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A sparkly GOAT necklace 🐐✨

Rachel G Bowers   Paste BN

Your Olympics essentials.

  • What happened yesterday: *takes a deep breath* So many medals! Simone Biles won all-around gold! Suni Lee won all-around bronze! Katie Ledecky won silver in the 4x200m freestyle relay! Fencers Lee Kiefer and Lauren Scruggs won team gold in team foil! Katie Douglas won gold in the 200m breaststroke! The U.S. rowed to gold in the men’s four finals! Regan Smith won silver in the 200m fly! The U.S. women’s hoops team beat Belgium! Check out all the day’s highlights.
  • What’s happening today: Track and field has entered the chat with prelims and qualis all day! More swimming finals! The USMNT plays Morocco in the quarterfinals! Both U.S. 3x3 hoops teams are in action! More beach volleyball! BMX racing finals! Follow all the day’s action.
  • The latest medal count: Entering Thursday, the U.S. held the lead in the medal count with 37 (nine golds, 15 silvers, 13 bronze), although China led the gold medal count with 11.

The GOAT of GOATs.

Hours before Simone Biles won another gold medal, this one in all-around last night, I was sitting in our media seats with colleagues Tom Schad and Nancy Armour. Nancy was chewing on what angle to write on Simone if she won again. (If you follow Nancy’s work, there are few angles about Simone she has not already written − multiple times.) So I leaned over and asked her if another all-around gold makes her the greatest athlete of all time. 

Of course, Nancy was way ahead of me, already thinking about exactly that. Now, it was about crafting a column to support that thesis. While Nancy chipped away at it, Tom and I went back and forth on the merits of this argument, something I have thought about for a while now. He pulled up Michael Phelps’ Wikipedia and medals table, and we discussed the practice of comparing athletes across sports, whether it’s useful and productive. (It’s not, but it sure is fun!)

Here is Nancy’s ultimate point, and I could not agree more: Your average person can swim, can run, can hit a tennis ball. We all suck at it but we can do the actual thing. None of us can do what Simone does. Here’s the punchline from her column: Ask the average person just to flip on the balance beam or do a simple vault, however, and you better have an ambulance on standby. And Biles does her thing with more ease and grace than most of us can muster walking to the bathroom.

Biles won and then pulled out a GOAT necklace with 546 diamonds in it. Iconic, tbh.

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Other highlights from yesterday.

  • Why Simone Biles was "stressing" big time during the gymnastics all-around final.
  • Jimmer Fredette missed two men's basketball 3x3 games as his U.S. team remained winless in Paris.
  • Andy Murray's tennis career came to an end with a doubles defeat. Afterward, he tweeted: "Never even liked tennis anyway." Actual lol, man.
  • Wyndham Clark's opening round did no favors for golf’s qualifying system.
  • On golf's first day at the Paris Olympics, it was an "awesome atmosphere" that stole the show.
  • USA beach volleyball's perfect top tandem braved a storm and a delay − and showed out for LeBron James.
  • The 3x3 U.S. women’s basketball team finally won.
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