The Pearl-Clutching Podium

Curmie finds great amusement in the meme you see reproduced on the left.  He knew he’d seen the two women whose greatly magnified faces appeared above the water-line as boats carrying athletes to the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics passed by.  He got as far as presuming the images to have been from a painting in the Louvre, but he confesses that he couldn’t quite place them, and had given up the search through the memory bank until a friend from high school posted the meme.

Of course!  Curmie remembers seeing the painting in person over a half-century ago, possibly in the company of that friend; we were roommates on a spring break trip to London and Paris sponsored by the school’s French club.  Curmie saw it again a couple years later while on a college Language Study Abroad program, and photos have crossed his path a few times in the ensuing decades.  He’s mildly embarrassed that he didn’t immediately see the tweak (if you’ll pardon the expression, Gentle Reader) to the spectators, but mostly he’s still giggling over the pearl-clutchers’ inability to partake of the low-hanging fruit: the part of the portrait that is suggested but not seen is indeed a little risqué by American television standards.  The resounding silence from the American right is indeed ironic, especially in the context of what did get their collective skivvies in a twist.  

Most of the controversies arising out of this year’s Olympics had to do with actions, past or present, of the athletes: were the Chinese swimmers (still) doping, what should be done about the convicted child rapist, what the hell was that Australian woman doing, stuff like that.  A couple of stories were about how members of the media behaved.  And, of course, there was the Great Floor Exercise Debacle, in which most Americans thought Jordan Chiles was much abused based primarily on the fact that she is American and the other contenders for the bronze medal are not.

But none of these stories make it to the podium in the Olympic Pearl-Clutching finals.  To reach those lofty heights, a contender must claim victimization on the basis of something other than nationality, and the top scorers are not the athletes themselves, but television viewers, who must claim to have suffered mightily themselves.  The outrageousness of the outrage, not its reach, is what determines the winner.

We begin, then, with the bronze medalist, the furor over Algerian boxer Imane Khelif.  Yes, it was a bit ridiculous to make a big deal out of the fact that an athlete who competed as a woman in the Tokyo Olympics was allowed to do so again in Paris.  And yes, the Italian woman who initially accused her of being male recanted after the “agony of defeat” wore off. 

But we can’t rank this any higher than third place because there’s some very real mitigation.  Transgender women, those who went through puberty as males, are in fact likely to have better upper-body strength than women who were born female.  As Lia Thomas has amply demonstrated, mediocre or merely good male athletes can become stars by doing little more than declaring themselves female.  There was, of course, a fair amount of internet chatter (without evidence, of course) that Khelif is transgender.  Some of this came from despicable but somehow trusted folks like Elon Musk and J.K. Rowling, both of whom Khelif has sued for cyberbullying.

Curmie, an advocate for both free speech and victims’ rights, hasn’t completely wrapped his head around the legal issues.  What is definitely true is that Khelif is intersex, not trans.  A lot of the people who expressed outrage believed the false reports; we can raise an eyebrow at their willingness to think the likes of Musk are even capable of truth-telling, but we can’t blame them too much.  And the fact that she’s been beaten before doesn’t automatically mean she doesn’t have an advantage. 

Moreover, there is no standard means of dealing with such issues: should we be considering testosterone levels? the presence or absence of XY chromosomes? visible male dangly bits?  The Olympics apparently make their decisions based on what it says on a passport. 

Curmie has a friend whose passport says “male” even though it was issued to someone who was born female and had only just begun the transitioning process: I can’t speak to the details with confidence, but I’d bet that surgery hadn’t happened, and testosterone boosters had only just begun if in fact they’d begun at all.  If that’s what the process looked like in that direction, it’s doubtful that going the other direction would be much different.  And there are certainly countries which would be willing to (ahem) bend the rules if there were no criteria other than passports.

