PARIS — Stephen Curry just wanted to feel like one of the Olympians.

During the July 26 opening ceremonies, he was floating down the Seine River on the Team USA boat, surrounded by hundreds of elite athletes. But the Golden State Warriors star’s celebrity status kept getting in the way of this once-in-a-lifetime experience.

“I didn’t feel like just one of (the athletes) at first, because people were coming up to me saying, ‘Can I have a picture with you?’” said Curry, who, at 36, is competing in his first Olympics. “It was that type of vibe. I had to actually stop and tell them, like, ‘No, I want to know who you are, what you do and level the playing field, because you’re here for a reason too.’”

Hours later, Curry had taken more than 200 pictures with other athletes on his phone while learning all about the timeless tradition of Olympic pin-trading. This would become Curry’s favorite off-court moment of them all.

“I got to be a fan,” he said. “It was special.”

For the players on this American men’s Olympic basketball team — who are among the most famous athletes on the planet, and whose collective star power is the primary reason they stay away from the athlete villages during the Games — they’ve cherished these chances to connect with and marvel at their contemporaries these past few weeks.

And as the Games near an end, with Team USA set to play in a semifinal Thursday against Serbia and the potential gold-medal game two days later, the reminiscing has already begun.

When Kevin Durant was asked to pick his favorite memory of these Games, the answer came without hesitation.

”Seeing Simone,” he said with a smile.

Much like LeBron or KD or Steph, legendary American gymnast Simone Biles is one of the few athletes here whose Q rating is so astronomical that no last name is needed. So on Aug. 1, one night after the men’s basketball team beat South Sudan in pool play and two nights before the Americans would rout Puerto Rico, a group that included Durant, Curry, Devin Booker, Jrue Holiday and Tyrese Haliburton went to watch Biles in action.

She won her sixth gold medal that night, winning the all-around event while fellow American Suni Lee took bronze.

“I’d never been to a gymnastic event up close like that,” said Durant, the Phoenix Suns star and three-time gold medalist who is hoping to become the program’s first ever to win a fourth. “Obviously I’d watched (gymnastics) on TV, but it’s different when you’re there. And just to see her greatness, along with the other girls who put so much time into their craft, it’s just amazing to see how great they’ve become.”

But Durant’s observations went well beyond the thrilling result.

Until that evening, he wasn’t aware that gymnastics is such a youthful sport. He heard all about how the 27-year-old Biles is considered “old” in her sporting space, and how there are so many gymnasts — like 16-year-old American Hezly Rivera — who become elite before they can vote.

He heard the widespread criticism Biles received back in 2021, when she pulled out of the Tokyo Olympics despite being a gold-medal favorite in most of her events while citing a condition known as “the twisties.” Biles, who would later open up about the mental health challenges she was facing at the time, would become disoriented in the air and chose to shut it down as a result. To Durant, that decision — and the roaring comeback that has unfolded since — are just as much of a part of her legend as everything that came before.

But what Durant admires most about Biles, it seems, is how unafraid she is to tell the world how she feels, no matter what scrutiny comes her way. In front of the cameras. On social media. Wherever it may be.

Durant, no stranger to scrutiny himself, is notorious for engaging with fans and media members on public platforms. Biles, in that way and so many more, is now one of his inspirations.

“When people see so much potential in you at an early age, you’re gonna get nitpicked like that, and she’s been through it at the highest of highest levels,” Durant said. “For her to continue to come out and showcase the brilliance every day, and also let people know that they sound crazy talking against her? To be able to do both is inspiring.”

Durant paused.

“So yeah, she’s inspired me to keep tweeting and keep doing what I do on the court too,” he said with a laugh.

Of all the American hoopers creating memories, Booker is the most qualified to actually document them. Way back in 2016, when he was looking for creative methods of chronicling his first-ever All-Star experience in Toronto, Booker decided to go the vintage route and use a camcorder rather than a cell phone.

“I have some really good friends of mine who introduced me to cameras in my rookie year, and they were like, ‘Yo, keep a handycam on you (because) it feels more authentic than an iPhone,” said Booker, the 27-year-old who won a gold medal in the Tokyo Games and is in his second Olympics. “You get that old-school-style feel. It makes you pay attention to it more, makes you listen a little bit more. With an iPhone camera, the camera’s too good.”

Fast-forward to these Paris Games, two of Booker’s friends who assist with the production of his online content came along with him, and he has been sharing high-quality, well-edited video that routinely goes viral on his Instagram feed.

