THE 33RD OLYMPIAD but the first O’Lympiad.
Seven days, seven medals.
On the first day, Mona McSharry touched the wall and found herself on the right side of a single hundredth of a second. She had flirted with quitting the sport a couple of years earlier and yet here she was, an Olympic bronze medallist, validating everything she had endured and also signalling to the rest of us that something was stirring.
On the second day, Daniel Wiffen was nervous. The guy who once went to a sports psychologist to be told he didn’t need a sports psychologist suddenly felt a prick of self-doubt. He needed reassurance and so he needed to find a pool. High performance coach Jon Rudd found one, and once Wiffen was in the pool, he asked Rudd if he had his watch, and would he time his next 100m. Rudd reluctantly agreed.
Wiffen’s target was 1:02, but someone got in his way in his final 50m, whom he had to swim around. He hit the wall and asked Rudd for the time. It was 1:01.01.
“It’s done”, said Wiffen. “We’ve won.”
Hours later Daniel Wiffen stood on top of an Olympic podium, and Ireland’s most easily confident Olympian ended the day as he started it, caught out by his own emotion. This time, there were tears leaking from his eyes.
On the third day, Kellie Harrington fixed another post-it note to the wall of her room in the athletes village. Her wife, Mandy, sent her a support package that included a card, photos, post-it notes and blu-tack. Every day Harrington wrote a positive message and fixed it to the wall.
I know I can. Professional. Smile. Happiness.
She rehearsed them all in the final moments before she left for the ring. Harrington returned later that night as a two-time Olympic medallist, winning her quarter-final to guarantee at least bronze. All that was left was to decide which colour it would be, and that would be measured by the number of post-it notes on the wall.
On the fourth day, Philip Doyle’s neck flared up amid his crazy strain on the water, before ever he was guaranteed to have anything draped around it. Daire Lynch later wobbled and collapsed by the water, and was revived in the shade. Doyle had a neck issue niggling at him all year, and Lynch had been dogged by a virus in the days previous. Yet they went out on the water and pulled through the agony, both general and private. Rowing, says high performance director Antonio Maurogiovanni, is not a sport, but a discipline. Philip Doyle and Daire Lynch earned their bronze medals.
On the fifth day, Paul O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy stood on the scales for the final time. Paris would be the final Olympics at which lightweight rowing would be part of the programme, and so it would be the skinniest O’Donovan and McCarthy will be for the rest of their lives. They made their weight and then made Olympic rowing look a weightless act, streaking home for a second straight gold medal.
Paul O’Donovan tried to cast them as pulling like the underdog but the shtick didn’t convince anybody. Their achievements will be eternal as the last of the lightweight rowers, but they will be eternal in our own national history, too. There has never been an Irish sporting performance on an international stage as dominant as this.
On the sixth day, Rhys McClenaghan was asked what we all just learned about him. “It shows I’ve got balls”, he said.
McClenaghan had his heart broken at the Tokyo Olympics and in Paris he had to confront it all over again. The pommel horse is a parable of the terrible realities of power and control. If it goes wrong out there, it’s all on you.
So McClenaghan bundled all of this together and went out to conquer his Olympic demons, and his means of doing so was to perform the most difficult routine of his life. He returned to Earth 47 seconds after taking flight. As soon as McClenaghan’s feet landed on the ground, they knocked loose great, generous tears. It was at that point he knew he was an Olympic champion. It’s the most audacious Irish sporting act I’ve ever seen.
On the seventh day, Daniel Wiffen did not rest. A bronze medal in a race won in a new world record time and still we felt a little underwhelmed. Once that feeling dissipated, another took over: Olympic Gold medals are hard won. Wiffen has already won one. We’ve already won three. Kellie might yet deliver a fourth.
Isolate each of the gold medals and they were predictable. World-class athletes who have been given the support they need are capable of winning gold medals. But once you stack them together and stand them against our meagre Olympic history, this was a heady, unfathomable rush, and something that felt capable of not only changing how a country views sport, but also how a country views itself.
**********
That’s not to say we didn’t greet the familiar sorrows. We bargained Rhasidat Adeleke’s near-miss away with talk of perspective and of bright signs for the future, but that was an unpalatable logic after the relay team went forth and finished fourth. Paris, pardon my French here, but fuck your bigger picture. Let us soak in the appalling here and now.
