Tuesday, August 03, 2021

Olympic Moments

My Olympic moment of Week 1 in Tokyo was the unlikely victory of Austria's Cambridge mathmo-grad Anna Kiesenhofer, achieved by refusing to conform and, if one is to be honest, by being completely forgotten by everyone else. 





Week 2 undoubtedly got in its own wonder moment early — one that will be hard to beat in a lifetime of Games. 

With one felicitous suggestion Mutaz Essa Barshim guaranteed himself so much more than a Gold medal in Olympic mythology, and made one tall Italian a very happy man. 





Talking of Italians, their new 100m Champion had been heralded pre-race as a transitioning athlete. It came as a relief that this did not refer to one of those matters about which one is no longer entitled to an honest, fact-based opinion, but merely the circumstances surrounding Lamont Marcell Jacobs's birth in Texas — so I was quite unprepared for the almost comedy Italian accent he deployed in his mixed zone interviews, which turned out to be even less expected than his triumph.


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