Olympic Games (2024)

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      Your Guide to Olympic Gymnastics: Floor Exercise

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      Want to follow the women’s gymnastics competition in Paris, but don’t understand the skills or how they’re scored? Here’s a guide.For two weeks every four years, women’s gymnastics is one of the biggest sports in the world. The rest of the time, those of us watching are kind of a niche group.That can make it hard to fully appreciate what you’re seeing when the athletes take the Olympic stage. If you want to know what’s required on each apparatus or how to distinguish good routines from great ones, we’re here to help.Here, we’ll look at the floor exercise, starting with a broad overview and then moving into technical details. We also have guides to the vault, uneven bars and balance beam.The basicsThe square floor mat is about 40 feet on each side, which makes the diagonal paths along which gymnasts tumble about 56 feet. A carpeted surface covers a layer of foam, over wood, over springs. The slight bounce of those springs allows gymnasts to do more difficult skills.Every floor routine must include:A flip with a twist of at least 360 degreesA double back flip, with or without twistsBackward and forward tumblingTwo leaps or hops in succession, either directly connected or with running steps in between. One must involve a 180-degree split.Floor routines, set to music of the gymnast’s choice — no lyrics allowed — last about 90 seconds and include three or four tumbling passes. Gymnasts generally do their most difficult passes first. They receive one score for difficulty and one for execution, and the two are added.Unlike the vault, which showcases pure power, the floor exercise combines power with artistry. In practice, though, some gymnasts don’t put as much effort into their choreography. But when a gymnast really puts on a performance, you can tell.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

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      Your Guide to Olympic Gymnastics: Uneven Bars

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      Want to follow the women’s gymnastics competition in Paris, but don’t understand the skills or how they’re scored? Here’s a guide.For two weeks every four years, women’s gymnastics is one of the biggest sports in the world. The rest of the time, those of us watching are kind of a niche group.That can make it hard to fully appreciate what you’re seeing when the athletes take the Olympic stage. If you want to know what’s required on each apparatus or how to distinguish good routines from great ones, we’re here to help.Here, we’ll look at the uneven bars, starting with a broad overview and then moving into technical details. We also have guides to the vault, balance beam and floor exercise.The basicsThe apparatus consists of two bars, one about five and a half feet high and one about eight feet high. Gymnasts swing in circles around the bars, fly between them, do pirouettes on their hands and perform release moves in which they let go of the bar and re-catch it. The best routines flow from one skill to the next.Routines must include at least one transition from the high bar to the low bar; one move releasing and catching the same bar; one 360-degree turn, or pirouette on the hands; and at least two different grips, or hand positions. Gymnasts receive one score for difficulty and one for execution, and the two are combined. The judges deduct for leg separation, flexed feet and other form issues; breaks in momentum; “empty swings,” in which the gymnast loses her balance or rhythm and has to swing back and forth to regain momentum before the next skill; and, of course, falls. It’s also a deduction if she isn’t fully vertical when moving into a handstand or finishing a turn.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

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      Your Guide to Olympic Gymnastics: Balance Beam

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      Want to follow the women’s gymnastics competition in Paris, but don’t understand the skills or how they’re scored? Here’s a guide.For two weeks every four years, women’s gymnastics is one of the biggest sports in the world. The rest of the time, those of us watching are kind of a niche group.That can make it hard to fully appreciate what you’re seeing when the athletes take the Olympic stage. If you want to know what’s required on each apparatus or how to distinguish good routines from great ones, we’re here to help.Here, we’ll look at the balance beam, starting with a broad overview and then moving into the technical details. We also have guides to the vault, uneven bars and floor exercise.The basicsThe beam is about 16 feet long, about four feet high and about four inches wide — not much wider than a credit card.Every routine must include:A successive series of two or more acrobatic skills (handsprings or flips). At least one must be a salto, meaning no hands.Two or more consecutive dance skills (turns, leaps or jumps). At least one must be a leap or jump featuring a 180-degree split.Acrobatic skills in multiple directions (backward versus forward or sideways).At least one turn or pirouette.Gymnasts receive one score for difficulty and one for execution, and the two are combined for their final score. In the best beam routines, the gymnast has no wobbles and, of course, no falls. (In reality, small balance checks are common.) Judges also deduct for poor form and excessive pauses between skills.The reigning Olympic champion is Guan Chenchen of China, and the reigning world champion is Simone Biles of the United States.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

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      Why Is It So Hard for Olympic Host Cities to Control Costs?

