After the better part of three weeks spent in front of the television, learning about drones and developing unexpected expertise in triple jump – I just knew that was a foul – it is time to reconcile a cold, hard truth. It is ending.
Soon, we will have to leave the couch and move, slowly, blinking, back into society. These 2024 Paris Olympics delivered on the promise of keeping us captivated, but before we get back outside, let’s take a moment to remember some of what we have just witnessed.
Here are the top 15 Olympic moments from one Canadian couch potato.
(*Note: This list is not exhaustive. We readily acknowledge more than 15 cool things happened.)
Femke Bol: A kick for the ages
Three runners were ahead of Femke Bol when she finally got a hand on the baton for the anchor leg of the 4×400-metre mixed relay. The Belgian and British runners were already sprinting away, and the American leader was practically in another postal code.
Bol began her hunt. The 23-year-old made unfortunate headlines a year earlier, when she tumbled mere metres from the finish line in the same event at the world championship. It was a heartbreaking finish: “It happened, and it sucks big time.”
Back under the lights at Stade de France, Bol slowly began to reel in her opponents. By the 200-metre mark, she had caught the Belgian. She got the Brit early in the final stretch. The crowd was roaring, and CBC play-by-play voice Mark Lee was in top form: “Running out of racetrack, but she’s got lots left – there she goes!”
She ran her leg in 47.93 seconds. She ran past the American. She ran to a gold medal.
“I just went for it,” Bol told reporters. “We just wanted a medal this time; we didn’t think it would be gold, just a medal. Well, we got gold and are the Olympic champions.”
The Turkish John Wick
A 51-year-old won an Olympic silver medal dressed like your high school science teacher on a field trip. Yusuf Dikec and teammate Sevval Ilayda Tarhan won silver in mixed team 10-metre air pistol, the first time Turkey earned a medal in the sport.
That is not what made Dikec internet-famous, though. It was the way in which he won it: In jeans, with his hand casually in his pocket. He wore regular glasses, and not the protective kind, and he did not wear anything special to protect his ears.
As the usually buttoned-down Associated Press described him: “He’s been likened to a regular guy competing at the Olympics, or even a hitman.”
“At that moment, everyone says I seemed very calm,” Dikec said, according to Reuters, “but actually, storms were raging inside me.”
Another cool shooter
A 31-year-old from South Korea became a viral sensation at the Games, both for her cool demeanour and her choice of attire. Kim Ye-ji wore futuristic glasses and a baseball cap turned backward during her run in the 10m air pistol event.
She also had a small stuffed elephant tied to her waist – a toy belonging to her young daughter.
“I didn’t feel any pressure,” she told reporters. “I had a lot of fun out there.”
She won a silver medal. (On Friday, she collapsed during a press conference, with Reuters reporting it was “apparently due to stress and exhaustion.”)
Big cuss word: Bigger win
You can be forgiven if you did not know the name of Cole Hocker. In fact, unless you are an immediate family member, you can probably be forgiven if you learned it this summer, and then forgot it again. But if you saw it, you can never forget his run in the 1,500-metre final.
Nobody was talking about Hocker, the American. The focus was on Jakob Ingebrigtsen, the defending Olympic champion from Norway, and Josh Kerr, his British rival. Hocker was just a supporting character in their story until the final metres of the home stretch.
After biding his time behind the leaders, Hocker kicked, and he won. In the stands, video of his father, Kyle, soon surfaced on social media. He was watching with the rest of us, and it did not take a professional to read his lips as his son approached the line: “What the f—!”
Julien Alfred: Star of Saint Lucia
According to most available data, there are fewer than 200,000 citizens of Saint Lucia. The small – but picturesque – island nation sent its first delegation to an Olympics in 1996, but it had never won a medal (in seven tries) heading into the Paris Games.
Mathematics underscores the reason. Saint Lucia has never sent more than six athletes to an Olympics. (That isn’t even enough to field a rugby sevens team for a fun game inside the athletes’ village.) It sent four athletes to France this summer.
