Image Credit: Matt Dunham/AP Photo
That sand looks super spongey, right? Like long jump gold medalist Brittney Reese is landing in a big cake? It’s tea time, fellow armchair Olympians. Let’s dig deep and dive right in.
Day 12 brought a gold-medal U.S. vs. U.S. beach volleyball match, a charmed third time for sprinter Allyson Felix, and my sneaking suspicion that I would willingly watch random track and field events in prime time any night. These athletes, man. They’re getting to me. I don’t know if I can go back to regular old humans again. Couldn’t NBC just keep showing more Olympics instead of America’s Got Talent? They could still call it that! READ FULL STORY »
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It’s a THREE-PEAT! Congratulations to Misty and Kerri — now three-time Olympic gold medalists and the best beach volleyball team in history. The pair, dubbed the Golden Girls due to their likenesses to Sophia and Blanche (nope), have been finding sand in weird places together for TWELVE YEARS. That’s nearly 2.1 million congratulatory mid-set ass pats!
Kerri and Misty have been the pinup girls of beach volleyball ever since their 2004 Athens win — and despite their wedgie-inducing uniforms and hot bods, I don’t mean “pinup” like that. I mean that every girl who decided to give beach volleyball a shot still has the Golden Girls tacked up somewhere on their bedroom walls. (Gabrielle Reece was on mine.) These two have set the tone of their sport and it’s gotten HUGE since then. Fun fact: Every player May and Walsh faced during the London games had started competitively after they’d won gold in Athens. READ FULL STORY »
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You know it was a packed day at the Olympics on Tuesday if NBC didn’t even try to squeeze a Mary Carillo anthropological adventure into primetime. Let’s break the broadcast down. (Click on links for videos.)
WOMEN’S GYMNASTICS Perhaps now that the event finals are over, we’ll see Gabby Douglas smile again. We got a small grin at the end of her beam routine — which drew gasps when she fell off on a leap – because the stress was finally over. For her. Aly Raisman, on the other hand, found herself in the middle of a U.S. protest after her score placed her in fourth. Kathy Kelly, vice president of the U.S. women’s program, and Marta and Bela Karolyi, quickly pantomimed for her coach to file an inquiry. “For what?” Aly’s coach asked. They thought the judges hadn’t calculated the difficulty value of Aly’s routine correctly. READ FULL STORY »
“Judging from this year’s performances, Lolo Jones seems to have only a slim chance of winning an Olympic medal in the 100-meter hurdles and almost no possibility of winning gold.”
Ouch. That’s the opening sentence of Saturday’s 1,000-word New York Times article on Jones, which went on to complain that the Olympic track and field athlete “has played into the persistent, demeaning notion that women are worthy as athletes only if they have sex appeal,” then quotes a professor who compares Jones to Anna Kournikova, “the former Russian tennis player whose looks received far more attention than her relatively meager skills.”
The critical piece was published just a few days before Jones competed in the women’s 100-meter hurdle race. Last night, she placed a disappointing fourth — and as the runner told Today‘s Savannah Guthrie this morning, the Times story only added insult to injury.
Image Credit: Julie Jacobson/AP
Okay, okay. Perhaps I should have picked Aly Raisman as today’s Stud after she nailed that first tumbling pass to win gold in the floor final and took bronze on beam following a scoring controversy. But two things worked against her: That painful studio sitdown with Bob Costas in which she kept insisting she was so excited but never actually looked it (maybe she was understandably exhausted, maybe she’s been media-trained to be that boring), and the fact that there’s just too much stress in women’s gymnastics for anyone to look like she’s actually enjoying herself while competing in the event finals. They’ve all worked years for those few moments and one tiny misstep can cost them their dreams. I get it. But after experiencing the weight of that insane pressure for days as a viewer, I just wanted someone to remind me gymnastics is fun. Enter the Netherlands’ Epke Zonderland.