“We watch all the video back, then just cut it up,” Booker said. “The handicam is easy. We just take the coolest moments, and put them all into one.”

Like Durant, Booker said the chance to see Biles up close ranks at the top of his personal list. But there were plenty more.

On Sunday afternoon, Booker went to watch his “good friend,” the American fencer Miles Chamley-Watson, in a bronze-medal team match against France, then made the trek out to Stade de France to witness Noah Lyles’ stunning 100-meter final victory that required a photo-finish.

If he had to choose a favorite experience besides Biles — that was Durant’s pick, after all — Booker said it was the July 29 trip to La Concorde when his passion for skateboarding was fulfilled like never before.

“Seeing (American skateboarders) Nyjah (Huston), seeing Jagger (Eaton), Yuto (Horigome) from Japan — who all went top three — those are guys I admire,” Booker said. “I’ve tried to be on a skateboard, and I grew out of that very quick. But I’m in tune with skate culture, and how they go about their business, and I f— with it.

“The experience has been second to none for me. It’s getting around all the other events and seeing all the other talented people in the world at the same time. It’s something that I’ll pass down to generations of mine. I’ll send my handycam footage down to my kids’ kids’ kids, and hopefully they feel it.”

As Curry thinks back on all the different interactions that brought him joy, he starts listing the mementos that came his way during some of those moments. None of them would compare to the gold they’re all striving for, of course, but they’re still special.

He had a pingpong ball signed by the American women’s table tennis team when they came to watch the men’s basketball team practice. And yes, for those who wondered, that’s the same group of women who told Minnesota Timberwolves star and self-proclaimed table tennis extraordinaire Anthony Edwards that he wouldn’t be able to score a single point against any of them during their opening ceremonies boat ride.

Anthony Edwards thinks he can compete with the USA table tennis team 😂 pic.twitter.com/30GdJOmR3G

— Sideline Sources (@sidelinesources) July 27, 2024

And then there are the pins. So many cool pins.

“My (USA) skateboarding one is my favorite,” Curry said. “I got one from Team Jamaica, which was cool since I’ve got a lot of family on my wife’s side that’s from Jamaica. Pistol shooting too.”

He has a plan for the pictures too.

“I’m sentimental like that,” he said. “So once I get the prints, I might actually archive this and put it in a way where you pull out a bottle of wine six months from now, or six years from now, and just go through them and reminisce a little bit. I just want to have all those memories, to be able to relive it.”

Required Reading

(Top photo of Steph Curry cheering on Simone Biles: Jean Catuffe / Getty Images)

Follow live coverage of Day 12 of the 2024 Paris Olympics, with 21 gold medals on offer

PARIS — It’s a Saturday morning at the Team GB Olympic House and Andy Macdonald is wearing one of the two suits he owns. This is the new one, but it doesn’t really fit. A little loose in the middle, a little long in the sleeves. There’s also the issue that, despite being 51, Macdonald looks ridiculous in a suit. That’s not an insult. It’s an abject truth.

“Skateboarders wear suits to weddings and funerals, that’s it,” he says.

Macdonald is in a new world, so he’s dressed for the occasion. As a member of the Great Britain Olympic Team, he was given an entire kit of new gear and instructions. Here’s what to wear at the opening ceremony. Here’s what to wear for the closing ceremony. Here’s a load of official Adidas gear. And here’s a suit for formal gatherings. You know, in case the king invites him for tea.

“But I don’t think the king is going to invite me to tea,” Macdonald says, “so I figured I’d wear the suit to this press thing.”

Macdonald’s laugh lines are deep, the collateral of a lifetime spent having a good time. The suit is meant to be a joke, he says. A nod to all the illogical lines that needed to cross in order for him to be here. That he’s the old one — born in July 1973 — in a sport often dominated by teenagers. That he was one of the central figures in the early movement to have skateboarding added as an Olympic sport, and he did so in the early 2000s, before his current Team GB skate teammates, Sky Brown and Lola Tambling, both 16, were born. That he’s competing for the English, despite being born and raised in the United States. That he, one of the sport’s true originals, is about to drop into an Olympic park blocks away from the Eiffel Tower and the Grand Palais.

Macdonald is aware of his age. He’s asked about it every day. He’s asked to rattle off a long, wretched list of brutal injuries. A personal wiki page of broken this, shattered that. He’s asked about having an 18-year-old son while competing with 16 and 17-year-olds.

But then Macdonald flips everything around.