Julien Alfred was one of them. The 23-year-old was largely unknown in mainstream circles, but she was a celebrity in the NCAA, where she was named top female track athlete for her work with the University of Texas Longhorns in 2023.
In the rain and under the lights, she won: Setting a national record, at 10.72 seconds.
“Growing up, I used to be on the field struggling, with no shoes, running barefoot, running in my school uniform, running all over the place,” Alfred told reporters. “We barely have the right facilities. The stadium is not fixed. I hope this gold medal will help Saint Lucia build a new stadium, to help the sport grow.”
Surf’s up, on an award-winning photo
On July 29, Brazilian surfer Gabriel Medina hit a big wave during the men’s surfing event off Teahupo’o, in Tahiti. On his way back down, he kicked off his surfboard and raised an index finger in the air.
Jerome Brouillet, a photographer with the news service Agence-France Presse, clicked his shutter in the moment. He captured an image of the surfer and his board frozen above the wave, both upright, as if celebrating on a dais.
“When I’m shooting at Teahupo’o I don’t shoot in such a high burst mode, because at the end of the day, if you push too hard on the button you come back with 5,000 shots in a day, and I don’t like that,” the photographer told AFP. “I got four shots of him out of the water and one of the four shots was this photo.”
An upset silences the crowd in Paris
Nobody was accusing the Canadian women’s rugby team of being a pushover leading into the 2024 Olympics. The program won a bronze medal at the 2016 Rio Games, and while it had undergone extensive personnel changes, Canada was still due its respect.
It just wasn’t a favourite. Not in a pool with New Zealand, which was loaded with some of the biggest names in the game, including Michaela Blyde, the atomic bomb of speed and strength who destroyed teams through the preliminary round.
Understandably, then, there was a festive mood at Stade de France as Canada faced the host nation in a quarter-final match. There was singing and chanting and expectation until Piper Logan, a 23-year-old from Calgary, snatched the ball out from a scrum in Canadian territory and sprinted nearly the length of the field.
She scored again in the second half. And when Chloe Daniels snuck down the wing for another try, the stadium sounded like an open-air library. Canada won, 19-14.
“To win a medal would mean everything,” Logan told reporters. “We’ve been waiting for this one for quite a while.”
Another shocking upset
Australia was undefeated during the group stage of the women’s rugby sevens tournament in France. More than that, the Aussies obliterated Ireland in their quarter-final match, a 40-7 rout that set them on a collision course with Canada.
It was threatening to be a painful collision for Canadian fans. Australia built a 12-0 lead in the first half, cruising along with a clear advantage in possession time, which is such a key in the sport. And then: Charity Williams happened.
The 27-year-old caught the Australians off-guard on the final play before halftime, running nearly the length of the field for a try. Something shook loose, and the Aussies were never quite able to put it back together.
Canada dominated the second half, en route to stunning 21-12 upset win. The Canadians advanced to the final to play New Zealand, where they would earn the first silver medal in program history.
Alysha Corrigan would tell reporters: “Words can’t describe how proud I am of this group.”
Poor, poor Australia
Australia faced the United States in the bronze medal game for women’s rugby sevens. It was another game the Aussies were expected to win, and that is exactly how it seemed to be unfolding as time ticked down in the second half.
It was only a matter of seconds. The ball was pinned deep in U.S. territory, and the Aussies held a 12-7 lead. And then: Alex Sedrick broke through a pair of Australian tackles and, with time ticking to zero, ran 80 metres for the game-tying try.
The U.S. nailed the conversion to win its first Olympic bronze medal in the sport.
“I hope it means we get more games in stadiums like this, that we get more money and funding for the women’s game,” American star Ilona Maher told reporters. “We deserve it. We need more girls in the US trying rugby and seeing what it can do for them.”
Mondo? Mondo!
Perhaps the most powerful feature of the Olympics is the enduring ability to captivate with a story. Before a random Monday night in August, most Canadians could be forgiven for not knowing the name Armand Duplantis.
By the end of the CBC broadcast, though, we felt we knew everything about him. And more than that, we were all suddenly enthralled with a 24-year-old representing Sweden in pole vault. We knew him, now, as Mondo.
