The New Yorker:

Cheers, howls, and the occasional boo have brought joyous cacophony to the City of Light.

By Anthony Lane

The second weekend of the Paris Olympics, roughly halfway through the Games, was a good time to sit down, in peace and quiet, and to ruminate on all that we have seen. Or, at least, it would have been a good time, except that the men’s kayak cross was scheduled for Sunday, August 4th, at half past nine in the morning, Eastern Time, and no one, obviously, would want to miss that. A new event, hitherto untried at the Olympics? Four paddlers, borne simultaneously through treacherous rapids, and required by the rules to flip over, beneath a horizontal bar, and dunk themselves head first? To hell with rumination.

The fact that the Olympics appear to exist in perpetual motion is both magnificent and frustrating. As you settle down in front of your TV to follow a favored event, a small voice of conscience murmurs in your ear that you are thereby missing other sports in which you have previously shown no interest whatsoever but which, if you were to watch them now, might consume you utterly. On August 1st, for example, the second run in the quarterfinals of the women’s BMX racing—craziness guaranteed—began exactly four minutes before the quarterfinal of the women’s fifty-four-kilogram boxing got under way. How to choose between such rare delights? For the purposes of economy, perhaps, could the organizers not have combined the two disciplines, with boxers on bikes punching one another’s lights out as they rounded a high bend?

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