The injuries? In 35 years of skating, he’s broken an ankle, once, and a patella, once. He’s had his knee scoped once and his ankle scoped. That’s it. “Very lucky,” he says.

And why should he feel weird? He’s not old. He’s just been at the skate park longer than everyone else, is all.

“Look at it this way — I was already there when the teenagers showed up,” Macdonald says. “I was there when they were figuring out where to put their feet on the board. Chances are, I taught them how to drop in for the first time. Some of the first tricks that they learned? I probably invented some of them. Or I was there when someone else invented them.”

This is Macdonald’s charm. A narrator in a sport steeped in oral history, he’s competing in these Olympics as a sort of patron saint. He’ll be there — Wednesday, men’s park prelims, fourth heat, fifth and final run. Andrew Macdonald from Great Britain.

Sort of.

Macdonald was born and raised around Boston. He fell into skateboarding early. His first driveway ramp was a quarter pipe, 8 feet wide, 8 feet high. He built it with ramp plans ordered from a magazine and soon emerged as a serious skater living on the wrong side of the country. He moved to San Diego to pursue the lifestyle.

That’s where the legend grew. At the same time “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” was hitting the shelves as a video game that every person of a certain age remembers, Macdonald had his own video game being released for PlayStation 1. “MTV Sports: Skateboarding Featuring Andy Macdonald.” The game looked an awful lot like Pro Skater and came with a musical accompaniment that was extremely Year 2000. System of a Down, Cypress Hill, Deftones, Pennywise, Goldfinger.

You might not remember Macdonald’s version because Hawk’s was comically better.

“It kind of vanished into the ether,” Macdonald says with a laugh.

But this was a time when skateboarders were going mainstream and the X Games were bringing action sports into people’s homes. Macdonald was in the middle of all of it. He was involved in an Olympic skating movement that began around 2003 or 2004, after NBC took over Olympic broadcast rights. He was a founding board member of USA Skateboarding not because he wanted to be an Olympian, but because “I just wanted to have some involvement as our sport went in that direction.”

The sport would have to wait until Tokyo 2020 before finally debuting.

Macdonald watched those Games from afar, seeing a long line of friends get their Olympic moment, albeit in a setting sapped by the pandemic. After the Games, he heard story after story about what it felt like to be an Olympian. One skater, Amelia Brodka, an American with parents from Poland, who competed in Tokyo under the Polish flag, suggested Macdonald look at his options.

As it turns out, Rodrick Macdonald, Andy’s father, was born in Luton, England, about 30 miles north of London.

So Macdonald looked into getting a British passport.

Then he looked into Paris 2024.

Last July, shortly before his 51st birthday, Macdonald made it through the Olympic Qualifier Series in Budapest.

“By an act of God,” he says.

“Some of the first tricks that they learned? I probably invented some of them,” Macdonald says of competing against teenagers in the Olympics. (Barrington Coombs / Getty Images)

Now he’s here, ready to compete in an event against a field led by defending gold medalist Keegan Palmer, a 21-year-old Aussie. The top American is 17-year-old Gavin Bottger.

Skill-wise, Macdonald remains among the best skaters in the world. Physically, things are a little different.

“They take a slam on cement and are back on their feet,” he says of his teenage competitors. “They get up and are like, ‘Where are we skating this afternoon!?’ I’m like, ‘Eh, I’m gonna go pick up my kids from school. Like, this is it for me skating today.’”

Macdonald has been jumping into the air and landing on his feet or his knees since about 1990. He’s avoided major injuries, but not defied time. His body is 51. Cartilage is calcified. Ankles are worn. Knees are worn. Lower back is wrenched.

His contemporaries are coaches. Sam Beckett, the British national team coach, had a long career in vert and park disciplines. He and Macdonald go way back, mainly because Macdonald was Beckett’s cabin counselor at the annual Woodward Camp near State College, Pa.

Macdonald, see, is 19 years older than Beckett.

That’s what happens when you’re a walking history book.

“The last time I was here was 16 years ago, and I was doing a demo with Tony Hawk inside the Grand Palais,” he said this week. “There was like 5,000 people in the Grand Palais, and Tony did a 900, which bought the house down, obviously.

“But that wasn’t even the end of the show, because he grabbed the mic and he was like, ‘And now, everyone watch Lin-Z Adams do the women’s first ever 540!’ Then she dropped in and did the first ever female 540, right in the Grand Palais. So that’s a little Parisian skateboard history for you.”

