PARIS OLYMPICS 2024 WRAP-UP—PART I

I just watched the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics for about nineteen hours a day, on every channel, and still couldn’t see it all! I loved having access to sooooo much coverage, but trying to get to every one of my hundreds of recordings of the individual sports made me feel like Lucy trying to get to all the chocolates on the conveyor belt!

I did get to see most of all the major entries, of course, such as track and field and gymnastics, but a lot of the other sports fell by the wayside. I didn’t even have time to watch an entire men’s basketball game until the Gold Medal Match!

Just trying to see the recordings in order, and match them up with which came first and on what channel, (not to mention making sure that neither my DVR nor External Hard drive get totally full before I have time to delete what I don’t want to save,) should be a new Olympics sport in itself! And I deserve the Gold Medal for it!

So suffice it to say that I haven’t had much time to take notes on it all. (I did manage to get a few tweets out, but not nearly enough. Remember, I’m @MajorCelebrity on that platform, so you can still see them there.)

I enjoyed all the proceedings, but some things really annoyed me, of course, so this article is mainly about those. (All the positive thoughts will be here later on in the week.) That means that you most likely haven’t read any of what I have to see elsewhere.

I honestly thought the long, drawn-out opening was idiotic. All I could think about while seeing all those athletes getting soaked in the rain, and for so many hours, was if they were going to get sick before their competitions!

So I had high hopes for the Closing Ceremony, figuring it had to be much better. But it was once again a disappointment. I expected soooo much more from the French.

And more from some of the American athletes, who were getting this opportunity of a lifetime, as well. Why did those NBA and WNBA players not go to the Closing Ceremony??? That was so rude of them! And they did a disservice to themselves. Steph Curry kept getting choked-up about finally having an Olympics experience, and understanding what it means, even going so far to say it was the best experience of his career, and then he chose not to attend the big closing night. And that was even though they were all still in Paris, the men having won their gold medals the night before and the women that very morning! Disgraceful.

Each sport opened their first day of competition with a person walking out and hitting some sort of cane thing on the floor or ground three times. They wore whatever they felt like and didn’t look special, so even though I wondered just who they were each time, when I saw the swim guy in his shorts and tee shirt, I assumed they were most likely contest winners, and let it go. But when an older man came out for track and field, and people cheered, and the man did a prolonged famous person wave, I changed my mind. Someone on any of the broadcasts should have told us who these people are! Couldn’t they have just put their names on the screen if they didn’t want to take thirty seconds to explain it??? [Note: The commentators for the Women’s Marathon finally did on the very last day. So good for them.]

They also never told us what was in those mystery boxes that they gave each medal winner instead of the usual flowers!!! I waited the entire sixteen days for someone, anyone, on TV to mention it, but finally had to look it up for myself. (And for you guys.) [Note: Someone finally did on the last day, as well. And the answer is—they are specially-designed posters of the Paris Olympics! And each one has a further detail to match each color medal.]

Someone needs to give gymnastics commentator Laurie Hernandez a dictionary! Or thesaurus. If there was a drinking game for every time she said “quite” or “however” or “may I say” or “as well,” or giggled, (even when delivering bad news,) we’d all be drunk in a few minutes!

Also, on the lesser channels, (meaning the NBC affiliates rather than the main network channel itself,) they rarely let us know who the commentators were! That was just crazy; I sort-of recognized some of their voices, and wasted way too much time wondering just who they were or where I had heard them before. (And yes, I did look up the list of Olympics commentators, but they listed only the main NBC peeps.) By the way, a channel or two had no commentators, and that was mostly a pleasure. During some of the more tense performances, they all needed to shut the frig up and let us enjoy what we were witnessing for ourselves!

It was so rude of the NBA producers and directors to keep showing girls’ crotches, especially close-up and sometimes in slow-mo! And occasionally a guy’s junk, as well. (I took a few pix of what I’m talking about to show you guys, but then I thought better of it because I’d be perpetuating that rudeness! Not to mention potentially publishing porn!)

The competition for the newly-included fake sport of “Breaking,” which is really break-dancing, (but they wanted viewers to look upon it as a sport rather than a form of dance, and they also didn’t want other dance disciplines to try to get into the Olympics, so they took out the second part of the name,) totally sucked! It was an insult to real sports for it to be in the Olympics. Even the krump-dancing Mr. X said that after watching the beauty and athleticism of rhythmic gymnastics and artistic swimming, breaking seemed somewhat silly. (Or something to that effect.) I, of course, realize that the organizers did that to try to attract a younger audience. But the whole debacle was soooo bad, (and not just that brutal girl from Australia, RayGun, who is now the laughing stock of the internet,) that it’s now out of the next Summer Games in LA. (More on her next week—she may now even be on Australia’s version of Dancing With The Stars!)

The female Canadian beach volleyball players are uber-obnoxious to use just their first names, as the Brazilians have done for years.

And now let me finish-up with just a few of the ultra-annoying misspeaks of all the commentators, hosts, and analysts:

I beg everyone, (mainly the American athletes in this case,) to stop being low-class by saying “me and him,” instead of the correct “he and I.” People—the rule is: always put yourself last!!! It’s the same with a person’s name or who they are to you, such as “my cousin and I.” And then use “he” or “him,” (or “she” or “her,”) depending on which it would have been if you took yourself out of the equation. Obviously, these people either weren’t taught the right grammar in school, or had illiterate teachers or family members who passed their lack of intelligence down to their children. Come on now—do better!

Also very annoying are these waaaay overused statements: “I did not have this on my bingo card” and “I’m not going to lie.” Why would you lie??? And who among the users of that phrase plays bingo ??? One female track commentator, who was good otherwise, kept saying that the main contenders “did not come to play,” when the expression is rather “he came to play!,” meaning he’s serious and ready. She kept saying the opposite, thinking she was meaning they weren’t going to play around. She made her commentary very confusing by using that expression wrongly.

Many of the people involved are still saying “I mean,” but the new verbiage wrinkle seems to be “ya,” meaning “yeah,” and signaling either the end of the interview, or that they just ran out of something to say.

Now on to the many positives of this Paris Olympics, in this same space a bit later on in the week.