Awesome / Olympic Games

General

• The opening ceremonies generally qualify, while the closing ceremonies are much more chaotic and informal, but the 2008 Beijing Games' opening ceremony deserve a special mention, as do the 2012 London Games' opening ceremony, which features James Bond, The Queen, Mr. Bean, Mary Poppins, Voldemort, and the Industrial Revolution, among others.
• The University of Southern California has produced a Gold Medalist in every Olympics for the last century, omitting the 1980 Moscow Games' boycott.
• The U.S. women's basketball team is on a 37-game win streak.
• Any time a world record is broken, or the country you support wins gold.
• In a nice counterpart to that depressing "Abandoned Olympic Venues" slideshow that gets released as every Olympics approaches, there's another one showing that some cities actually did manage to make good use of the infrastructure built for the games.
• American women have earned 1-2 medals in ladies figure skating at nearly every Olympics since the sports inception, for a total of 23 medals, including 7 golds. This is a statistic no other country can boast.^note Unfortunately, it makes the failure to win a medal since 2006 all the more noticeable and sadder.

Athens 1896

• In the first Modern Olympic Games, the Greeks hadn't won any track and field event^note A victory in discus throw, a classical Greek sport, won by American Robert Garrett was particularly painful. All that was left was the marathon. It started with thirteen Greek athletes and four non-Greek athletes. After such incidents like the collapse of a French runner and Australian 800m and 1500m winner Edwin Flack, Spiridon Louis took the lead. As he was arriving at the stadium, there were chants of "Hellene, Hellene!" When he appeared, there were tremendous celebrations and Louis got company in his last meters by none other than Greece's Crown Prince Constantine and Prince George, who rose from their seats to help "Spiros". Wild celebrations ensued. Almost a century later, the Olympic Stadium in Athens was inaugurated. Its nickname is "Spiros Louis".
• Speaking of Edwin Flack: He was the first Australian to ever represent the country at the Olympics, and the only Australian present. He won not one, but two gold medals in the aforementioned 800m and 1500m.

Paris 1900

• František Janda-Suk was a Czech athlete who competed for Bohemia^note The Bohemian Kingdom was a part of the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy back then in the discus throw. This was the first time a modern athlete threw the discus while rotating the whole body. He invented this technique when studying the position of the famous statue of Discobolus. The world of sport was in awe^note It's slightly lessened because he got the silver medal, but it's an awesome moment for modern athletics if there ever was one.

London 1908

• At the opening ceremony, track and field competitor Ralph Rose, the U.S. flag bearer, refused to lower the flag before the royal box. Most of his teammates were Irish Americans or of Irish heritage and agreed to this show of defiance. Years later his teammate Martin Sheridan was asked why they did that, and replied, "This flag dips to no earthly king." They haven't dipped the American flag at the Olympic Games since.

Stockholm 1912

• Sac and Fox's Jim Thorpe's performance in track and field, where he won gold in pentathlon and decathlon, were so dominant that Sweden king Gustav V said to him, "You sir, are the greatest athlete in the world."

Los Angeles 1932

• Pat O' Callaghan wins gold at the hammer throw, becoming the only Irishman to be crowned Olympic champion at consecutive games.

Berlin 1936

• James Cleveland "Jesse" Owens winning gold in the Olympics organized by Nazi Germany. To put this in perspective, a black man went to the country where its leader declared that black people were biologically inferior to white people, especially Germans. He then handed Hitler's ass to him — along with those of all the German athletes — and dispelled the Aryan myth in front of the entire world. When Sports Illustrated made a list of the greatest Olympic moments, they put Owens' showing in the 1936 Olympics on top — above Muhammad Ali's surprise appearance at the 1996 Atlanta Games, above Bob Beamon's record jump at the 1968 Mexico City Games, and above Michael Phelps winning eight gold medals in one Olympic games at the 2008 Beijing Games. Owens is still widely considered to be a national hero to this day.
  • This moment is lessened because Owens and another black athlete, Ralph Metcalfe, replaced two Jewish runners, Sam Stoller and Marty Glickman, in the 4*100m relay, the only time in U.S. Olympic history that athletes were replaced without being injured or otherwise unable to compete. Reasons are disputed, but what is known is that the coach was a founder of a Nazi-sympathizer group, the America First Committee. Stoller claimed to have been told later that Goebbels himself told the coach that Hitler would be embarrassed by Jews in the race.
  • Also, the fact that Owens was black didn't matter that much to German people or the Nazis, as he didn't live in Germany and racial laws focused most prominently on Jewish and Romani people (black people were not a big enough minority in Germany at the time to be "matter of concerns" for the Nazis, less than 30000 people in total, though they ended up being subjected to sporadic deportations and sterilizations). He could sit wherever he wanted on German public transportation, got huge cheers from the mainly German crowds and was featured on equal footing with the other athletes in Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia. His victory in the long jump happened because he got a tip from a German opponent he befriended, Lutz Long. And contrary to popular belief, he was not snubbed by Adolf Hitler. Hitler was told by the Olympic Committee that it was improper for the leader of the host country to congratulate the athletes. Owens even said Hitler waved to him as they met in passing. He waved back.^note Owens was snubbed by the President upon his return to the U.S; Roosevelt never acknowledged him in public or private.

