Five-ring circus: The Thread of the XXXIII Olympiad

I hope you told the execution story.

 

Yes! And Challenger. And Loma Prieta. And then the NEXT career, followed by the even more NEXT career.

I think he's wondering if he should just sell insurance from here on out. I asked him what he thought the media world would look like when he was 65 and he just stared at me on the Zoom call.

EDIT: However, I did not add "don't be so stupid to get yourself thrown in jail."

 

So true. I thought the whole field false-started in the men’s 100 final.

 

I hope you mentioned lugging portable typewriters and a telecopier to a football game and then connecting via a third-number operator-assisted collect call. Great fun on deadline.

Or, once laptops came along, discovering on a trip to Canada that the phone calling card didn’t work outside the U.S., and the baseball writer never mentioned it because he had his own card that did. Which meant three dictated stories on a Saturday night deadline. More delight.

Or filing from a street corner pay phone via Model 100 couplers with a thunderstorm approaching because the lazy mope running the park at the state championship wanted to go home. Pure joy.

 

I remember years ago interviewing Jon Drummond, who IMHO is the greatest 4x100 leadoff man of all time and at the time was coaching Tyson Gay, and asking him about the keys to his start. And part of his asnwer was when he got into the blocks he would "engage the mechanism"and everything around him, all the sights and noise and chaos, would disappear -- until the gun went off.

BTW, thinking of Drummond reminds me of the gutsiest thing I ever saw in track. In the first round of the 4x100 of the 2001 World Championships, Drummond was leading off and midway through his leg he started limping badly. He was obviously injured, but he was somehow able to keep going and get the baton to Mickey Grimes before collapsing. The U.S. was behind because of Drummond's injury but came back to win the heat and advance. Drummond, it was later discovered, had suffered a torn quadriceps during his run.

The Americans won the title but were DQed several years later because Tim Montgomery was found guilty of doping as part of the BALCO operation.

 

Morgan Pressel for the gold.

https://awfulannouncing.com/olympic...tRvrWQHBGVc7tfovvg_aem_EzVi1iNfS9mOxhJnZQPlgQ

 

The Wikipedia page "United States at the 2024 Summer Olympics" is very helpful for these kinds of numbers, but the short answer is, basically yes:

Women: 21G, 20S, 19B
Men: 11G, 15S, 19B
Mixed: 1G, 4S, 1B

Perhaps more telling is that all six Americans who have won four or more medals at this Olympics are women, albeit five swimmers (Huske, Smith, Douglass, Walsh, Ledecky) and Simone Biles.

 

Swimmers and gymnasts have way more chances to win medals than any other sports I can think of.

 

That look from Richardson in the final meters was stone cold.