"We ask all broadcasters to refrain from showcasing any disruptions or reactions in response to the President’s attendance in any capacity."

Said the memo from the United States Tennis Association, quoted in "USTA asks broadcasters to censor reaction to Donald Trump’s attendance at U.S. Open" (NYT).

"We regularly ask our broadcasters to refrain from showcasing off-court disruptions," said a USTA spokesman.

If the President is showcasing himself, shouldn't the anti-President forces get their say? Well... the President's attendance at the event is to watch tennis, which fits with the USTA enterprise of displaying tennis to all of us, traditionally done with celebrities in the live audience. The protesters' opposition to the President has nothing to do with tennis. They want to speak/"speak" on a different topic. The President is only "speaking" (silently) about his (possibly bogus) interest in tennis, so it's not really censorship... is it?

If you feel that Trump's occupation of the presidency is a highly alarming catastrophe, these fine distinctions are outrageous and intolerable. I'm sure I'm not the first person to bring up Hitler's showcasing of himself at the 1936 Olympics:

"The United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee quietly changed its eligibility rules on Monday to bar transgender women from competing in Olympic women’s sports..."

"... and now will comply with President Trump’s executive order on the issue, according to a post on the organization’s website. The new policy, expressed in a short, vaguely worded paragraph, is tucked under the category of 'USOPC Athlete Safety Policy' on the site, and does not include details of how the ban will work. Nor does the new policy include the word 'transgender' or the title of Mr. Trump’s executive order, 'Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,' referring to it instead as 'Executive Order 14201.'"

From "U.S. Olympic Officials Bar Transgender Women From Women’s Competitions/The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee changed its eligibility rules on Monday to comply with President Trump’s executive order, taking the decision away from national governing bodies for each sport" (NYT).

Interesting language, especially "tucked under." It seems to evoke the effort of a biological man to pass as a woman. Did the NYT want us to see an analogy there? The U.S. Olympic Committee wants to look like it is what it wants to be. In this analogy, following Trump’s executive order corresponds to the male genitalia that must be "tucked under" and the look of female genitalia is achieved with the words "USOPC Athlete Safety Policy."

If that's not intentional, the editing at the NYT is incompetent/nonexistent. If it is intentional, it's hilarious and very very wrong.

"Pilloried by Democrats during his 2012 run, Romney has emerged as a strong voice for a bygone kind of politics."

Said Jake Tapper, introducing Mitt Romney on "State of the Union" yesterday.

Romney gave a long interview, and maybe you saw a clip of it, but I want to do my own edit:

ROMNEY: Donald Trump won. He won overwhelmingly. He said what he was going to do, and that's what he's doing. I mean, people are saying, oh, I don't like this appointment or this policy that he's talking about. But those are the things he said he was going to do when he ran. So you can't complain about someone who does what he said he was going to do. And I agree with him on a lot of policy fronts. I disagree with him on some things. But it's like, OK, give him a chance to do what he said he's going to do and see how it works out.... 

TAPPER:  Are you worried at all about being a target for retribution, you or members of your family?

ROMNEY: No, actually, I have been pretty clean throughout my life. I'm not particularly worried about criminal investigations.

"You can’t disfigure the Eiffel Tower by giving it a sense that isn’t its own."

Said Olivier Berthelot-Eiffel, great-great-great-grandson of Gustave Eiffel, quoted in "Eiffel’s descendants say Non to keeping Olympic rings on Eiffel Tower/The Paris mayor wants the Olympic logo to stay on the monument. Gustave Eiffel’s descendants say the tower shouldn’t be a permanent billboard" (WaPo).

The mayor, Ann Hidalgo, says it's a "very beautiful idea to combine the Eiffel Tower, a monument designed to be ephemeral for [the 1889 World’s Fair], with the Games, an ephemeral moment which will also have marked Paris and our country. I want the two to remain married."

It's a terrible idea to leave the Olympics logo on the Eiffel Tower! I'm not even a fan of the Eiffel Tower. I think it should have been taken down, as originally planned, after the 1889 World's Fair. It doesn't harmonize with the rest of the city. But people have fixated on the thing, so there it is, with its weird power. Don't change it now.

But I'd have sided with the "Artists against the Eiffel Tower," who said this in 1887 (Wikipedia):

"So you start to see the the trappings of this thing that was created in New York City, in the Bronx in the 1970s start to leave its beginnings a little bit..."

