Lifestyle
These Olympic medals don’t exist — so we made them up
Clockwise from left, pole vaulter Armand Duplantis, the Canoe Slalom Women’s Kayak Cross, women’s rugby player Sammy Sullivan, and the Men’s 100m Final.
Kirill Kudrtavtsev/AFP via Getty Images; Alex Davidson/Getty Images; Kristy Sparow/Getty Images; Richard Heathcote/Getty Images
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Kirill Kudrtavtsev/AFP via Getty Images; Alex Davidson/Getty Images; Kristy Sparow/Getty Images; Richard Heathcote/Getty Images
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The real Olympic medals are given out according to rules about speed, scores, perfection, actually defeating your opponent, all that boring stuff. But what if they weren’t?
What if there were another set of medals we could give to some of the best achievements of the games, even if they weren’t in officially recognized sports? We tried to think of what we’d hand out. So here are nine additional medals — call them the Extra Golds — for some of the additional feats of strength and cleverness that have delighted us in the last two weeks.
The one-man lift of one man
Mijain Lopez Nunez (right) celebrates with his coach on Aug. 6, 2024.
Punit Paranjpe/AFP via Getty Images
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Punit Paranjpe/AFP via Getty Images
It would have been enough that Cuba’s Mijain Lopez Nunez won his fifth consecutive gold medal for Greco-Roman wrestling — becoming the first Summer Olympian ever to hit that milestone. After he finished, he unlaced his shoes and set them on the mat to mark his retirement. But it wasn’t all poignancy — he also playfully flipped one coach onto his back, then lifted another and carried him a few steps. It’s one thing to win your match; it’s another to set a record in a grueling event and then celebrate by picking up an entire wrestling coach and carrying him around.
The 400 meter WHAAAAT?
Quincy Hall on the home straight in the Men’s 400m final on Aug. 7, 2024.
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Richard Heathcote/Getty Images
Team USA sprinter Quincy Hall was going to lose the men’s 400 meters. It was obvious. Heading into the last 150 meters or so, he seemed to have been bested by not one, not two, but three of the other guys in the race. And then he just accelerated. It looked magical. One of the curious things about sprinters is that when they’re speeding up, it can almost look like they’re slowing down. As Hall pushed toward the finish line, if you were watching him in a vacuum, you might think he was more spent, more tapped out. But he was somehow passing everybody! And he leaned at the finish line and just edged out Matthew Hudson-Smith of Great Britain to win the gold medal. We still have to admit: We don’t entirely get what happened.
The athlete drop
The beginning of the Canoe Slalom Women’s Kayak Cross heats on Aug. 4, 2024.
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Alex Davidson/Getty Images
Olympic sports begin in a lot of ways. A whistle blows, or a pistol bangs, or an athlete runs or serves or jumps. But the gold medal in athlete-dropping can only go to the kayak cross. In this event, several competitors are kept suspended above the course they are about to paddle through. Then they are dropped. Yes, they are flat-out indifferently dumped into the water the way you would release an undersized fish. And, crowded together, they have to navigate a course of buoys and get to the finish line. Anybody can run when a whistle blows or start a game when the referee says so. This is something entirely different.
The 6.25-meter maximum flex
Armand Duplantis set the new Olympic record in the men’s pole vault final on Aug. 5, 2024.
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Kirill Kudrtavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
Swedish-American pole vaulter Armand Duplantis — Mondo — already was guaranteed a gold medal. He didn’t need to jump anymore. But Mondo does not jump because he needs to. No, Mondo jumps because he wishes to. And at the Paris finals, even when he already knew he had won, he wished to do something more: swipe the world record held by his greatest rival … [checks notes] himself. Earlier this year, Duplantis jumped 6.24 meters. So what was next? 6.25 meters, obviously. Never one to deny his loyal audience the drama they crave, he took three jumps to clear the bar at that height, but on that last one, he nailed it. Who knows what he’ll do next? Dare we hope for … 6.26 meters?
Audience participation
Léon Marchand reacts after competing in the Men’s 400m Individual Medley Heats on July 28, 2024.
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Sarah Stier/Getty Images
The Paris crowds have been thrilling to listen to, overall. Particularly in support of French athletes, they cheer, they yell, they chant, they roar. But they may have peaked when swimmer Léon Marchand was in the pool. Marchand swam in four individual races, and he won four gold medals. And every time, the crowd didn’t just yell for him; they pulsated for him. Whenever he was doing a stroke that brought him rhythmically up out of the water, the crowd made sure that every time they saw his head, they gave him a fresh shout. Let’s be honest: It’s hard to know whether any of this is intelligible to a guy whose head is still mostly underwater and who is hyperfocused on things like his own arms and legs. But it was as if the people watching his races wanted you to be sure they were cheering for no one else, sure they were there for him. And indeed, we knew.
