Nerds and geeks are taking over the Paris Olympics. How cool is that?

There have never been so many glorious geeks gathered in one place as there are at the 2024 Olympics, unless you want to count heads at a soil dynamics convention. What sweetness comes from total absorption in an eccentric pursuit – and what surprising athletic confidence, judging by the performances of the Gabby Thomases, Grant Fishers and Stephen Nedorosciks, not to mention all the throwers, fencers, shooters and archers. If there’s a main lesson of these Paris Games, it’s this: Make fun of the eyeglassed kids who draw strange schematics in their high school notebooks if you wish, but what they do as adolescents is likely to be the least of what they accomplish, while the mockers peak in 11th grade.

Thomas, the commanding gold medalist in the women’s 200 meters, is Harvard-educated in neurobiology with a master’s degree in public health and a special interest in the epidemiology of sleep. A few years ago, when she tired of the dual stress of training and making grades, she took two months off – for a field-study trip to Senegal. She called it “refreshing.

” That’s geekdom. Fisher, only the fourth American man to medal in the 10,000 meters, is a Stanford grad in electrical engineering with a master’s in computer science. When he is asked to name a hobby, he lists computer programming and piano.

His true love apart from running is computational social science, the use of data “to predict various things in the world.” He told Track and Field News, “It�.