Moreover, Khelif was indeed disqualified from the 2023 World Championships after the fact by the Russian-controlled International Boxing Association for unspecified offenses totally unrelated to the fact that she had the audacity to beat a Russian boxer.  (Ahem.)  The IOC cut ties with the IBA and criticized that judgment, which they claimed was “sudden and arbitrary” and devoid of due process.  When you’re too corrupt for the IOC, you are definitely not the good guys in the story.

Still, we can understand those who are hesitant to advocate for Khelif in the absence of further evidence.  So these pearl-clutchers aren’t the champions of their event.  But the mere fact that the same people who insist that everyone should be permanently classified according to the sex they were assigned at birth are the ones howling that Khelif should not be allowed to compete… erm… according to the sex she was assigned at birth is enough to earn them a spot on the podium.

In the silver medal position is the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth that accompanied the perception that there was a brief moment in the opening ceremony that someone decided had parodied the Last Supper… not the event, to be sure, but the painting.  Every pseudo-Christian yahoo with access to an X account or a Fox station was sore aggrieved, although it’s unclear whether people were actually offended or whether they dutifully pretended to be so when instructed by right-wing media.  And no, the fact that a lot of people purported to be offended does not mean there’s legitimacy to their claim.

The facts that there were a lot more people in the image than there were at the Last Supper, that there was no table, that the artist who created that particular vignette insisted it was intended to reference both the Greek origins of the Olympics and the notion of Dionysian (or, to use the Roman term, Bacchanalian) revelry: all this is to be ignored, apparently.  Even the Vatican got into the act, albeit belatedly, with this bizarre statement: “The Holy See was saddened by certain scenes at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games and cannot but join the voices raised in recent days to deplore the offense done to many Christians and believers of other religions [?!?]”  (emphasis added).

Curmie confesses that he didn’t know what the hell that moment was all about.  He didn’t think of Dionysus, although in retrospect that identification makes sense, but he fancies himself reasonably adept at understanding both cultural references and symbology, and never thought of the Last Supper, either.  It was just another in a series of rather strange vignettes that bespoke the avant-garde or, perhaps more specifically and relevantly, Frenchness. 

But let’s assume for the moment that Curmie was just asleep at the proverbial wheel on this one, and that the MAGA hordes were correct that DaVinci’s Last Supper was being referenced.  At the risk of rendering further offense, Curmie wonders, “So what?”  The Christian religion is not being parodied. 

First off, that would be a remarkably silly thing to do in a city whose principal tourist attractions include the cathedral of Notre Dame (it is an amazing space, and Curmie is very happy it will soon re-open), the chapel of Sainte-Chapelle, and the basilica of Sacré-Cœur.  But more to the point, there is nothing sacred about that painting.  A painting of a bunch of white guys all sitting on the same side of a long table isn’t likely to represent, even to believers, an accurate portrayal of a meal served a couple of millennia ago.  It’s on a religious theme; that’s it.  It would be only marginally sillier to have forbidden Curmie to cheer for his alma mater’s football team when we played the Holy Cross Crusaders.

There are, in fact, sacred relics in Paris.  When Curmie was last in that city, Sainte-Chapelle housed what they proclaimed to be the crown of thorns, a piece of the true cross, and so on.  (Those relics are now apparently housed in the Louvre.)  Make fun of those—or of items of similar significance to another religion—and you’re a first-class jackass, even if you’re “right” to doubt their authenticity.  But to suggest a pastiche of a painting obliquely and perhaps even unintentionally?  Seriously?  Your God is pretty much a wimp if he can’t handle that level of presumed disrespect.  And so, O Much-Abused Faux Christian, are you.

There’s no question that these folks deserve their silver medal.  But the fact that few observers immediately caught on to what was being represented, and that it’s merely a stretch as opposed to a fabrication to see the Last Supper referenced lends a pinch of legitimacy to the hand-wringers.  Despite their over-enthusiastic clamor, therefore, they don’t get the gold medal.

Remember, it’s the outrageousness of the paranoia, not the extent to which it gained traction, that earns points in the battle for the pearl-clutching gold.  The top of the podium is therefore reserved for those who gasped at the demonic figure in the closing ceremony.  

