Olympics Preview Live From Paris
Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It. I'm Kousha Navidar. I'm in for Allison Stewart. Happy Friday, everyone. I'm so glad you're here. On today's show, journalist Michael Waters joins us to talk about his book, The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness and the Making of Modern Sports. We'll also talk about wedding etiquette for parents. Yes, we will take your calls, and we definitely want to hear your experiences. Plus, we'll mark the 40th anniversary of the Brooklyn-based performance group, the Urban Bush Women. That's the plan. Let's get this started with the Summer Olympic Games.
[fanfare music]
If those trumpets and timpanis are any indication, as most of you know, the Olympics just started on Wednesday. The games began with soccer and rugby matches. I'm super excited that the opening ceremony starts around 01:30 p.m., it's just in about an hour and a half. The ceremony is taking place this year in the City of Lights and will be the first outdoor and water ceremony as athletes will be on floats going down the Seine River.
I bet a lot of you are equally thrilled about the games. Today we'll be continuing our coverage, starting with an Olympic preview. We're being joined by someone who is in the middle of all the action, I believe is right on the edge of the Seine right now. Matthew Futterman is a deputy sports editor of the New York Times, and he's covered a number of Olympic games throughout his career. In fact, Matt, you are right next to the Seine in Paris right now. Is that right?
Matthew Futterman: I am, but I'm not the deputy sports editor of the New York Times. I'm a senior writer with The Athletic, which is the sports unit of the New York Times.
Kousha Navidar: So sorry about that. Thanks for catching that for us. Really appreciate it. Thanks for joining us on All Of It. Can you tell us where you are right now, what the vibe is like?
Matthew Futterman: I am on the left bank of the Seine, a couple hundred meters from the river, and people are trying to make their way over to the-- I know there's no degrees of uniqueness, but one of the more unusual opening ceremonies that has ever taken place, an incredibly ambitious plan to break this event out from the cloistered stadium into the city that's hosting the games itself.
Kousha Navidar: When you're standing there right now, what are you seeing? How big is the crowd?
Matthew Futterman: I'm seeing a lot of security. I'm a little bit aways from the crowd because it's a little complicated. make your way to the actual access point, and I'm on my way to doing that. There's people milling around. It's funny, it's a weird combination of people making their way to the big event, and also Parisians just sitting casually at cafes, facing outward towards the street, sipping cappuccino and beer, whatever is their preference.
Kousha Navidar: Are you getting a sense of how the residents of Paris are feeling about the games?
Matthew Futterman: Yes, I think they're excited. The ones that are still here are seemingly genuinely excited about it. They're a little nervous about it. There was a terrorist-- I don't know if. I'm sorry, there was an arson earlier. I don't know that it was a terrorist attack. There was an arson earlier on a train in the region. People are kind of on edge. You know, it's always a mixed bag with the residents of the host city. It's kind of a pain in the neck to host the Olympics. There's a lot of inconveniences that go along with it. Often what happens is once the games start going and the medals start being awarded, people kind of get into the spirit, and it becomes really a pretty festive atmosphere when there isn't a pandemic going on.
Kousha Navidar: This is the first time that the opening ceremony is on water. What do you think of that?
Matthew Futterman: I think it's great. Having sat through many opening ceremonies in these cavernous stadiums where you're just sitting there for five hours, there's some interpretive dance, there's some stunts. There's, a very-- in the summer, a very, very long parade of athletes coming into a stadium, which can be great, but it's also kind of long. I think what this event is really trying to do is really trying to relaunch the games after certainly a bad four years, some would say a bad 10 years.
They're trying to give it a new taste and a new flavor and trying to send a new message that the games aren't this like exclusive, lofty thing, necessarily, that they can be really, like I said before, a part of the city and a part of the humanity that lives in that city and has come together to play some sports for a few weeks.
Kousha Navidar: That's beautiful. How's that showing up both in what you've seen them talking about leading up to the event and also in what you anticipate with the opening ceremony.
Matthew Futterman: I think the main way it's showing up is the giddiness that you find among the athletes who went through this three years ago in Tokyo, would have been four years ago, but it had to get postponed for a year. They're just giddy because, you know, the last time the games were going on, they were being tested every day or something or every hour, it seemed like. Everyone was terrified of getting COVID and nobody could really hang out with each other, and everybody had masks. It just wasn't all that joyous at all.
I think what you see when you talk to the people who were there in the village in Tokyo and are now here is, it's like those kids who got to go back to college a few years ago after having to do remote school for a year. They'll never take connecting in the unique way that they do at the Olympics for granted again, if they ever did.
Kousha Navidar: You've been to a number of Olympics. I'm wondering, what is it like to cover in Olympics? It sounds like each one kind of feels like a totally new experience? Is that fair to say?
Matthew Futterman: To an extent, it's a fairly new experience, but to an extent, it's also very familiar. It's like being, in some ways, it depends where it is. Sometimes it can really feel like you're on a very elaborate NBC soundstage. In other ways, and I think specifically this one, it's not necessarily going to feel that way at all because they've, like I was saying before, about the relaunch, what they've really tried to do here is bring the games into the city. The old, the previous model of the Olympics was to build this massive park with lots of stadiums and everything would be centrally located.
This one, they're just doing it almost completely differently in the sense that they're having, they set up a beach. There are just temporary stadiums all over the city. Imagine just big sets of bleachers at iconic places, that if you were lucky to have parents who took you to Europe as a child, you probably were dragged to as a kid or maybe have gone as an enthusiastic adult. For instance, beach volleyball is going to happen underneath the Eiffel Tower. Three-on-three basketball and a few other sports are going to happen at Place de la Concorde.
Equestrian is taking place in the Gardens of Versailles. What they've really tried to do is show off the city, but also bring this idea that sports are a part of life and culture and mixing sports and culture in a way that it's never been done before.
Kousha Navidar: It goes back to that sense of humanity that you were talking about and accessibility in what seems like the folks that are putting this on are trying to define this event as. You mentioned a few sports. Breakdancing is also a new sport that's being included. Is that right? Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Matthew Futterman: Yes, you know, the Olympics are always trying to reach out, or lately have been trying to reach out, let's say last 25 years or so, have been trying to reach out to new audiences and find ways to appeal to young folks. They try different kinds of sports, different years, and sometimes they're not really sports or, you know, who's to say what is a sport, right? This year's entrant is, or one of a few of this year's entrants is breaking, which, you know, I'll be honest with you, I'm kind of a traditional stick and ball kind of sports person, and I like races and stopwatches and things like that.
It's not really going to be my thing, but people are super excited about it, very interested in it. Now, it may be a one-hit wonder because right now it's not currently in the program for the Los Angeles Summer Games in 2028, so catch it while you can if it's what you're interested in.
Kousha Navidar: Some people like stick and ball. Some people like pop and lock. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
Matthew Futterman: Yes.
Kousha Navidar: I understand that your reporting as of late has been a lot about tennis. Is that what you'll be covering specifically?
Matthew Futterman: I will be covering a chunk of the tennis when it gets particularly interesting, like when Carlos Alcaraz, who's the new tennis sensation, plays doubles with Rafael Nadal, who's his countryman from Spain and is a pretty good tennis player himself. The Olympic allows for unique things, unique moments like that. That's one of the things I'm really interested in covering. One of the great things about the Olympics is it allows you to move outside your comfort zone.
There's a world champion fencer from Harvard who went to Harvard, who is going to try and win the first gold medal for men's US fencing ever. Kind of crazy to think about, considering that fencing has been around in the Olympics for more than 100 years. I'll be bouncing around a bit. I also cover a lot of endurance sports. I'll probably be present at the marathon and triathlon and things like that.
Kousha Navidar: What are you most excited about generally? Like, what's the next big event or big athlete that you are going to be watching that you have your eye on?
Matthew Futterman: It's a little bit of a trite answer, but there really is no event, no sports event in the world that I've come across quite like the 100 meters, the men's and the women's. It's this amazing thing where you have a stadium of 80,000 people that goes completely silent, and then there's this suddenly a gun goes off and there's this absolute explosion of noise for 10 seconds, and it's all over in 10 seconds, and that person is the fastest man or woman in the world.
That is really almost always, if not the signature event, a signature event of the games. It's hard not to get excited this year when you have an athlete like Sha'Carri Richardson, who's just like potentially one of the brightest lights in sports, who's a favorite to win the gold medal. If she does, you'll probably be seeing her everywhere for a long while.
Kousha Navidar: Yes. Track and field. It has so much excitement around it, always. Before I let you go, I'm also wondering, what events are people sleeping on? I mean, besides the popular sports, are there any that you think people would really enjoy watching that maybe they're not in the United States right now?
Matthew Futterman: I don't know that it's a great television sport, but it's certainly going to be a spectacle when the triathletes and the marathon swimmers-- The marathon swim is 10 km, so 6.2 miles, which is really a long way to go in the water. They're going to do it in the Seine, which is the river of rivers that cuts through the heart of the city where the opening ceremonies will be. It's not the cleanest of waterways.
They've been trying to make it cleaner. If there's a big rainstorm the night before, it's going to wash a lot of sewage into the water and they might have to postpone the race. It's touch and go, but it should be quite a spectacle to see all these people jumping off a dock into the water with the Eiffel towel in the background.
Kousha Navidar: Absolutely. We'll be excited to see it. I'm sure you have a lot to do in the next hour and a half, so I'll let you go. I've been speaking with Matthew Futterman. I want to make sure getting this right, so correct me if I'm wrong, the senior writer with The Athletic, which is the sports unit at the New York Times. Is that right, Matt?
Matthew Futterman: Yes. I mean, I'm a senior writer, not the senior writer, to be specific. I just want to make sure you're not putting me ahead of a lot of great colleagues I have.
Kousha Navidar: Certainly.
Matthew Futterman: That's close enough. How about that?
Kousha Navidar: A senior writer with The Athletic from the sports unit of the New York Times, live from Paris as the opening ceremony of the Olympics are about to begin. Matt, thanks so much for calling in. Enjoy the show and thanks for all of your coverage.
Matthew Futterman: Thank you for having me. Really appreciate it.
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