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      An Oxford study estimates that despite cost-cutting efforts, Paris is spending more than $1 billion above the Games’ historical median cost.Like every city that hosts the Olympics, Paris designed its opening ceremony to make a splash, with ethereal dance performances, athletes floating down the Seine and a blowout performance by Celine Dion. A big display is table stakes, and hundreds of thousands of people jammed the city’s bridges and riverbanks for hours to cheer the flotilla.But to make these Olympics truly unique, Paris also had something quieter in mind: It vowed to buck the decades-long trend of spending a dizzying fortune on hosting them.That vision for a budget-conscious Olympics does not seem to have panned out. The tab for the Games in Paris, the first city to fully test cost-cutting reforms that the International Olympic Committee introduced in 2019, is at least $8.87 billion. That isn’t an eye-popping bill compared with the $17 billion that London spent in 2024, the estimated $28 billion that Tokyo spent in 2021 or the $24 billion that Rio de Janeiro spent in 2016 — the three most expensive Summer Games to date. But the figure is more than $1 billion above the historical median cost of hosting the Games, according to a study by researchers at Oxford’s Said Business School published in May. And it is about 115 percent above Paris’s initial estimate.“This is not the cheap Games that were promised,” the study concluded.Figuring out how to keep host city expenses on budget is vital for the Olympics, which have struggled to find host cities in places where citizens have a say in the decision. When the I.O.C. voted on Wednesday to give the 2030 Winter Games to the French Alps and the 2034 Winter Games to Salt Lake City, both cities were the only candidates.Repurposing buildings hasn’t necessarily solved the Games’ budgeting problem. Paris’s central argument in its bid for hosting rights was that reusing existing sporting facilities would help it avoid the steep capital investment that inflicted lasting economic pain on Olympic cities like Athens and Rio de Janeiro, as well as stave off anti-Olympic sentiment in the city. Los Angeles, host of the 2028 Summer Games, has promised no new Olympic buildings.But while refurbishing buildings may be more sustainable, adapting old monuments for the Olympics has taken years — at a cost that has not been revealed. Take the 125-year-old Grand Palais, a soaring iron, glass-roofed exhibition hall in central Paris, where fencing and taekwondo competitions will take place. It shut down for renovations in March 2021 and was scheduled to be closed for so long that the city constructed a new Grand Palais near the Eiffel Tower.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

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      The Best Looks of the Paris Olympic Opening Ceremony

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      Paris raised the fashion stakes for the XXXIII Olympiad, and even with the rain, the result transformed the Seine into a watery runway. Even before the XXXIII Olympiad officially began, the litany of firsts was enormous. The first Olympics in Paris in a century. The first with equal gender participation. The first opening ceremony, ever, en pleine air. The first sponsored by a global luxury behemoth.The first Olympics in which fashion was so central to the identity of the host country itself.The opening ceremony featured not only a red carpet at the entrance but offered a full-blown runway show in the middle of vignettes devoted to the history and spirit of the country, including the French Revolution and the reconstruction of Notre Dame. As the monuments of Paris — the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Palais, the Place de la Concorde — provided the backdrop to the event, style was at its heart.The bar was set as soon as it was announced that LVMH would be a premium partner. The goal, according to Thomas Jolly, the Games’ artistic director, was to “shed light on French savoir-faire,” broadly defined. They did it with cabaret and heavy metal, dance, acrobats and 1,800 outfits from brands both new and old. From the start, it was clear the fashion competition stakes would be raised for every other national team. At the opening ceremony for the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics, Team USA with flag bearer LeBron James (in foreground holding the large American flag).James Hill for The New York TimesIt’s tempting, during an Olympics, for teams to resort to the usual uniform of blazer and chino in national colors (yes, we’re looking at you, USA and Ralph Lauren), to default to the basic athleisure warm-up suit (hello, Italy in Emporio Armani and Canada in Lululemon) or to fall into a trap of national stereotype (Bermudans in Bermuda shorts).But by the time the Olympic cauldron had risen aloft beneath a hot-air balloon, and Celine Dion had begun to belt beneath the Eiffel Tower, and despite the rain that had pelted down requiring mass distribution of ponchos, it was clear the most memorable looks belonged to the teams who played their own fashion game. Not to mention the attendees who dressed for the occasion, and the brand that turned out to have been the secret couturière to the celebrity performers.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

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      Doused by Rain, Paris Opens Its Games With a Boat Party on the Seine

