Rio 2016: Olympics news and updates

The 4-inch-wide balance beam, called “the most unforgiving surface in sports,” may be the most mind-boggling of the four events in women’s gymnastics. It tests even the phenomenal Simone Biles, the five-time Rio Olympics medalist who wobbled and grabbed the beam to keep from falling — but still managed to medal in the event last summer.

Our brains can handle some balance without much effort: We take thousands of steps a day, and for split seconds between each stride we are balancing on one foot. That’s easy because our legs are strong and our feet have enough relative surface area to hold our weight.

When hackers tried to use Olympic gymnast Simone Biles’s use of prescription medication to downplay her athletic abilities, Biles flipped the script and used the leak to send a personal message about stigma and mental health.

The four-time Olympic gold medalist was the victim of a cyber attack on Tuesday after a Russian cyber espionage group known as Fancy Bear hacked the World Anti-Doping Association database and released private medical records to the public, WADA confirmed in an official statement.

The Brazilian edition of Vogue magazine published an image from a photo shoot this week that designed to promote the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games, which begin this week.

Here’s where things got weird: Instead of shooting Paralympic athletes, the publication chose to use actors whose images were edited to make it appear as if they had disabilities.

In the lead-up to the Rio Olympics, there was a flurry of panic around whether the games might act as a super-spreading event for the Zika virus, flinging cases out of the hot zone (Brazil) and into the far corners of the earth. Some worried critics even called for the games to be postponed or moved. Some athletes dropped out in fear of the virus.

But researchers studying Zika and expert agencies like the World Health Organization insisted the fears were unfounded.

One of the biggest scandals of the 2016 Olympics in Rio was the story of US swimmer Ryan Lochte’s admission to “overexaggerating,” as he called it, about an encounter with security guards at gas station in the early morning hours of August 14, along with swimming teammates Jack Conger, Gunnar Bentz, and James Feigen.

While it’s still not clear what exactly happened (although it seems very clear the swimmers were not robbed at gunpoint, as Lochte originally claimed), the saga has elicited plenty of interest and scorn. The damage to Lochte’s reputation has even cost him sponsorships from Speedo and Ralph Lauren.

Ryan Lochte, via his lies about being robbed in Rio, has evolved from slightly lovable American oaf to American embarrassment. In the wake of the debacle and his dishonesty, sponsors like Speedo and Ralph Lauren have dropped the swimmer, but there’s still a lingering feeling of discomfort around Lochte’s privilege and a lack of accountability.

A lot of that has to do with his excuses. The first time Lochte told his story, it was about a gunpoint robbery. Then he walked it back a bit, before eventually apologizing for misjudging a situation — a situation that involved a gas station manager and a security guard who were mad at Lochte and his friends for vandalizing the gas station’s bathroom and urinating around the premises.

The Rio Olympics officially ended on Sunday, with the closing ceremony in Maracanã Stadium. For the 11,000 athletes who participated in the Rio Games, the closing ceremony marks the end of an intense two weeks of competition and the media attention that comes with it.

Now they return to their lives away from the spotlight — either to eventually begin training for the Tokyo Games in 2020, or, for athletes who are retiring, to find a new career path.

Originally published on Grist.

Long after the athletes have packed up their Speedos and the torch has gone out, the structures that house the 2016 Olympics will remain. While Rio de Janeiro used its existing national soccer stadium for the opening and closing ceremonies, it also built a number of other stadiums and venues for the games — and displaced 80,000 residents in the process. So what’s to come of all those buildings once everyone has taken their balls and gone home?

After two weeks of mesmerizing athletic performances, the 2016 Summer Olympics will wrap up with the closing ceremony at 7 pm Eastern Sunday, August 21, in Rio de Janeiro’s famous Maracanã Stadium.

But like the opening ceremony, if you’re hoping to watch it live on television, you’re out of luck — NBC isn’t airing it in real time. In the Eastern time zone, coverage starts at 8 pm. If you’re in the Central and Mountain time zones, tune in for the beginning of the ceremonies at 7 pm Central. In the Pacific time zone, watch at 8 pm.

Every day of the Olympic Games in Rio seems to have generated at least one cringeworthy story about female athletes. Each incident on its own can be addressed with little more than an eye roll — sexism is nothing new, especially for women athletes. But cumulatively, the portrayal of female Olympians points to a real issue of inequality for women in sports, compared with their male peers, and how poorly (if ever) they are typically represented in mainstream sports media.

The frustration comes down to a very real truth: Women are barely ever shown competing in sports on primetime television. Aside from the Women’s World Cup (and when those matches are broadcast, due to the host country’s time zone difference), the rare WNBA game, high-profile tennis, and a few March Madness matchups, the Olympics pack in the most female athleticism on our television screens, during highly coveted primetime spots. And they only come every two years between Winter and Summer Games.

