The supercut (handball, speed climbing, etc)
- Go to NBC Sports’s YouTube channel.
- Filter by the past two weeks.
- Sort by popularity.
- Skip any sports that are remotely popular.
- Skip any sports that are Olympics popular.
Behold the nickd Olympics supercut. The handball team from Kazakhstan. The world record of a sport you’ve never heard of. The medalists who come back from nothing and burst into tears the instant the final buzzer sounds. It is all there, in glorious, perfectly shot 8K, filmed & covered just as reverently as the guy who’s now king of France.
Let’s go on a tour, shall we?
The triathlon is fine, they swam in the Seine, whatever. But skip to the last 30 seconds of this, where the winner bursts into tears in child’s pose, using the final ribbon as an enormous kleenex. It was France’s first-ever gold in the sport, with a hometown crowd, on a comeback.
Anyway, speed climbing. I had no idea existed that speed climbing existed until this morning. Because the same person set a world record. Twice. During qualifiers.
You can take track, I’ll have field. In specific, I will have this guy and his hair, doing something absolutely impossible while also looking like he just shotgunned a 24 of Natty Ice.
You know of badminton, but you probably don’t watch much competitive badminton. Reasonable! Put this on, then minimize your browser window and just listen. Listen to the sounds of the racquets, but also the crowd, and the announcers, slowly growing into a fever pitch. It is a song. This was just one volley in a much larger game.
Table tennis might be the most underrated deception sport in the history of the human experiment. Pay attention to the spin on the ball here, how it bounces. The American table tennis team chatted with Steph Curry & Anthony Edwards on the boat during the opening ceremony, and apparently the basketball players were shocked that the table tennis players were, you know, Olympic. They firmly believed they would win 21-0. And so the basketball players did the best thing possible and hung out at the table tennis matches.
It’s hard for my eyes to follow fencing, but I absolutely live for facial expressions like the one on the winning (trailblazer!) player for Team USA at 6:30 of this. That’s the look of someone who knows that her life just changed forever, who never believed for a second that it would happen. It happened, y’all.
There are nailbiters like the incorrectly-called 0.005 second difference in a comeback-fueled 9.7 second race, and then there are nailbiters like the gold match in archery, where it had to go to a single-shot face-off that was decided by five millimeters. Imagine the most important moment of your whole sports career, something you’ve probably trained decades for, coming down to five millimeters on one shot.
I’m well aware that the Olympics are problematic, especially since I once campaigned against Chicago’s failed 2016 bid. But man, if you watch any of those and don’t feel something. And it feels like Paris is mostly doing it right, in a way that doesn’t full-throttle ruin the city. In conclusion, please send me all of the best Olympic highlights that you have and I will absolutely dine out on them.