It is, as Curmie recognized immediately, and suspects you did, as well, Gentle Reader, a replica of the Winged Victory of Samothrace.  You can see the original here, to the right.  It strikes me as a particularly apt usage, combining the notion of victory, certainly relevant to the competitions of the previous couple of weeks, with the Olympics’ origins in Greece (Samothrace is a Greek island), with the host city (the statue has been on display in the Louvre for about a century and a half). 

It is certainly one of the most famous statues in the world.  What’s better known?  Well, the Venus de Milo, Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David, Christ the Redeemer overlooking Rio de Janeiro, the Statue of Liberty… and maybe something else that’s slipping Curmie’s mind right now.  But it’s certainly in the top ten in the world. 

Ah, but not to the proudly ignorant X user Carolann, who asserts that it is a “headless, and armless Angel with what appears to be an effigy of Lucifer (The Golden Voyager) standing in gold. Certainly a fitting close to the MOST demonic & satanic Olympics in history.”  Needless to say, there are followers who say that it is “a slap in the face to all Christians” and similar hogwash. 

Someone points out what virtually anyone with a modicum of cultural literacy knows (or at the very least suspects), but our gal Carolann responds with the classic “we can see what it is from here.”  It is impossible to argue with such idiots.  Evidence means nothing to them.  Only two things enter their minds: chauvinistic hatred and the quest for victimhood.

The latter used to be the sole preserve (or nearly so) of the so-called underprivileged or disenfranchised, whose failures are to be excused because of their demographic profile: hence, for example, criticisms of Kamala Harris’s politics or performance, even if deserved, are dismissed as racist or sexist or both.  But now the (pseudo-) Christian right is demanding their place in the Victimhood Hall of Fame, despite the lack of anyone actually doing anything to even inconvenience them.

The good news is that this particular hallucination doesn’t seem to have generated much of a following, but the mere fact that someone could go on the record with such paranoid ramblings about imaginary threats to an already privileged position is somewhere between chilling and terrifying.  Yes, the MAGA cultists are weird.

La la, how the life goes on.

Incompetence and Arrogance of Olympian Proportions

 

The three women you see pictured at the top of the page, Gentle Reader, currently stand in the third (i.e., bronze medal), fourth, and fifth positions in the Olympics final in the women’s floor exercise. You see them from top to bottom in their relative positions as Curmie writes this; whether those will be the final rankings remains to be seen.

Anyway, from the top down we see Romania’s Ana Bărbosu and Sabrina Maneca-Voinea, and the US’s Jordan Chiles.  Each of them has reason to believe that she—and she alone—should be the bronze medalist.  But a series of judges’ fuck-ups (sorry, Gentle Reader, there is no other term) have turned what should have been an easy ranking into a brouhaha that makes clear that whatever the NCAA or FIFA may do, the IOC isn’t going to give up its title of Most Corrupt and Incompetent Sports Organization without a fight.  But wait!  Who’s that coming up on the outside?  It’s the Tribunal Arbitral du Sport (Court of Arbitration for Sport), or TAS,  staking their claim, and they’re backing it up with hubristic posturing!  It’s coming down to the wire, Gentle Reader, and it’s anyone’s race!

Curmie has already made clear his distaste for sports which rely on the subjective opinions of judges rather than on some objective criterion.  Yes, referees can make mistakes, but at least we know that the team that scores the most points will win, as will the swimmer who touches the wall first.  In these events, it’s clear: the US won a gold medal in the 100m sprint because a photograph made it clear that Noah Lyles’s torso crossed the finish line .005 seconds before Kishane Thompson’s did.  The US women’s basketball team also narrowly won gold, beating the French team by a single point.

Those close finishes seem more arbitrary when there’s no objective way of distinguishing between the performances.  It’s also true that gymnastics is second only to figure skating in terms of judges giving credit to established stars just because they’re established. 

