They all want to see Simone Biles. On Thursday, so her night of wonder and redemption at these Olympics, that meant a few well-known names turned up. Zinedine Zidane was there at the Bercy Arena, so too Bill Gates and Stephen Curry, and what a performance it was, just as they knew it would be.
Biles is the star and Biles is the show. Biles leaves all in her dust and Biles brings the smoke. And for one man in particular, she was also the screen, which takes us to another spectator, Thomas Bach, the International Olympic Committee president.
It was Bach who placed that sixth gold medal around Biles’s neck, and he was beaming the grin of a man who is on to something — you can always bank on the Olympics to find 10 distractions for a crisis.
Biles was Bach’s blanket on Thursday. When she flew to such incredible heights, culminating in her winning the all-around title at 8.20pm, Bach was fully aware of the storm that has raged for much of the week in the French capital.
It had been around 11.30am that morning when the Italian welterweight, Angela Carini, decided she could no longer go on. It had taken 46 seconds in the company of Imane Khelif for her to prioritise an instinct to ‘preserve my life’ over her sporting ambition.
USA gymnastics star Simone Biles has caught the attention of everyone at the Paris Olympics
Football legend Zinedine Zidane was in attendance at the Bercy Arena to watch the USA star, Biles, in action
We know plenty about Khelif by now and why those words lapped the planet. Which is to say we know Khelif and a Taiwanese fighter, Lin Yu-Ting, were expelled from the world championships in March 2023, because, according to the head of the body who ran that tournament, unspecified gender tests had shown they had the XY chromosomes that determine half the population as male.
Bach knew all the context as well, and we might say the blood on Carini’s shorts was the blood on his hands. Because the IOC stepped in to run the boxing here and it was the IOC who let them compete.
To follow Bach’s garbled reasoning on Saturday morning, if your passport says female, you are female, and that’s enough. The scientific understanding that has been amassed in this area across the past decade, not least through the Caster Semenya case, appears to matter far less than your travel document. There is the wind, go pee into it.
The market is too crowded to say those decisions signify the greatest dereliction of duty in Bach’s 11 years in charge — I’d say cosying up to Vladimir Putin for so long gobbled up that biscuit — but it was rotten. It was a stinker. It was an egregiously irresponsible hand to play in favouring inclusivity over fairness in a workplace that is dangerous enough without the burden of spineless leadership.
But still, Bach had Biles and when you have Biles your show goes on. That seems to be the fallback, because volume always wins — the IOC know they can just about drown it out with great sport. When Khelif fights her quarter-final on Saturday, Biles will have just gone in the vault; when Lin fights next, on Sunday morning, Novak Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz will be limbering up for a gold medal match.
Biles is the star and Biles is the show. She leaves all in her dust and brings the smoke
And it’s an equation that checks out. I’m extremely uneasy about the boxing decision, but a few months from now I’ll mainly recall the last 400 yards of Alex Yee’s triathlon. I will remember Muhamed Aly’s wonderful shades of madness in in the handball arena, Biles floating high above the floor, Leon Marchand in the pool, Antoine Dupont’s happy feet. To that list I would hope to add Katarina Johnson-Thompson in the heptathlon and Keely Hodgkinson in the 800m.
The Olympics always finds a way to make us favour the good. But these Games will be a triumph in spite of the IOC and in spite of Bach, not because of them or him.
And we shouldn’t forget that. We should wish to see that change. We should keep pointing out that the IOC harvests gargantuan profit for erecting and branding this magnificent tent, but promptly cowers and hides behind the federations and passports when a subject gets too hot.
It is truly a bizarre paradox — the IOC’s tentacles and restrictions are famously restrictive, and yet they have lacked the legal dexterity to find a means of keeping a child rapist out of their beach volleyball tournament.
They ought to feel extreme shame for that debacle, for the appalling way they abandoned their post. But they haven’t expressed any. Just as they ought to feel embarrassed by other allegations. One of which is a claim that they threatened to have Salt Lake City removed as host for the Winter Games in 2034 if American investigators refused to curb hard questions about Chinese swimmers here and the flawed investigation into their failed drugs tests. Bad look, that one.
Thomas Bach (right) placed the sixth gold medal around Biles’s neck and he was beaming with the grin of a man who is on to something
So too was a situation explained in an email to reporters a fortnight ago about the Russian delegation in Paris. Their participation as neutrals was contingent on an IOC demand that they express no support for the invasion of Ukraine or hold ties to the military. A human rights group presented evidence to the IOC that two-thirds of the group had violated the terms but they say it was ignored.
That didn’t get much traction because there was too much sport on the horizon. That can be the way of the Games.
I will always find the Olympics of Biles and Marchand and handball to be breathtakingly fantastic. And I will always understand that some rough edges are impossible to smooth on something so vast.
But you can always hope for better and on that front it really would be lovely if Bach and his band of spoilers could reach for their own passports and go some place far, far away.
Farewell Andy Murray
Farewell Andy Murray, a fighter to the last. Plenty of tributes have been written to him in recent days, so instead one goes to his partner, Dan Evans. By snubbing the Citi Open in Washington to be here it is estimated he will lose 110 spots in the world rankings, thereby hurtling outside the top 170.
Playing an Olympics is no immense sacrifice, but his prime reason was to support Murray and he deserves great respect for that. Evans was once depicted as a bit of a hell raiser with a big heart — these days he only ticks half the description.
Andy Murray (pictured) bowed out from his glittering tennis career earlier this week at the Olympics
Dan Evans (front) was once depicted as a bit of a hell raiser with a big heart — these days he only ticks half the description
Chelsea are desperate
Chelsea’s desperation to offload Conor Gallagher is entirely understandable. It is understandable because he has a year remaining on his deal and a fee of £34million would do wonders on the balance sheet.
It is also understandable because the club’s leadership are pants-on-head crazy. Their failure to recognise the deeper value of a homegrown player with considerable talent is not remotely a surprise by this point.