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      In a blaze of French style blending history and artistic audacity, the Paris Olympic Games opened beneath plumes of blue, white and red smoke, as thousands of athletes defied a downpour to sail through the city’s heart, down the Seine toward the Eiffel Tower.Steady rain and rising security concerns could not deter the athletes from more than 200 delegations. They laughed, they danced and they waved national flags, some from the decks of converted sightseeing boats, in a ceremony dedicated to the theme of togetherness to heal a divided France and a fractured world.Lady Gaga, emerging from behind pink puffballs in a black bustier, performed in French. Cabaret artists can-canned on the riverbanks. Aya Nakamura, a French-Malian singer whose presence was contested by the nationalist right, emerged from the august Académie Française, bastion of the French language, to offer her slang-spiced lyrics as she gyrated and stroked herself to the music of an impassive Republican Guard marching band.A new and diverse France confronted an old and traditional France. At a moment of sharp political confrontation that has left the country deadlocked, the ceremony was an invitation to think again about the meaning of the nation and the possibility of understanding. The Republican Guard relented at the last and tried some modest dance moves in their military uniforms to Ms. Nakamura’s massive hit “Djadja.”Team France during the opening ceremony.Jeremy White/The New York TimesThough a steady rain chased away many spectators before the ceremony was over, thousands stayed. Daniel Berehulak/The New York TimesWe 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

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      Snoop Dogg, NBC’s New Voice of the People

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      The network hired the rapper for an expanded role on its broadcasts of the Summer Games in Paris after posting record-low viewership of the Tokyo competition.Once Snoop Dogg had waded through electrical cords on the floor and ambled his lanky frame around the disorderly equipment in a partially constructed television studio in Paris, he was able to peer out over a balcony overlooking the Eiffel Tower and survey the city he hopes to conquer during the Olympics.“This is my home,” he said triumphantly to himself. Below, a handful of people flashed their phones.The man who NBCUniversal hopes will become the breakout star of the Paris Games was right where he wanted to be.The Olympics are always about the athletes, and as usual the focus this year will be on the brightest ones: Simone Biles, Katie Ledecky, Noah Lyles, Novak Djokovic, LeBron James.But the event’s billing as the pinnacle of athletic achievement has not been enough to prevent NBC’s Olympics television ratings from skidding amid a fractured media landscape, and the network hopes Snoop Dogg’s aura as one of the most recognized and beloved figures in pop culture will energize viewers of all ages.Ratings for the Summer Games have dropped steadily since an average of 31.1 million prime-time viewers watched the 2012 London Olympics. NBC executives cite pandemic-related restrictions and an unfavorable time zone for Americans as reasons the Tokyo Games averaged 15.5 million prime-time viewers, its lowest audience ever.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

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      Opening Ceremony Misses the Boat

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      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.About six hours before Celine Dion gutted out the final number of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony, the streaming service Peacock emailed a promo for its coverage with the headline, “We’ll all be crying by the end of this.” So maybe they knew more than they were letting on.The homestretch of the marathon four-hour broadcast, when the celebrating athletes and dance extravaganzas and speeches were out of the way, had some starkly lovely images and moving moments: the speedboat carrying former champions up the Seine in the dark (like a real-life echo of Leos Carax’s great water-skiing scene in “Les Amants du Pont-Neuf”). The grand scale and dramatic lighting of the Louvre as the torch was carried, like a firefly’s flame, through its courtyards. The torch coming to the hand of a 100-year-old French cyclist, steady in his wheelchair, and Dion defying her illness to belt out “Hymne à l’Amour” on the Eiffel Tower.Celine Dion’s performance of “Hymne à l’Amour” provided a triumphant finale.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesBut it took endurance to get there — for the athletes, performers and spectators drenched by the summer rain, and for the viewers at home watching the ceremony as it was conceived by the French organizers and packaged by NBC and Peacock.The decision to abandon the event’s traditional format — the long, formal parade of athletes marching into a stadium — for a waterborne procession along the Seine intercut with performances had a twofold effect. It turned the ceremony into something bigger, more various and more intermittently entertaining. But it also turned it into something more ordinary — just another bloated made-for-TV spectacle, like a halftime show or awards show or holiday parade that exists to promote and perpetuate itself.Those spectacles can be fun, of course, and the traditional Olympics opening ceremony could feel dull and interminable. But it was not quite like anything else, and it played a key part in making the Games feel special.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