These are just the ones that are felt most keenly. There were others. Liam Jegou clipping the final gate. Daniel Coyle’s horse hitting the final run of showjumping fences. Rory McIlroy dunking his ball in the water in front of the 15th green. Ciara Mageean’s injury withdrawal. Jack Woolley’s opponent stepping out of the arena two-hundredths of a second too late. Sean Dickson and Sean Waddilove’s days-long wait for their medal race culminating in a jumpy start that left them in fourth place. Daina Moorehouse’s daylight robbery in the ring. Narrow decisions against Aoife O’Rourke and Grainne Walsh.
We had four gold medals but three fourth-placed finishes. They were part of 13 top-fives and 26 top-tens, delivered by a team of 136 athletes who are now known as Olympians.
To cover this as a sports journalist is to constantly feel like you are violating laws of human decency. These athletes scrimp and save and sacrifice in obscurity for 207 weeks, pleading for coverage while we tell the world about the latest Leinster player who trusts his process and why Manchester United’s latest defeat is bad news for Erik ten Hag. Then we rock up to the biggest moment of their lives and arch our eyebrows and ask why they didn’t perform against their most talented global peers in a sport we don’t fully understand.
Why would anyone want to be Olympian? In a general sense, there isn’t any money in it. There’s no attention and no glory. There is often no justice in it either. An Olympian spends their life in the shadows while knowing the single moment on which your country will judge you is so fragile it can be ruined by a poorly-timed head-cold.
Everyone wants their kids to do sport, but would you really want them to do that sport to a level that they might make the Olympics?
Kellie Harrington won her gold medal at Roland-Garros, a stage so grand and historic that it felt like a one-off reproach to the grubbiness that has enveloped amateur boxing. Having sank to her knees and slapped the canvas in her moment of triumph, she then stood up and started dancing. She danced and she danced and she danced. Zaur Antia jumped into the ring and he danced while Kellie danced and danced and danced like nobody was watching.
Which is how Harrington felt.
“When I get into that ring, I’m allowed to be the craziest version of myself,” she told us after her semi-final victory over Beatriz Ferrera. “It’s unbelievable, it’s the best feeling ever because nobody is judging me.”
Harrington’s Paris story is indivisible from the fall-out to her interview with Off the Ball, where she refused to answer questions about a tweet she had posted praising a GB News commentator reacting to a story and condemning immigrants. Harrington deleted the post but told Off the Ball she wouldn’t answer questions about it, saying they were hanging her out to dry.
Both Harrington and the Off the Ball journalist spent days at the bottom of an online pile-on, and regardless of who you feel was right or wrong, anyone with empathy felt for both. Harrington said she went to the “darkest of places”, and had counselling sessions.
It’s in experiences like that the world feels angry and restless and much too big.
Watching Harrington dance and sing from my seat high in the steep stands of Roland-Garros, I was reminded of one of my favourite lines of sportswriting, from Sally Rooney.
“Watching Mohamed Salah play football”, she wrote in the Guardian, “is not unlike staring up at the stars and contemplating the vastness of the universe: it makes my own life seem nice and small.”
In the ring, Kellie Harrington’s world looked nice and small.
Consensus is that technology has shrunk the world but really it’s only brought its vastness into view. Many of us are still stumbling through, always aware of what others are doing and what we are not doing.
Olympians can distill the world into a 6m roped square, a 100m stretch of track, a 50m pool or a 1.6m pommel horse.
So maybe this is why it’s worth becoming an Olympian: they have carved themselves away from the world’s burble and spin by dedicating themselves to this one, tiny, infinitesimal thing in the firmament.
Our gold medal winners are very different people but they are all united by the single fact of loving the fact they get to practice their sports every day. They are obviously competitive but don’t give the impression they are motivated solely by the prize at the end of it all. The medal is less a reward for hard work but justification for being allowed to continue doing the hard work.
The Olympics is a gigantic, global event at which athletes come together and show off just how small their worlds are. What a beautiful thing.
**********
Winning is altogether less beautiful. The 2024 Games will eventually be relitigated because every edition of the Games is. Champions will fail drugs tests, medals will have to be re-assigned, records quietly adjusted, and history rewritten.
The question everyone brings to the Olympic Games: can I believe what I’m seeing?
The general rule, at least among journalists, is the more you see, the less you believe. And yet it would be wrong to reject the Games completely. That would just be the last in a series of injustices visited upon the honest and the clean.