The out of left field leader
Kristen Faulkner passes the finish line during the women’s road race of cycling on Aug. 4, 2024.
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Wu Huiwo/Xinhua – Pool/Getty Images
U.S. competitor Kristen Faulkner didn’t think until relatively recently that she was going to compete in the women’s road race that runs almost 100 miles through the streets of Paris and surrounding towns. She didn’t even think she was coming to the Olympics until another competitor resigned from the team in July. As in, this July, last month. But things happen, and there she was. Late in the road race, she was in a chasing pair with another cyclist, separated by a few seconds from the leading pair. The announcers talked about whether the chasing pair could make a move — did they have enough left to get close? Could they close the gap? Well, they did close the gap. But almost as soon as the two pairs met and became four competitors together, Faulkner took off. Nobody followed. The announcer yelled, “Nobody is chasing! Nobody is chasing the American, Kristen Faulkner, the gap is exploding!” Faulkner — who only picked up cycling in 2016 – started her move with about two miles to go, and she ultimately won by almost a full minute. She was simply gone. Oh — and a couple days later, she won a gold medal in the track cycling team pursuit, making her the first U.S. woman to win gold medals in two different disciplines. Not the August she thought she was going to have in July, huh?
The last-minute lean
Noah Lyles crosses the finish line to win the Men’s 100m Final on Aug. 4, 2024.
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Richard Heathcote/Getty Images
All of the sprinting events rely on the lean, for the simple reason that the rules state that you cross the finish line with your torso, not your head or your foot. (Quincy Hall, noted above, leaned, too.) Even after the men’s 100 meter dash, many of us believed that Team USA’s Noah Lyles had not won it. We were not even sure he had medaled. When they said he had, in fact, won the gold by five one-thousandths of a second, it felt like … no, he didn’t. He didn’t, did he? As it turned out, he did. Kishane Thompson of Jamaica looked like his essence, his general being, was ahead of Lyles. Your eyes might have told you he was the winner — at least one commentator’s eyes told her he was. Ah, but Lyles has the lean. He won by pushing his chest forward just enough. Lyles ran a remarkable race overall; he’d been in last place at the 40-yard mark. But you have to respect the lean that ultimately sealed the deal.
A note: It was only after I first added Lyles to this list that the news broke that he had competed in the 200 meters after testing positive for COVID. It was a sobering reminder of the lingering effects of COVID on these games that what had been such a uniformly great story turned troubling. Lyles is far from the only athlete who has gotten COVID or competed with COVID. But he has asthma, and particularly given what we know about long COVID, the sight of him leaving the field in a wheelchair was a reminder of the risks that remain, especially in the absence of meaningful precautions.
Use of an accessory
Stephen Nedoroscik celebrates after the Artistic Gymnastics Men’s Pommel Horse Final on Aug. 3, 2024.
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Jamie Squire/Getty Images
Look, by now we all know about Stephen Nedoroscik, “Pommel Horse Guy,” who helped clinch the bronze medal for the U.S. men’s gymnastics team. We know that he is great at pommel horse – a specialist, in fact. We know that he was the last to go, that he had to hit and hit hard in order to win the bronze that was obviously so special to those guys that it might as well have been gold. But we must also recognize the power of his accessory game. Nedoroscik has a couple conditions — coloboma and strabismus — that affect his eyesight, and he says that when he competes on pommel horse, he’s doing it by feel, so he leaves his glasses behind. We (his fans) got to the point where the sight of his glasses hanging on the chalk bowl – as they did during the team final, and as they did when he won an individual bronze medal in pommel horse – had an unmistakable, “Oh, it’s HAPPENING” feeling. Like lots of us, he doesn’t wear his glasses for fashion, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be cool.
Enthusiasm management
Sammy Sullivan wasn’t ready to celebrate until the win was official.
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Kristy Sparow/Getty Images
When the U.S. women won a bronze medal by beating Australia in rugby sevens, it was an absolutely classic last-minute sports moment. With Team USA down 12-7 in the closing seconds, Alex Sedrick ran all the way down the field from almost the opposite end and scored a “try,” tying the match at 12. Team USA would still need a conversion — a pretty easy-looking one, but still – in order to actually win. And so, as the team celebrated Sedrick’s score, one face on the sideline was not ready to celebrate. Sammy Sullivan served the very important function of jinx avoider, because as they waited to see whether they would actually get that conversion, she told her teammates: “SHUT UP.” We’ve all been there, teetering on the edge of jubilation, afraid that other people will ruin it just by admitting it’s happening. We have all lived with the fear that our moment of victory is impossibly fragile and hubris will make it shatter. Sammy Sullivan was all of us: “SHUT UP.”
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President John F. Kennedy, left, looks at a model of what was later named the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC., in 1963.
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National Archives/Getty Images
On Thursday, the Kennedy Center’s name was changed to The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.
