The Progress Report: Olympic Strides Forward

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Zachary Karabell: What could go right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined by the queen of all news, Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network, and this is our weekly progress report, where we look at news that you may not have. noticed or that may not have percolated to the top of your various feeds Because it’s news of things that are going Decently well, okay, or at least pointing in the direction of a world that is more together than apart That is more cohesive than divisive, that is more functional than dysfunctional, and that kind of news is not usually news.

Nice weather is not news on the Weather Channel, a day that passes without drama, tragedy, horror is not often news on the front page. of one of those old paper newspapers. Those still exist, right? Paper newspapers, Emma, do they? 

Emma Varvaloucas: I mean, I’m told that they exist, but does anyone get them?

Zachary Karabell: I mean, I, I do, but it’s, you know, the classic lining the litter box thing.

And we’re going to look at some news as we do every week in these shorter versions of our longer weekly interview podcast, conveniently or confusingly also titled What Could Go Right?, as well as our newsletter, conveniently or confusingly titled What Could Go Right?, We kind of like that title, it’s clear that we have a certain amount of, uh, sweat equity vested in What Could Go Right?

And so we look at some stories that you may have missed, and we, we do so because Emma has spent every waking hour, and potentially a few sleeping hours, scouring the planet for, for news in her new AI generated Emma settings that, uh, do some of the work at night while, whilst asleep, at least that’s the.

AI, uh, bot, avatar, Emma, future tense, how we’re going to do the work in the future. But for now, most of it’s actually done by the old fashioned looking, searching, and finding. So what have you looked for, searched for, and found for us this week?

Emma Varvaloucas: I was going to say, that description of the AI doing my work in my sleep I think was more dystopic than utopic.

Zachary Karabell: I guess it depends on how much you like your work.

Emma Varvaloucas: All right, yeah, yeah. Anyway, moving on from that thought, moving on, you know, you mentioned, uh, cohesion over divisiveness in the beginning. So I thought that what better to talk about than the paragon of unity and bringing the world together, the Olympics this week.

And I love talking about the Olympics as a reflection of our current times and what has changed and what has moved forward. So I have some Olympics based Stories for us today.

Zachary Karabell: So before we get into the stories, I have a question. There was a lot of, meme- y stuff going around the interweb land, juxtaposing the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, and I think there was another one.

Oh, Russia, too, right? Authoritarian Olympic opening ceremonies, which were very staged and metronomic and incredibly elaborate but precise with the more free form, gender fluid, creative, non place based opening ceremonies of Paris, you know, which used the river and boats and houses and different places.

And there was a little bit of like authoritarian wish factor going on in these memes. Like, oh, what a shame that we’re not as a thousand people beating drums. Flashy. Yeah.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: I don’t know. Where do you, what, what’s, what’s with that?

Emma Varvaloucas: I’m not really sure if the Brit, like, I think it’s just by chance that the last two countries to have done that were authoritarian governments.

The Paris opening ceremony was deliberately supposed to be the first one that was held outside of a stadium. Every other opening ceremony has always been inside of a stadium. And so they were trying something new with what they did on the river. I have seen, I feel like there have been other, like, flashy, glitzy, tech forward, and artistic in a good way opening ceremonies from other countries that are democracies.

I think it just so happened that France’s one was a little bit, they had the weather going wrong, and then it was just a, it was a bit French, right? Like, it was kind of wacky and all over the place and disorganized, and like, people were striking right before, and there was sabotage on the train line. As a, as an artistic spectacle, I do, I did kind of prefer the stadium based ones, I’m not gonna lie.

Well, how did you feel about it?

Zachary Karabell: I don’t know. I mean, I’m, I think I’m probably the wrong person asking that. I’ve, I’ve lost a certain amount of my, golly gee, enthusiasm for opening ceremonies at the Olympics. But, I think that’s much more a statement about me than it is about the Olympics.

Emma Varvaloucas: I’m an Olympic stan.

I’m enthused. I’m excited. I’m here to not, maybe not cheer on what happened at the opening ceremony in Paris, but we’re going to get over it. There are other things, you know, going on that are positive. One thing that I think. A lot of people are looking forward to. I’m looking forward to. Some people don’t even know about this, but we have a new Olympic sport this year, which is breakdancing.

