Category: Olympics

The average sports fan is increasingly a big-eventer and there is a risk of the Games losing out in the attention economy

We are knee-deep in Twixmas: that twilight zone between Christmas and new year, excess and reflection, lists and yet more lists. Over the past week there have been many saluting the best sporting moments of 2024. Yet across the globe there is one constant: these lists are dominated by a Paris Olympics seared into the memory. Nothing else came close.

Pick your day, relive the moment. Keely Hodgkinson, Alex Yee, Simone Biles, Léon Marchand, Mondo Duplantis, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and a men’s 1500m final for the ages; I was fortunate to see them all up close. But even that list still barely scratches the surface. As Christophe Dubi, the executive director of the Olympics, put it to me recently, Paris 2024 was like the Dude in the Big Lebowski: the right Games at the right time and place.

Gold, silver and bronze medallists reflect on what they did as 2024 broke and how they will celebrate 12 months on

Toby Roberts’ last New Year’s Eve is all a bit of a blur. It’s not that he was drinking – anything but – just that he was in the thick of such a hellish stretch of specialist winter training that the days have all blended into one. His father, and coach, Tristian, eventually reminds him that they spent most of it doing a strength session on a climbing board with a couple of friends. “Oh,” Toby says, not quite recalling. “Honestly, my New Year’s Eve is not that exciting. I just do my same old.”

• Hediger represented Switzerland at Winter Olympics
• Swiss-Ski federation: ‘We are speechless’

The Olympic snowboarder Sophie Hediger has died following an avalanche accident in Arosa on Monday, the Swiss-Ski federation has announced.

Hediger, 26, was a member of the snowboard cross-national team and took part in the 2022 Winter Olympics in China before achieving her first two World Cup podium places in the 2023-24 season.

The French capital overcame issues including an opening ceremony deluge to deliver 17 days of joyous madness

Four months after Paris 2024’s spectacular finale, starring Tom Cruise abseiling off the top of the Stade de France and hurtling out of a plane above Los Angeles, the executive director of the Olympics is mulling over the lasting impact of the Games. Albeit with the help of a rather different cinematic icon.

“I was making a presentation to Deloitte executives recently,” says Christophe Dubi, the man responsible for planning and delivering the Olympics. “And I started by paraphrasing the Stranger in The Big Lebowski: ‘Sometimes, there is a man, he’s the man for his time and place, he was The Dude.’ Because Paris really was the right Games, at the right time and place.”

The Oscar-tipped drama follows the ABC crew of journalists who had to cover the unfolding violence as terrorism overtook the the Munich Olympics in 1972

Geoffrey Mason had begun the day expecting to oversee TV coverage of sports such as boxing, swimming and volleyball. Hours later, he found himself staring at German machine guns and being ordered to turn the cameras off.

The story of how Mason’s control room responded to the hostage siege at the 1972 Olympic games in Munich is told in September 5, a thriller starring John Magaro and Peter Sarsgaard and directed by Tim Fehlbaum. The film follows the ABC Sports team as they turn their cameras on the news – the first time a terrorist attack would be broadcast live to a global audience.

Double Olympic champion regrets ‘one of the darkest and most difficult periods of my life’ after investigation into a video from four years ago

The double individual Olympic dressage champion Charlotte Dujardin says she “fully respects” the International Federation for Equestrian Sports’ decision to suspend her for one year following a horse whipping controversy.

Dujardin was provisionally suspended by the FEI on 23 July as it launched an investigation into a video from four years ago showing her making what she described as “an error of judgment” during a coaching session.

• Former rower will succeed Hugh Robertson in new year
• Grainger is currently in second term as chair of UK Sport

One of Team GB’s greatest ever athletes, Dame Katherine Grainger, has become the first female chair of the British Olympic Association in its 119-year history.

Grainger, who is the only British woman to win medals in five separate Olympic Games, beat the BOA’s vice-chair, Annamarie Phelps, in a vote of the organisation’s 46 members on Thursday. She will take over from Hugh Robertson, who has helped lead the organisation since 2012, early in the new year.