"...and become more of a competition and more of a sport through Red Bull and these other entities that are sponsoring it.... It's actually a bit of a wild story [how breaking went from a Red Bull event to the Olympics]. So nearly three decades ago, this global governing body of dance, international dance sport is recognized by the International Olympic Committee and they wanna bring dance to the Olympics. So they want to have ballroom dancing and they suggest that and they get rebuffed. So they eventually rebrand themselves as World Dance Sport Federation, and they find out that it's not foxtrot or salsa or ballroom that the Olympic thinks could have a shot. It's breaking. Breaking is highly watchable, easily viewable on social media. And it comes along as the Olympics is reevaluating what they're going to use as a sport to try and gain that younger audience. There was a testing period in 2018.... They debuted breaking at the Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires.... There was over 2.5 million social media impressions according to the International Olympic Committee. I mean, it seems like it aligns itself perfectly with the Olympics mission of trying to skewer to a younger audience. And once you see those numbers that pretty much locked up breaking for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris..."

From the new episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, "Breaking’s Olympic Debut." 

"Skewer" — sometimes the wrong word is the right word.

I could not tell what portion of this is humor. I had to do research.

Australia has lost the plot. For the breakdancing competition at the Olympics they put this woman with a PhD in breakdancing up as a competitor. She admits that she barely ever trains and complains that she doesn’t fit into the hierarchy of merit, which she considers to be a form… pic.twitter.com/zrmIhPZLjt

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) August 10, 2024

 

I'd seen the video yesterday and believed — though it's hard to believe — that this is a real Olympic performance in what is the sport/"sport" of breakdancing. But what about the rest of that — the PhD in breakdancing and the critique of hierarchy? It's too good as satire. True?!

I found this: "Raygun, mocked on internet for her routine, is Sydney professor with PhD in cultural studies/In what is a young person’s sport, the 36-year-old Raygun was mocked on social media on Friday for her attire and routine. In her day job, Rachael Gunn is a lecturer at Sydney’s Macquarie University with a PhD with her thesis focusing on the intersection of gender and Sydney’s breaking culture" (Indian Express).

"She yelled 'this is unjust' at her corner and slammed her headgear on the canvas as the match in the 66-kilogram division was called off."

From "Imane Khelif, boxer in middle of Olympics gender storm, forces tearful first opponent to quit 46 seconds into fight" (NY Post).

Kamala Harris supports this…

Vote accordingly.

pic.twitter.com/RHJzfrQlvv

— John LeFevre (@JohnLeFevre) August 1, 2024

An absolute travesty at the Olympics.

Angela Carini is forced to box against a biological male. She quits after just 45 seconds, and cries hysterically as her opponent is declared the winner.

Don't look away. This is wokeness. pic.twitter.com/wOkVRs88t5

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) August 1, 2024

"You might recall the epic 2008 Beijing opening ceremony, which showcased the four great Chinese inventions: the compass, gunpowder, paper, and typesetting."

"This one in Paris, put up last Friday, celebrated analogous French contributions like threesomes, the Minions franchise, and dressing like a clown...."

Begins Suzy Weiss, in "Was the Opening Ceremony Demonic, or Just Cringe? Don’t feel bad for Christians—feel bad for the French" (Free Press).

Ha ha. Very well put.

"very shocking & disrespectful to make light of the Feast of Dionysus; deeply offensive to those who have devoted their lives to feasting, drinking, & salacious behavior."

Writes Joyce Carol Oates, tweeting in response to this:

ADDED: "Paris Olympics organisers apologise to Christians for Last Supper parody/Apology follows anger among Catholics and other groups at opening ceremony segment that resembled biblical scene" (The Guardian).

"As the boats ferrying the athletes moved along the Seine, what stood out was what was missing."

"The great mass of athletes in one place, moving in a continuous tide. The chaotic palette of national costumes, the different marching styles, the proud flag bearers. Few events more effectively combined the monumental and the individual. Everything about Friday’s ceremony and broadcast worked to diminish the athletes. Sitting in cheering clumps, sometimes three and four countries together, they looked like passengers on party boats competing to make the most noise, to signal that their country was having the most fun."

From "Opening Ceremony Misses the Boat/The Paris Games began with a new look and sparkled with Celine Dion. But the show suffered from bloat similar to TV’s other spectacles" (NYT).

"I don’t think it’s an accurate representation of what breaking is. Breaking is a lot more organic, and the way that we do it in the Olympics..."

"... is, like, 'Do a round. Stop, look at what your score is. Now do another round.' It doesn’t feel real because when someone goes into the circle and they finish your round, you want to go right after to respond."

 
Said Odylle Beder, "a B-girl from Brooklyn known as Mantis," quoted in "Breakers Grapple With Hip-Hop’s Big Olympic Moment/Largely left out of hip-hop’s 50th anniversary, breaking will get its stage at the Paris Olympics. Its pioneers wonder if their art will translate into sport" (NYT).

