My Favorite Moments and Drama From Day 12 of the Olympics
We have reached the home stretch of the Olympic Games. The closing ceremony is this Sunday and I will be sad, but I am also looking forward to the upcoming 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and the next 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles. For now, let’s look at what happened today, day 12.
A very important day in Australia
The 12th day of the Paris Olympics belonged to Australia. The country had its best day of any Olympics, winning four gold medals and two bronzes. This moves Australia into third place in total medals behind China and the USA. However, this is a distant third place. Australia won 18 gold medals and 41 medals in total. The USA won 27 gold medals and 90 total medals.
Ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics
At the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris this Sunday, the Olympic torch will be passed to the next host city – America’s finest city Los Angeles, California, where planning is already underway for the 2028 Games. This is the third time Los Angeles has hosted the games, and L.A. Games organizers are keeping a close eye on what worked and what didn’t in Paris.
Athletes’ concerns about sometimes uncomfortable accommodations at the Paris Games will be resolved by 2028, according to Janet Evans, chief athlete at LA2028, the organizing committee for the Los Angeles Olympics. Decent food, beds and air conditioning for Olympians is easy compared to traffic in Los Angeles, however. How the city’s already congested freeway system will cope with the huge influx of visitors remains to be seen, but one possibility being discussed is “athletes only” lanes, which would undoubtedly work just fine. Either way, game organizers have four years to work out this and other logistical challenges the games will bring.
Please watch Kevin Hart and Kenan Thompson’s coverage of the Olympics.
Over the past couple of weeks I have made two important discoveries related to the Olympic Games. First: Rugby is the greatest sport at the Olympics. And two: the best coverage of the Olympics is Olympic Highlights with Kevin Hart and Kenan Thompson . This streaming-only show has a simple premise: Hart and Thompson rhyme with all things Olympics. But it’s fun, funnier than you think. Whether they’re chatting with guests like Tony Hawk and John Cena or just commentating on the action, it was smart of Peacock to provide completely non-serious coverage to remind us all that the Olympics are supposed to be fun.
Colin Jost forced to withdraw from Olympic coverage
Speaking of the Saturday Night Live cast, Keenan Thompson’s co-star Colin “Weekend Update” Yost covered the surfing portion of the Olympics with Tahiti, but was recently forced out of the games due to injuries. Yost was surfing the legendarily powerful surf at Teahupo’o early in his Olympic challenge and cut his foot on a reef. Since then, Yost said he has been in the medical tent “more often than any of the athletes” due to a leg infection and an ear infection. Even covering the Olympic Games is dangerous.
What anthem is played for “neutral” athletes?
The 2024 Games will feature several Olympians representing no single nation. Since Russia and Belarus are not allowed to participate in the games, athletes from these countries compete at the games as “individual neutral athletes”. Their flag is a jade or turquoise banner featuring the AIN emblem, which looks like this:
Ivan Litvinovich and Viyaleta Bardilovskaya became the first neutral athletes to win medals at the 2024 Olympic Games. Litvinovich won gold in men’s trampoline, and Bardilovskaya won silver in women’s trampoline.
Playing the anthem of winning athletes is an Olympic tradition, but since Belarus is not competing, Olympic organizers came up with an interesting solution: they played a piece of music that does not represent any nation, but sounds like the national anthem. . This is a masterpiece of unobtrusiveness .
Interestingly, countries can opt out of playing their national anthem during the awards ceremony for their athletes and replace it with another piece of music. At the 1992 Games, the former Soviet republics competed as a team known as the “United Team” and chose to play Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” instead of the national anthem—a cool choice.
The coolest national anthem on earth, in case you were wondering, is the Algerian anthem. The text goes like this: “We are soldiers who have risen for the truth. And we fought for our independence. When we spoke, no one listened to us. So we took the noise of gunpowder as our rhythm. And the sounds of machine guns are our melody.” Unfortunately, the music doesn’t quite match the intensity of the lyrics.