Awards time: The best (and worst) of Paris

In 2019 the confident, charismatic and brilliant US gymnast Simone Biles spoke the truth: “I’ve won five world titles and if I say, ‘I’m the best gymnast there is, [the reaction is] ‘Oh, she’s cocky. Look at her now.’ No, the facts are literally on the paper.”
So, watching Biles suffer “the twisties” in Tokyo was unnerving and tragic. Thankfully the 1.42m high (4 ft 8 in) pocket rocket from Spring, Texas, is back and better than ever. 
Biles won the team, individual all-around and vault gold medals in Paris to increase her Olympic haul to 10 medals (seven gold). With 41 Olympic and world championship medals, Biles is the most decorated gymnast ever.
Before the individual all-around competition, Biles was introduced by superstar Beyonce on NBC. Despite a wobble on the uneven bars, a spectacular vault score was enough to fend off the opposition. 
Biles became the first woman since Věra Čáslavská in 1968 to win consecutive all-around competitions, and at 27, age was very much against her. Biles is the oldest US female gold medallist by five years and was the oldest gold medallist in gymnastics since Polina Astakhova in 1964.
Since her comeback, Biles is responsible for 11 of the best 12 all-around individual scores but interestingly, since a change of scoring system, there has yet to be a perfect 10 in gymnastics since 2006.
Larisa Latynina (gymnastics) and Katie Ledecky (swimming) are the only females in Olympic history to have won more gold medals than the ‘Goat in the Boat’, Dame Lisa Carrington, who with German paddler Birgit Fischer has eight gold medals in kayaking. 
With three gold medals in Paris, Carrington herself would have finished 29th equal on the nations’ medal table, and is responsible for 12.69 percent of New Zealand’s total Games gold medal tally of 63. 
Carrington is a sprinter; the most explosive starter kayaking has seen. But, with age, she has reinvented herself. While she’s retained her blistering beginning, she’s increased stamina evolving from a 200-metre specialist to a 500-metre juggernaut. She’s also mastered the art of working in a pair and quartet helping Alicia Hoskin (twice), Olivia Brett and Tara Vaughan also become Olympic champions. 
In the K-4 500 and K-2 500 events, a New Zealand victory was never in doubt after Carrington led the burst from the blocks. she had to work harder to win the K-1 500, running down Hungary’s Tamara Csipes at the halfway mark.
The USA women’s football team were an arrogant, embarrassing shambles during the World Cup in New Zealand, but the most influential female sports team in the world has rediscovered their groove, winning a record-extending fifth gold medal in Paris.
The US stormed through pool play winning all three matches and scoring a record nine goals. The playoffs proved trickier with extra time required to foil Japan in the quarterfinals and Germany in the semis. In the quarterfinal, Trinity Rodman (daughter of NBA star Dennis Rodman), delivered the winning goal. Sophia Smith came up with the goods in the semi.
A resurgent Brazil peppered the American’s goal in the first half of the final, but the US defence was resolute and after Mallory Swanson’s 57th-minute goal, the US didn’t look like losing under the shrewd coaching of Emma Hayes, five-time English premiership winner with Chelsea.
The US were paid more than their men (essentially an Under-23 side) for their success. Wages included a $10,000 payment to each player for featuring in a match, $12,000 for every victory at the tournament and a bonus of $36,000 for winning the gold.
The US record is an incredible 589 wins, 90 draws and 72 defeats from 751 matches. They have scored 2288 goals and only conceded 456.
With 33 Olympic medals, including 15 gold medals, rowing is the country’s most successful Olympic sport. New Zealand women have made 69 appearances in rowing events since Los Angeles in 1984 and won five gold, four silver and three bronze medals, a stunning conversion rate of 17 percent.
New Zealand rowers delivered the goods in Paris with ‘Super Mums’ Brooke Francis and Lucy Spoors winning gold in the double sculls final ahead of the two-time reigning world champions and Tokyo 2020 gold medallists, Ancuta Bodnar and Simona Radis of Romania.  
Francis and Spoors had children in 2022 with Spoors hilariously observing after the pairs’ semi-final victory: “I like to think that they were cheering us through the last 200m, but in reality, they were probably eating crackers and watching Peppa Pig if they didn’t want to sit still.”
According to a survey by the Washington-based Pew Research Centre, around 92 million selfies are taken daily, with an average person taking more than 450 selfies yearly.
Such a volume of imagery reduces most pictures to redundancy. The selfie taken by South Korea’s Lim Jong-Hoon to celebrate the silver and bronze medals won by South and North Korea in the badminton mixed doubles was a rare case of cross-border harmony in front of the largest possible audience. 
North and South Korea are still technically at war. The Korean War ended in 1953 with an armistice, and no peace treaty has ever been signed.