London 1948

• The mere fact that a heavily bombed city in a virtually bankrupt country that was still rationing food post-World War II was able to host the Olympic Games at all. No new venues were built, the male athletes stayed at Army and RAF barracks, and the women stayed at colleges in London.
• At the Games themselves, the stand-out athlete was Fanny Blankers-Koen, a Dutch athlete who won four gold medals — the 100m, 200m, 80m hurdles and 4*100m relay. It is quite possible that she could have won more medals^note She had six world records at the time of the Games, but the rules in force at the time prevented women from competing in more than three individual athletic events. Her feats were made more remarkable by the fact that she was written off because she was 30 years old. Whilst being involved in sports in your fourth decade is commonplace today, it was virtually unheard of in the 1940s.

Helsinki 1952

• The 1952 Summer Games in Helsinki were awesome Games for Czechoslovakia:
  • Emil Zátopek, a Czech long-distance runner nicknamed "The Czech Locomotive", won three gold medals. He won gold in the 5000m and 10,000m runs, and he decided at the last minute to compete in the first marathon of his life, which he surprisingly won as well. No one before or since has repeated this triple.
  • Emil Zátopek's wife Dana Zátopková was an outstanding athlete in the javelin throw. She won the gold medal in the javelin, only a few moments after Emil's victory in the 5000m run.
• First Olympics in which the USSR, the largest black horse in world sport at this moment, participated — and took second place behind only the USA in both total and gold medal counts.

Cortina d'Ampezzo 1956

• Tenley Albright improving on her silver medal at the previous Games to win the US' first gold medal in ladies figure skating. Even better, it was a 1-2 finish with Carol Heiss, who would go on to win gold of her own at the following Games in Squaw Valley 1960.

Melbourne 1956

• The Hungarians beating the Soviets in the Blood in the Water match, just a month after the Hungarian revolution was violently put down. They won the gold a few days later, before most of them defected to the U.S.. Ervin Zádor, the player who received the punch that led to the match's nickname, would then go on to coach a young Mark Spitz.

Squaw Valley 1960

• Perhaps the most amazing thing about the Squaw Valley Olympics is that they happened at all. At the time the Games were awarded, the resort at Squaw Valley consisted only of one chair lift, two rope tows, and a fifty-room lodge — all in an unincorporated community. Compare this to other past Winter Olympics venues, which were all held in established resort towns. The whole thing was put together in four years; most Olympics now are awarded seven years in advance, and even then incomplete venues are common.
• Carol Heiss improving on her silver medal at the previous Olympics to become the second American woman to win gold in ladies figure skating.

Rome 1960

• Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia became the first sub-Saharan African to win an Olympic gold medal. In the marathon. Barefoot.^note (At the time, this gave rise to some remarks suggesting he was a sort of primitive badass who Prefers Going Barefoot. Truth was he couldn't find shoes that both fit and were comfortable.)
• Wilma Rudolph (USA), who had overcome childhood polio and earned a bronze in Melbourne as a member of the 4×100m relay team, winning three Gold Medals in the 100m, 200m, and 4×100m relay, setting Olympic records for all three events in the process.

Innsbruck 1964

• With the Games threatened by unseasonably warm and dry conditions, the Austrian Army trucked 20,000 blocks of ice and 40,000 cubic meters (or 88 million pounds) of snow down from the Alps and packed it down by hand with the help of civilian volunteers just days before the opening ceremonies.

Tokyo 1964

• Remember Abebe Bikila, who won the previous Olympic marathon barefoot? Well, he did it again—this time wearing shoes—becoming the first Olympic marathon winner to defend his gold. And he did this just over a month after receiving an emergency appendectomy.
• Billy Mills, a little-known sprinter who had finished second in the US team heats for the 10,000 meter run, and whose best time was a full minute slower to world record holder Ron Clarke, catching a literal Heroic Second Wind down the final stretch to capture the gold, the only time an American has won that particular event. Here's the finish of the race.
• Dawn Fraser wins gold in the 100m women's freestyle for a third time in a row.

