If some people had their way you would have had no Timmy McCarthy, no Steph Curry and no basketball at all at the Paris Olympics. In the justified scepticism of golf and tennis being individual events at the Olympics, there can be a tendency to lump hoops into the same bracket because the year-round visibility, star power and earning power of a Curry and LeBron James is equal at the least to that of a Djokovic, Scheffler and McIlroy. That there’s something contrived and artificial about them and their sports being accommodated in the same window and village as rowers, gymnasts, swimmers, track and field athletes.
Such minority sports only get two weeks every four years to have their moment in the sun; why then should some of that light be blocked out by sports and names that get to bask in it the other 200-plus weeks of an Olympic cycle? Such a take though not only lacks nuance but a knowledge of Olympic history. Tennis only resumed as an Olympic sport in 1988, having been discontinued after the Paris Olympics of a hundred years ago. In the intervening decades, four slam events established themselves as the most prized trophies in the sport, a natural order that has not been disturbed by or since Seoul.
While it was striking how moved Novak Djokovic was to finally win a gold Olympic medal at the fifth attempt, the truth is that Olympic final was only the second-biggest match between himself and Carlos Alcaraz this past month, and the second most-important men’s tennis fin.