Paris 2024: Olympics news and updates

In October 2023, members of the World DanceSport Federation, or WDSF, learned breaking, the sport they’d been trying to make happen at the Olympics for years, would not be appearing at the 2028 Los Angeles Games.

In response, the organization’s president, Shawn Tay, made a grand proclamation. “Ensuring the success of breaking’s Olympic debut at Paris 2024 is therefore on the forefront of the WDSF agenda,” he said. “Our performance in Paris will define the future of dance sport within the Olympic Movement.”

Humans are simple creatures. Since the dawn of spectator sports, we’ve wanted to watch muscular people fight and do flips. Today, TikTok-friendly high-drama sports like women’s gymnastics regularly dominate Olympic viewership on TV networks and streaming platforms. But watching artistic gymnastics isn’t the only way to see ultra-strong people do flips and splits.

Pole dancing — the erotic striptease-turned-sport that’s essentially sexy gymnastics on a stick — has all the makings of a perfect Olympic sport. The athleticism of pole performers, whether at a family-friendly competition or a strip club, is undeniable. Even the most basic pole moves are no joke: Getting off the ground at all is kind of like doing a pull up, a push up, a crunch, and an air squat all at once. At the highest level, pole athletes — yes, there are pole athletes — can perform several minutes worth of choreographed handstands, flips, tumbles, and other aerial tricks, all set to music. Sometimes, they do it in eight-inch stilettos. And just as gymnastics increases in difficulty over time, pole dancers get stronger, bendier, and more creative every year.

Athletes at the 2024 Paris Olympics are competing against the toughest opponents in the world, the clock, the record books, and increasingly, extreme heat.

Rain soaked the opening ceremony, but it followed an extensive heat wave across France and much of Europe. According to the World Weather Attribution research group, such temperatures would not have been possible without human-induced climate change. The competitions began with more heat as temperatures reached 95 degrees at outdoor venues. Athletes complained about the lack of adequate cooling in the Olympic Village where they stay and some teams brought their own air conditioning units, undermining the host city’s goals to curb energy use with techniques like underfloor cooling.

It’s fair to observe that in the run-up to the Summer Olympics, Parisians were feeling a bit of, how do you say, ennui.

If they hadn’t already put their apartments on Airbnb in anticipation of fleeing the city, Parisians took to social media to complain about the Olympics and beg tourists not to come.

During every Olympic Games, lesser-known professional athletes are catapulted into household names overnight. Typically, they have to win medals. Other times, their personalities are enough to build their own fandoms. Heading into this summer’s Olympics in Paris, Noah Lyles expects to be recognized for both.

If you don’t follow track and field, you may not be familiar with Lyles — although his name could soon become inescapable. Already, the new Netflix docuseries Sprint, set around the 2023 World Athletics Championships in Budapest, has shone a bigger spotlight on him. The six-part series follows track and field’s brightest stars in the 100- and 200-meter sprints, including the fastest woman on Earth, Sha’Carri Richardson; Jamaican gold medalist Shericka Jackson; and British record-holder in the 100 and 200 meters, Zharnel Hughes. Despite this star power, the series’s main attraction has been Lyles, whose ambitions to outrun retired legend Usain Bolt have ruffled some feathers.

At last, the B-boys of summer — and B-girls — are here, and they’re bringing their unique blend of dancing, gymnastics, and hip-hop culture to Paris. On August 9, breaking — don’t call it breakdancing — makes its hotly anticipated Olympics debut in the sport’s highest-profile moment to date.

The entrance of breaking into the Olympics is a huge milestone for a sport and a dance style that has fought long and hard for social acceptance. After all, you don’t get to be an Olympic athlete without approaching a mindblowing level of physical stamina and ability. And when you match that with the level of agility required of great dancers, plus the heady competitiveness of a sport that was honed through street battles, you have the recipe for a truly unique, groundbreaking Olympic sport — and the mainstreaming of this American-born street dance on a whole new global level.

India’s star Olympic wrestler Vinesh Phogat is out of the competition ahead of a gold medal match, after being disqualified for being over her class’s weight limit. It’s a devastating end to the Paris games for the wrestler who has led the charge against sexual harassment at the highest levels of her sport.

