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Paris 2024 Olympics - Ceremonies - Paris 2024 Closing Ceremony - Stade de France, Saint-Denis, France - August 11, 2024. General view of fireworks during the gran finale of the closing ceremony.
Hard Numbers: Olympic Edition. Au revoir, Paris!
126: Team USA had its third-best Summer Olympics ever, winning 126 medals across 34 different sports. Historically, the US has done even better at home, netting 174 medals with a staggering 83 golds in the 1984 LA games and 231 medals at the 1904 games in St. Louis. With Sunday’s closing ceremony behind us, all eyes now turn to the next edition: Los Angeles 2028.
40: China came in second in overall medals with 91, but the real rivalry is all about the gold, baby. The United States and China walked away with 40 gold medals each — the first-ever golden tie for the sporting superpowers.
12: Russian athletes were not allowed to participate under their national flag due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, so the usual medal powerhouse wound up with zilch — while Ukrainian athletes won 12 medals, including gold in the women’s high jump, men’s boxing, and women’s team saber. It was Ukraine’s second-lowest medal count since independence, and the country sent its fewest-ever competitors – 140 athletes – this year, a downturn attributed to the ongoing conflict.
8: None of the eight Palestinian athletes at the Games won a medal, but their mere presence was a major achievement given the ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza. The conflict has claimed the lives of national volleyball team members Ibrahim Qusaya and Hassan Zuaiter, national athletics coach Bilal Abu Samaan, and the Palestinian Olympic football coach Hani al-Masdar. Others have seen their Olympic dreams eviscerated by war, like weightlifting Junior World Champion Mohammed Khamis Haidar Hamada, who lost 20 kilograms and suffered a possibly career-ending knee injury while carrying water amid the fighting.
1: Boxer Cindy Ngambamade history by winning bronze in the women’s 75kg category, becoming the first-ever Refugee Olympic Team athlete to win a medal. Ngamba has lived and trained in the UK since age 11 but struggled with her immigration status and had to fight to avoid returning to her native Cameroon, where her homosexuality is criminalized.
0.1: The biggest controversy of the Paris Games came from the smallest of margins, after US gymnast Jordan Chiles saw her score in the floor exercise final improve by 0.1 following an appeal from her coaches — just beating Romanian athlete Ana Barbosu for the bronze. The Romanians weren’t happy and appealed the decision immediately, saying Chiles’ coaches had missed the 60-second window allowed for scoring inquiries. The case went to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which decided Saturday that Chiles’ coaches had indeed missed the cutoff – by four seconds. Chiles’ score was reverted, and Barbosu was awarded the bronze instead. The US team plans to appeal the ruling.
32 million: NBC says the first 13 days of the Olympics drew 32 million viewers, a major coup for the broadcaster and a 76% increase over the Tokyo games. Can they beat their own record in LA? We’ll find out in four years.Signs welcoming Indiana Fever's new player Caitlin Clark, at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis.
Basketball double whammy: Gender pay gap and betting scandals
It’s been a big week for professional basketball leagues catching heat. Fans were outraged to learn that college basketball legend and all-time NCAA top-scorer and top WNBA draft pick Caitlin Clarkwill earn a meager $338,056 over four years with the Indiana Fever.
That means, Clark’s earnings will be less than 1% of the 2023 NBA top draft pick, Victor Wembanyama’s $55 million deal. It’s even lower – much lower– than some NBA mascots.
Sure, Clark is set to make $3 million in ad deals, but the gender pay gap point remains, particularly as the league continues to grow. The WNBA draws fewer attendees, television viewers, and broadcast rights revenue, which means its players have a weaker collective bargaining agreement. But with a star like Clark – who is already helping set WNBA viewership records – that balance may begin to shift thanks to a one-woman rising tide that will lift other boats.
But Clark’s pay wasn’t the only pro basketball scandal. This week, Toronto Raptors forward Jontay Porterwas banned from the NBA after an investigation found him guilty of colluding with sports bettors. He was, according to the ruling, providing information to them and betting on games, including against his own team, and “limiting his own participation in one or more games for betting purposes.”
While Clark’s contract called attention to gender-based pay discrepancies, Porter’s ouster has raised questions about player’s involvement in betting scandals (and sponsorship deals with gaming outlets) – something that has become more common following the 2018 US Supreme Court’s decision to strike down federal laws against betting on professional sports. With a bigger pool of bettors offering more opportunities for such insider betting scandals, could it be time for the legal ban – or at least limits – to rebound?Afghanistan's captain Hashmatullah Shahidi celebrates the team's victory against Pakistan in the ICC Men's Cricket World Cup 2023, at MA Chidambaram Stadium, in Chennai on Monday.
Afghanistan’s cricketers inspire nation with World Cup dream
The streets of Kabul erupted in joy Monday night as Afghans celebrated their national team’s massive upset victory against Pakistan in the Cricket World Cup. It’s a brief moment of elation amid the crushing crises that have immiserated millions since the US withdrawal.
The stunning eight-wicket win against one of the sport’s most celebrated sides put Afghanistan in a four-way tie for a knockout stage berth. They face an uphill climb for a shot at the trophy, though: The mighty South African and Australian teams are sure to put Afghan bowlers and batters through their paces, and they’ll have to beat both Sri Lanka and the Netherlands as well. If they manage to pull it off, waiting in the knockout stages is thus-far undefeated India, playing at home to roaring crowds.
