The 2024 Paris Olympics deserve a Texas-size celebration

This year’s Paris Olympics were a fantastic showing of athletic prowess, comeback stories, camaraderie and friendship, and Texas athletes helped more than we could have hoped to make that possible.

Nineteen Texas athletes won 28 of the United States’ 126 medals, according to The Washington Post. Current and former University of Texas student-athletes won 16 medals, including six gold, according to UT. The number of medals won by athletes with Texas ties is higher still, according to The Dallas Morning News SportsDay team.

That’s worth celebrating. And this year’s games came with a few comeback stories that have made us positively giddy.

Sha’Carri Richardson, the 24-year-old Dallas track star and finalist for our 2023 Texan of the Year award, proved she still has her stride. After she was suspended from the Tokyo Olympics for testing positive for THC, Richardson this year helped lead the U.S. to a gold medal in the women’s 4x100m relay final, Dallas Morning News columnist Kevin Sherrington reported from Paris.

Brittney Griner made a great comeback as well. Two years ago, Griner was imprisoned in a Russian penal colony, unsure of whether she would ever get home, let alone play basketball again.

But a 2022 prisoner swap brought her back stateside after spending 10 long months in prison, and this year, Griner did better than just compete in the Olympics again. She helped bring home a gold medal for the U.S. women’s basketball team in a nail-biter of a game against France, marking the team’s eighth consecutive gold medal in the event.

And who could forget about the woman who is perhaps the greatest gymnast of our time? She calls herself “Simone Biles from Spring, Texas, that loves to flip,” Sherrington reported. After withdrawing from the Tokyo Olympics for mental health reasons, she brought home three gold medals and a silver this year.

If winning a silver medal in the Olympics can be called a defeat, Biles showed extraordinary graciousness in it. After the floor exercise event, she called Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade, who won the gold, “queen,” Sherrington reported.

There have been a couple of sour notes, like the dispute over a bronze medal involving Jordan Chiles and Romanian Ana Barbosu in the floor exercise. But even still, the Olympic games, and the athletes who made them so wonderful to watch, reminded us why these events mean more than medals. They are about people who come together despite differences of culture, language and politics.

They set the example of graciousness in victory and in defeat.

In an age when many of us don’t watch the same things or talk about the same things, these Olympics brought us together. If there’s one thing we know, it’s that a little unity can go a long way, especially with divisions all around us.

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