Before the Olympics, tensions in the Korean Peninsula flared up over thousands of garbage-laden balloons Pyongyang sent to South Korea, some of which have reached the grounds of the presidential compound in Seoul.
After the opening ceremony organisers “deeply apologised” to South Korea over a “human error” that saw its 143 athletes wrongly introduced as North Korea.

New Zealand Sevens skipper Sarah Hirini cut an apparently forlorn figure when receiving her gold medal after New Zealand beat Canada, 19-12, in the gold medal match. Hirini had conceded two penalties and thrown an interception that led to a Canadian try before an inspired 45m run set up the winning try for Stacey Waaka. Hirini wrote on Instagram afterward:
“I promise it was one of the happiest days of my life…but I was in some amount of pain from the knock I got on my cheek…The next day after scans we found out that I have multiple fractures in my face, thankfully not requiring anything other than some rest.” 
Hirini had recovered from an ACL injury at the Dubai Sevens in December to take her place at the games. An ACL injury typically requires nine months of recovery, Hirini was back in six-and-a-half months.
US swimmer Katie Ledecky resisted a furious finish from Australian superstar Ariarne Titmus to win her fourth consecutive gold medal in the 800m freestyle. Ledecky joined a rare club of six other athletes to defend an individual Olympic title on four consecutive occasions. With 14 overall medals, Ledecky is the most decorated female Olympic swimmer ever and has won more medals than any American woman. 
Less high-profile was Isabell Werth winning her seventh consecutive gold medal as part of the German dressage team. Werth has won Olympic titles in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2008, 2016, 2020 and 2024 and holds the record for the most years between first and last Olympic medals (32 years), overtaking Kiwi Sir Mark Todd (1984 to 2012).
Werth’s career hasn’t been without controversy, with two suspensions for giving her horses prohibited substances in international competition. 
US wrestler Amit Elor won the 68kg weight class in women’s wrestling, extending her winning run to five years and 41 consecutive matches.
The USA women’s basketball team stretched their unbeaten run to 61 successive games with an incredible 67-66 victory over France to secure the 329th and final gold medal of the games and tie China with 40 golds atop the overall standings.
Dirty Seine water and Tokyo football champions Canada spying on lowly New Zealand with a drone before the Olympics was going to be hard to top, but remarkably it was by the kind of farce only boxing could provide.
With champions like Muhammad Ali and Katie Taylor, boxing leans heavily on nostalgia for validity because boxing has been besieged by scandal for years. Paris was no different.
Emil Gurbanaliyev and Sergei Krutasov were two judges removed from the referees and judges pool at the AIBA World Championships in Serbia in 2021
The move came after both were randomly selected for integrity testing by Professor Richard McLaren, who exposed state-sponsored doping in Russia.
Yet somehow, the pair deemed to be at “high risk” of manipulating bouts passed their background check and took charge of more than 20 fights in Paris.
Worse was the disgraceful demonisation of Algerian boxing gold medallist Imane Khelif.  In 2023 Khelif and fellow boxer Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan were disqualified from the International Boxing Association’s (IBA) world championships after failing unspecified eligibility tests.
The circumstances of that disqualification have been considered highly unusual since it happened, and Khelif called it “a big conspiracy” at the time.
Khelif was disqualified three days after she won an early-round bout with Azalia Amineva, a previously unbeaten Russian prospect.
It’s worth noting the IBA is run by autocratic president, the Kremlin-linked Russian Umar Kremlev, who made his wealth in energy and transport, and who US officials have linked with organised crime, gambling and heroin trafficking.
So, despite Khelif being born a woman, raised a woman, having a female passport and competing as a woman since 2018 fashioning a 42-9 record, she was suddenly claimed to be a man.   
A special IOC-appointed unit ran Boxing in Paris because of concerns about IBA mismanagement. Boxing, unlike World Aquatics, World Athletics and the International Cycling Union, has no policy on what constitutes a man or woman and what to do in unique cases where a female athlete may test for unusually high levels of testosterone. Boxing is not guaranteed to be part of the Olympics programme in 2028.
“And I was just like, ‘yep, who cares? Just all or nothing’.”
Arisa Trew, 14, won the park skateboard event to become Australia’s youngest Olympic gold medallist. Trew crashed on the run before setting her winning score of 93.18 out of 100. Her carefree attitude is a delightful antidote to the crippling pressure and realities other athletes feel and face.
New Zealand swimmer Erika Fairweather (20) made four swimming finals, a feat never achieved by a Kiwi. Fairweather was fourth in the ‘Splash of the Century’ 400m individual medley won by Australian titan Ariarne Titmus (four Olympic golds) ahead of Katie Ledecky and Summer McIntosh. The average age of a female Olympic swimming finalist is 23. Fairweather might be at her peak in Los Angeles in 2028, with two Olympic campaigns under her belt.