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.
Richard Heathcote/Getty Images
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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.
Kirill Kudrtavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
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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.
Wu Huiwo/Xinhua – Pool/Getty Images
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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.
Richard Heathcote/Getty Images
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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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You want to see some real fashion ingenuity? Watch the N.F.L. draft.
I’m not saying it’s all good, but where else are you going to see someone in a double-breasted suit made by a company better known for making yoga pants? Or an Abercrombie & Fitch suit jacket so short that it exposes the belt loops on the pants beneath?
On the whole, the style on display at the N.F.L. draft last night was very overeager senior formal: a lot of suits in colors beyond basic blue. The quarterback Ty Simpson wore a custom suit by the athleisure label Alo, which, I have to say, looked better than I would have envisioned had you said the words “Alo Yoga suit” to me.
I thought it might have been from Suitsupply, but the conspicuous “Alo” pin on his right lapel put that idea to rest. Simpson, smartly, unfastened that beacon before appearing onstage as the 13th pick to the Los Angeles Rams. He had, perhaps, satisfied his contractual obligations by that point.
Earlier in the evening, as the wide receiver Carnell Tate threw up his arms in exaltation after being picked fourth by the Tennessee Titans, his cropped Abercrombie & Fitch jacket revealed a swatch of rib cage. He looked like a mâitre d’ who had just hit the Mega Millions.
During the N.B.A.’s extended fashion awakening, its draft has become a sandbox for luxury brands to cozy up to would-be endorsers. The Frenchman Victor Wembanyama broke a kind of cashmere ceiling when he wore Louis Vuitton to go first overall in the 2023 N.B.A. draft.
The N.F.L. draft has none of that. The brands you see are often not brands at all, but custom tailors that reach the league’s neophytes through a whisper network among players. The draft is also a platform to raise the curtain on longer-term brand deals that better suit these rookies. We may, for instance, never see Simpson in a suit again. Nearly every photo from his time at Alabama shows him in a T-shirt or hoodie. It makes sense for him to sign with Alo.
Football is the most mainstream of American cultural entities. And it’s one that still hasn’t, in spite of the league’s best efforts, taken off overseas. Few players, save some quarterbacks and a tight end who happens to be engaged to a pop star, feel bigger than the game itself. If you’re a new-to-the-league linebacker, you’ll most likely never harness the star power to grab the attention of Armani, but you might have just the right pull for Abercrombie.
The N.F.L. draft is therefore one of the few red carpets where the brands worn by the athletes may also be worn by those watching at home. How many people watching the Oscars will ever own clothes from Louis Vuitton or Chanel? People may comment online about Lady Gaga wearing Matières Fécales to the Grammys, but how many of those fans and viewers could afford to buy clothes from it?
The Japanese designers changing fashion
Yesterday, I published a deep dive into how a newish crop of Japanese designers are soaking up all the attention in men’s fashion right now. This was a piece I was writing in my head long before I sat down and finally started typing. I remember sitting at a fashion show in Paris over a year ago — I believe it was Dior — and being asked by my seatmate if I’d made it over to a showroom in the Marais to check out A.Presse. That Tokyo-based brand is now part of a vanguard of Japanese labels that, on many days, seems to be all anyone in fashion wants to talk about. I spent months talking with designers, store owners and big-time shoppers to make sense of why these brands have kicked up so much buzz and, more than that, what makes their clothes so great. You can read the story here.
Other things worth knowing about:
Thirty years ago, comedian and actor Tig Notaro didn’t have a clear direction in life, so she followed some childhood friends who wanted to get into entertainment to Los Angeles. Secretly wanting to do stand-up, Notaro decided to try her luck at various outlets in town, which became the start of her successful career.
“I stayed on my friends’ couch near the Hollywood Improv on Melrose, and a couple months later, got my own studio apartment in the Miracle Mile area,” Notaro says. “I love all the options for everything in L.A. — the entertainment, the restaurants. I like to stay active. So many people love the hiking options in Los Angeles, and I’m one of them.”
In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.
Notaro appears in Season 3 of Apple TV’s “The Morning Show” and is a series regular on Paramount+’s “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy,” as she was on “Star Trek: Discovery.” She’s also a touring stand-up comic and hosts “Handsome,” a comedy podcast, with Fortune Feimster and Mae Martin. The trio will be taping a live show May 4 at the Wiltern with the cast of Netflix’s “The Hunting Wives.” The live shows include interviews, but also “incorporate some ridiculous things,” she says. For example, upon hearing that some of the hosts always wanted to learn to tap dance, Notaro “hired a tap instructor to come to our live show in Austin and teach us how to tap dance in front of the audience.”