Grenoble 1968

• Peggy Fleming becoming the third woman to earn the gold medal in ladies figure skating, the only gold medal that the U.S. Olympic team won in these games, reviving U.S. figure skating following the death of most of the organization's members in the 1961 Sabena plane crash.
• Jean-Claude Killy winning gold for the hosts in all three men's Alpine skiing disciplines contested at the time—slalom, giant slalom, and downhill.^note (Combined had been contested in 1936 and 1948, but was then discontinued, not returning until Calgary in 1988. Those Games also marked the Olympic debut of Super-G.)

Mexico City 1968

• U.S. track and field athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos' iconic Black Power salute while receiving their gold and bronze medals in the 200m dash. Nicely followed by IOC president Avery Brundage, who denounced them for bringing a political issue into the games, being reminded that he had made no such objection to the German athletes making Nazi salutes in the 1936 Berlin Games.
  • The silver medalist, Australian Peter Norman, wore an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge—given to him by U.S. rower Paul Hoffman — to show solidarity with Smith and Carlos. Considering Australia wasn't too keen on that sort of thing, especially at that time, it counts as a MoA for him.
  • Even better, Norman collaborated with Smith and Carlos for the whole thing—they discussed the move before they went out onto the podium, and as Carlos had forgotten to bring his black gloves from the Olympic village, Norman suggested that Smith give one of his gloves to Carlos, which is why the pair raised their opposite arms. The three medalists knew their sporting careers were on the line and had everything to lose.^note Especially Norman, whose home country still supported the White Australia Policy, and what he did ended up destroying his career completely. The Australian government only apologized for his treatment in 2012, six years after his untimely death in 2006. And yet they walked out onto the podium fearlessly, consequences be damned.
• Another moment of protest: Czechoslovakia's Věra Čáslavská turning her head down and away during the Soviet anthem, for which she too was punished when she returned home. Only a few months prior to the Games, Czechoslovakia had been invaded and the Prague Spring crushed by the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries. For additional Awesome that mixes with Tear Jerker, Čáslavská had openly protested the invasion and had subsequently been forced to go into hiding to avoid arrest. She was therefore forced to train in secret in a forest while her competitors traveled early to Mexico City to acclimate to the altitude. Despite this, Čáslavská went on to win four gold medals and two silvers.
  • Čáslavská in general. Not only did she win four gold medals in spite of adversity, most people believe that the judging decision that got her the silver was political rather than based on performance and that she should have been awarded the gold there as well, which would have amounted to her winning gold in every single individual gymnast final — something no other gymnast has ever done or even approached, before or since.
• Bob Beamon beating the previous world long-jump record by 55 cm.^note Nearly two feet (Prior to this, the world record had been broken thirteen times since 1901, with an average increase of 6 cm). His record stood until 1991, and still hasn't been surpassed in the Olympics.
• Felipe "El tibio" Muñoz, a Mexican swimmer best known for his then-unusual habit of refusing to swim in an unheated pool, managed to beat out the heavily favored Soviet and American athletes to win gold in the 200m breaststroke. He still stands as the only Mexican athlete to win gold in a swimming event.
• Dick Fosbury managed to win the gold medal and set an Olympic record in the high jump with his "Fosbury Flop" technique. The admittedly silly-looking technique was mocked in the media prior to the Olympics. However, the technique is now standard amongst almost all high jumpers.
• Al Oerter won his fourth gold medal in the discus, becoming the first athlete in any sport to win the same event in four consecutive Games. On top of that, all four of his golds were won with Olympic-record throws that were also personal bests.

Sapporo 1972

• Host country Japan, which had previously only won a single (silver) medal in Winter Olympics history, sweeping the podium in the normal hill (70 m) ski jumping event.

Munich 1972

• The opening ceremony. Its concept was something completely new at the time and you can see where the fantastic opening ceremonies of today's games have their roots. Especially the music during the entry of the nations is awesome, as it it is one huge, 80 minute medley, where pre-recorded music is mixed with live drummers. You can listen to it, and watch the whole ceremony, here^note The music starts at 9:00. Kudos to the German organizers who gave us light pop tunes instead of martial airs, pastel colored outfits, the Olympic Flag brought in by athletes instead of soldiers as had been customary, and the adorable Blumenkinder dancing to Karl Orff's "Sumer is icumen in".
• Helmut Bellingrodt Wolf became the first-ever Colombian silver Olympic medal winner by finishing second in running game target shooting. The Colombian delegation went so wild that the organization had to tell them to remain silent. Wolf repeated the feat in the 1984 Los Angeles Games, being the first Colombian sportsman to obtain two Olympic medals.
• Olga Korbut's legendary performance on the uneven bars. It must be seen to be believed. Her signature Korbut Flip is not only one of the most Difficult, but Awesome skills in gymnastics, it's now banned from competition!^note Years later she revealed that just before the Games, her coach had raped her.
• Mark Spitz winning seven gold medals, a record that would stand for 36 years until Michael Phelps surpassed him with eight gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Games. Spitz also set seven world records in the process.

