Olympics

Sunday

Mike Jakeman

The Enhanced Games isn’t what you think it is

From our UK edition

When it was first announced three years ago, the Enhanced Games was described by Aron d'Souza, its Australian founder, as a direct rival to the Olympics. ‘The International Olympic Committee has effectively been a one-party state running the world of sport for 100 years’, he declared, ‘and now the opposition party is here. We are ready for a fight.’ For the IOC and the rest of global sport, the promised fight of the Enhanced Games has fizzled out D’Souza envisaged an annual competition with events in five sports – athletics, swimming, weightlifting, gymnastics and martial arts, with ‘a couple of thousand’ participants.

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

European culture is being Americanized

Did Mariah Carey mime or not when she headlined the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan? That was the main takeaway from last month’s jamboree. Organizers have since suggested that the US singer did indeed lip-sync to Domenico Modugno’s “Nel Blu, dipinto di Blu” and the song that followed, her very own, “Nothing is Impossible.” “The technical, logistical and organizational complexities of an Olympic ceremony are not comparable to a live performance by a single artist,” said a spokesperson for the organizing committee.    Was there also a linguistic complexity in the decision? Perhaps Carey didn’t feel confident singing live in Italian in front of 75,000 spectators in the San Siro Stadium, plus the 9.

Une bouteille de beaujoulais nouveau à côté d'un repas McDonald's, France, 1994. (Photo by Robert DEYRAIL/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

Thursday

Kevin Cook

The dying art of sports journalism

Late in January, while the Washington Post was gearing up for the Olympics, staffers got an email from managing editor Kimi Yoshino. “As we assess our priorities for 2026,” she wrote, “we have decided not to send a contingent to the Winter Olympics.” A few days later the Post announced that it would send four journalists to Italy after all – down from more than a dozen. That’s four people to cover a two-week event with more than 116 medal competitions. Then at the start of this month, all 45 members of the sports team were told the section was being shut down. “We will be closing the Sports department in its current form,” the Post’s executive editor, Matt Murray, said in a statement afterwards.

Tuesday

Emily Rhodes

Highs and lows: The Boys, by Leo Robson, reviewed

From our UK edition

The Boys, the entertaining debut novel by the literary critic Leo Robson, is set in Swiss Cottage during the 2012 London Olympics. Johnny Voghel is ‘methodically lying about’, home on leave from an admin job in the West Midlands and grieving both for his mother, who died the previous year, and – by extension – his father, who died when he was a child. A typical day is spent ‘smoking badly rolled cigarettes, watching the ring-fenced patches of grass suffer in the heat, nodding at passers-by, tweezing grey hairs from my nostrils and popping the spots on my chin’, before walking into the centre to gaze at the BT Tower with its Olympics countdown.

Friday

Katy Balls

The Sarah Storey Edition

From our UK edition

28 min listen

Dame Sarah Storey is Britain’s most successful Paralympian of all time. She is a 45-time World champion, a 23-time European champion, and a 77-time world recorder breaker – including times she broke her own records. Earlier this year she won her 18th and 19th Olympic golds at the Paris 2024 games. On the podcast, Sarah talks to Katy Balls about switching from swimming to cycling, the influence of bullying at school and the funding disparity that Paralympians face. She also talks about working with Dan Jarvis and Andy Burnham on improving cycling infrastructure, as well as her preparations for the next Olympics – Los Angeles 2028. Plus, where does she keep all those medals? Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

The art inspired by the 1924 Paris Olympics was a very mixed bag

From our UK edition

George Orwell took a dim view of competitive sport; he found the idea that ‘running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue’ absurd. ‘Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play,’ he wrote in Tribune after scuffles broke out during the Russian Dynamo football team’s 1945 tour. ‘It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war without the shooting.’ Suzanne Lenglen’s loose-fitting knee-length tennis dresses inspired the new ‘style sportif’ of Coco Chanel Baron Pierre de Coubertin, visionary founder of the modern Olympics, took the opposite view: to him the three words ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger’ represented ‘a programme of moral beauty’.

Thursday

Peter Jones

The first Olympian: what was there to celebrate about Heracles?

From our UK edition

However great the achievements of athletes at the Olympic Games – and even more so the Paralympics – there will always be those who have their doubts about their real value. Some ancient Greeks certainly felt like that about their Olympics. Complaints were made that an athlete’s physical fitness did nothing for the public health. No boxer would order the city better or stock her granaries, and surely it was valour in war that counted. A satirist pointed out that naked wrestlers covered in olive oil would not be much use in the front line of battle. Others expressed concern about the character of the Games’ founder, Heracles, the greatest mortal ‘winner’ of them all.