Had she been able to compete and won Wednesday’s match, she would have been the first Indian woman to win a gold medal in any Olympic event.

If you’ve spent any time watching the Olympics on NBC or Peacock over the past two weeks, you’ve almost certainly seen them: schmaltzy advertisements for the world’s biggest corporations’ new AI tools. From Google’s Gemini to Microsoft’s Copilot and Meta AI, artificial intelligence is inescapable at the Summer Games, ostensibly an event about showcasing the best of human ability.

Meta’s begins with a sad lady on a couch asking AI how to prepare for a marathon. In Microsoft’s, a pregnant woman asks Copilot to write an email about weight training (are we sensing a theme here?), while a dad asks it to summarize his morning calls so he has more time to help his son practice boxing. The uplifting music and vaguely inspiring taglines — “Expand your world” and “You, empowered,” respectively — are meant to show how using AI can act as something of a personal assistant, leaving users with more time to spend on the things that matter. As far as Olympics-themed ad campaigns for tech giants go, it’s pretty standard stuff.

Nothing prepares a casual Olympics fan for falling in love with a sport they know nothing about.

During the gymnastics trials in Milwaukee this year, I waited to watch Simone Biles, Suni Lee, and the rest of the ladies dazzle with their awesome skills. Could we get the men’s competition over with already?

We all know the medal winners for the competitions that have taken place so far in the 2024 Paris Olympics (or, rather, they’re all a single click away).

The US women’s gymnastics team reclaimed gold for the team all-around after a second-place finish in Tokyo, while the men’s team won its first medal in the team event since 2008. Some of China’s swimming successes are being scrutinized, given recent doping scandals. The triathlon finish line was incredibly impressive — and a reminder of how intensely these athletes push themselves.

Simone Biles and Team USA are golden again.

At the 2024 Paris Olympics, Team USA won the gold medal in the team final on July 30. Biles, along with teammates Suni Lee, Jade Carey, Jordan Chiles, and Hezly Rivera, compiled a score of 171.296 and defeated Italy (165.494) and Brazil (164.497) who won silver and bronze. Two days later, on August 1, Biles took home the individual women’s all-around gold, with a total score of 59.131.

Despite being a time when people from all over the world come together in equality and peace, the Olympics are still uncertain territory for transgender athletes. There are no transgender athletes who are competing outside of the gender they were assigned at birth at this year’s Games. Transgender women who transitioned after puberty aren’t allowed to compete in major sports on a college level.

Athletes Nikki Hiltz, a runner, and Hergie Bacyadan, a boxer, both identify as transgender (Hiltz also identifies as nonbinary), but both have always and continue to compete in the women’s division, which is the sex they were assigned at birth.

Editors note: This story originally ran during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, and is being reshared as part of coverage of the Milan 2026 Winter Olympic Games

Olympic athletes: They’re not like us. They eat differently; they sleep differently; and they definitely think differently.

Ready or not, the 2024 Paris Olympic Games have begun.

As with any quadrennial, there will be stories of glorious triumph, heartbreaking defeat, feel-good underdogs, and maybe even a villain or two. But headed into Paris this year, one of the main storylines was whether or not the city could properly host the Games — and whether Parisians even wanted this in the first place.

Editor’s note, July 26, 2024, 10 am: This story has been updated to include news of arson attacks on the French train system.

It’s not as if no one was thinking about security issues when Paris was awarded this summer’s Olympics back in 2017. Just two years earlier, the French capital had been the scene of one of the worst terrorist attacks in European history, when Islamic State gunmen killed more than 130 people. That attack came only a few months after a massacre at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

A key promise in Paris’s bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympics was that its famous river, the Seine, would be cleaned up in time to host open water swimming events: the triathlon, paratriathlon, and marathon swimming. But swimming has been banned in the Seine for a century because the Paris sewer system is designed to dump wastewater into the river during heavy rain when the sewers get overwhelmed by stormwater. When that happens, levels of E. coli, a bacteria associated with fecal matter, spike, making the water too contaminated to swim in.

To deliver on their promise to clean the river for the Olympics, Paris officials took on a $1.5 billion USD infrastructure project that included a massive underground tank and tunnel system that could hold excess sewage during heavy rain to minimize contamination of the Seine.