Also, you don’t say break dancing. If you are actually a breakdancer, you call it breaking and the dancers are called breakers. That is debuting this year in the summer Olympic Games. The US I think has three competitors. I’m very excited about it. I think that it’s super fun. A great move by the IOC, the International Olympic Committee, to open up the Olympics to a younger audience, when unfortunately it might be a one and done thing because the next host, which is Los Angeles, has already decided to drop it and they’re going to be debuting cricket, flag football, lacrosse, and squash instead.

Which I feel like is a trend in a very different direction, but breaking will be on the menu as well. And there’s also a second sport making its debut this year, which hasn’t received nearly as much media attention, and that is kiteboarding, also known as kitesurfing.

Zachary Karabell: So all the skateboarding and the freeform skateboarding, that was, that was a few Olympics ago.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. I think they, I don’t remember what year they introduced skateboarding, but it’s not for the first time this year. There’s also like a very specific kayak event that is. Having a debut this year, but I didn’t even know enough about Kayak to really understand what I knew about it.

Zachary Karabell: Although to be fair about the cricket inclusion, I mean, it is one of the most popular sports in the world, just not in the Western world.

And they just did that at the Cricket World Series in Long Island. So that was like a big, a big thing. So that one you could probably defend on inclusive, broadening the audience grounds.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I would say on that, I feel like the squash and the, I also agree with you about fly football. I think that one is like kind of a fun, young, new thing to do.

But lacrosse and squash, I’m like, uh, it’s a very boarding school, very prep school feeling, you know?

Zachary Karabell: It’s true.

Emma Varvaloucas: It’s just, yeah, not as exciting as breaking or breakdancing in my opinion.

So, what else is going on at this year’s games? They had set a goal to achieve total gender parity this year. They didn’t quite get there, but they’re really close.

5, 712 men. are registered to compete and 5, 503 women. So off by around 200.

Zachary Karabell: It’s like 49. 5 to 50. 5.

Emma Varvaloucas: Basically. And it’s, it’s come a long way even in the recent past, because even in the 1980s, it was more like 75, 25. So it’s really accelerated in recent years. And if not this year, I think we’re gonna, well, I don’t know about maybe adding, uh, lacrosse and squash, flag football might not be the most gender, uh, Parody events, but what do I know?

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there’s like a really excellent women’s flag football team out there in the world waiting to compete at the Olympics.

Zachary Karabell: We’re gonna find out.

Emma Varvaloucas: So last piece of sort of gender equality. This has actually sparked some debate, uh, this year, but this year’s games was the first to allow male swimmers to compete in synchronized swimming.

Before it was actually like a, I always thought it was a women’s event because women wanted to synchronize swim. Turns out it was really just strictly a women’s only. So, this is the first year they are allowing men to compete and each country gets to choose their team. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I guess, depending on where you stand in the debate, none of the countries chose men for their team, so there are no male synchronized swimmers competing.

But, uh, that has sparked some debate in synchronized swimming circles, which I found really kind of fun and interesting. That’s

Zachary Karabell: like the ultimate, like, what if you throw a party and no one comes issue. Done it, open it up, and no one does it. That’s wild. I mean, I would assume, like, any event in the Olympics, once you establish it, like, somebody comes and does it, but I guess not.

Emma Varvaloucas: So, my understanding was that male synchronized swimmers are a very recent thing, just in general. Um, I think that they just started doing it not too long ago, and There seems to be some kind of traditional aesthetic view, views still in play in the way that there was with, for instance, I know this from being in ballet, there was a really strict and traditional view about ballet dancers and their heights and in their race.

And that has started to kind of break apart in recent years, I think, which is moving forward and all for the best. And it kind of seems like synchronized swimming is going through this evolution now, too, with the male and female mixed teams, like, they’re like, no, we really want, like, everyone to be a woman so that there’s a certain, like, appearance on the eye.

And I think men are going to have to, really passionate male synchronized swimmers are going to have to break through that and kind of change things up.

Zachary Karabell: Things we didn’t know about the Olympics.

Emma Varvaloucas: First year as well, that the Olympic Village, where the athletes stay for, During the duration of the games, it’s going to have a nursery.

So this is a partnership between Pampers. And Allison Felix, who is the most decorated woman in Olympic track and field history, if you haven’t heard her name, go look her up. She was parenting at previous Olympics. As you can imagine, it’s kind of hard if you’re competing and also breastfeeding or just competing and trying to find someone to look after your child while you’re, you know, competing in your event.