There’s more coming on Wednesday. Macdonald, who Hawk says is a “prime example of how much discipline can pay off,” will get a prologue to his own story.

It’s one all those younger guys might tell someday.

(Top photo of Andy Macdonald practicing ahead of the Paris Olympics: Garry Jones / Getty Images)

CLEVELAND — Francisco Lindor is a natural right-handed batter who desperately wanted to switch hit as a child to be more like his heroes. His brother and his cousin were both switch hitters, as was his favorite player, Hall of Fame second baseman Roberto Alomar. 

Lindor pleaded with his father, Miguel, to bat left-handed. Miguel fought against it for years because Lindor was such a good hitter from the right side. Why intentionally make yourself worse by doing something so unnatural? It didn’t make sense. 

“That was the way my dad forced me to practice,” Lindor said. “If I did everything right, then I could hit from the left side.”

Now Lindor is part of a dwindling subset of players. Switch hitters are a dying breed in the major leagues, particularly among Americans. 

Of the roughly 550 batters to log a plate appearance through the end of June, only 58 were switch hitters, according to Stathead. It continues a trend from last season, when baseball’s switch hitters plummeted to their lowest numbers in 50 years.

Only 26 of those are American-born players, one more than last year, which saw the lowest number among Americans in nearly 60 years.

While Latin players are often encouraged to switch hit as children, it has almost become taboo among youth in America. Seattle Mariners manager Scott Servais spent 11 years as a right-handed catcher in the majors. He believes being a switch hitter is the biggest advantage in all of sports.

“Youth baseball in our country has changed dramatically over the last 15 years,” Servais said. “The focus ultimately comes down to college scholarships or getting into pro ball, and the lack of patience in letting those things develop in young players. So they get on Select teams and they’re traveling all over the country and Mom and Dad are paying a lot of money to put you in front of all of the top coaches. Why would we ever put you in a situation where you might fail? And you’re going to fail. Switch hitting is really hard. It’s really hard when you’re young. And they’re afraid of failure.”

Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor, who had to convince his dad to let him switch hit, is part of a shrinking number of major leaguers who can hit from both sides. (Charles LeClaire / USA Today)

Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh is unsure which side of the plate is his natural side. Raleigh, like Baltimore’s Adley Rutschman, is a triple world score combination of a switch-hitting catcher with power. He has always been right-hand dominant in everyday activities, but from his earliest memories in baseball, the slugging catcher could swing the bat from both sides of the plate because his father made him do it that way. 

“Every day I thank the Lord my dad made me a switch hitter,” Raleigh said. “Because I see some of this nasty stuff that’s being thrown up there.”

The number of switch hitters in baseball has been declining for the last decade and finally bottomed out last year, when only 63 of more than 650 players logged at-bats from both sides of the plate. That’s down from an all-time high of 111 switch hitters in 1998. American-born switch hitters peaked at 78 in 1987, according to Stathead.

Carlos Beltrán was a rookie with the Kansas City Royals during baseball’s switch-hitting peak. He played 20 years and hit 438 home runs as one of the best switch hitters of his era. He began toying with the idea after playing winter ball in Puerto Rico with Bernie Williams, who also switch hit. Beltrán struggled so much staying back on offspeed pitches and breaking balls that he wanted to give up and go back to hitting solely right-handed. Kevin Long, now the Phillies hitting coach, was with Beltrán in the minors and encouraged him to stick with it. 

“Thank God for Kevin Long,” Beltrán said. “He said, ‘We are so close. Let’s stay with it. Keep trying.’ I was grateful that I had a coach that believed that what I was doing was the right thing. And he didn’t let me really go back to the right side. I don’t know what my career would have been if I only would have been a right-handed hitter.”

Carlos Beltran credits Kevin Long for encouraging him to stick with it in the minors when he was struggling to hit left-handed. (Bob Levey / Getty Images)

Baseball has changed drastically since Beltrán played. The game is more specialized, even at the youth levels, as hitters chase data and cutting-edge metrics. The changes make some of the past greats bristle. 

“This generation has lost the ability to hit,” said former Reds star Eric Davis, now a special assistant and roving instructor for the club. “You have a lot of guys today who are caught up in exit velocity and launch angle and they’re not being taught how to hit. They’re not good hitters. So the game is not going to bless them unless you develop a skill to play the game for a long time. And switch hitting for some guys is an avenue to play the game for a long time.”

Davis, who hit right-handed during his 17 seasons in the majors, switch hit early in his career but said he gave it up as a minor leaguer because his coaches told him he didn’t struggle to hit sliders. The majority of switch hitters are natural-born righties learning to hit left-handed. The biggest benefit is to hit sliders from right-handed pitchers that break toward the left-handed batter, rather than trying to hit pitches tailing away as a right-hander.

In youth leagues, however, pitchers don’t throw breaking pitches until they’re teenagers, and most don’t develop great movement until closer to high school. It leaves kids struggling to hit from a side of the plate where they aren’t comfortable and aren’t having success. And they’re doing it to hit breaking pitches that won’t actually start breaking drastically until years later.

There is no magic age to begin switch hitting, but various hitters and coaches polled on the subject believe the right age to start ranges from 9 or 10 years old up to around 13. Beltran, who started switch hitting in the minor leagues, is the rare exception. For teenagers who wait until they reach high school, it’s often already too late.

“If you have problems with sliders and you want the ball coming toward you rather than going away from you, work on being a switch hitter,” said Cleveland Guardians veteran coach Sandy Alomar Jr., who played 20 years in the majors as a catcher. Alomar came up as a switch hitter like his brother, Roberto. His father made both boys switch hit at a young age. Sandy dropped hitting left-handed his first year in the minors, while Roberto compiled 2,724 hits, 210 home runs and 12 consecutive All-Star appearances as one of the greatest switch hitters of all time. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2011.

Rutschman, Lindor and Cleveland’s José Ramírez are among the game’s best switch hitters today. Ramírez made his sixth All-Star team this year and Rutschman made his second. Lindor did not make the team, but his season was good enough to justify another All-Star bid.

Guardians third baseman José Ramírez, who competed in this year’s Home Run Derby, is among baseball’s best current switch hitters. (Jerome Miron / USA Today)

Reds third baseman Jeimer Candelario is one of the few American-born switch hitters, but he actually skews the numbers a bit. Candelario counts on the U.S. side because he was born in New York City, but his father moved the family to the Dominican Republic when he was 5 to open a baseball academy. Candelario worked on a plan developed by his father to hit from both sides of the plate every day as a child.

Latino players comprised about 30 percent of major-league rosters last year. They made up more than 60 percent of all switch hitters. 

“It’s a lot of work. It’s not easy,” Candelario said. “Not every day is going to be perfect, but it’s the consistent work every single day. If you don’t fall in love with it, you’re not going to have success. You have to love it.”

Not everyone believes in the concept. Mets hitting coach Eric Chavez, who batted .268 with 260 home runs over 17 years as a left-handed hitting third baseman, marvels at what Lindor can do, but he doesn’t encourage others to try it. 

“You’re two different people, two different swings,” he said. “Because the body moves differently. You’re right-hand dominant, now you come to the left side and your right hand is on the bottom (of the bat). You’re training two different swings.

“You can have a right-handed at-bat and feel really good. In that same game, you can go lefty and think, ‘Oh crap, where’s my swing?’”

Alex Miklos played Division I baseball at Kent State University, where he was a three-year captain and led the nation in triples in 2014. He is now co-owner of BioSport Athletics, a baseball and softball facility in suburban Cleveland that opened two years ago and has trained between 900 and 1,000 athletes ranging in age from 7 up through the professional ranks. Miklos estimates that roughly half of the players who have trained at BioSport are position players. Out of those 450-500, he said about 10 have asked about switch hitting and only three or four have worked on it consistently.

“There’s no such thing as being too early. The earlier the better,” Miklos said. “But there’s definitely too late. It’s something you have to commit to. By the time you’re 13 or 14 years old, you’ve established patterns. It’s really tough to develop that ability from the other side of the plate.”

Youth sports have become so competitive in the U.S. that kids feel like every at-bat matters, even on the club level or travel leagues, Miklos said. It can be difficult for kids — and coaches — to “give away” at-bats in games to work on player development, such as a right-handed hitter learning to bat left-handed.

Whether the number of major-league switch hitters begins to increase again, particularly in the United States, will depend on how it is handled in the youth leagues going forward. The data isn’t encouraging. 

Out of about 140 of baseball’s best prospects listed on FanGraphs’ preseason list, ranging from Class AAA down to Rookie ball, 34 were switch hitters who had yet to debut. 

Eight were Americans. 

GO DEEPER

Missing Bats, Part 1: How an obsession with strikeouts upended the balance of baseball

(Photo of Francisco Lindor: Jamie Sabau / Getty Images)