Notaro lives near Hollywood with her wife, actor Stephanie Allynne, their 9-year-old fraternal twin boys, Max and Finn, and three cats, Fluff, Linus and Skip. When she’s not touring, her ideal Sundays include sampling vegan restaurants, wandering through bookstores or museums, and doing something physically active with the family.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.
6 a.m.: Up with the kids
Because we have active children, we still wake up at 6 a.m. or 6:30 a.m. on Sunday, but there’s not as much of a rush to get going. Stephanie and I will often have coffee and chat in the living room together. I love that part of the day. Stephanie may cook breakfast, but Max and Finn are pretty self-sufficient and can make certain little meals for themselves. Max is really starting to take an interest in cooking, so he’d make breakfast for himself. Our family is vegan, but he eats eggs, so he makes himself an egg sandwich with avocado a lot of times.
9 a.m.: Daily morning walk
After breakfast, we usually have a morning walk around our neighborhood. That’s a daily thing I like to do, regardless of what’s going on. Now that I’m not touring as much, tennis is back on the schedule. So I’d go to Plummer Park in West Hollywood and play for a while, then join the family for lunch.
11:30 a.m.: Hike with a side of chickpea sandwich
I love Trails, a cafe in Griffith Park, where you can eat outdoors. It serves simple food, and has good vegan options. I usually get their chickpea salad sandwich. The food there is great. Afterward, we’d visit Griffith Observatory, where there’s lots to see. There are lots of great trails in the park, so we’d go for an hour hike before leaving.
3 p.m.: Browse the shelves for rock biographies
Bookstores are fun, so we’d head downtown for the Last Bookstore, which is in a historic building with lots of vintage books. I really love all things plant-based, and I’m a very big music fanatic. So I love to look for vegan books, nutrition books, rock biographies and autobiographies. It’s just fun to browse around the stacks.
If we didn’t go to the bookstore, we’d probably go to LACMA. Our sons are huge fans of art and want to go for each new exhibit. They love Hockney, Basquiat and Picasso, to name a few.
4 p.m.: Cuddle with cuties at a cat cafe
We’d then make a quick stop at [Crumbs & Whiskers], a kitten and cat cafe on Melrose for coffee, snacks and to pet the cats. It’s best to make reservations in advance. There’s cats all around the place that need to be adopted. You can visit and pet them, or find a new roommate. I’d love to take some home, but we already have three.
5:30 p.m. Italian or sushi, but make it vegan
We’re an early dinner family. One restaurant we like is Pura Vita in West Hollywood. It’s the greatest vegan Italian food, and for non-vegans, nobody ever knows the difference. It’s the first 100% plant-based Italian restaurant in the United States. They make an incredible kale salad and I love the San Gennaro pizza. It’s got cashew mozzarella, tomato sauce, Italian sausage crumble and more.
Then there’s Planta in Marina del Rey. It’s right on the harbor and you can sit outside and look at the boats coming in and out. They have sushi, salads and other plant-based entrees. They’ve got a really great spicy tuna roll that’s made out of watermelon. They are magicians.
Or there’s Crossroads Kitchen in West Hollywood. They play the best classic rock, and the atmosphere is upscale, fine dining. The appetizers that we always get are called Moroccan Cigars, which are vegan meat substitutes fried in a rolled batter. I really like the grilled lion’s mane steak, their mushroom steak with truffle potatoes, or the scallopini Milanese, that has a chicken or tofu option. I get the chicken with arugula on top. I always love to have a decaf espresso with dessert, which is either a brownie sundae or banana pudding.
7:30 p.m.: Comfort watch or word games
After dinner, the kids often like to watch an episode of “Friends,” a show that all ages enjoy, sports or “The Simpsons.” Or we’d play a game where each of us will add a word to a sentence and create a weird or funny long sentence until one of our sons says period. Then they’ll try and remember the whole sentence and repeat it back.
9:30 p.m.: Bubble bath then bed
The boys usually go to bed at 8:30 p.m. and bedtime for us is 9:30 p.m. Stephanie and I would read or chat. I like to take a bubble bath, if people must know. The best Sundays for me mean finding a good balance of relaxing and being active. I feel very lucky that my family and I can do those things together.
