Olympic Games hit their target and then some
Paris 2024 offered plenty for the fans, the geeks and the locals
Bien fait, Paris.
(Well done, Paris.)
I’m not sure if it’s just me and my general love for the Olympics but it seems to me that the Paris Games did the French equivalent of knocking it out of the ballpark. (Seriously, what would that be?)
Great performances, just a smattering of controversy, fantastic TV ratings, just enough entertaining ridiculousness (we needn’t talk about the pole vault dude or the breaker from Australia) and as far as I know, nobody died — though final health conditions of those who swam in the Seine have yet to be revealed.
Speaking of smattering, here is a smattering of impressions of the Games of the 33rd Olympiad:
Iowa-connected athletes make their marks
For a state our size, there was much to be proud of. A few Iowans I introduced you to before the Games had mixed results in terms of medals but I’d wager a guess they had a pretty good time nonetheless.
On the track, Iowans had plenty to cheer about. Former Hawkeye Brittany Brown won a bronze medal in the 200 meters, becoming the first Hawkeye woman to medal in track and field. Urbandale/Dowling Catholic’s Karissa Schweizer did a tough double with the 5,000 and 10,000 races, finishing ninth in the 10,000 and 10th in the 5,000. Her time in the latter race, 14 minutes 45.57 seconds, was the fastest ever run by an American woman at the Olympics.
On the water, another former Hawkeye, Eve Stewart, won a bronze medal for Great Britain in the women’s 8 rowing competition. Davenport native Emily Delleman’s quad sculls team was eliminated early in the rowing competition.
A few Iowa-connected basketball players represented other countries. Former Hawkeye Megan Gustafson averaged 18 points and 9.3 rebounds to lead Spain into the medal round, where they lost to Belgium in the quarterfinals. Another former Hawkeye, Tomi Taiwo, played sparingly for Nigeria, which saw its historic Olympic run end with a quarterfinal loss to the U.S.
Former Iowa State player Bridget Carleton averaged 13.3 points for Canada, which didn’t make it out of the qualifying round. Another former Cyclone, Lauren Mansfield, was on the Australian 3x3 team that lost to Canada in the quarterfinals
And just days before the Olympics, wrestler Kennedy Blades of Chicago announced she would wrestle for Iowa. On Sunday, she won a bronze medal at 76kg. So basically, until some other Power 5 school decides to add women’s wrestling, just hand that trophy to the defending national champion Hawkeyes for good or at least for the time being.
Because everything is local
In the midst of all the current Olympic news out of Paris, I have been thinking a lot about Doreen Wilber. Who? Why?
Wilber was the 1972 Olympic gold medalist in archery from Jefferson, Iowa, well-known enough that her community built a gorgeous statue of her with a lovely little plaza downtown. She didn’t need fancy eyewear or anything, just some cat-eyed glasses. She won that medal at age 42 and was often described in the media at the time as “a 42-year-old housewife from Jefferson, Iowa.” Yeah, a 42-year-old housewife who could shoot you dead between the eyes from 70 meters.
I’ve thought about her because the fact that I even know about her represents how the Olympics are a huge international story that gets brought home by the many athletes who are there. I didn’t grow up in Iowa, but I was so well-schooled in Iowa history by my colleagues in the Des Moines Register sports department that I probably know more about Iowa sports history than that of my native Wisconsin.
I’ve also thought about it a lot because before the Paris Games began, I had a chat with Olympics reporter extraordinaire Rachel Blount. Rachel, a native of Van Meter, Iowa, had covered Olympic Games since Nagano in 1998 but at the last minute her paper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, decided not to send her to Paris. (I worked in the Star Tribune sports department in 2000-2005, editing several Olympic special sections filled with Rachel’s work). It apparently wasn’t a money issue for the paper, just shifting priorities. While there is no shortage of wire service copy about the Olympics, those reporters aren’t chasing various local stories because that’s not their job.
I understand why many papers and other media outlets can’t afford to send reporters and photographers to the Olympics anymore, though that apparently wasn’t the issue with the Strib. I don’t understand, though, why so many traditional media outlets seem to think people don’t care about the Olympics and would much rather spend their summer reading about football and college basketball. The Star Tribune move created a stir up there, causing one commenter (I know, I know, never read the comments) to say something like, “Well, their coverage always seemed provincial anyway.”
Ya think?
This is what local news does: It takes something that is going on in the world and connects it to the local community. In other words, provincial is the point.
It’s the provincial coverage that explains why a cheesehead like me is fascinated by the story of Doreen Wilber; it’s the lack of it that explains why when I posted a photo of her statue on The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter, it got more engagement than just about anything I’d posted since Twitter became X. No one who commented or shared, most with Iowa connections, knew who she was and delighted in learning the story. They know now.
OK, I’ll get off my soapbox now.
NBC figures it out
For sports fans of a certain age, the worry had long been that the Olympics (and sports in general) were going to become pay-per-view TV events. The NBC Triplecast in 1992 gave a hint of what, possibly, was to come. Turns out it wasn’t a preview of a pay-per-view cash grab but a preview of a content delivery method that was ahead of its time.
The hegemony that is NBCUniversal Media seems to have hit on just the right mix with its various channels (local NBC affiliates, CNBC, USA, E!) and a streaming service (Peacock) to provide the general coverage for casual viewers and the specialized coverage for the geeks and obsessives.
You don’t want to watch gymnastics yet again? Fine, hop on over to Peacock and watch trampoline. Got a Canadian cousin competing in a C-1 seminfinal? You can find it on the Peacock link dedicated to canoeing.
Of course, this requires cable or live streaming subscriptions and spending money, but that’s just the world we live in now. You pretty much need any or all of that if you are a sports fan at all, and the fact is the free network TV version never would have shown trampoline or Canadian canoeists anyway. One of Central Iowa’s fun summer storms knocked out my internet for a week and after finally figuring out where in my home the over-the-air antenna works (taped to a chair in the middle of the dining room if you’re curious), I settled in each evening and enjoyed the network prime time coverage after bouncing around the streaming stuff on my phone during the day.
I even enjoyed Snoop Dogg, whose presence outraged many of my sports-loving friends who saw it as pandering to the masses. Maybe, but his curiosity about the sports and affection for the families captured what so many people love about the Olympics in general.
I usually spend the Olympics grumbling about TV coverage, but pretty much the only knock I’d have is I wish I could have seen more medal ceremonies. Who doesn’t want to hear the Uzbek national anthem?
Maybe there can be a Peacock link for that for Milano Cortino 2026 and LA 2028. See what you can do about that, Snoop.
Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”
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Mrs Wilbur! The worst of the many pet peeves I carry. I know nothing about typesetting, but it certainly appears that there’s enough white space left to have used Doreen instead of Mrs.
Olympics-Paris was indeed special.
I am an Olympics fanboy. I have been my entire life. I even remember snatches of the 1960 games when I was 3 years old. Many times during my adult life I wondered if the games could survive the reality of world conflict, cheating, financial cost to stage, etc. I also remember the 1992 PPV disaster. (as I recall, there were three options available) I was not a fan, and definitely not a purchaser. I felt like the games started taking a turn back toward relevance in 2000 (with a slight cheating detour at Sochi), so I had hopes that Paris would be good. I did not expect these games to be as transcendent as they were. The ultimate signal that this was special (for me) was hearing about how all of the Parisian who left the city in disgust ahead of the games were now returning FOR the games. If you can impress Parisians, you've done something special. NBC and Peacock get flowers here too. They won a gold medal.