Lola Karimi ’25
EE Co-Managing Editor
Team USA may be red, white, and blue, but at the Olympics, we take home gold.
For the third time in history and the first in a century, the Summer Games will be held in Paris. The Tokyo Olympics, which were postponed from 2020 to 2021 owing to the COVID-19 epidemic, took place only three years ago, as opposed to the customary four-year gap between Summer Olympics.
The dates of the 2024 Paris Olympics are July 26, through August 11, 2024. A number of activities will start prior to the Opening Ceremony on July 26, which will mark the formal start of the Games. On July 24 and 25, there will be handball, rugby, and soccer competitions. On July 25, archery will also begin.
During the games, NBC will broadcast daytime coverage for at least nine hours every day. Additionally, it will provide a three-hour primetime show every night that is improved and features access to behind-the-scenes footage, cutting-edge technology, and commentary from well-known athletes.
In its history, the United States has won 2,629 medals at the Summer Olympics: 1,061 gold, 830 silver, and 738 bronze. It has more gold medals overall than any other nation.Since the 1996 Atlanta Games, Team USA has won the most medals in every Summer Olympics. It led the field in golds (39), silvers (41), bronzes (33) and total medals (113) in Tokyo, demonstrating its continuous supremacy. In 25 sports, American athletes earned medals and 14 golds. With 30 medals in the water, swimming was Team USA’s strongest sport. The next sports on the list were gymnastics (6), shooting (6), wrestling (9), and athletics (26).
When breakdancing is added to the Olympic program in the Paris Games, get ready for lots of “how-did-they-do-that” moments. Athletes will do “headspins,” “windmills,” and “freeze” maneuvers as their bodies are twisted and gravity appears to be defied. All of this will happen to music. Breaking, as the sport is also called, had a great debut at the 2018 Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where, according to NBC Olympics, it attracted over a million people, surpassing the viewership of several other sports. As the Olympics hailed it as a “outstanding success,” the participants and organizers are now hoping to bring that charm to the biggest platform in sports.
“This is a chance for us to grow and educate people on breaking,” B-Boy Jeffro Jeffrey Louis said to NBC Olympics. Louis, the world’s fifth-ranked B-boy, is favored to take one of the final berths on the American Olympic team. Breaking has joined the ranks of other more recent sports, including sport climbing, skateboarding, and surfing, which were all introduced to the Olympic program for the first time at the 2020 Tokyo Games. The International Olympic Committee hopes to attract a younger audience by including those sports on the official Olympic roster because, as the Paris Olympics state, “all four are easy to take up and participants form communities that are very active on social media.”
The breaking competition in Paris is scheduled for August 9 and 10 at La Concorde Urban Park. It will consist of two events: one for ladies and one for men. The Paris Olympics state that a total of 16 B-boys and 16 B-girls will “go face to face in spectacular solo battles.” According to the Paris Olympics, the contestants will display their greatest movements as they attempt to keep up with the pace of the DJ’s music. They will improvise to survive the dance fight by combining a variety of “power moves,” such as freezes, the 6-step, and windmills.