Sunday, August 11, 2024

The Olympics are no match for Tom Cruise.

17 days of events, billions spent on promotion, and all of it was upstaged by one guy on a motorcycle.

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• Finis! It's the end of the Paris Olympics, and Mike Tirico is at the restaurant studio with Jimmy Fallon, so we can count on the whole evening being overly energetic.
• But what about at the stadium? In fitting with the weirdness to come, Terry Gannon will be hosting with noted nutballs Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir doing commentary. Johnny looks like an extra from a Tim Burton movie with his ruffled suit and butterflies in his pompadoured hair. The athletes are all lounging on the lawn outside, waiting to come in.
• And now the Closing Ceremonies (from now on CC) are about to begin. As always, I'm not on drugs. Any weird thing I'm describing here is what the French are doing, not what I'm doing. Here we go!
• It starts with a video recap of the Opening Ceremonies. Then off we go to the Tuileries Gardens, where a French singer I won't bother Googling sings a song that I'm sure is very moving, but since there are no translated lyrics, I have no idea what she's saying. While she's singing, she's walking around the hot air balloon Olympic torch cauldron. It seems strange to have the biggest event in the world concluded with 30 people singing in a park with no crowd. But here comes Leon Marchand, walking around the balloon. It's surrounded by a pond. Will he swim over to it and put the flame out? He's in a pretty nice suit, so that seems unlikely. He walks over to a small podium and picks up a small lantern. As he does so, the cauldron goes out. That's it? Show's over folks! Have a good night! Noooooo. Marchand now carries the tiny flame in the lantern toward the Louvre all by himself. I don't know that one guy walking across a parking lot by himself is riveting television.
• Cut to the stadium! While Marchand makes his lonely walk, everyone in Stade de France is partying. An orchestra plays. It's time for the ceremonial exchange of corrupt money. President Emmanuel Macron will be handing a suitcase full of unmarked bills to Thomas Bach, head of the International Olympic Committee. Noooo. Of course he won't. (He totally will). Everyone stands while the orchestra plays the national anthem of France, then the flag bearers for each country enter the stadium. They all congregate in the stage which is shaped like… I don't know. A bunch of triangles? It's not really anything. It's kind of a mess, really. Mike and Jimmy talk to the US flag bearers, Nick Mead and Katie Ledecky. The interview questions are okay, but the audio is terrible. The stadium is so loud that you can barely hear their responses. This is the kind of idea that sounded better in preproduction.
• Now all the athletes are coming in. I'd guess about half of them are recording videos on their phones as they do. Wouldn't you? Don't judge! Terry, Tara, and Johnny are doing a good job as usual, but Jimmy Fallon is weak as a commentator. I would have thought he'd be better given that he hosts a talk show, but he seems nervous.
• Jimmy has his top five moments of the Olympics. He's so twitchy. It's uncomfortable to watch.
• Team USA finally arrives, and a few countries later we're done with athletes entering. On with the show! The crowd spontaneously starts singing "Seven Nation Army." Hey! I've finally figured out the triangles. They're actually stylized continents. There's a big bridge stretching all the way from Australia to North America and that threw me off. Anyway, now the athletes are in and dancing around. They play "We Are The Champions" over the loudspeakers. Well, yes. The gold medal winners are. All of you who aren't? Better luck next Olympics!
• Hey! It's an actual event! The women's marathon was today, we get to see the last half mile. And at the end Ethiopia's Tigst Assefa and Netherland's Sifan Hassan are sprinting next to each other and throwing elbows! You usually don't see that kind of combat in a marathon. Hassan wins, making this her third Olympic medal in Paris.
• Back to the CC. The lights are out. Let the weirdness commence! The orchesta plays spooky music as lightning illuminates the continents. Tara says we're about to see a dystopian future of what the world would be like without the Olympics. Thomas Bach must be horrified at the thought of a loss of private jets. A "golden voyager" has arrived. A man covered in golden glitter and fiber optic filaments descends from the roof of the stadium. The future looks weird. You can hear Terry trying to stifle his own laughter. Mr. Voyager lands on the African continent and starts exploring the hazy stage, looking for civilization. Or something. The Silver Surfer and the Phantom from the OC make a reappearance. The Phantom has a lance and Silver Surfer has a flag. Ohhhh… it's a flagpole and Silver Surfer has just attached the Greek flag to it. He plants the flag in Greece and the stage lights up. You see, it's the rebirth of the Olympics!
• Gray ninja dancers erupt from holes in the stage and erect a 20-foot tall ring. They dance around it as Golden Voyager dances by himself. The gray ninjas find four more rings and start setting them up in different continents. A grand piano suspended from it's end rises vertically out of Australia while a man wearing a long, sparkly trash bag plays it. Johnny says, "the French are so cool." If the CC was produced by animator Chuck Jones, this segment would end with them dropping that piano on someone.
• The rings are on the move! The ninjas roll them all to a central location, where they are slowly lifted into the air. The ninjas are so excited they do backflips. Tara says this is where she gets emotional because all of the athletes have been looking forward to this moment. I could be wrong, but I don't think LeBron has been preoccupied with thoughts of gray ninjas hooking up big metal circles to scaffolding. The Golden Voyager stands on a gray ninja pyramid and points to the rings above their heads. Fireworks ignite! Terry says, don't worry, you don't have to worry about a future without the Olympics. Thomas Bach's Swiss bank account breathes a sigh of relief.
• A French rock band named Phoenix plays on stage. Everyone nods along, like you would do with the opening act when you're waiting for the main act to show up. Daft Punk is French. I know they broke up, but couldn't we get them back together for one night for the Closing Ceremonies?
• Thomas Bach congratulates France on a fantastic Olympic games that contained not a bit of corruption! Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Anyway, down comes the Olympic flag to the Olympic anthem, a song that no one knows. So now France is officially done! Au revoir, Frenchies! Now it's America's turn!
• France is now passing the flag from Paris to Los Angeles. The mayor of LA takes the flag. She'll hand Thomas Bach the suitcase full of money later. She hands the flag to Simone Biles. And now, the Star Spangled Banner plays, performed by H.E.R. Who's that at the top of the stadium? Tom Cruise! Mission impossible time! He leaps from the top of the stadium and is lowered down to the stage on a cable, where he is then greeted by all the athletes of the world as he runs up to Simone. He takes the Olympic flag from her, attaches it to his motorcycle, and rides out of the stadium. This five minutes has been better than anything put together by the entire French Olympic committee. He rides his motorcycle through the streets of Paris and straight onto a waiting plane. The plane heads to California where Tom skydives out, stopping briefly to alter the Hollywood sign into Olympic rings. He hands off the flag to cyclist who rides it to the LA Coliseum where it is then paraded through the streets of LA until it gets to the beach where the Red Hot Chili Peppers are playing on a stage. So THIS is the opening act that Phoenix was warming up for! After they play, Billie Eilish is next. Meh. But now the moment we've been leading up to for the last two weeks. SNOOP! He's dropping it like it's hot along with his twerking dancer. And he's joined on stage with Dr. Dre. It's been 30 minutes and everyone has already forgotten about the Golden Voyager. Snoop and Dre finish and Olympic colors explode up from behind the stage. D-O-Double G finishes by waving the Olympic flag. Seriously, who wants to go back to Paris now?
• Remember lonely Leon Marchand and his tiny lantern? Yeah, he's back. Seriously, it holds a flame the size of a candle. After the show LA just put on, now France is going to have some guy blow out a candle? Talk about anti-climactic. Thomas Bach officially closes the games. For real this time. He, Leon Marchand, and several other athletes blow out the Olympic birthday candle. Yawn. Bring back Tom Cruise!
• Throughout tonight's show, we've been seeing the "Fallon Five," Jimmy Fallon's five favorite moments of the game. While the moments were noteworthy, this segment wasn't. But mercifully, they were brief. Three minutes of fluff.
• French singer Yseult, brings us down one last time by singing "My Way." She finishes and fireworks surround the stadium. Very pretty.
• One last time with Mike and Jimmy and what they liked about the CC. Jimmy liked Tom Cruise. Mike liked Leon Marchand. They thank each other for being there. Is this it? Off to LA, they say.
• But wait, there's more! I'm not going to document the 55 minutes we spent on an advertisement for the city of Los Angeles, because that's not really a part of the Paris games. But we come back to Paris for one last visit with Mike Tirico to wrap it all up. He gives a five minute speech on dreams realized and dreams crushed. It's pretty standard stuff and not worth commenting on specifics. It's fluff, but it's the kind of fluff you wrap up a 17-day broadcast with. Well done, Mike.
• The last seven minutes of the show is a best-of video replay. They used to put 10 minutes of credits here. I appreciated that since I know a bunch of people who work the games, but I also understand why now they just do a recap video.