Wednesday

James Delingpole

About as edgy as Banksy: Joe Rogan’s Netflix special reviewed

From our UK edition

My resolution this summer was to see how far into the Olympics I could get without watching an event. It’s harder than you think. Especially when you’ve got kids calling constantly from the sitting room: ‘Dad, Dad, it’s Romania vs Burkina Faso in the finals of the women’s beach volleyball and there’s been a tremendous upset…’ Rogan is marketed as an edgy alternative to the mainstream media. He is about as edgy as Banksy I jest. I actually do know what happened in the finals of the women’s beach volleyball. It was the first thing I watched because that was what was on when I walked into the room and broke my duck. Italy beat the long-standing champions the United States, which delighted me enormously.

Monday

Alexander Larman

Why was Tom Cruise’s Olympics appearance so weird?

After the bizarre, weather-beaten and at times purely controversial Olympics opening ceremony, the finale to a largely successful event was more assured, not least because of its most spectacular coup de théâtre. The now-sixty-two-year-old Tom Cruise, still the biggest movie star in the world, literally and symbolically, transferred the Olympics from Paris in 2024 to Los Angeles in 2028 by abseiling from the top of the Stade de France, collecting the Olympic flag and transferring it to the Hollywood sign above LA, with much airborne derring-do and implicit early promotion for the next Mission: Impossible film, to be released next summer. Cruise’s status as a living legend is now beyond discussion.

tom cruise

Thursday

Amber Duke

The Olympic Games have been really bizarre

I am typically a huge Olympics fan because I am very big into national pride and love to shamelessly root for the USA. Gymnastics, swimming, volleyball, soccer, or even canoeing, judo and fencing — don’t care, will watch. Unfortunately, this year’s Summer Olympic Games in Paris, France were immediately marred by the obvious mockery of the Christian faith during the opening ceremony. There was a drag show version of Leonardo Da Vinci’s depiction of Jesus Christ’s Last Supper with his apostles prior to his crucifixion (plus, separately, a faceless rider on a pale horse and a queer ménage à trois).

Toby Young

Welcome to the new global theocracy

From our UK edition

I had a revelation while watching the Olympics opening ceremony. It was during the infamous section that I (and almost everyone else) understood to be a reference to Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper’. A large woman in a halo-like headdress was flanked by various avant-garde performance artists, including three drag queens. These, presumably, were the disciples. The table then turned into a catwalk and we were treated to a fashion show featuring representatives of the LGBT community, culminating in a naked man covered in sparkly blue paint. Sacré bleu! ‘This is France,’ tweeted Emmanuel Macron afterwards, apparently satisfied that this performance, like the rest of the opening ceremony, had epitomised everything worth celebrating about La Belle France.

Thursday

William Moore

The curious rise of Kamala Harris

From our UK edition

48 min listen

This week: Kamala takes charge. Our cover piece discusses the rise of Kamala Harris, who has only one man standing in her way to the most powerful position in the world. Her's is certainly an unexpected ascent, given Harris’ generally poor public-speaking performances and mixed bag of radical left and right-wing politics. Does she really have what it takes to defeat Trump? Kate Andrews, author of the piece and economics editor at The Spectator, joins the podcast with deputy editor Freddy Gray to discuss. (02:34) Next: Will and Lara go through some of their favourite pieces from the magazine including Damian Thompson's article on how the upcoming Hollywood film Conclave may be mirroring real-life events at the Vatican. Then: Olympics on steroids.

Roger Alton

Why Keely Hodgkinson is the one to watch at the Olympics

From our UK edition

The Olympics have been creeping up on us through the forest of top-class sport this summer. But now they’re here, the third time the summer Games have been held in Paris. The first was in 1900, and reflect what a very different place the world was then. There were old favourites such as track and field athletics and cycling, but less probably croquet, firefighting and fishing and – one to scare the pants off the woke warriors of today – live pigeon shooting, making its one and only appearance at the five-ringed circus. Indeed an Olympic historian, reflecting on the fate of the luckless pigeons, said: ‘This disgusting event marked the only time in Olympic history when animals were killed on purpose.

Douglas Murray

Will we always have Paris?

From our UK edition

There are times when you might be fooled into believing all is well. I had a moment of such weakness the other day when I saw our new Prime Minister welcoming his European counterparts to a summit at Blenheim Palace. When Keir Starmer came down the steps to greet King Charles, he even did a pretty good job of pretending he wasn’t just Airbnb-ing the place for a few days. At such points our country can look at peace. The English baroque architecture stood out against a blue sky and everything in England seemed to go on as it should. If the Olympics go off safely it will be because of months of preparation by every arm of law enforcement Of course, at the same time people in Leeds were turning over police cars and burning the place down.

Max Jeffery

Olympics on steroids: the millionaire behind the Enhanced Games

From our UK edition

Aron D’Souza likes to celebrate the new year with Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist billionaire who is good friends with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. ‘Before Peter had kids, we’d go on these holidays around the world. Small group of us. Gay, tech, venture capital, founder-types,’ says D’Souza, an Australian businessman. ‘It’s quite a close-knit little community.’ Lately, because of the kids, they’ve partied at Thiel’s place, an $18 million compound on a man-made island off Miami’s turquoise coast. In December 2022, days before Thiel’s annual party, D’Souza came up with the idea of an ‘Enhanced Games’. The Olympics – but all the athletes dope. ‘That’s what I do over Christmas, when no one else is working,’ D’Souza says.

Saturday

Kate Andrews

Kate Andrews, Adam Frank, David Hempleman-Adams, Svitlana Morenets and Michael Beloff

From our UK edition

40 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Kate Andrews argues vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance is more MAGA than Trump (1:27); Adam Frank explains how super-earths could help us understand what life might look like on another planet (5:15); David Hempleman-Adams recounts his attempt to cross the Atlantic on a hydrogen ballon (14:31); from Ukraine, Svitlana Morenets reports on the battle to save Kharkiv (20:44); and, Michael Beloff takes us on a history of the Olympics (30:12).  Presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Ed Horler

Should Olympians be paid?

The Olympics are the pinnacle of athletic achievement, a global stage where the very best compete for ultimate glory. With the XXXIII Olympiad now underway in Paris, we’re reminded of their magnitude as 206 countries participate across thirty-two different sports. Until recently, winning an Olympic gold medal was a reward in itself, but with World Athletics’ (the body that governs track and field) decision to introduce prize money this year, there is now extra incentive to win. Leaving behind 128 years of Olympic tradition, forty-eight gold medalists will receive an award of $50,000 this year. Not every athlete is eligible.

Olympics

Thursday

Digby Warde-Aldam

The mesmerising Olympic posters designed by the likes of Warhol and Whiteread

From our UK edition

You could be forgiven for assuming that the citizens of Paris weren’t exactly bursting with joy at the prospect of this summer’s Olympic Games. They’re annoyed at everything: road closures, public transport price hikes and – would you believe it? – the prospect of their country being taken over by extremist cranks before the month is out.  Bref, or indifference towards the Games is the prevailing attitude – and should you need (flimsy, anecdotal) evidence, I offer you the fact that when I visited an exhibition devoted to the Olympics the day before the first round of voting in the election last week, I had the space entirely to myself. Beyond a single wall down by the Seine, you won’t see the artist posters displayed much around Paris It was a shame.

Monday

The Spectator

This month in culture: July 2024

The Bear, season three Hulu, June 27 America loves a misanthropic, depressive chef. How else would we know the chef is a real artist? The Bear returns for its third season with the trailer promising lots of arguing, screw-ups, failures and everything else you’ve come to expect from the beloved show. We’re not sure why you would take a perfectly good beef-sandwich shop in Chicago and try to turn it into a Michelin-starred restaurant, but we hope Carmy and the gang give us some sort of good reason. — Zack Christenson Jeremy Allen White in The Bear Wimbledon ESPN and ABC, July 1 You know summer has arrived when the brilliant green grass of the All-England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club lights up your screens.

culture
Paris
Estella Shardlow

Paris: a gold-medal minibreak

As the Olympic Games descend on the French capital this July, the contest that really matters for this sports-shy travel writer is where to stay. From historic heavyweights to new contenders, these Parisian properties stand head and shoulders above the rest. Best for wellness: Shangri-La Paris The cool marble interiors of Shangri-La’s Parisian outpost feel a world away from the tumult of the Champs-Élysées (in fact, it’s only a fifteen-minute walk). If the Grecian frescoes, silk wallpaper and sweeping, gilded staircase all seem distinctly regal that’s because the nineteenth-century building was originally the pied-à-terre of Prince Roland Bonaparte, Napoleon’s great-nephew.