But let’s assume for the moment that the judges’ votes, though subjective, were both informed and honest.  The point that if you were to ask a dozen experts which of the three women discussed here was the “best,” suggesting that all three would get at least two votes apiece is both accurate and irrelevant.  These women didn’t go to Paris to get a participation trophy.

OK, so what happened?  By the time Chiles, the last to do her routine, hit the floor, the gold and silver medals were de facto wrapped up by Rebecca Andrade and Simone Biles, but the bronze was very much up in the air.  Bărbosu  and Maneca-Voinea were tied on points, with the former placed third because her execution score was higher.  Chiles performed well, but came up just short, with a score of 13.666, behind the two Romanian women’s 13.700.  But American coach Cecile Landi submitted an inquiry about Chiles’s difficulty score.  Less than a minute after Chiles’s score was posted, the appeal was granted, her score was raised by a tenth of a point, and she catapulted from fifth to third.

By this time, Bărbosu had already draped a Romanian flag over her shoulders to celebrate the first of her country’s Olympic medals in gymnastics in a dozen years: this in a sport once dominated by the likes of Nadia Comăneci.  Indeed, from the time Comăneci appeared on the scene in 1976 through 2012, six different Romanian women won Olympic gold in the floor exercise, and ten earned a medal of some color, averaging more than one competitor per Olympics on the podium.  This was big for the individual gymnast, but perhaps even more so for her country.

Needless to say, Bărbosu was devastated by the change in Chiles’s score.  It’s completely understandable that she felt frustrated, betrayed, and, yes, bitter.  Her initial response garnered her a substantial amount of harrassment on social media.  Of course, Chiles suffered that fate, as well, being accused of cheating, as if she had anything to do with the judges’ decisions.  Chiles received the bronze at the medal ceremony, and initiated one of the iconic images of the Games, as she and Biles bowed to Andrade in a gesture of respect and friendship to their Brazilian competitor.

But the story doesn’t end there.  The Romanian team submitted a challenge, claiming that the inquiry about Chiles’s score came after the allotted one-minute window for such appeals.  The TAS ruled that Landi’s challenge did indeed come in four seconds too late, and was therefore disallowed.  That meant Chiles’s score reverted to 13.666.  The TAS kicked the subject of what should happen to the medal back to the FIG (the Fédération International de Gymnastique) who punted the decision back to the IOC, who predictably ignored the Romanian team’s suggestion that all three women should receive bronze medals.  The IOC decided that, having already awarded Chiles the medal, they wanted it back, despite no wrongdoing on Chiles’s part.

But, as they say in the late night infomercials, Wait!  That’s not all!  Notice that the Romanians suggested that not merely Chiles and Bărbosu should receive medals, but so should Maneca-Voinea.  Why?  Well, the Romanian team sought to change her score because she suffered a tenth of a point reduction for stepping out of bounds… which replay showed she did not do.  But that appeal was denied, without explanation (!).

In other words, if the judges had done their job in the first place, Maneca-Voinea would have had a score of 13.800 and would have won the bronze medal.  Even with the extra tenth of a point she received for doing a more difficult routine than she was initially given credit for, Chiles would have finished behind her.  The inquiry, even if it was late, was still submitted before Chiles’s score was posted (the one minute timetable is from the end of the routine), so it would have gone forward, but there’d be no reason for the Romanians to quibble about the timing, because it wouldn’t have affected the medals.  No one cares who was fourth as opposed to fifth. 

Who precipitated the kerfuffle?  Not Chiles or Landi.  Not Bărbosu or Maneca-Voinea or their coaches.  This is all on the judges, the IOC, the FIG, and the TAS.  And not because somebody thinks Gymnast A was “better” than Gymnast B.  No, this is all about getting things objectively wrong.