He was the last active athlete on the floor of Stade de France that night. And when he broke his own world record, clearing 6.25 metres, the stadium erupted, along with living rooms around the world.
“I haven’t processed how fantastic that moment was,” he told reporters. “It’s one of those things that don’t really feel real, such an out-of-body experience.”
Pommel Horse Guy
Stephen Nedoroscik is a 25-year-old with an electrical engineering degree from Penn State University. He lives with a genetic eye condition that makes him sensitive to light. He wears glasses. And as we all learned, he is the ultimate pommel horse specialist.
He helped the U.S. team to an all-around bronze – its first Olympic medal since he was in elementary school. He won bronze in the individual event a few days after that.
“A lot of horse specialists, you’ll see, are engineers or, you know, really smart people,” he told The Associated Press. “They’re just kind of nerds. And honestly, kind of geeky people, they’re all just kind of fun.”
Every Canadian medal
Camryn Rogers, the 25-year-old Canadian who won gold in women’s hammer throw, told Postmedia reporter Andrea Hill about how she felt when it finally sunk in. The cheers from Stade de France began to break through her protective coating; her coach, her family. The moment was clear: “Oh my God, this is it. It’s over, I did it. We did this thing.”
Every athlete in an Olympic uniform endures years – a lifetime – of training just to make it to the global stage. Almost by definition, then, every medal has a story: In hammer throw or in rugby sevens, in swimming or fencing.
Alysha Newman incorporated her injury history when she celebrated her bronze in the pole vault, feigning a pulled hamstring before breaking into an abbreviated twerk. Boxer Wyatt Sanford won bronze, but only with help from just about everyone living back home, in tiny – but fiercely proud – Kennetcook, N.S.
Sophiane Methot won bronze in trampoline after missing out on Tokyo three years earlier, due to injury. “I’ve had a lot of mental blocks,” she told reporters. “Just to be here, get through those things, and go out there, do the performance of a lifetime and get bronze is amazing.”
I said “drone,” not “done”
Days before the Olympic flame was set alight, Canadians learned about drones, and what role an “unaccredited analyst” was supposed to fulfill. Everyone knows the rest of it: How three coaches – including head coach Bev Priestman – were sent home, then suspended, and how Canada Soccer was fined.
The fallout from that will be a souvenir that follows Canadian soccer officials for the next several months, if not years. What the players – who were not directly tied to spying with evidence – did on field bears remembering for much longer.
A six-point penalty from FIFA meant they had to win all three group stage games to move onto the knockout stage. Despite the chaos around them, that is exactly what they did.
“We’re not cheaters,” defender Vanessa Gilles told reporters after one win, “we’re damn good players, we’re a damn good team.”
One GOAT …
Serena Williams. Tom Brady. Spike Lee. Tom Cruise. Natalie Portman. Lady Gaga. They all made a cameo appearance at Bercy Arena to watch Simone Biles, the generational talent, make her triumphant return to the Olympics.
The 27-year-old did not disappoint anyone in the arena, or watching at home. She won four more medals, giving her 11 for her Olympic career. (So far: She made it clear she was not a fan of being asked about whether she planned to return for the 2028 Los Angeles Games.)
“I’ve accomplished way more than in my wildest dreams,” Biles told reporters. “Not just at this Olympics, but in the sport.”
… and another
Thomas Jolly, the artistic director for Paris 2024, told reporters it was customary for a host country to play its national anthem during the Opening Ceremony. In Fance, he said, there is a second anthem, the “Hymne A l’Amour,” by Edith Piaf.
Celine Dion, who had not performed in public since 2020, would sing it.
She was powerful. She was perfect. The television coverage caught tears in the eyes of those along the Seine, and they very likely would have caught many more from those watching at home.
“She wanted to be on the Eiffel Tower,” Jolly told reporters. “She was very clear. We offered her other suggestions depending on her health, and she said, ‘No. I’m going to do it on the Eiffel Tower because that’s what you want.’”