#99: My war against French barricades

Thoughts from the mixed relay.

issue #99: Aug. 8, 2024

Whew, you all, this is officially going out one full day after the newsletter normally publishes. A stomach virus took out most of our Airbnb — and even though I escaped the multiple days of vomiting, it certainly threw an exhausting wrench in all plans. So, we got fully completely off-schedule.

Once the Olympics wrap up in the next few days (and I’m back in the U.S. where it uses less of my brain power to navigate the train systems), we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming of: Wednesday morning newsletters for all + Sunday evening extra pieces for our paying subscribers (and the voiceovers for easier listening).

In the meantime, today, we’re still all about Paris, that mixed team relay bright and early this past Monday, and the non-stop sports-ing. If you want more, listen to the daily morning from-the-ground ‘Croissants & Commentary’ Feisty podcast.

- Kelly

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First, the good (great?) parts

People don’t like to hear you complain about being in Paris. Or at the Olympics. So, let’s start with: The triathlon races here were epic.

We already talked about the individual races last week. And I’ll double down on the argument that Paris’ great big bet paid off. The iconic locations got the exact kind of global coverage you want in order for your sport to go beyond your sport. I’d also argue that without the somewhat manufactured controversy over the water, triathlon wouldn’t have gotten the attention it did. It wouldn’t have been on the front page of the New York Times or on primetime NBC.

And, afterall, this is the goal of the Olympics, right? Reaching beyond just us. Remember?

The mixed relay race was also exactly everything organizers were hoping for when they added mixed team relay to the Olympic program for Tokyo. The goal was to create something exciting. They wanted a race that would be fast and could swing wildly one direction or the other, that would end dramatically and conjure up patriotic excitement.

They certainly got that.

Photo: Wagner Araujo/World Triathlon

You don’t get on the Today Show without this kind of photo finish sprint drama. And, so, now there’s some kid somewhere who saw this and wants to try triathlon. (If you haven’t seen the official photo finish, it’s worth checking out.) That’s what’s considered a success.

In those respects: The Olympics have been everything anyone could have hoped for. They aimed bigger than just our individual sports and, from a broadcast, global standpoint, it worked.

I also have to say: When some of the high-performance USAT staff was talking to me a little bit about their line-up & strategy a few days before the relay, I understood what they were going for but I also thought ‘man, that’s only going to work if it plays out exactly one way.’ So kudos to them, because it did and it worked.

If you want more play-by-play on how the mixed relay went down and the French favorites getting taken out in a crash on the first leg: We talked about it on the daily podcast that morning.

Now, the bad: let’s discuss French policing

So. Here’s the thing. I hear the mixed relay was epic, but I didn’t actually see most of it. Mostly what I saw was a quick glimpse of someone going by for a couple of seconds, and then I spent the majority of 2.5 hours (because you have to get there early) seeing nothing so much as the large men surrounding and pushing against me, and getting elbowed in the face.

It was, hands down, one of the most unpleasant sports experiences I’ve ever had as a spectator and I’ve been to a lot of sports-ing things.

Part of this is just math: The relay run loop was a condensed 900m (and there was only 3/4 of the loop that intersected with the bike loop). Unlike in the individual race, you couldn’t spectate from either side of the road; the inside of the square 900m was closed off to most spectators. And of the four sides of the 900m square, one side was grandstands (of which tickets seemed to be largely reserved for athletes not racing, friends & family, and coaches — probably because it would have been hard for them to see otherwise); one side (which was where I had been aiming to watch from) turned out to be completely barricaded off as some kind of staging area (?) I think and there were additional barricades and multiple checkpoints thrown up blocks before you even got to that intersection so it wasn’t like you could post up at the corner but were instead sent multiple blocks out of the way to walk around and back to one small chokepoint area. That left just two sides — or 450 meters — in which to cram a lot of spectators.

Part of it though is a direct result of the arbitrary policing and barricades that aren’t so much a bug but a feature of these Olympics.

Look. If the course had just been clearly marked: ‘No spectators allowed xxx here, credentials required to go here, entry points here, bridge will close once it reaches capacity,’ then yeah, that’s on you to figure out. But that is not how things work at these Olympics. The rules and barricades constantly and randomly change.

Let’s use the tri relay as an example: I didn’t have any kind of credential or badge with me because I had just been planning to stand on one side of the run course that in no way looked marked off on any map. But Steve managed to get through the first couple of arbitrary checkpoints and ultimately stand close to that corner. How? He just waved a generic random Team USA badge he had. It had nothing to do with the race or event or in any way was official.

At some point, maybe 45 minutes before the race, police also started asking for tickets or badges OF ANY KIND (triathlon-related or not) to even get onto the bridge. When I finally got out of the crowd after the race, new barricades had also been erected behind us, trapping us in.

This isn’t real, actual security. It has no logic or purpose. It’s security as role play.

And, while obviously my hatred of French barricades has been well-documented since last year’s Test Event, this isn’t unique to me. I’ve heard from Games staff who needed to bring supplies in simply to be told by police: ‘Oh no, it is not possible, we are closing this road.’ I’ve talked to non-French residents who live here, who have endless stories of unexplainable and changeable arbitrary rules. I’ve seen huge crowds, thousands of people, be forced and directed to exit out of just one small gate because every entrance had (for some reason) been barricaded off, only to then reach a new random fence and be told with the giant French shrug ‘Oh no, you can not go this way, it is not possible.’ Even Sha’Carri Richardson and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Price were turned away from the athlete entrance at the track because the rules had suddenly and abruptly changed.

Sure, I’m being super American about this. And, sure, some degree of overly intense policing and officiousness always exists at every Games.

But also, it’s not just me being American; arbitrary security states (even those that are constructed around large events) are deeply fucked up. Because when the rules change at random, at the whim of a handful of singular authority figures, that system by definition isn’t fair and isn’t designed to treat everyone equally. I also saw a Black teenager get yanked out a crowd at a subway station here by a set of police officers who seemed to be quizzing him on what he was doing and where he was going. Was it possible he was a pickpocket? Sure. But it was also possible he was just a Black teenager.

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The best things I’ve seen in person at the Olympics

Of course, though, there are many things that have run smoothly given how many people are here (the metro for the most part, entering stadiums has largely involved no lines, the courses and venues themselves seem to be well-operated and constructed). And the actual events have been, obviously, epic.

Here is my list of the best sports moments I was there for:

5. The final day of swimming: Swimming runs a tight ship and the last day was an hour of all finals. Jam-packed excitement. That included the men’s medley relay (which had the crowd going insane with France v. the U.S. neck-and-neck until China somehow nipped us both) and then the women’s medley that saw a crazy world record.

4. The triathlon races: While I couldn’t see the actual finishes, just because of the nature of being out on course, they were all nail-biters and leaning over the fence yelling at the athletes was something. Plus, Alex Yee re-passing Hayden Wilde for the gold is still unreal.

3. The women’s rugby bronze medal game: We picked up tickets to this at the last-minute, but the U.S. coming from behind with the clock already run out to make a full field run, score, and convert — and win over Australia after it seemed like the game was over — was so sudden and insane even the players were like ‘wtf just happened.’

2. The men’s 1500m: You have to understand that in the crowd at the track stadium, it was 60,000 people there primarily for Josh Kerr or Jacob Ingebrigtsen. When Cole Hocker started making his move on the inside, Steve & I were standing and yelling, and when he pulled it off we jumped up and down screaming — but so much of the stadium seemed to be like ‘Huh?’ Amazing.

1. Mondo’s pole vault world record: Again, one of these experiences that was probably mildly interesting in the 30” recap on TV but was next-level in the stands. The meet was over, every running race was done, and the whole stadium stayed. He had only jumped like four times the entire competition and easily won gold, just chilling in between. No other athlete even cleared 6 meters — and then Mondo Duplantis comes in and just sets the bar at the Olympic record height (6.10m), no problem. And then skips ahead to world record height (6.25m). He was commanding the whole stadium to clap at the pace he wanted (he made us re-start our clapping) and the suspense built and built. He missed the first two attempts just barely — and then, on the last try, he cleared the bar! Everyone was screaming and jumping up and down and the stands were shaking.

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Other non-Olympic races and results

• Shoutout to Sarah True & Trevor Foley for the wins at Maine 70.3 after tough races (for different reasons) in IM Placid.

• Gustav Iden won a race again! Challenge Finland.

• Supertri Boston — at the Boston Triathlon — is officially going to be the first race for the Olympic medalists after Paris (including both winners!). I’ll be there in a week and if you missed out on being over here in France, then it’ll be a good time to catch them in the U.S.

No big races coming up this weekend, but then the weekend after is Supertri and IM Frankfurt — and we get back to it after our mini Olympic “break.”

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The -ish

• The big news outside of the Olympics: It was announced that Tomas Rodriguez Hernandez, the Mexican triathlete who was a surprise winner of IM Texas back in April, tested positive for Clomiphene in his in-competition test immediately following that race. Clomiphene is a hormone used in female fertility drugs, which can trigger production of testosterone as a performance-enhancing side effect, and it’s certainly possible it was a result of contaminated food as Tomas is claiming. (One WADA study found that it *can* have a long life in eggs and cause athlete contamination, especially as tests get even more precise at detecting tiny amounts.) And, to be fair, it is semi-shocking to fail a post-race in-competition test if you’re knowingly doping. But also there’s a reason this doping positive isn’t tearing the tri world apart with shock. While the ban is provisional and he appeals, he can not race and his Kona spot has rolled down but Ironman can not yet take away his prize money, points, or results until the appeal is resolved. FYI. (ITA/WADA/Instagram)

• As a reminder: Ironman runs a fairly comprehensive anti-doping program contracted through ITA. (Triathlonish)

• There have been a few anonymous (for whatever that’s worth) studies recently with amateur triathletes at Roth self-reporting levels of doping and 13% of elite British athletes across sports admitting to it. (Honest Sport)

• It sounds like Taylor Knibb is hoping to get a wildcard to Nice — though Ironman won’t confirm wildcards until after qualification is done, of course, and I don’t think she’s going to validate with a full next weekend. But it also sounds like she applied for a discretionary pick for the UCI World Champs in the time trial (which is the same day). So, you know, Taylor doing Taylor. (Triathlete/Twitter)

• There was a big party here in Paris for the outgoing World Tri president Marisol Casado, who has really shaped the sport for half its life. There are now eight candidates to replace her and I don’t yet have particularly strong feelings about who it should be out of those eight. (World Tri)

• Maurten has raised €20 million from an equity firm — which seems like a lot to me for a gel. (Silicon Canals)

• I summed up all my Olympics highlights in the Feist women’s sports newsletter on Tuesday. (The Feist)

• I’ll add that being an Olympic athlete is not necessarily a healthy thing to do and, also, I don’t care if everyone’s over hearing about COVID, it still exists and its longterm repercussions and consequences are still TBD bad. So I’m kinda surprised so many of the Olympians are being laissez-whatever about it. How you feel about a thing doesn’t change the facts of the thing. (New York Times)

• And I’m not going to say I told you so, but I definitely told you so: Claire-Michel, the Belgian triathlete, had a virus not e. coli from the Seine. Just like a lot of other athletes. (NBC/CBC)

• Why didn’t Belgium field an alternate? It sounds like Valerie Barthelemy was told she’d have to give up long-course racing in the build-up to Paris in order to be listed as the alternate. Which is dumb. (3athlon)

• Something I hadn’t thought about before: The two U.S. gymnastics national team doctors who have had to rebuild that job. (Washington Post)

• The 2034 Winter Olympics were awarded to Salt Lake City — with the big caveat that like the FBI needs to chill with their investigation into WADA. Hah. (CBS)

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One last thing

Photos of the crowds at the tri.