Thursday. I don't think they have much of a shot.