Whether it is the Winter Olympic Games or the Summer Olympic Games, there is always someone or some country to cheer on. As I write this, at the halfway point of the 2024 games, Canada has a total of seventeen medals. And we have more Olympian’s reaching the semifinals in their sports. When I watched the Mexican men’s synchronized diving team on the three-meter board, I could not believe how coordinated the dives were. They were the first team ever to win a diving medal for their country. They did not come first, but will be remembered in history.
We all cheered on Summer Macintosh as she swam for four medals. We could not help but cheer on Katie Ledecky as she has now become the most decorated Olympic Swimmer in the United States. Nor could we not marvel at Simone Biles who now has amassed the most medals ever for a US gymnast.
On Sunday, our hammer thrower Ethan Katzberg on his first throw narrowly missed a world record and won the contest on his first throw and even his second throw would have won the event. He made us proud in a sport we really didn’t even know existed.
We cried when Damian Warner missed his pole vault in the decathlon event where he was leading and ended up pulling out of the event. Our women’s soccer team hamstrung by a cheating call, pulled themselves together and were eliminated from contention in a shoot out against Germany after playing to 0-0 tie in regulation and overtime.
I have never enjoyed watching the distance events in swimming or running but this year the swimming 1500-meter men’s final came down to a sprint between the American swimmer and an Irish swimmer for the gold. It was awesome. Moh Ahmed finished fourth in the 10,000-meter road race and he let Canada know that the finish was as good as a medal. Thirteen runners in the event broke the world record and Moh Ahmed missed the podium by thirteen one hundreds of a second.
It was even more amazing that in the men’s 100-meter race, the first two runners were tied for the finish and the officials had to go to 1/1000 of a second to determine the winner. The difference was five one-thousands of a second. Noah Niles of the US claimed gold while Kishane Thompson of Jamaica claimed silver. We had to wait for the results of the photo finish to see who had won the race. It was a longer wait to find out who the winner was than the actual race.
Track and field will continue all week. There will be more remarkable stories to watch as the best athletes compete. Every event has the potential to inspire new athletes from around Canada and the world.