He’s the first Dutch athlete to ever medal in gymnastics, and it was gold on the high bar. Watch his routine, which had the highest difficulty of any gymnastics routine performed in London (male or female), below. The spectator-shot video not only gives you a great view of his epic three release moves in a row but also of his competitors watching him. Look for Danell Leyva in his gray U.S.A. track jacket on the left… READ FULL STORY »
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After hearing that 16-year-old U.S. gymnast Gabby Douglas is a huge fan of their show, the cast of The Vampire Diaries made her a video congratulating her on her team and individual all-around golds and wishing her and her teammate, Aly Raisman, good luck in today’s event finals. Watch it below. (No spoilers in the comments, please!)
Nina Dobrev, a former artistic and rhythmic gymnast, was behind the group effort. “Forget sleep. It’s all about the Olympics right now. I’m obsessed. Like, it’s actually a problem. They’re starting to tell me I’m looking tired on set, and it’s because I’m up until, like, two in the morning watching the Olympics and going to work at 5 a.m.,” Dobrev told EW earlier today. “I used to be a gymnast, and I competed internationally, so it’s my favorite time. I even bought a 3D TV so that I could watch them in 3D. When I found out that Gabby liked the show, I was incredibly excited and really happy to make the video. And now we follow each other on Twitter, so we’ve been direct messaging. The 16-year-old in me wishes that I was up there with them. So I’m just so happy for her success. And she’s so cute. She has the most amazing smile.” READ FULL STORY »
Michael Phelps was on Today this morning, once again being asked if he’s really competed at his last Olympics, making Matt Lauer the latest person to refuse to believe Phelps is not going to go to Rio in 2016. How can Phelps make this any clearer? “I’m done,’’ he said. “I’m finished. I’m retired. I’m done. No more.” Yeah, but seriously. “The biggest thing is I can look back at my career and say I’ve done everything exactly the way I wanted to, and if you can say that, I’m happy. I’m satisfied,” Phelps said. Matt, I believe, successfully read between the lines: Phelps hates to lose, and he wants to go out on top. Normally, that notion would be applauded, but someone in the Today crowd actually booed the greatest Olympian of all time after he laughed off Matt’s psychoanalysis and again assured him, “I will not be coming back, we’ll just leave it at that.”
I get it: Enough athletes have come out of retirement to make us skeptical, Phelps is notoriously competitive, everyone loves a comeback story, and he’s only 27. What else is he going to do besides travel (may we suggest The Amazing Race), cage-dive with great whites in South Africa with Chad Le Clos (which better be a Shark Week 2013 special), buy a racehorse (he’s thinking about naming it Schmitty), and perfect his golf game (for a celebrity tournament)? Whatever he wants to! I think that’s the point. I love seeing the smile he gets on his face talking about 15-year-old gold medalist Katie Ledecky. (It’s there again when Lauer brings her up.) When Phelps is ready to return to the pool on a daily basis, maybe it will be as a coach, and one day, we’ll see him tearing up on the deck of an Olympic warmup pool like Bob Bowman did. READ FULL STORY »
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Aly Raisman is about to get big. Along with the rest of the Fab Five, Raisman (who is Team USA’s gymnastics captain) has already earned a team gold medal, and tonight, you can watch the 18-year-old compete in individual floor exercise and beam. She may not have been the buzziest name pre-Games, but she certainly has won our attention. EW caught up with Raisman earlier, when she told us about her pop-culture favorites — from Ringer to Channing Tatum – and who she really wants to meet in London.
She’s got “Call Me Maybe” fever. “I just like to listen to music that kind of like pumps me up and gets me ready. I like hip-hop, just kind of like fun music, not slow stuff. I like “Call Me Maybe” a lot! [Laughs]” READ FULL STORY »
Welcome to ‘What Is Your Damage,’ Annie Barrett’s summer shop of all the melodrama and self-absorption she misses from springtime reality TV. Every Tuesday and Friday, she’ll rant about a current offense to her humanity, then assess readers’ damages via video replies. Don’t be shy about admitting what annoys or intrigues you. We’re all in this pop cult together!
What’s your damage, Olympics? Last Tuesday, I railed against poolside interviewer Andrea Kremer among other Olympics offenders like Ryan Seacrest. Friday’s Volume 2 brought spitting in the pool, a lucky towel, and a very special wedgie. But most damaging right now? NBC interrupting — and cutting a significant chunk from! — a primetime SPORTING event in order to air another “What is….London?” Mary Carillo segment. Brutal! READ FULL STORY »