"At the time of my history with the Germans, there was a whole generation of young girls that missed out on their medals, their trophies, their awards, their chances of careers because the IOC did nothing."

Said Sharron Davies, who won a silver medal swimming in the 1980 Moscow Olympics, when the East Germans used drugs that were the equivalent of “putting girls through male puberty."

Quoted in "Sharron Davies: ‘The trans debate is toxic. It’s made my life hell. But female athletes must speak up’/The former swimmer, still driven by the injustice of not winning 1980 Olympic gold, wants an uprising from athletes to ensure swimming’s transgender ban extends to all sports" (London Times).

"The Olympics brand is really struggling. A lot of people don’t feel that emotional connection anymore... Audiences watch the Olympics for the stories."

"They need that superhero story, that star quality. They don’t really see the Olympics as a true sporting event, but rather as something more personal."

Said Tang Tang, a media professor at Kent State University who has studied the Olympics, quoted in "Beijing Olympic Ratings Were the Worst of Any Winter Games/NBCUniversal’s coverage had 11.4 million viewers per night on average, compared with 19.8 million for the Pyeongchang Games in 2018" (NYT).

"I thought a lot about the implications of photographing women, many of whom are still teenagers, figure skating in revealing costumes...."

"Nicole Schott, 25, of Germany, wore a costume with a massive cutout on one side of her waist. As she turned into a backbend while spinning on one skate, I snapped a few frames of how far she was bending. The shadows on her neck and along her stomach, to me, showed the amount of torque the athletes’ bodies endure and the strength it takes to accomplish these tricks."

From "Our Photographers’ Favorite Olympic Images/Times photographers sought to capture every aspect of the Olympic Games in Beijing. These pictures were special to them" (NYT).

Is there something creepy about fixating on the details of the bodies of very young women? The photograph frames the torso and excludes the face, the arms, and the legs — that is, most of what you usually look at when watching a figure skater.

Do you feel differently about that quote when you know that the photographer who wrote that is female? Does it matter that the skater herself chose — or her people chose for her — to wear "a massive cutout on one side of her waist"? Does a cutout say I want you to look right here, dictating fixating?

ADDED: Do you immunize yourself by thinking about it a lot — or by saying you thought about it a lot? Or does the thinking add to the creepiness? And what did you think? This particular photographer, a woman, says "I thought a lot about the implications of photographing women" within what I assume she expected us to imagine was a properly feminist framework.

"Norway, with a population of just five million, is executing its quadrennial triumph over the rest of the world...."

"For Norway, everything changed after the 1988 Calgary Games, where it won just five medals, none of them gold. That was an unacceptable outcome.... Norway, which had quickly transformed from a middling economy built around fishing and farming into a petroleum-rich nation, started plowing money into Olympiatoppen, the organization that oversees elite Olympic sports. It also doubled down on its commitments under its Children’s Right in Sports document, which guarantees and encourages every child in the country access to high-quality opportunities in athletics, with a focus on participation and socialization rather than hard-core competition. Norway’s well-funded local sports clubs, which exist in nearly every neighborhood and village, do not hold championships until the children reach age 13.... 'There just seems to be a lot more emphasis on including everybody,' said Atle McGrath, a 21-year-old Norwegian Alpine skier whose father, Felix, competed in Alpine for the United States at the 1988 Olympics... Jim Stray-Gundersen, a former surgeon and physiologist who is the sports science adviser to the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association, lived in Norway, where his father grew up, for five years while working as a scientist with Norway’s Olympic athletes. He said a priority of the country is to build a culture of health and regular exercise, and its competitive prowess flows from that. 'It’s how you produce psychological satisfaction, healthy life habits, and stellar athletes over time, and it’s very much in contrast to how we do it and don’t do it in the U.S.,' he said."

From "It’s Norway’s Games Again. What’s Its Secret?/Norway won its record 15th gold medal on Friday, the kind of success that has drawn experts from other countries trying figure out how the tiny nation keeps doing it" (NYT).

Here's the final medal count. Norway finished with 16 gold medals, twice that of the U.S.A. Germany won the second most gold medals — 12 — but Germany has a population of 83 million. 

Notice that what produced a lot of medals also seems to be great for everyone's health and well-being.

"The women’s free skate had promised to be one of the most-watched events of the Games. But few could have expected its stunning denouement...."