Let’s not forget that getting Maneca-Voinea’s score correct in objective terms would have prevented all this.  But competent judges would have prevented the Chiles/Bărbosu controversy, as well.  They could have noticed that Landi’s inquiry came too late (assuming it did), and said, right then and there “we’re sorry, this request came outside the time limit, and we therefore can’t review the situation.”  Or they could have waited an extra 30 seconds or so before posting Chiles’s score, thereby announcing only the upwardly-revised total, placing her directly into third place, and not giving Bărbosu the impression that she’d won a medal, only to snatch it away moments later.

The US team subsequently submitted time-stamped evidence that Landi’s inquiry was submitted after 47 seconds, not 64.  The TAS, of course, refuses to re-examine the case in the light of new evidence, and Chiles has been ordered to return her medal.  After all, it’s her fault that the governing bodies fucked up and apparently believed false information (Curmie apologizes if it appears he’s strayed into politics here).

The two teams are, of course, looking after their own, but the Romanian suggestion that the three women each receive a medal is easily the closest we could get to a judicious and ethical conclusion.  Bărbosu has gone on social media commiserating with Chiles (she knows what it feels like, after all), and hoping that the three of them will share a podium in Los Angeles in 2028.  The athletes, the eldest of whom is Chiles at 23, are showing a lot more maturity and a lot more humility than the constipated and flat-out stupid narcissists at the IOC and TAS.

The US team vows to continue the fight to allow Chiles to keep the medal they believe is her due.  Curmie makes no prediction what will happen down the road.  What he does know is that if he were Jordan Chiles or Ana Bărbosu and they came for my medal, I’d be sore tempted to tell them to perform an exercise best suited to extremely limber hermaphrodites.  And I’d know, or at least suspect, that Sabrina Maneca-Voinea might just have a better case than I do.

EDIT: two new pieces of evidence further demonstrate the bungling of the TAS.  First, they notified the wrong US officials of the hearing (!).  Oh, and the International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution reports that Dr. Hamid G. Gharavi, the head of the hearing board which handed down the TAS decision, has represented Romanian interests in such cases on numerous occasions.  That doesn’t mean that he’s corrupt, of course, but he’s definitely pulling a Clarence Thomas by not recusing himself when there’s plenty of appearance of conflict of interest.

Breaking News

Curmie is told that this was intentional.  OK?

When Curmie was an undergrad, he wrote a fair number of theatre reviews for the college newspaper.  One show he reviewed was a student-written revue-style piece that had everything from original songs to vulgar humor (the central shtick was that we should solve the energy crisis by harvesting buffalo farts for the methane).  One segment Curmie praised was a hilarious parody of a pretentious modern dance piece.  There was one problem, though.  The choreographer/dancer in question wasn’t pleased; he didn’t think it was a parody.  Oops.

That incident was called to mind this week when Curmie learned that Rachael Gunn, a 36-year-old Australian college professor with a PhD in cultural studies, has become an internet sensation by placing last in the breaking (formerly known as break-dancing) competition at the Olympics.  Competing as B-girl Raygun (don’t blame her for that part; such noms de guerre are apparently required of competitors) she went through a series of maneuvers looking like a cross between a demented inchworm and flounder flopping on the deck of a fishing vessel.  What it certainly was not was anything that could reasonably be described as a demonstration of strength, balance, or skill of any description.

There are a lot of questions here, not the least of which being what the hell breaking is doing as an Olympic event (I refuse to call it a “sport”).  Curmie has always despised the notion of “sports” in which the winners are determined by judges rather than by who got the most points or crossed the finish line first or whatever other objective criteria might be employed.  This aversion is amplified when original moves are encouraged if not required.  If a gymnast, diver, or figure skater does one more spin than anyone else has ever done or does it in a different position than it’s ever been done, that’s obviously harder and can be reasonably rewarded.  But breaking has no apparent guidelines other than what each individual judge thinks is cool (or whatever term is currently in vogue).  Gunn says all her routines were original.  We can only hope so.

All of this, of course, is an extension of a belief that any activity that requires any measure of athleticism ought to be a sport.  Hence artistic (formerly “synchronized”) swimming, skateboarding, rhythmic gymnastics, breaking, etc. appear as Summer Olympic sports.  I’m not here to suggest that these events don’t require a combination of strength, precision, stamina, timing, and agility.  Of course they do!  So does ballet.  So does roofing a house.  I’m just not interested in seeing how many style points are deducted for using more nails than necessary or having a little caulk spill out of the gun.

Anyway, revenons à nos moutons…  Gunn was, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty awful.  Could I do her routine?  Not now, no.  But I’m pretty sure I could have when I was her age, and that puts her well beneath the status of an elite athlete.  So what’s going on here?  Well, she apparently won the qualifying tournament for Oceania (I really don’t want to see who came in second), and she’s represented Australia at the world championships three years in a row, so she’s at the Olympics fair and square.  There is a qualifying time in, say, a track event (I have a former student who placed second in the Olympic trials in a middle-distance race, but missed the qualifying time by a fraction of a second), but if you’re the best your nation or geographical area has to offer, you get to go, and it’s difficult to establish a qualifying standard if there’s nothing objective about the decision-making.

So, what’s going on?  Well, there’s the post on X that calls her a “grievance studies scholar” and claims she has argued that “breaking’s institutionalization via the Olympics will place breaking more firmly within this sporting nation’s hegemonic settler-colonial structures that rely upon racialized and gendered hierarchies.”  Speaking as a PhD in the humanities, Curmie responds, “Huh?”

It's unclear, to me at least, whether Gunn’s intention is trying to a). open breaking up to other cultural influences, b). participate in an activity she enjoys despite not being especially good at it, c). parody the “sport,” either for squishy pseudo-academic reasons or because it shouldn’t be competitive (or at least not an Olympic event), or d). get international attention for its own sake.  Of course, there’s always e). more than one of the above.

If “a,” I’m not seeing how we get there from her performance.  If “b,” I have no objection, although the Australian Olympics folks might wonder why they’re subsidizing her when they have dozens of current or potential actual Olympics-quality athletes who could use their support.  (They seem to be lining up in her defense, however)  But “c” and “d” seem the most likely candidates.

I have no grudge against lovable losers—as a lad I was a fan of the 1962 Mets, after all—and the 1988 Winter Games alone gave us such celebrities as the Jamaican bobsled team and British ski-jumper Michael David Edwards (a.k.a. “Eddie the Eagle”).  Moreover, the overwhelming majority of the athletes in Paris over the last fortnight and change had little hope of earning a medal.  They went there for the experience, to meet the international stars of their sport, to represent their country, or whatever.  The Olympic ideal, tarnished over the ages though it may be, emphasizes the competition over the result, and we’ve been inundated, both at the Games themselves and (with the notable exception of a series of obnoxious Nike ads) in the accompanying advertising, with stories of sportsmanship and mutual respect. 

So should we cheer Gunn on despite or even because of her obvious athletic inferiority compared to her competitors?  Or do we suspect that her non-conformity suggests she’s in it completely for herself or perhaps for her ideology, hoping to turn notoriety into fame and/or fortune?  Is she charmingly idiosyncratic or just starved for attention?  Is our hesitance to grant her the license we cheerfully provided to Eddie the Eagle based on our interpretation of her motives or on something as basic as sexism?  What do we make of the head judge and the Australian authorities rushing to her defense?

My answer to the series of questions in the previous paragraph, I’m afraid, is “I don’t know.”  My temptation is to believe that no one could be that bad unintentionally, but I’ve been mistaken about that before and felt awful about it.  Help me out here, Gentle Reader…

Going for the Bronze

 

Curmie suspects he’s not alone in having a love/hate relationship with the Olympics, and both parts of that status have manifested themselves this time around.  The doping and spying scandals, the Dutch beach volleyball player who served time for raping a 12-year-old girl, the whoring out to corporate sponsors (too many to choose from), the dumpster fire that was NBC’s coverage of the opening ceremonies (no link here, Gentle Reader, because Curmie likes you)… all of these are good reasons not to care. 

