What Could Go Right? The Ever-Evolving Olympics

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The Ever-Evolving Olympics

The 2024 Summer Olympic Games began yesterday in Paris, France, with preliminary competitions in soccer and rugby kicking off events before the opening ceremony tomorrow. As International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach said in a speech on Monday, the Games are about “togetherness, hope, solidarity, equality, [and] dignity,” even against a geopolitical backdrop of tension and conflict. Athletes from Russia, Ukraine, Palestine, and Israel will all be competing.

At their best, the Games represent the full spectrum of humanity, from the inspirational to the controversial to the absurd (did anyone predict pooping-as-protest to emerge as an Olympics story?). They are also a reflection of both current times and the passage of time. One of the sports making its Olympic debut this year, breakdancing, will be held at Place de la Concorde, where Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and others were executed during the French Revolution.

Below are some stories from this year’s Games that illustrate the Olympics’ ongoing progression.

Sport firsts

Breaking—also called breakdancing, although not by those who do it—is making its Olympic debut this year. Breaking began in the Bronx in the 1970s as part of hip hop culture and quickly gained traction worldwide, with international competitions starting in the 1990s.

Thirty-two breakers, known as B-Girls and B-Boys, will compete in Paris through a series of freestyle dance battles. They will be judged on five criteria: vocabulary (of dance moves), technique, execution, originality, and musicality. Like soccer, breaking also has a penalty system. Instead of flags, judges can use what are called misbehavior buttons.

The next host of the Summer Olympic Games, Los Angeles, has already decided to drop breaking from the lineup, however. They will instead introduce cricket, flag football, lacrosse, and squash. The 2032 host, Brisbane, Australia, could decide to bring it back, but has not made any announcements yet.

Another sport, kiteboarding, or kitesurfing, will also make its Olympic debut this year, but hasn’t received nearly as much media attention.

This year’s Games are also the first to allow male swimmers to compete in synchronized swimming as part of mixed-gender teams. Ultimately, each competing country chose only female swimmers, however, a decision that has sparked some debate.

Women and parents welcome

The IOC was aiming to reach total gender parity at this year’s Games, and they nearly achieved it: 5,712 men are registered to compete (including backups) and 5,503 women. The modern Olympics have come a long way since the first, male-only Games in 1896, when their founder, Pierre de Coubertin, remarked that female competitors would be “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic, and improper.” Even in the 1980s, the male-female split was closer to 75-25. 

The Olympics are also becoming a more supportive place for athletes who are parents. The Olympic Village, where most of the athletes stay during the Games, will have a nursery this year for the first time. It’s a space in which parents can change diapers, breastfeed, and spend time with their infants and toddlers, and is a striking turnaround from the 2020 Games in Tokyo, Japan, in which family members, except for children of breastfeeding mothers, were banned due to Covid restrictions. 

The nursery was established by a partnership between Pampers and Allyson Felix, the most decorated woman in Olympic track and field history, who is a mother of two and had personally gone through the struggle, she says, of breastfeeding and finding ways to look after her child while competing in past Olympics.

Everyone loves an underdog

The United States men’s basketball team, packed with stars from the NBA, is the favorite to win gold at the Olympics. They were nearly defeated in a friendly match over the weekend, however, by an unlikely foe: South Sudan, the world’s newest country, which became independent in 2011 after decades of civil war. (It was engulfed in civil war again between 2013 and 2020.) South Sudan’s team, the Bright Stars, are ranked 12th in the world and are a point of pride for the young nation. “This moment gives us the feeling that we have finally arrived on the global stage,” wrote South Sudanese analyst Akol Nyok Akol Dok in Semafor. The final score was 101-100, with a layup by LeBron James cinching the win for the US with only eight seconds to go.

If you’re looking for another inspiring-Olympics-story fix, Afghanistan’s first female breaker, Manizha Talash, will be competing on the Refugee Olympic Team. Talash fled to Spain after death threats and bombing attempts on her breaking club in Afghanistan, and once her Olympic participation was announced, her family had to be extracted in order to protect them from the Taliban.

One piece of fun

Technological progress has some unexpected effects. The material now used for shooting jackets, which stabilize an athlete’s shooting stance, has gotten so effective that adoption of the new jackets has caused a global inflation in air rifle scores, a trend experts expect to see showcased at the Games.

I am a huge Olympics stan and will definitely be tuning in to the gymnastics, surfing, and breaking events. Another attraction will be the opening ceremony, a river parade down the Seine that will be the first held outside of a stadium. I’ve also been enjoying seeing the inside scoop from athletes posting on TikTok about the Village accommodations and their “kit,” their official uniforms and gear from sponsors. Will you be watching?

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What Could Go Right? S6 E14

What does an assassination attempt mean for the United States in an already emotionally charged presidential campaign? Zachary and Emma speak with Bret Stephens, a columnist at The New York Times, about the current political climate and the rush to assumptions about political violence. They discuss the cultural temperature, the degradation of civility, and the connection between civic culture and violence. The conversation also touches on the resilience of Trump’s support, the changing nature of the political parties, and the potential impact of J.D. Vance as a vice presidential candidate. | Listen now

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By the Numbers

53%: The global drop in air pollution deaths in children under five since 2000.

1.6M: The number of Colombians lifted out of poverty last year, although a third of the country still lives below the poverty line, and inequality is acute.

~1M: The number of EV chargers now in the United Kingdom. New public ones are being installed every 25 minutes.

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Quick Hits

🧑‍⚕️ Iowa and Virginia are joining four other states in allowing licensed foreign doctors to practice medicine without completing additional, and often repetitive, post-medical school “residency” training in the US. Many other states have pending bills on the matter, which address a shortage of American doctors. (WSJ $)

💊 A preliminary study suggests that the drug rapamycin, which can delay menopause and extend a woman’s fertility by five years as well as increase lifespan, is safe. A co-leader on the study, Yousin Suh, told The Guardian that the study is “the first in human history” and gives hope to women with age-related fertility issues.

🏳️‍🌈 In a landmark ruling, Korea’s Supreme Court has decided that same-sex couples will qualify for the national health insurance’s dependent coverage. (NYT $)

🌕 A boon to plans for a permanent human base on the Moon: scientists have discovered a cave there for the first time. At 100 meters deep, it is visible to the naked eye from Earth and was formed millions or billions of years ago by lava flow. The technology used to locate it may also help find caves on Mars, where evidence of life could be hiding.

⚡ The transition to greener steel is afoot, says a new report from Global Energy Monitor (GEM). While most steel production still uses traditional, coal-based methods, about half of new steelmaking projects in development will use an electric arc furnace, which melts iron into steel using electricity. These plans, if executed, put a 2030 net-zero target for steel within reach.

🐢 Loggerhead sea turtles, a threatened species, are having a record-breaking nesting year in Florida. In Houston, an Asian elephant, a resident of the Houston zoo, was the first to receive an mRNA vaccine for endotheliotropic herpesvirus, a common killer of elephants.

👀 What we’re watching listening to: Our friends at Fix the News (formerly Future Crunch) are producing a new podcast about one of the “greatest healthcare stories of all time”—the development and delivery of the world’s first malaria vaccines. We’re looking forward to following along when it’s out!

💡 Editor’s pick: Per the above, meet the Chilean tree whose bark is a critical ingredient of the vaccines that experts hope will halve malaria mortality in Africa within the decade.

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