"[Kamila Valieva, 15].... had stepped on the ice wearing the same face she’s worn all week in Beijing: Nearly expressionless.... Now that her free skate was over, she buried her face in her hands.... 'Why did you let it go?' [asked her coach Eteri Tutberidze]. 'Why did you stop fighting? Explain it to me, why? You let it go after that axel.' Valieva did not reply.... On NBC, Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir called the scenes around the end of the competition 'heartbreaking' and 'devastating,' and made clear, over and over, that they believed it had been unfair — to Valieva, to the other skaters, to viewers around the world — for the 15-year-old to have competed.... 'It’s not fair,' Lipinski said as the sobs played out on the screen, for a 15-year-old to have dealt with all of this. Her colleague Johnny Weir posted a video to his Instagram story soon after the broadcast ended, calling the night the 'most bizarre and heartbreaking event I have seen in my entire life.'... And on Russian state television, the commentator Andrei Zhuranko thundered, 'Sports officials, you have broken the most talented figure skater in the world.'"

From "Tears and sobs, and not just from Kamila Valieva, follow her crushing Olympic end" (NYT).

I used to be part of the huge audience that watched what must always be the most-watched event of the Winter Olympics — women's figure skating. I can't watch anymore. There's something awful about it. We're watching abused children, aren't we? So tiny, so young, so insanely controlled. It used to seem beautiful. It was always emotional, but now the emotion is ugly. The fashion is still idiotically sparkly, pumping up the grotesquerie.

"Althaus, who helped Germany win the mixed team event three times at the ski jumping world championships, was among the women disqualified Monday when FIS ruled that their suits were 'too big and offered an aerodynamic advantage.'"

"Bigger suits could increase the time ski jumpers are able to stay aloft, given the possibility of increased wind resistance... 'I have been checked so many times in 11 years of ski jumping, and I have never been disqualified once, I know my suit was compliant,” the German star [Katharina Althaus] said.... The sport is among the eight that go back to the original Winter Olympics program in 1924, but women weren’t allowed to participate until 2014, after a group of athletes filed a lawsuit in 2009, ahead of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. 'It’s like jumping down from, let’s say, about two meters above the ground about a thousand times a year, which seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view,' former FIS president Gian Franco Kasper infamously claimed in 2005. (Kaser, a Swiss native who held that position from 1998 to 2021, did not have a medical background.)... In an Instagram post, Althaus wrote in German: 'I have no words for the decisions that were made today. Our sport was damaged as a result. Athletes and their dreams were destroyed. … It was one of the most important competitions for us women, a premiere for the entire sport and then something like that!! I am so disappointed and angry.'" 

From "Five female Olympians disqualified because of suits in one of the ‘darker days’ for ski jumping" (WaPo). 

I love the name Althaus, but I must say, looking at the photograph, below, that the very long crotch on those pants seems to give something of a wingsuit — or flying-squirrel — effect. I can see why competitors would seek every advantage they can get from their gear, but if they are technically in violation, they take on the risk of disqualification. It also looks bad, and so — to paraphrase Kasper — it seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a fashion point of view. Do looks matter? Is the Olympics about getting us to watch?

"In a climactic moment to end the opening ceremony of the 2022 Winter Olympics, China chose two athletes — including one it said was of Uyghur heritage — to deliver the flame to the Olympic cauldron..."

"... and officially start the Games. The moment was tinged with layers of symbolism — a man and a woman working together, a nod to China’s Olympic history — but it was the choice of Dinigeer Yilamujiang, a cross-country skier who the Chinese said has Uyghur roots, that confronted head-on one of the biggest criticisms of the country’s role as host."

The NYT reports.

Biden is betting Americans don't care about Afghanistan and we'll blind ourselves to the ongoing catastrophe.

Looking at the "Most Read" list at The Washington Post this morning, I think he might win that bet.

How many Maryland workers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Grandma wants a hug. Covid's still percolating in the dumbosphere. And a lady lost a footrace. 

America curls up and gets cozy. That virus is going after Republicans who sorta deserve it. The birdies didn't deserve the murderous workers. Are we getting our snuggie-wuggles from the kiddies? Feeling better to know that the runner who didn't run in the Olympics probably wouldn't've won anyway? 

It's comfy to tsk at the Gramma who loves too much, the unvaccinated dead man, the Mississippians buying their medicine at the feed store, the workers who killed birds. 

It's manageable caring. Shed a tear for a bird and another bird! Keep it up, and Joe's bet is won.

"I've tried really hard not to tell people what to think... because, really, I trust people to consider the issue and form their own opinions... but some people take emotions as the starting point for how they feel about the situation..."

Transgender Olympian Laurel Hubbard gives an interview: