Subterms
Richardson’s slow start put her behind, a position she had been able to overcome in the past. But not on Saturday, as she rarely matched Alfred’s speed during any part of the race. Women’s 100-meter final results 1 Alfred 10.72s 23.15mph 25.50mph 2 Richardson 10.87s 22.84mph 25.18mph 3 Jefferson 10.92s 22.64mph 25.03mph 4 Neita 10.96s […] More
If it feels like the same countries are winning most of the Olympic medals every two years, that’s because it’s largely true.Even though more than 150 countries and territories have claimed a medal since the modern Games began in 1896, the list of winners is top-heavy. Entering the Paris Summer Games, the United States has the most, by far, with 2,975 medals, according to the International Olympic Committee’s research wing. A group of usual suspects follow: the former Soviet Union (1,204), Germany (1,058), Great Britain (955), France (898).Nearly 70 countries and territories, though — roughly a third of the parade of nations — cannot boast an Olympic medalist in any discipline, summer or winter. Some, like South Sudan, which sent its first team to the Olympics in 2016, have only just begun trying. Others, like Monaco, have been at it for more than a century.“It’s frustrating, definitely,” said Marco Luque, a member of the Bolivian Olympic Committee’s board and the president of his country’s track and field federation. “And you feel impotence, of not being able to do better.”Every once in a while, though, a nation breaks its maiden. On Saturday night at the Stade de France, Thea LaFond-Gadson, 30, of the Caribbean island of Dominica, won the gold medal in women’s triple jump. And soon after, Julien Alfred, 23, of St. Lucia, also in the Caribbean, won the gold medal in the women’s 100-meter sprint.“It means a lot to the small islands,” she said. “And seeing how we can come from a small place but also be on the biggest stage of our career.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
Ben ShpigelTalya MinsbergChang W. LeeGabriela Bhaskar and Julien Alfred, the fastest woman in the Caribbean nation of Saint Lucia, blitzed the field in the 100-meter dash Saturday night at the Paris Games to earn a far more awesome title — the fastest woman in the world.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesShe swiped the distinction from Sha’Carri Richardson of the United States, who claimed it at the world championships last year but could not retain it at these Olympics. In a driving rain in Saint-Denis, France, Alfred finished in 10.72 seconds, 0.15 clear of Richardson, who was slow off the starting block and never seriously threatened.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesGabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesWhen the results were shown at the Stade de France, Alfred jumped for joy and jogged to the bell set up on the edge of the track for gold medalists to ring. After winning Saint Lucia’s first Olympic medal ever, Alfred wrapped herself in her nation’s flag, sobbing as she fell to her knees before being embraced by Richardson and Melissa Jefferson of the United States, who won the bronze.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesChang W. Lee/The New York TimesBidding to become the first American since Gail Devers in 1996 to win the 100 at the Games, Richardson, 24, could not claim the gold in the race she thought she would do so in three years ago at the Tokyo Games, when she was suspended after testing positive for marijuana.Daniel Berehulak/The New York TimesDaniel Berehulak/The New York TimesRichardson arrived in France as the 100-meter world champion. She will leave it as the fastest woman in the United States — but the second-fastest in the world. More
Mientras muchos aplaudían a la campeona olímpica por haber priorizado su salud mental en 2021, el hoy candidato republicano a la vicepresidencia dijo en ese momento que los medios celebraban la debilidad.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]El senador JD Vance, de Ohio, candidato republicano a la vicepresidencia, está siendo objeto de un nuevo escrutinio debido a declaraciones que hizo en el pasado, afirmando que la gimnasta estadounidense Simone Biles, quien el jueves ganó otra medalla de oro en los Juegos Olímpicos, había mostrado debilidad al retirarse de la edición anterior del evento por un problema de salud mental.Durante una aparición en Fox News en 2021, Vance cuestionó que Biles estuviera recibiendo elogios por haber salido de la competición en los Juegos de Tokio.“Creo que el hecho de que intentemos alabar a las personas, no por sus momentos de fortaleza, no por sus momentos de heroísmo, sino por sus momentos más débiles, hace que nuestra sociedad, digamos, terapéutica, se vea muy mal”, dijo Vance, quien en ese momento se postulaba para el Senado.Ahora que tanto Vance como Biles se encuentran de nuevo bajo los reflectores, los demócratas estaban ansiosos por destacar estos comentarios. Aida Ross, vocera del Comité Nacional Demócrata, afirmó el jueves que Vance no estaba “en posición de hablar de los ‘momentos más débiles’ de nadie”.“Mientras el resto del país celebra la actuación del equipo femenino de gimnasia de EE. UU. en los Juegos Olímpicos, JD Vance se enfrenta a su momento más débil en medio de un lanzamiento lleno de tropiezos que lo ha hecho el candidato a vicepresidente más impopular en décadas”, dijo.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
Online fury and unclear rules have left organizers of the women’s boxing competition in Paris facing complex questions about fairness in women’s sports.Olympic officials on Friday tried urgently to rebut what they described as widespread “misinformation” that had turned a 46-second Olympic boxing match at the Paris Games into a forum for fierce debates and complicated questions about biology and competitive advantage in women’s sports.Mark Adams, the chief spokesman for the I.O.C., derided news articles and social media posts that he said sought to cast doubt — unfairly, in the view of Olympic officials and even some other competitors — on the gender of one of the boxers in the women’s competition, Imane Khelif of Algeria. Mr. Adams stressed at a news conference that Khelif is not transgender.“There has been some confusion that somehow it’s a man fighting a woman,” Mr. Adams said. “The question you have to ask yourself is, are these athletes women?” he added. “The answer is yes,” according to their eligibility, passport and history.Khelif won her opening bout on Thursday when her Italian opponent, Angela Carini, refused to continue, and after she was cleared to compete in the Olympics despite being suddenly disqualified during last year’s world championships in a dispute about her eligibility.Thursday’s fight ended after less than a minute when Carini abandoned the bout after taking a powerful punch to the face. Khelif, who had boxed as a woman for her entire career with occasional success, will fight next in the quarterfinals on Saturday.Carini later told reporters that the controversy over her defeat “makes me sad” and that she was worried about the focus on Khelif. “If the I.O.C. said she can fight, I respect that decision,” she said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
