Re: weight-class sports: adjust them to cut down on the medals awarded. Award medals by team, rather than by individual weight class.
For the transfer to the new host, we have the mayor of LA and Simone with a rather substantial ankle brace.
H.E.R. does the US anthem grandiously but well.
Tom Cruise Mission Impossibles himself into the stadium and walks through the athlete crowd then segue to production video about taking the flag to California.
Neat. Rumors were that he would rappel down the Eiffel Tower. I thought that sounded unlikely and it was. Jumping into the stadium from its edge was neat, though.
I will go there.
That lady that grabbed Cruise and kissed him on the cheek should not have done that. It looked spur of the moment and he couldn’t do much other than just smile and keep moving. I just think it is strange to kiss someone when they haven’t consented to.
Let’s not hijack this thread, though. If enough people want to talk about it, we could start a separate thread.
…and it closes with Yseult doing the American version of a French song - My way.
Which was something of a theme through it all.
I kind of hate that song, but she did a great job. Is she famous?
I’ve been trying to come up with a good rap name for myself, but so far none of them have stuck.
Seems to be quite popular in France
Oh, don’t worry, I think Robot Arm is a perfectly cromulent rapper name. 
They got it from Asterix.
Closing ceremonies done. I’ll see if I’m up to a timestamped runthrough (love those! 
) later today. For now, my general takeaways:
- If you attend an event in Europe in the summer, you have to be able to deal with unpredictable weather without getting completely cracked up.
- Almost nobody uses the word “loss” correctly.
- Losing out on the silver by THAT MUCH is even more common than losing out on the gold by THAT MUCH, albeit usually less painful.
- Telecasts where I don’t have to listen to Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin for one picosecond are better than telecasts where I do.
Railer13 - I’m talking about social media (primarily Twitter…I can’t give it up, so many people whose opinions I respect are on there) and those barely sentient lumps of flesh (MAGAs, bible thumpers, rednecks, incels, armchair fascists, you know the drill) who are invariably the first voices on any story you see on CNN (I don’t watch Fox News, but I’m pretty sure it’s even worse) and frequently the last. In the past, I never had to listen to them; hell, I was barely aware of their existence. When the tobacco industry really came under fire, the news outlets didn’t spend 90% of the time parroting industry propaganda and talking to diehard smokers. When the fight over sexual harassment came to a head in the 90’s, I didn’t have to wade through thousands of posts demonizing the women who stepped forward and furiously defending the inalienable constitutional right of white collar executives to grope women and treat them like sex toys. Now a group of French performers do a simple tribute to the Olympiad’s Greek origins, and within the day I’m inundated with religious fanatics shrieking “children’s drag show” and “Last Supper disrespect”. 
It’s freaking exhausting.
Kinda unfortunate for McEwen (Kerr wasn’t trying to be a jerk, he just didn’t feel right about accepting the gold without beating him), but them’s the breaks. There’s never any shame in silver.
Robot_Arm - Well, there need to be certain uniform standards for the judges. If you have regular exposure to the fine arts, I can see how it would get boring for you. The fact that I don’t even have access to a decent dance competition (Dancing With The Stars hasn’t qualified for about 20 seasons) makes me appreciate the beauty of gymnastics all the more.
Toxylon - “Reportedly?” Source? And, more pertinently, under what circumstances? If we’re talking a spit-flecked social media moderator shoving a mike in their faces on a show watched by thousands of snarling half-orcs, I have to question the honesty of those responses.
Look at Katie Moon in the interview. Does that look like someone full of regret?
flurb - Yeah. Look, I’m not going to call anyone a whiner. If the officials screw up, those harmed have the right and the obligation to call them out on it. However, one ironclad rule should be that you do not have the damn medal ceremony while the results are still in dispute. Even if the judges eventually got it right, giving Jordan Chiles a bronze and then yanking it away was just crass. Nobody in the IOC had any problem with making the American, Japanese, and Russian figure skating teams wait two years to get their rightful medals, so taking an extra day to iron out the proper start values shouldn’t have been any problem.
Fiendish_Astronaut - I don’t doubt for a second that table tennis is huge at the recreational level (I even remember my own family having a table behind the house auld lang syne), like darts, pool, or racquetball. But anything that can’t attract the strongest, or the biggest, or the fastest, or the toughest athletes isn’t going to become a leading worldwide sport. The countries you listed are the one’s I’d expect to dominate…not the greatest physical specimens, but once they set their eyes on an objective, nothing can stop them.
RickJay - Boxing is a crapstorm from top to bottom, and it’s been infuriating seeing the news outlets stick their heads in the sand about this again and again. Good riddance. As for what replaces it, I can think of no better robustly deserved RIP middle finger to the whole broken, corrupt mess than the sport that replaced it everywhere else, mixed martial arts. It’s past time, dangit.
Beckdawrek - Saw a little breaking so far. Still undecided on whether it’s belongs here, but my general feeling is that this should get some kind of award, just not medals (yeah, there I go again ). Don’t mind stage names if they’re that protective of their identities, but I think that immediately delegitimizes this as a regular Olympic event.
I was wondering how embarrassing they could make the hand-off of the Olympic flag. Mission accomplished. Thanks Tom.
I thought that segment was pretty cool. What about it was embarrassing?
All of it after the national anthem. The anthem was well done.
Agreed. Fun. It was just a fun way to pretend they are getting the flag there.
Nothing tops HM the Queen and James Bond parachuting in to open the 2012 Games in London.
Football would make far LESS sense. It’s not much played outside the USA and Canada.
Baseball is very, very popular in many Caribbean and South America countries, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and it’s doing well in Australia. It’s as popular in some European nations as football is.
I can’t imagine ever adding American football. It has Canada, America, and nothing else.
American football is played in the US and a similar game is played in Canada. The NFL plays some games in Europe, but their attempt to start a European league failed. Besides, they only play one game a week, so it would take 3 weeks to accommodate teams from 8 countries if it were more popular. Finally it really isn’t a summer game at all.
Flag football is planned for the 2028 Games.