Is there a tattoo artist in the Olympic Village?
OK, I know this from giving blood: if you’re about to do anything in any way weird with your body – like push it to its farthest frontier, or take blood out of it – that’s not a great time to get a tattoo. So it would be natural to assume that the many athletes with five rings inked on their magnificent biceps, thighs, triceps etc did that before the games. Wrong: at the floating Olympic village in Tahiti, 10,000 miles away, there is a tattoo parlour on the ship. So the surfers aren’t worried at all about communicable disease, and I guess it could be worse: at least they’re not surfing in the Seine.
How do the swimmers ever get out of their swimming costumes?
There is a very good reason for the tightness of swimming costumes, which has nothing at all to do with the French diver Jules Bouyer’s popularity. (Just Google it, why don’t you?) The close fit compresses the muscles and aids the posture. But once they’re on, is it possible to get them off, or do they then fuse with the skin?
What’s the best outfit to shoot in?
The Chinese air rifler Huang Yuting took gold (in the mixed team air rifle event) in an outfit that looked like a Fortnite skin – futuristic in its harsh, clean lines, the menace heightened, if anything, by its Squid Game primary colour scheme. Of course she was going to win a medal. Naturally that’s what a shooter should look like.
Wait though, who is this guy who’s just ambled in on his way to a garden centre? That is Turkish 51-year-old Yusuf Dikeç, who forgot his special glasses and ear protection, failed to take his other hand out of his pocket, and still took silver (also in a mixed team event: air pistol). It’s first-date rules, with shooting; wear whatever makes you feel the most you.
For the love of God, can they not just score everything out of 10?
Unfortunately not: gymnastics used to be scored out of 10, but now it is sometimes out of 14, other times 16, and this is the combination of the difficulty score, decided by a difficult panel, plus the execution score, which is a different panel, minus any cock-ups (conspiracies are referred separately to the conspiracy panel). And diving is similar but different, and judo is not similar at all, and there is no point following any of this. It’s better just to figure out which person in the audience is the mum and watch her face.
Has anyone ever loved parmesan as much as Giorgia Villa?
Not gonna lie, I would previously have thought that, were cheese-appreciation a competitive sport, I’d have been in with a shot myself. But then I saw the promotional photos of the Italian gymnast Giorgia Villa, part of the magnificent team that won Italy’s first medal (silver) in gymnastics since 1928. Parmesan is quite committed to sports sponsorship, also bankrolling the tennis player Jannik Sinner, the former NBA point guard Nico Mannion, the Paralympic swimmer Giulia Ghiretti and the fencer Matteo Neri; none of those people, though, can do the splits on cheese, and none of them – no offence – really hug it like they mean it.