Speaking of that opening, Curmie may or may not write up a few thoughts about that utterly silly, yes, silly, controversy over that alleged affront to Christianity that got a few seconds of air time.  But that’s a topic for another day, if indeed at all.

It is only fair to note that, to NBC’s credit, the insufferable jingoism of earlier Olympics coverage has been toned down to merely annoying, we are no longer subjected to interminable medal ceremonies celebrating Americans, and most of the announcers (especially for sports the average American doesn’t know very well) and hosts not named Mike Tirico have been pretty competent.  Forgetting the irrelevant and puerile squeals of Kelly Clarkson and the narcissistic and ultra-nationalistic bleatings of Peyton Manning (what the hell were either of them even doing there?) at the opening ceremonies will be difficult, but overall, this is the best NBC has done in decades.

The Olympics have been corrupted in innumerable ways since Curmie was a wee lad, but there are moments that will forever endure.  Simone Biles and Katie Ledecky had nothing to prove—both were already the GOATs of their respective sports—but they proved it anyway.  There were, of course, memorable efforts by non-Americans: Léon Marchand, Ariarne Titmus, Summer McIntosh, Tom Pidcock, the South Korean archery team, et al.  But all those gold medalists were expected to win; indeed, anything less would be a profound disappointment.

Curmie is well aware that there is a special kind of pressure to win when a silver medal would be considered a failure, and he’d really like to have trademarked the line “go for the gold,” but today he wants to talk about two American athletes who were rightfully thrilled to clinch a bronze medal for their team, not least because of the dramatic manner in which that was accomplished.  As Curmie writes this, only a couple of track and field events have been completed, and there’s still a long way to go before medals are awarded in sports like basketball, volleyball, and soccer.  But irrespective of what happens over the next few days, these third-place finishes will be near if not at the top of Curmie’s memories.

There have, of course, been some great stories of athletes who achieved individual bronze: women’s gymnastics alone has given us Suni Lee, Jade Carey, and Jordan Chiles, all of whom have personal as well as team-related reasons to call the Paris Olympics their “redemption tour.”  But the ones who clinch a team medal where there hasn’t been one in a long time… or ever… these are the ones that will stay in our minds for many a year.

First up, then, is Stephen Nedoroscik, a.k.a. Pommel Horse Guy.  His story is most fun because of who he is: a self-identified nerd who seems as proud of his speed in the Rubix Cube (under 10 seconds) as in his skills on the horse.  And when Curmie says “on the horse,” that’s it.  He does one event, whereas his teammates are all-arounders, and there was no little sniping from the pundits (including more than one who are now gushing about him) about including a one-event specialist on the team. 

On the sidelines, he meditates, seemingly oblivious in the goings-on around him.  He looks like a stereotypical nebbish, complete with Clark Kent glasses… until he takes off his warm-up jacket.  Yes, that’s the upper body of an athlete.  And then the glasses come off as he prepares his mount.  He says he “sees” the horse with his hands, not his eyes.  (One is tempted to wonder if eyesight is as much of a reason as innate skill for why Nedoroscik doesn’t compete in events like vault and bars.)

By the luck of the draw, the US team found itself on the pommel horse as their last event in the team final.  And Nedoroscik batted clean-up, the last American to compete.  He could secure the American men’s team its first medal in 16 years, or he could fail.  The routines at the Olympic level are by definition extremely difficult; two medal contenders in the event final a few days later fell off the apparatus altogether.  The pressure had to have been enormous.  And he nailed it.  The US medal wasn’t gold, but it was pretty special.

The only thing keeping this performance from being even more special was the fact that he didn’t actually need the metaphoric home run he hit, NBC analyst and former team gold medalist and pommel horse bronze medalist Tim Daggett said “ironically, he needs to hit a double… no, he needs a single… he needs to get on base.  He could take a walk; just don’t get out.”  He hit it out of the park, anyway.  And the meme-meisters went into high gear.