After Scruggs, 21, became the first Black American woman to win an individual Olympic fencing medal, she clinched gold for the U.S. team.After Lauren Scruggs clinched the gold medal for the United States in the women’s fencing team foil competition on Thursday, she threw off her mask and spun around, her eyes and mouth wide open.It was the team’s first-ever gold in the event. But it wasn’t the first big moment for Scruggs at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.On Sunday, Scruggs, in her Olympics debut, became the first Black American woman to win an individual Olympic fencing medal for the U.S.“Fencing has largely, historically, been a non-Black sport,” Scruggs told NCAA.com in a July interview. “So I hope to inspire young Black girls to get into fencing and to think that they can have a place in the sport. I just hope that more people who look like me, little girls like me, feel they have a place in the sport.”A Queens native and a rising senior at Harvard, Scruggs was around 7 when she started fencing. She was inspired by her older brother, Nolen, who was eager to try fencing after seeing “Star Wars,” “Good Morning America” reported.“As the younger sibling, I always wanted to do whatever he did, so I started fencing, and I stuck with it,” Scruggs told BET in an interview last month.Scruggs clung to the sport’s competitive nature, telling “Good Morning America” that it channeled her creativity. But as a Black fencer, she felt added pressure whenever she stepped onto the piste.“Growing up in fencing, no one really looked like me,” she said in the “Good Morning America” interview. “I think in order to prove myself, I really had to be the best at the tournaments.”She kept winning those tournaments. Scruggs was accepted into the Peter Westbrook Foundation, an organization founded by Peter Westbrook, the first Black American man to win an Olympic fencing medal.The organization supports young fencers from underrepresented racial and economic backgrounds. Scruggs, who now volunteers as a mentor for the group, eventually wants to own her own fencing club, she said in the BET interview.Scruggs is a six-time world champion and the youngest U.S. foil fencer to win the Junior World Championship, according to her Harvard bio. She has been named a first-team All American three times at Harvard and was the 2023 N.C.A.A. national champion.She was No. 11 in the International Fencing Federation’s world rankings when she arrived in Paris.“I think my success in fencing has also helped break stereotypes about what Black people can do and who can be a fencer,” she told “Good Morning America.” More
A program of arts events shown in conjunction with the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games looks at the relationship between art and sport.In dance and in sports, there is a common ritual: warming up. As much an art as an activity, it energizes not just the body, but also the mind, speaking less to effort than to surrender. What does it take to get into the zone, that place where the body and mind show up as equals?Since 2022 France has been warming up — on a grand scale. Culture, along with sport and education, is a pillar of Olympism, and France has taken that seriously with its Cultural Olympiad, a program of multidisciplinary arts events directed by Dominique Hervieu, a choreographer, an experienced leader in the arts and a former dancer as well.The thread running through this Olympiad is the connection between sports and art. When do they find symbiosis? When do they diverge? As Hervieu sees it, what binds the Olympic Games is culture, and there, the dance values she embraces play a role: “It’s a way to think with your body,” she said in an interview in Paris. “To think about society, to think about individuality, to think about space.”In other words, to be aware of yourself in the larger world. The contemporary mandate for including a cultural component with the Games began in 1992 in Barcelona, Hervieu said. But how to integrate it is a choice made by the host city, and Hervieu decided on the sports-art connection.Dominique Hervieu is the director of the Cultural Olympiad, a vast program of arts events that began in 2022. “We have 2,500 projects, and it’s incredible,” she said. “It could have been only 500. And everybody would be happy with 500. Me too!”Benjamin BoccasThere are obvious similarities between the two — the idea of excellence and surpassing oneself — but Hervieu also wanted to “show that art is not sport and vice versa,” she said. “The dimension of physical performance, which is the goal of sport with a view to winning, is not the goal of art. This difference is fundamental, because virtuosity in art is always a means of creating a space for meaning or poetry.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
When South Sudan’s young basketball team took to the court for an exhibition game against America’s basketball royalty, there were few expectations that they could hold on against the likes of LeBron James and Stephen Curry. Then they lost by just one point, 101-100, stunning not only their loyal followers, but also the team’s players, who had grown up revering the N.B.A. stars.The South Sudanese will face the United States again Wednesday, this time at the Paris Olympics, and with the Americans now on notice, the odds are distinctly against the African team. But for many of their fans in Africa and elsewhere, that is beside the point.The way they see it, it is a bit of a miracle that a team of refugees and their descendants, whose home country is just 13 years old and has suffered through devastating wars, made it to the Olympics at all.Despite having no place of their own to train, the team won the only slot open to Africa for men’s basketball. They already beat the odds by not only coming within a hair of winning against the Americans — James made the winning layup with just 8 seconds remaining — but also by beating Puerto Rico in their first match of the Games in Paris.“South Sudan and its people are known all over the world now,” said Aninyesi Tereza Mark, a 33-year-old university lecturer in the South Sudanese capital, Juba. “We are very proud of them and we are happy.”South Sudan is the world’s youngest country. It won its freedom from neighboring Sudan only in 2011, and since then, has suffered through a civil war that has claimed the lives of some 400,000 people and displaced more than 4 million. While a shaky peace deal has been in place since 2018, inter-communal violence persists. Poverty and corruption are endemic.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