When Marian Sherry Lurio and Jonathan Buffington Nguyen met at a mutual friend’s wedding at Higgins Lake, Mich., in July 2022, both felt an immediate chemistry. As the evening progressed, they sat on the shore of the lake in Adirondack chairs under the stars, where they had their first kiss before joining others for a midnight plunge.
The two learned that the following weekend Ms. Lurio planned to attend a wedding in Philadelphia, where Mr. Nguyen lives, and before they had even exchanged numbers, they already had a first date on the books.
“I have a vivid memory of after we first met,” Mr. Nguyen said, “just feeling like I really better not screw this up.”
Before long, they were commuting between Philadelphia and New York City, where Ms. Lurio lives, spending weekends and the odd remote work days in one another’s apartments in Philadelphia and Manhattan. Within the first six months of dating, Mr. Nguyen joined Ms. Lurio’s family for Thanksgiving in Villanova, Pa., and, the following month, she met his family in Beavercreek, Ohio, at a surprise birthday party for Mr. Nguyen’s mother.
Ms. Lurio, 32, who grew up in Merion Station outside Philadelphia, works in investor relations administration at Flexpoint Ford, a private equity firm. She graduated from Dartmouth College with a bachelor’s degree in history and psychology.
Mr. Nguyen, also 32, was born in Knoxville, Tenn., and raised in Beavercreek, Ohio, from the age of 7. He graduated from Haverford College with a bachelor’s degree in political science and is now a director at Doyle Real Estate Advisors in Philadelphia.
Their long-distance relationship continued for the next few years. There were dates in Manhattan, vacations and beach trips to the Jersey Shore. They attended sporting events and discovered their shared appreciation of the 2003 film, “Love Actually.”
One evening, Mr. Nguyen recalled looking around Ms. Lurio’s small New York studio — strewed with clothes and the takeout meal they had ordered — and feeling “so comfortable and safe.” “I knew that this was something different than just sort of a fling,” he said.
It was an open question when they would move in together. In 2024, Ms. Lurio began the process of moving into Mr. Nguyen’s home in Philadelphia — even bringing her cat, Scott — but her plans changed midway when an opportunity arose to expand her role with her current employer.
Mr. Nguyen was on board with her decision. “It almost feels like stolen valor to call it ‘long distance,’ because it’s so easy from Philadelphia to New York,” Mr. Nguyen said. “The joke is, it’s easier to get to Philly from New York than to get to some parts of Brooklyn from Manhattan, right?”
In January 2025, Mr. Nguyen visited Ms. Lurio in New York with more up his sleeve than spending the weekend. Together they had discussed marriage and bespoke rings, but when Mr. Nguyen left Ms. Lurio and an unfinished cheese plate at the bar of the Chelsea Hotel that Friday evening, she had no idea what was coming next.
“I remember texting Jonathan,” Ms. Lurio said, bewildered: “‘You didn’t go toward the bathroom!’” When a Lobby Bar server came and asked her to come outside, Ms. Lurio still didn’t realize what was happening until she was standing in the hallway, where Mr. Nguyen stood recreating a key moment from the film “Love Actually,” in which one character silently professes his love for another in writing by flashing a series of cue cards. There, in the storied Chelsea Hotel hallway still festooned with Christmas decorations, Mr. Nguyen shared his last card that said, “Will you marry me?”
They wed on April 11 in front of 200 guests at the Pump House, a covered space on the banks of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River. Mr. Nguyen’s sister, the Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen, who is ordained through the Unitarian Universalist Association, officiated.
Although formal attire was suggested, Ms. Lurio said that the ceremony was “pretty casual.” She and Jonathan got ready together, and their families served as their wedding parties.
“I said I wanted a five-minute wedding,” Ms. Lurio recalled, though the ceremony ended up lasting a little longer than that. During the ceremony, Ms. Nguyen read a homily and jokingly added that guests should not ask the bride and groom about their living arrangements, which will remain separate for the foreseeable future.
While watching Ms. Lurio walk down the aisle, flanked by her parents, Mr. Nguyen said he remembered feeling at once grounded in the moment and also a sense of dazed joy: “Like, is this real? I felt very lucky in that moment — and also just excited for the party to start!”
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