But if Nedoroscik didn’t need to be quite Clark Kent/Superman, Alex “Spiff” Sedrick pretty much had to be superhuman in the bronze medal match of the women’s rugby 7s.  Her personal story doesn’t have quite the allure of Nedoroscik’s quiet assassin schtick, but she is an unlikely heroine.  She was in her first Olympics, and is one of the smallest, if not indeed the smallest, member of the team in a sport in which size and strength are valuable commodities.  The face of the team in both Tokyo and Paris has been Ilona Maher, who’s 5’10” and 200 pounds; Sedrick is 5’3”, 137.

But both the play itself and the timing were extraordinary.  The US team had been pretty well crushed by eventual champion New Zealand in the semi-finals, and Australia was upset by Canada.  That meant that in the bronze medal game the US Eagles faced the pre-tournament favorite when the Aussies were undoubtedly a bit pissed off at the world.  Curmie was not optimistic.

Surprisingly, the Americans kept it close at 7-7 until with only about a half a minute left, Australia scored a try.  The only good news from the US perspective was that it was nearer the sideline than to the center of the pitch, making the conversion attempt more difficult; the kick did indeed sail to the left of the uprights.  Still, the Eagles trailed 12-7 with time quickly dwindling away.

The kick went deep into the US end, and the vaunted Australian defense seemed to have the American squad pinned a very long way from the try line.  Until they didn’t.  Rupert Cox, NBC’s play-by-play guy, called it thusly: “They’re going to have to go the distance here if they’re going to take this one to Golden Point [extra time].  Ilona Maher.  Ramsey.  Sedrick.”  Just then, with seven seconds remaining on the clock, Sedrick side-stepped one defender and, to use a phrase Curmie stole from some sports reporter (Curmie regrets that he can’t find the link to include here), “absolutely molly-whopped” another.

Cox then delivered what will surely be one of the most-remembered lines in Olympic TV coverage since Dick Bank’s “Look at Mills!  Look at Mills!” in the men’s 10,000 in 1964.  Cox exclaimed, “Spiff Sedrick’s AWAY!”  Sedrick made it only to midfield as time ran out, but the play in process could proceed, and she carried the ball straight down the middle of the field, diving over the try line after a 90-meter gallop, finishing with the grin you see at the top of this entry.  There was some confusion about the conversion, as Sedrick thought for a moment that she’d already won the match, and the normal kicker was on the sideline.  With only a few seconds remaining to attempt the kick, however, Sedrick nailed the conversion herself, and the first Olympic medal for American rugby in literally a century was secured by a final score of 14-12. 

Rugby, especially women’s rugby, got a huge boost in this country, and not just because Michele Kang donated $4 million to the cause.  Ordinary people, folks who’ll never make that kind of money in their entire lives, let alone be able to give it away, are going to check out the sport and follow the Eagles; some young girls (and boys, too, Curmie suspects) are going to find the sport that engages them.

Nike has been running a series of reprehensible commercials under the slogan “Winning Isn’t for Everyone,” suggesting that even a second-place finish is somehow shameful, or a sign of inadequate mental or physical toughness.  These ads appear regularly on coverage of the Olympics, which has since its origins purported to be about the competition, not the victories.  Yes, that sloganeering shows little relationship to the reality of the overwhelmingly commercialized and politicized fortnight and change, but the residue of the original intent remains.  We even see it manifested occasionally in congratulations and condolences between competitors, and that’s a good thing.

The medal Spiff Sedrick secured for herself and her teammates wasn’t gold, but the moment was nothing if not golden, and we’ll see the video replayed again and again for years to come.  She proved the acuity of the great twentieth-century philosopher Yogi Berra’s observation that “it ain’t over ‘til it’s over,” underscoring what should have been Nike’s message: there is no shame in not being the very best, but sometimes you can shock the world if you don’t give up.  Sedrick is something of a reverse Batman: Curmie isn’t sure this fractured nation deserves her, but she is very definitely the heroine we need.