Intimidating, but cricket is a game that rewards resilience, a trait Afghans have shown they possess in spades over the trials of the last half-century. Many members of the Afghanistan Cricket Board fled the country after the Taliban takeover, and the team has since played home games in the United Arab Emirates and India.
Daily life for those back home teeters on the knife’s edge: The World Food Program is urgently calling for $400 million to keep the country fed through winter as the families that can afford food report spending 91% of their incomes to buy it. Women are shut out of public life so totally that 90% of the victims of recent earthquakes near Herat were women and children, stuck indoors during the day.
That’s just a taste of the pressure the Afghan players will feel to bring a little joy and hope into the darkness when they take on Sri Lanka next week. If this sounds like must-see TV to you, read this cricket explainer for Americans, brew up some coffee, and we’ll see you at 4:30 a.m. on Monday.Qatari fans celebrate after the announcement that Qatar will host the 2022 World Cup
Saudi vs. Qatar: A sporting rivalry
Saudi Arabia announced this week that it plans to launch a new sports investment company that will be part of the oil-rich Gulf kingdom’s $650 billion sovereign wealth fund.
The move signals the Saudis are accelerating their efforts to become a global powerhouse in sports — not so much with their athletes as with their wallets. The kingdom recently bought up English Premier League football club Newcastle United, absorbed the Men’s PGA Golf Tour into a Saudi-based rival, and lured Portuguese megastar Cristiano Ronaldo to a local football squad with a nine-figure contract.
Saudi come lately? Riyadh’s regional nemesis, Qatar, has been at this game for more than a decade already. In 2011, Doha bought the Paris St. Germain football club. It then spent $300 billion to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup, snapped up a stake in the Portuguese side Sporting Braga last fall, and just a few weeks ago took a 5% stake in the structure that owns Washington DC’s NBA, WNBA, and NHL teams.
New look for an old rivalry. From 2017 until 2021, you may recall, Saudi Arabia – along with the UAE, Egypt, and a number of other Arab nations – cut ties with Qatar and imposed a strict blockade against the Kingdom because of its friendly ties with Iran and its support for Islamist political groups in the region that Saudi Arabia opposes. Since then ties have been restored, but they remain on opposite sides of many regional issues.
Is this “sportswashing”? Human rights activists and other critics say this is all a soft power play to distract the world from the Gulf monarchies’ appalling human rights records. Taking Gulf money, they say, makes teams complicit.
Money talks. But the Gulf monarchies’ flush sovereign wealth funds — Abu Dhabi is in on the act as well — are a huge new source of cash for teams and leagues to spend on better players, newer facilities, and sharper marketing.
Newcastle, for example, was a storied club in a deteriorating post-industrial city, making it an easy target for Saudi investment. Even the NBA, hardly a league starved for cash, changed its rules last year to allow sovereign wealth funds to take stakes of up to 20% in clubs.
The upshot: It’s long been true that the largest market for sports, China, had an abysmal human rights record. Now leagues around the world must contend with the fact that some of the sports world’s flushest investors have similar baggage as well.
Additional time – a linguistic interlude: Sports, in Arabic, is “riyadha,” coming from the same root as Riyadh, which means “gardens” or “meadows.” So if the Saudis bought the Knicks, “The Gardens” would run The Garden. It could happen!
Can sports fans save America?
You already know that America is getting more polarized by the day. Democrats and Republicans hardly live together, work together, or hang out together the way they used to.
But a new book called Fans Have More Friends argues that highly-engaged sports fans are less politically polarized, have greater trust in institutions, and generally live happier lives.
To learn more, GZERO's Alex Kliment met up with one of the book's authors, Dave Sikorjak, a marketing consultant who studies the motivations of sports fans. Where'd Alex and Dave link up? Where else -- at a tailgate in Philadelphia ahead of a game between the Giants and the Eagles. It all went great until Alex got taped to the front of a bus, but you'll get to that...
Podcast: The IOC's Dick Pound on how sports and politics should mix
Listen: On the GZERO World Podcast, a look at the long history of protest at the Games with Dick Pound, the longest serving member of the International Olympic Committee and a former Olympic athlete himself. With COVID rates rising globally, this year's Olympics faced some major hurdles. But the pandemic was only part of the picture. The Tokyo Games played out against a backdrop of mounting global tension surrounding gender equality, racism and human rights, leaving many people to examine the place of politics on the playing field and podium.
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.
Dick Pound: Olympics successful despite COVID tensions
Before the Olympics, most Japanese people were against the Games due to fear of COVID. As the tournament got on, the International Olympic Committee's Dick Pound says that most resistance vanished, but some resentment still lingers among Tokyo's residents. "There's that tension, that still exists, but it's not interfering with the sport," Pound tells Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.
Watch this episode on US public television - check local listings.
How should athletes protest at the Olympics?
For Dick Pound, the longest serving member of the International Olympic Committee, protesting at the Games is fine — as long as it doesn't "interfere" with the competition itself or awards ceremonies. The Olympics, in his view, are an oasis of calm in the middle of an increasingly tense world, and "we shouldn't be spoiling that by pointing out the obvious , which is that there are social and political problems." Watch his interview with Ian Bremmer on the latest episode of GZERO World on US public television.
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