And there were some dispiriting moments. Bahrain’s Salwa Eid Naser, who served a two-year ban for drug-testing whereabouts failures across 2019 and 2020, won a silver medal in the women’s 400m and thus left Rhasidat Adeleke on the fringe of the podium.
Eid Naser insists to this day she did not intentionally miss these tests, and among her excuses was that an employee of her federation did not do as she instructed and update her whereabouts on time. Eid Naser didn’t do it herself, she said, as she didn’t know her username and password to the system.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport banned her as they said that athletes are ultimately responsible for their own whereabouts, regardless of whether they are the ones inputting the data or not. And yet when I asked her about this after winning her silver medal, she said her whereabouts are not her responsibility.
Time served: Two years. Lessons learned: Zero.
So there are still athletes winning Olympic medals who do not believe they should play by the same rules as their competitors.
France’s Léon Marchand turned every night at the pool into a stunning, raucous event, but it was still sicklied over by the pre-Games revelations about the Chinese swimmers. Thanks solely to reporting by the New York Times and ARD in Germany, we learned that 23 Chinese swimmers all tested positive for the same banned substance before the Tokyo Games, but were cleared to compete because a Chinese investigation attributed it to contamination while preparing food in the hotel kitchen.
The World Anti-Doping Agency read this report and decided not to appeal the Chinese decision, despite the fact the original source of the substance was never found, and an explanation as to how a kitchen during Covid times was left so unclean that a substance could end up ingested by 23 different athletes. Eleven of those swimmers were included in the Chinese squad that travelled to Paris, but the story’s greater impact was to undermine athletes’ confidence in WADA, which is corrosive to the whole point of the Games.
Meanwhile, too many people were too willing to believe what they were told in Paris when it came to the stories of Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting.
Last year, the International Boxing Association (IBA) banned both boxers on the eve of their medal matches at the world championships for failing gender eligibility tests, but when the IOC confirmed both would fight in Paris, all hell broke loose.
Khelif in particular became the subject of an astonishingly intense level of global scrutiny, tossed into the global culture wars and ultimately subject to the ridicule of Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
Media outlets who should know better flung themselves into the story, accusing the IOC of an outrageous violation of the sanctity of female sports and of threatening the safety of the two boxers’ opponents. Amid the clamour and the outrage, facts were ignored, to the point the Boston Globe apologised for a headline incorrectly describing Khelif as transgender.
Too few people paused for breath to acknowledge their source for this story: the disgraced and Russian-backed IBA, who have been excommunicated by the IOC. The IBA also repeatedly shirked multiple opportunities to clarify the facts around the case. Why had they suddenly banned the fighters years after they first started competing under the IBA’s auspices? What specifically were the tests performed on the two fighters?
So here was an outlaw organisation making claims backed by flimsy evidence against fighters during an Olympics they were motivated to undermine. The IOC, meanwhile, didn’t do enough to try and quell the scale of the story, shrugging their shoulders and pointing to each of the boxers’ passports as their justification for allowing them to fight. By the time the IOC brought out a statement accentuating the IBA’s credibility issues, the story was already out of control.
The IBA then got a free afternoon’s propaganda when they hosted a farcical press conference at which president Umar Kremlev spoke Russian via video link from Moscow to reporters in a building literally bearing the title Hall of Mirrors.
There are vital discussions to be had around intersex athletes in women’s sport, with the ultimate ambition to preserve the sanctity and safety of female sport. But personalising it two fighters on the word of the disgraced IBA during an Olympic Games is not the way to do it. We don’t know about the fighters’ respective biological make-ups: all we knew about this story is that we did not know enough to leap to any firm conclusions.
Many sports governing bodies have drafted policy and regulations around both transgender and intersex athletes, acknowledging how difficult it is to balance inclusion against competitive fairness. But the IOC, as a pop-up governing body for boxing at the Olympics, didn’t have any such policy for boxing.
Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting were caught in the public crossfire of two warring sports bodies, and the failure of the IBA and IOC to come together to share information and discussions in the interests of their wellbeing condemned the fighters to a horrifying fortnight in the public eye.
So, yes, there are cheaters among the athletes at the Olympic Games but on a broader level, athletes are more sinned against than sinnners. Paris was another instance in which they were let down by the authorities and administrators whose job is to protect athletes, and preserve the ideals by which they demand athletes live by.
**********
Paris’ opening ceremony initially suffered for being too big.
