Other races, other events, surely command attention. But it is the men’s 100 that produced track and field’s biggest name, Usain Bolt. It is the men’s 100 for which the stadium went dark Sunday night. The crowd went ooh and ahh for a light show.
Then the bright lights came back up.
All eight guys settled into the blocks.
And on this Sunday night, Noah Lyles would silence – after one of the great hype campaigns in American history – every critic.
By five-thousandths of a second.
PARIS – The athlete who has ignited a worldwide controversy in Olympic women’s boxing was disqualified from the 2023 International Boxing Assn. world championships in New Delhi after two tests, one in India amid that tournament and a prior test in Turkey in May 2022, “concluded the boxer’s DNA was that of a male consisting of XY chromosomes,” according to correspondence the IBA sent in June 2023 – more than a year ago – to the International Olympic Committee.
The June 5, 2023, letter, spotlighting Algeria’s Imane Khelif, reads, “This situation epitomizes the importance of protecting safe sport, and the integrity of sport in which the Olympic Movement is jointly committed to.”
3 Wire Sports has seen the letter and the tests.
PARIS – There are places that are out there in the Pacific Ocean, and then there is Tuvalu, which is halfway between Hawaii and Australia, a collection of three reef islands and six atolls. All in, maybe 11,000 or so people call Tuvalu home. That makes it the second-least populous country on Planet Earth, behind Vatican City, and the least populous country where English is an official language.
If you put the reefs and the atolls together, you have a land mass of 10 square miles. For comparison, San Francisco is, rounding off here, 47 square miles.
Tuvalu sent two athletes to these Paris Games, both in track and field, and when one of them, 20-year-old Temalini Manatoa, settled into the blocks Friday morning in her heat of the women’s 100 meters, she was shaking from adrenaline and excitement and, if we are being honest, fear. She was scared. She said so. It’s big out there on that track for a young woman from a very small place.
“I’m doing my best,” she said afterward, finishing in 14.04 seconds, a personal best.
PARIS – Thirty-two years ago, at the 1992 Games in Barcelona, a young Israeli, Yael Arad, won her nation’s first-ever medal in judo, a silver in the women’s under 61-kilo class. The very next day, in the men’s under-71 category, another young Israeli, Oren Smadja won a bronze.
The story of Israel at the Olympic Games, its hopes and dreams, particularly in the aftermath of 1972, is and forever will be intertwined with Yael Arad, who is far better known, because history summoned her first, but also Oren Smadja.
On Thursday, amid so much in our world that makes being Israeli at the Olympics extraordinary, with all that word conveys, destiny called again, a mixture of elation and unspeakable heartache as a new generation of Israeli judo players for the first time in that nation’s history won two medals on the same day – Arad now both president of the Israeli Olympic Committee and a member of the International Olympic Committee, Smadja the men’s national team coach.
PARIS — When one thinks of Kenya, does one’s mind skip to – racewalk?
“I believe,” said 36-year-old Samuel Gathimba of Kenya, “I was born a walker.”
He also said, and he has a flair for any number of aptitudes, including expressing himself, “It’s a talent.”
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome anew to the amazing and, if you allow yourself to see it the way it can be, beautiful world of racewalk.
PARIS – By any measure, landlocked Moldova, on the northeastern corner of the Balkans, is one of the poorest countries in Europe. Bordered by Romania to the west and Ukraine to the north, east and south, Moldova has been buffeted by an array of crises made all the more challenging in the past two years by the war nearby.
Over the past 30 or so years, roughly half the people who once called Modolva home – they’re gone. This exodus, this demographic decline, is so profound the situation is potentially, as a nation, existential. When it gained independence amid the end of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the population of Moldova was more than 4 million. Currently: 2.5 million, and dropping.
Before these Paris Games, Moldova had won a total – since its first appearance, in Atlanta in 1996, as an independent entity – of six medals.
Now, already, here two.
Both in judo. Both bronze.
The national Olympic committee of Yemen's annual budget is about $370,000, all of which comes from outside the country, mostly from the International Olympic Committee. That money supports 16 sports and feeds a staff of 21. Each lives on roughly $200 per month. There is no government funding. “They don’t have the budget anymore,” the secretary general of the Olympic committee, Mohammed Al-Ahjeri, 66, said here Tuesday.
This, though, is not a story about pity for Yemen. Far from it.
This is a story about the true meaning of the Olympics.
What it means, ultimately, to “win.”
PARIS – Messaoud Redouane Dris of Algeria is the No. 14-ranked fighter in judo’s men’s under-73 kilo class. He’s the current African champion. A junior African champion. Last year, he took silver at the International Judo Federation Grand Prix in Zagreb, Croatia. He is the gold medalist at the 2022 Mediterranean Games.
This is a guy who, one would think, by any measure would relish the chance to get on the tatami at his first – very first – Olympic Games.
But no.
PARIS – In the blue corner, representing the United States, from Spring, Texas, ladies and gentlemen, Roscoe Hill, dancing with orange shoes, baptized – why should you believe it because everything in boxing is 100% true but this really is – by George Foreman himself.
In the red corner, in lime-green shoes, representing the Refugee Olympic Team, Omid Ahmadisafa, a product of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a world champion in 2017 in kickboxing – not boxing, kickboxing – who three years later, while competing in Italy, sought asylum was invited to train with the German national team in Cologne.
And here we were, the rain having finally cleared outside, the stands maybe half full, perhaps 25 reporters from around the world here inside Arena Paris Nord, to take in this first-round men’s under 51-kilogram fight.
You couldn’t make it up if you tried. Script this, fight club, if you dare.
PARIS – Swim competition at these Paris 2024 Games got underway at 11:02 Saturday morning. By 11:38, Micah Masei, representing America Samoa, was done, his Olympics over just that quickly, 34th of 35 in the men’s 100-meter breaststroke, second to last.
Masei knew coming in that this, or something very much like this, would be the drill.
Which, in the case of Micah Masei and literally thousands of others of those taking part in these Paris Games, is absolutely the fundamental truth.
Because for most here the Olympics are not about winning.
The Olympics are about hopes and dreams.
Most swimmers do not take part in the opening ceremony. He did. Through the pouring rain. To take part in what International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach declared to the assembled athletes would be the “pinnacle of [their] Olympic journey.”