By Friday morning, workers were already changing signs on the building itself, although some lawmakers said Thursday that the name can’t be changed legally without Congressional approval.
Though the arts venue is now closely associated with President Kennedy, it was three American presidents, including Kennedy, who envisioned a national cultural center – and what it would mean to the United States.
New signage, The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, is unveiled on Friday in Washington, D.C.
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Jacquelyn Martin/AP
The Eisenhower Administration
In 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower first pursued building what he called an “artistic mecca” in Washington, D.C., and created a commission to create what was then known as the National Cultural Center.
Three years later, Congress passed an act to build the new venue with the stated purpose of presenting classical and contemporary music, opera, drama, dance, and poetry from the United States and across the world. Congress also mandated the center to offer public programs, including educational offerings and programs specifically for children and older adults.
The Kennedy Administration
A November 1962 fundraiser for the center during the Kennedy administration featured stars including conductor Leonard Bernstein, comedian Danny Kaye, poet Robert Frost, singers Marian Anderson and Harry Belafonte, ballerina Maria Tallchief, pianist Van Cliburn – and a 7-year-old cellist named Yo-Yo Ma and his sister, 11-year-old pianist Yeou-Cheng Ma.
In his introduction to their performance, Bernstein specifically celebrated the siblings as new immigrants to the United States, whom he hailed as the latest in a long stream of “foreign artists and scientists and thinkers who have come not only to visit us, but often to join us as Americans, to become citizens of what to some has historically been the land of opportunity and to others, the land of freedom.”
At that event, Kennedy said this:
“As a great democratic society, we have a special responsibility to the arts — for art is the great democrat, calling forth creative genius from every sector of society, disregarding race or religion or wealth or color. The mere accumulation of wealth and power is available to the dictator and the democrat alike; what freedom alone can bring is the liberation of the human mind and spirit which finds its greatest flowering in the free society.”
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Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline were known for championing the arts at the White House. The president understood the free expression of creativity as an essential soft power, especially during the Cold War, as part of a larger race to excellence that encompassed science, technology, and education – particularly in opposition to what was then the Soviet Union.
The arts mecca envisioned by Eisenhower opened in 1971 and was named as a “living memorial” to Kennedy by Congress after his assassination.
The Johnson Administration
Philip Kennicott, the Pulitzer Prize-winning art and architecture critic for The Washington Post, said the ideas behind the Kennedy Center found their fullest expression under Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson.
“Johnson in the Great Society basically compares the arts to other fundamental needs,” Kennicott said. “He says something like, ‘It shouldn’t be the case that Americans live so far from the hospital. They can’t get the health care they need. And it should be the same way for the arts.’ Kennedy creates the intellectual fervor and idea of the arts as essential to American culture. Johnson then makes it much more about a kind of popular access and participation at all levels.”
Ever since, Kennicott said, the space has existed in a certain tension between being a palace of the arts and a publicly accessible, popular venue. It is a grand structure on the banks of the Potomac River, located at a distance from the city’s center, and decked out in red and gold inside.
At the same time, Kennicott observed: “It’s also open. You can go there without a ticket. You can wander in and hear a free concert. And they have always worked very hard at the Kennedy Center to be sure that there’s a reason for people to think of it as belonging to them collectively, even if they’re not an operagoer or a symphony ticket subscriber.”
The Kennedy Center on the Potomac River in Washington, D.C.
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Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Kennicott estimated it will only take a few years for the controversies around a new name to fade away, if the Trump Kennedy moniker remains.
He likens it to the controversy that once surrounded another public space in Washington, D.C.: the renaming of Washington National Airport to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in 1998.
“A lot of people said, ‘I will never call it the Reagan National Airport.’ And there are still people who will only call it National Airport. But pretty much now, decades later, it is Reagan Airport,” Kennicott said.
“People don’t remember the argument. They don’t remember the controversy. They don’t remember the things they didn’t like about Reagan, necessarily. . . . All it takes is about a half a generation for a name to become part of our unthinking, unconscious vocabulary of place.
“And then,” he said, “the work is done.”
This story was edited for broadcast and digital by Jennifer Vanasco. The audio was mixed by Marc Rivers.
In the 1998 World War II film “Saving Private Ryan,” Tom Hanks played Captain John H. Miller, a citizen-soldier willing to die for his country. In real life, Mr. Hanks spent years championing veterans and raising money for their families. So it was no surprise when West Point announced it would honor him with the Sylvanus Thayer Award, which goes each year to someone embodying the school’s credo, “Duty, Honor, Country.”
Months after the announcement, the award ceremony was canceled. Mr. Hanks, a Democrat who had backed Kamala Harris, has remained silent on the matter. On Truth Social, President Trump did not hold back: “We don’t need destructive, WOKE recipients getting our cherished American awards!!!”
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