The first ceremony to be held outside a stadium was mocked by the relentless rain, to the point that the promise of inviting hundreds of thousands of people became less of an opportunity and more of an indignity.
The worst place to watch the ceremony was from the ceremony: it was obviously designed for TV. Lady Gaga’s performance on steps leading to the Seine, for instance, was pre-recorded.
The grey of the sky and the murk of the water gave everything a weirdly listless feel, and the athletes felt isolated and distant on their respective boats down the river. But when night fell and the darkness foreclosed on that sense of distance, all was redeemed.
Cutting from a giant floating cauldron to Celine Dion belting out Edit Piaf from the Eiffel Tower is the kind of moment that would make you forget you’d spent five hours in the sluicing rain, fretting that the Olympians on the river were about to have their Games scuppered by the flu.
So it can be said that Paris redeemed Paris’s opening night. Paris then edified the Games. The city worked as a kind of celebrity endorsement for whatever you happened to be watching. Showjumping, it turns out, feels an awful lot more important when it’s at the Palace of Versailles. Or beach volleyball at the Eiffel Tower. Or taekwondo at the Grand Palais. Maybe even breakdancing at Place de la Concorde.
The Olympics needed Paris. There have been so many stories of spiralling costs and abandoned venues over the last three decades that appetites to host the Games have waned, to the point that Paris and Los Angeles were the only bidders for 2024, and nobody at all expressed an interest in 2028. Hence they were divvied up to keep everyone happy. Paris actually committed to the ‘sustainability’ tagline, and so they built only two new venues. Otherwise, everything was repurposed, and future bidders were shown a template for how to do this thing.
Paris at least initially didn’t give the feeling of needing the Olympics. The metro closures and security measures and the traffic routing were maddening to a people who saw the Olympics as little other than an invasion of clumsy savages who can’t roll their rs and will wave wildly at waiters.
When I wrote about this apparent apathy ahead of the Games, I reached for a line from top, top Parisien Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote that “Hell is other people.”
A reader emailed to say I’d got that quote all wrong, and pointed me in the direction of an article explaining what Sartre actually meant.
“When we think about ourselves,” he later clarified, “we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves.” In other words, hell is other people as we are forever trapped in their judgements of us.
Paris rarely gives you the impression that it particularly cares about what anyone else is saying about it, but these Games showed the city is just as subject to international flattery as the rest of us. The world quickly swooned for Paris’ beauty, history and truly magnificent metro network and then Paris fell in love with itself all over again.
It was evident in the support any French athlete received throughout the Games: it didn’t matter who they were or what they played, they were backed with full-throated fervour. 70,000 people turned up at the Stade de France on a Wednesday afternoon to watch Antoine Dupont and the men’s rugby sevens team. The most difficult event for media to be accredited for was not basketball or swimming or athletics but judo, where Teddy Riner swatted a series of comparatively tiny men aside. The face of the Games, however, was Léon Marchand, who raised a racket inside the La Defense arena unlike anything I’d ever heard.
“The end of an enchanted fortnight,” read the headline Le Parisien’s final Olympics newsletter.
As to what this means for Paris now, who knows. The national political situation remains utterly dysfunctional, and while the far-right have been kept from power, they remain an obvious force. The sheer optimism and happiness of the Games is a reproach to the pessimism and fear on which the far-right political project relies, but regrettably history teaches us that these feelings do not last.
The 2012 Games was an equally enchanted time for London, but now that fortnight resembles the end of something rather than the beginning; a peak from which the only direction was down.
The power in these experiences is less for what they teach the hosts about the future but how they made the hosts feel at the time. They have often have the effect of greying what comes, where life takes on a taint of aftermath.
France has already had this experience around the 1998 World Cup.
“The 1990s just past held no particular meaning for us,” wrote the great French writer Annie Ernaux in her memoir The Years. “They’d been years of disillusion…We preferred not to remember much of anything at all.
“Above all we wanted to remember the World Cup. People would have willingly relived the weeks of waiting around, of congregating around TV sets in the silent cities where scooters buzzed back and forth delivering pizzas; the weeks that led match by match to that Sunday and that moment when, amidst the clamour and ecstasy we knew that, having won, we could all die happy, die together, and rediscover the great surrender to one sole desire, one image, one story.”
The Olympic Rings on the Eiffel Tower were that image, and to Paris they told a great story about Paris. If people turn to politics to find that story again, they will be disappointed.
Nobody will recapture the feeling of the last fortnight ever again.