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That wraps it up for another Olympic Games! And what have we learned? Well, keep reading!

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The 2024 Olympic Watch Wrapup

After 2022, I was wondering if the need for this blog had ended. Events were the highest percentage they had ever been. Fluff was the lowest percentage it had ever been. NBC had finally learned their lesson and we were out of the dystopian future predicted by the Golden Traveler. Alas, the dystopia had only been postponed. The final tally:

The fluff is back. As high as it's been in a decade. And yes, a lot of it was Snoop and he's apparently the favorite man in America right now, but it's still fluff. Take a look at our slide backwards.

	Events	Ads	Fluff
2000 Sydney	62.7%	24.4%	12.9%
2002 Salt Lake	I attended the Salt Lake Games, thus I didn't keep time for them.
2004 Athens	68.1%	23.5%	8.3%
2006 Turin	65.0%	27.0%	8.0%
2008 Beijing	70.8%	22.1%	7.1%
2010 Vancouver	68.2%	23.9%	7.9%
2012 London	66.8%	23.8%	9.4%
2018 PyeongChang	70.1%	25.2%	4.6%
2021 Tokyo	67.7%	27.9%	4.3%
2022 Beijing	72.4%	23.7%	3.9%
2024 Paris	67.3%	24.8%	7.9%

Does this mean the Rockwood Olympic Watch will continue in the future? Who knows? It takes a surprising amount of work just to dedicatedly watch TV, but if I didn't enjoy it I wouldn't do it. Maybe I should just make a GoFundMe and go to the games instead. In 2028 some events will be in my home town! I can't pass that up. But for now, let's talk medals!

Bronze Medal: Stephen Nedoroscik. He solves Rubik's Cubes. He wins gold medals. He makes amazing memes. I mean, c'mon. What's not to like about this guy?

Silver Medal: Noah Lyles. You can't deny the fastest man in the world a medal, and I love his attitude. So why silver? And much like the double he wanted, he was so close! But the gold goes to...

Gold Medal: Cole Hocker. I do love me some Noah Lyles, and maybe I would have put him here had he not got COVID and won the 200m instead of getting bronze. But I might have still gone with Hocker because he wasn't supposed to be here. I love the underdog stories in the Olympics. One of my favorites is still Rulon Gardner's wrestling win in 2000. And what did Hocker do in Paris? All the hype -even all the fluff- in the men's 1500m was about the two favorites, Britain's Josh Kerr and Norway's Jacob Ingebrigtsen. Then Hocker came in and snatched the gold medal away from both of them in dramatic fashion. It's everything you want in an Olympic story: unknown man beats favorites in thrilling race. It's stuff like this that makes the Olympics so exciting.

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So that's it! It's over! You can look for the next Rockwood Olympic Watch in Milan and Cortino! Maybe some enlightened sponsor will pony up some dough and send us there for live coverage, but I wouldn't bet on it. As always, thanks for reading my little bit of Olympic madness. See you in 2026! Faster! Higher! Stronger!