So they’re going to have a nursery this year for the first time. Parents can change diapers there, breastfeed, just like spend time with their kids. And I’m kind of, to be honest, surprised that this is the first time that that’s been available.

Zachary Karabell: That’s wild. Yeah.

Emma Varvaloucas: Let’s do one more. This is just another sort of like fun fact, and then we’re going to conclude our Olympic special for episode of The Progress Report.

This was another, like, just really niche piece of news out of a really niche sport. Apparently, the material used in shooting jackets, so, you know, the shooting events at Olympics, I don’t know if anyone watches them, but someone’s gotta watch them, right? The athletes wear these shooting jackets that stabilize their stance, and the more stable your stance is, the better you shoot.

The material for the jackets has gotten so good that they’ve, like, stabilized the athletes to an incredible degree, much more than they’re used to, and this actually caused a global inflation in air rifle scores, and so there’s more, like, distance shooting. So they’re expecting that trend to continue in the games, they’ve kind of been shown in the games.

How the sport’s going to adjust around that, I mean, obviously everyone’s going to be wearing these new jackets now, right? And how the sport is going to adjust around that. I have no idea. I’m going to have to leave that to the shooting and air rifle experts, but I thought that was just such a funny little, like, unexpected outcome of technological progress in materials.

Like, who would have guessed that?

Zachary Karabell: I mean, I noticed that I, over the winter, I shot a really high caliber rifle, you know, a thousand yards or more with a sight and basically a, you know, a scope and the scopes are so good now that a lot of the. Art of being able to shoot really high distances. You know, yes, you have to be very stable and all of it, but you’ve got to stand.

I mean, it is clearly true that the technology in these areas has made it far more likely that a mediocre person can do well in a variety of sports. You know, not skiing and not, I mean, there are, there are a whole series of things that like, it doesn’t matter what the technology is. If you suck, you suck, but there’s a whole series of things that that technology has clearly made even average people above average over earlier years, not necessarily above average compared to really good people today, but it is an interesting effect of technology that it kind of increases aggregate capacity in a whole series of things.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, well, I’m sure you’ve seen the, um, social media jokes that they’ve been around for a while that the Olympics should always show a normal person trying to do the sport that they’re showing at the moment so you can see, like, just how terrible someone is at kayaking or gymnastics or whatever. 

Zachary Karabell: That’s a very good point.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, like then you have like a baseline, right, like you understand just how incredible like Simone Biles is for instance, right, like to the layperson you’re like, I don’t know, they’re all flipping around, but no, you know, you need to have a baseline of.

Zachary Karabell: Have like your average club swimmer just be on lane 8 for like one of the heats just to show you, like they’re basically at the, at the back wall when everyone else has done four laps.

You’re like, oh, yeah, I guess they’re kind of best.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yep, exactly. Like somebody who’s like mediocre at it. Yeah, it couldn’t just be a normal person off the street, right? Because if they tried to do synchronized swimming, they would drown or something like that. But like a mediocre break dancer or something, right?

A mediocre breaker

Zachary Karabell: You thought you were good, but. So that’s good.

Emma Varvaloucas: So that’s what I have for today.

Zachary Karabell: Well, thank you for listening. Granted, Olympic news, a lot of this was just interesting tidbits. But in the overall arc of, you know, the Olympics are one of these rare moments where the world does in fact come together peacefully, competes ruthlessly, but without any degree of lethality.

And that’s what it was meant to be when it started, what, 1896 was the, the first modern Olympics and was very consciously designed to be. a counterpoint or an offset to increasing belligerence between nations. Human beings do a lot of things other than fight via their national and state identity, and this is one, and we should both celebrate that, facilitate that, and support that.

Emma Varvaloucas: A hundred percent. And if you really want an underdog story to support, facilitate, and be inspired by, there is the first female breaker out of Afghanistan who is competing on the refugee team.

Zachary Karabell: Cool.

Emma Varvaloucas: Just saying.

Zachary Karabell: That is fun. All right. We’ll be back with you next week. Thank you for listening. Send us your thoughts, your comments, as always, and we’ll be back with you soon.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thanks everyone. Thanks, Zachary.