Ryan Lochte, America’s majestic platinum-haired merman and 12-time Olympic medalist, has triggered the most confusing story to come out of the Rio Olympics. The tale does not involve doping, or Zika, or human body parts washing up on the sand of Copacabana Beach.

No.

LeBron James, the greatest basketball player alive, isn’t on the US Olympic team. But after watching the Americans struggle, he says he wishes he were playing.

But he’s not. And neither are Russell Westbrook, Stephen Curry, Chris Paul, and a handful of other elite players.

The more I watch of NBC’s primetime Olympic coverage, the more perplexed I am by how bad it is.

As I stated last week, the network’s streaming app is a terrific way to watch the Olympics, and its daytime coverage on both NBC and its various cable networks is solid too. But in the primetime hours, NBC reimagines an athletic competition as an episode of Dateline, and it just doesn’t work. And those primetime installments are by far the most watched Olympics coverage out there, so they’re most viewers’ primary consumption of the Olympics.

We don’t usually hear much about women’s periods during the Olympics. That is, until Chinese swimming phenomenon Fu Yuanhui broke the silence last week in Rio and brought up her menstrual flow following a fourth-place finish.

“My period started last night,” she told a Chinese journalist, “and I’m feeling pretty weak and really tired right now.”

There’s been a lot of sexism involved in the coverage of the 2016 Rio Olympics. Women’s athletic accomplishments have been attributed to their husbands; some commentators seem to have a bad habit of trying to praise women athletes by comparing them to men; and NBC’s chief marketing officer condescended to women viewers by suggesting that they don’t actually care about sports.

So it’s no wonder that this unfortunate Olympics headline from the Bryan-College Station Eagle* caught fire on social media this week. It seemed to be the perfect encapsulation of exactly how the coverage of this year’s games is going when it comes to women — and the way women are treated in society more generally:

Watching the incredible Olympic feats performed by athletes like American swimmers Katie Ledecky and Simone Manuel, gymnast Simone Biles, and basketball player Tamika Catchings will leave you speechless. Sometimes the best and perhaps only word to describe a Ledecky race or a Biles tumbling pass is “superhuman.”

Fittingly, that’s what Marvel and ESPN had in mind back in November, when they teamed up, for the second year in a row, to create the Impact 25 — a list of 25 female athletes and influencers who have put their mark on women in sports.

The Olympics have been called a “carnival of junk food marketing” for good reason.

Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Kellogg’s are all official Olympics sponsors as well as sponsors of teams like Team USA and Team Great Britain. And when we see ads from them and other food companies during the Olympics, they’re likely to showcase less healthy items, according to the nonprofit Children’s Food Campaign.

Simone Biles is the most dominant female gymnast in recent memory, possibly history.

For the past three years, she’s won every team and individual all-around competition she’s competed in. At the Olympics, she maintained that record, helping the American team to gold as well as wiping the floor during the individual competition. She also added a gold medal in vault and a bronze on balance beam.

These Olympic Games have been flooded with women’s sports badassery — in events of all types, from women all over the map. But one of the most striking things about this Olympic Games has been Muslim women’s participation.

Fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad was the first Muslim American athlete to compete in a hijab, a headscarf that covers the face and neck, at the Olympic Games. Her presence as an outspoken black Muslim woman has certainly been powerful. Time magazine named her to its 100 Most Influential People list, calling her a new face for Team USA.

Chinese swimmer Fu Yuanhui defied a major sports taboo, and won legions of internet fans, for doing something pretty simple: actually admitting that she was on her period, and that it was affecting her physically.

Fu, who is already a viral favorite in China for her animated facial expressions and candid sense of humor, was approached by a journalist Sunday after China finished fourth in the women’s 4x100-meter medley relay.

The 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro is underway.

For months, people questioned whether the games would actually take place. Would the Olympic Park be ready in time? Would the Zika virus prove too dangerous for the athletes and spectators? Would the political turmoil and economic collapse bring the entire event to a standstill?

American sprinter Allyson Felix would’ve had another Olympic gold medal instead of a silver if Shaunae Miller had stayed on her feet. Miller, a fantastic runner from the Bahamas, beat Felix in the women’s Olympic 400-meter sprint on Monday night by diving, belly-first, for the finish line.

Miller came out of the blocks with a big lead on Felix. But as she approached the finish line, she seemed to run out of gas, with Felix breathing down her neck in the last few meters. So Miller dived, her torso crossing the finish line at 49.44 seconds, seven-hundredths of a second before Felix’s 49.51.

Four years ago, at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, Gabby Douglas became the first black American woman to win gymnastics’ most prestigious title: Olympic individual all-around champion. She was 16 at the time, a bundle of flash and grace in a metallic leotard. Looking back at her best event, the uneven bars, is like watching a superhero use her powers for the first time.

Douglas almost seems uncertain of her own ability, still figuring out how much power to pump into each swing. Her talent is undeniable: