Brandon Veale column: All the important numbers from Paris – Duluth News Tribune

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One of the first and biggest pitfalls of this job as sports editor is assuming that the sports and things I like are the sports and things everyone likes.

As much as I love writing about the Olympic Games, I do sometimes worry that I’m talking to myself. However, I justified this enterprise as necessary to stop bothering my coworkers, who are supposed to be working, with my thoughts on beach volleyball and why team handball isn’t more popular in this country.

But it’s OK, because you have stepped up and sat down in front of your television. I’m happy to report that through 13 days (Thursday), NBC’s ratings are up 76% from the same time period of Tokyo 2020. More Americans have spent time watching the Paris Games on Peacock, NBC’s streaming service, than all previous Olympics combined.

Many factors have been cited for the success, such as a nation weary to hear about anything that’s not politics, more people at home during the day, an alluring location and (Noah Lyles excepted) not having dread of COVID-19 hanging over our heads.

If anything, NBC's joining the 21st century and not withholding major events to preserve the appeal of the primetime show seems like a key to its success. Even though everything I wanted to see was on live, I didn’t miss a primetime show over the course of these Games, using it as a backup plan to make sure I caught things I missed during the day due to meetings and all the other trappings of having full-time employment.

But outside the swimming/gymnastics/track/diving core of NBC’s coverage, there are some little details you might have missed, so let’s round up Paris 2024 from a competitive aspect.

Through the close of competition on Saturday, the United States has 38 gold, 42 silver and 42 bronze medals. Though the totally imaginary competition with China will go down to the last day, a few other matters are settled. In particular, Team USA’s 42 silver and 42 bronze medals through 15 days are already a record for a Games held outside the United States. The 122nd medal, a gold in men’s basketball, is a record total for a foreign Olympics.Team USA has won gold medals in 13 different sports and medals in 27 (with a chance to add to both categories in the women’s volleyball gold medal and men’s water polo bronze medal games on Sunday). Due to the tremendous success of the U.S. men’s and women’s teams, this will be the first Olympics since 1992 in which track and field produced more medals and more golds than swimming.NBC billed last weekend (Aug. 3-4) as “Gold Rush Weekend”, which turned out to be more than a marketing exercise. On Saturday, Aug. 3, American athletes won 18 medals, the most on any single day of Olympic competition since Oct. 1, 1988 (the next-to-last day of the Seoul Games). Also, if you were wondering about the “Battle of the Sexes,” the American women won by a mile. Through Saturday, 22 of America’s 34 gold medalists were women, 11 were men and there was one mixed team. The medal count was also 63-45-6 in the women’s favor. American women have won more medals than the men in each of the last five Olympics and more golds in each of the last four. In fact, if “American Women” was a country unto themselves, their total of 22 gold, 22 silver and 19 bronze would outpace every other country in the world except China in golds and would be more medals than anyone but China and tied with Great Britain. Though the first week of the games seemed to yield an unusual ratio of silver and bronze medals to golds, the weirder thing is that Americans have been mostly able to avoid the dreaded fourth place. I’ve counted 19 fourths going into Sunday. Italy has 20 in the same span, which is more than their running total of real medals of any color.Four countries removed themselves from the list of teams that have never won an Olympic medal: Albania (wrestling), Cape Verde (boxing), Dominica and Saint Lucia (track and field). Also, the Refugee Olympic Team, instituted in 2016 to represent displaced persons around the world, also had its first medalist, boxer Cindy Ngamba. Ngamba was born in Cameroon but cannot return, as she is openly lesbian and homosexuality is illegal there. Dominica and Saint Lucia, small islands about 110 miles apart in the southern Caribbean, made those first medals gold. Botswana (track and field) and Guatemala (shooting) won gold for the first time. The Individual Neutral Athletes, Russians and Belarussians who could prove they did not support Russian aggression in Ukraine, collected five medals, one gold, three silver and one bronze. All but one of those medals were from Belorussian athletes, with the only medalists of Russian extraction being doubles tennis players Mirra Andreeva and Diana Shnaider. Even with the help of Peacock’s ingenious “Gold Zone” channel whipping around to every medal event, it’s impossible to keep track of all these stories. But seeing all these people trying their best to do so makes me feel like a little less of a nerd, so I appreciate that.

Brandon Veale is sports editor of the News Tribune. He has been writing columns about Olympic history and issues throughout the 2024 Summer Olympics. He can be reached at bveale@duluthnews.com.

Brandon has been sports editor of the News Tribune since August 2021.

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