Innsbruck 1976

• Franz Klammer's spectacular, death-defying gold medal run in men's downhill skiing. The fact that it was for the host country of Austria just made it all the better.
• West German skier Rosi Mittermaier (who'd never won a downhill race going into the Games, and never won one afterward) winning gold in women's downhill as well as women's slalom.
• Dorothy Hamill continuing the trend of excellence in U.S. ladies figure skating by becoming the fourth American woman to win a gold medal in this event.

Montreal 1976

• 14-year-old Nadia Comăneci from Romania gets the first perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics competition. So awesome that it could not be properly registered in the scoreboard. The scoreboard wasn't designed to handle double-digit numbers, only single digits with decimal points. They hadn't bothered to add a tens place, as it never occurred to anyone that it might actually happen at the sport's most prestigious competition. As it turned out, it happened not just once, but seven times. By the same athlete. That's right — out of the sixteen routines Comăneci performed in that Olympics, seven were perfect 10s. She didn't Break the Rating Scale — she left it curled in the fetal position crying for its mother, then cackled and ground it into the dust.
• While Nadia's performance is certainly awesome for its impact on her sport, it still might not be the most awesome of these Games. Cuba's Alberto Juantorena won both the 400 and 800 m—which, before he came along, was known in track circles as the "impossible double". (The events are different enough that even today, it's virtually impossible to perform to an Olympic standard in both at the same time.)

Lake Placid 1980

• The "Miracle on Ice", in which the U.S. hockey team managed to beat the heavily-favored Soviets in the semifinal. (The U.S. team was made up of college kids, only one of whom had prior Olympic experience. Their average age was 22. The Soviet squad was a Dream Team who'd been together since 1964, winning golds along the way, and who had earlier crushed the NHL All-Stars team with ease.) Not to mention that they did this at the height of the Cold War while representing the Games' host country, which was still reeling from the Iran hostage crisis and a severe economic recession. Then they completed their incredible run by beating the Finns in the final to win gold.
  Al Michaels: Do you believe in miracles? Yes!
• U.S. speed skater Eric Heiden won gold in all five events, at distances ranging from 500m to 10,000m. This made him the first person ever to win five individual gold medals at a single Games.

Moscow 1980

• The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan a year earlier saw a large-scale (65 nations) USA-led boycott of these Games, with some nations only parading under the Olympic Flag, so these Games were dominated by the USSR and East Germany. A lot of world records got broken, though. Other standouts include British decathlete Daley Thompson breaking Jenner's record en route to gold (and later repeating four years later) and Cuban boxer Teófilo Stevenson becoming the first heavyweight to win three consecutive golds (it would be equalled later by Felix Savón). Even though the boycott was made on its behalf, Afghanistan ironically participated and later joined the 1984 boycott (it had a pro-Soviet regime at the time, after all).
• These were also the first games in which the opening and closing ceremonies became the expensive, full-blown, almost theatrical events we know today (the animated crowd mosaic of Misha shedding a tear at the closing ceremonies became an enduring image of the Olympics).
• The sporting level in the Olympic final which took place on 30 July 1980 at the Central Lenin Stadium in Moscow, was significantly higher than four years earlier with no less than six athletes jumping higher than the previous Olympic record. The atmosphere at the stadium, however, as it was for the entire games was very hostile with the local Soviet crowd booing, hissing, and whistling at every non-Soviet competitor's attempt. Soviet officials even tried to disrupt Polish athlete Władysław Kozakiewicz by opening doors to the stadium during his jumps so wind conditions would disturb him.
  This irritated Kozakiewicz who, after jumping 5.70 metres, higher than any other competitor that day, showed the bras d'honneur gesture in defiance to the jeering spectators. He then repeated the gesture after clearing 5.75 metres which ensured his victory over the local favourite, Konstantin Volkov. He finally confirmed his dominance over the competition by breaking the world record with 5.78 meters. This was the first time since 1920 that the world record in pole vault was broken at the Olympic Games.
  The photos of the incident circled the globe, with the exception of the Soviet Union and its satellites, although the event was broadcast live on TV in many countries of the Eastern Bloc. While international observers varied in their reaction to the incident, Kozakiewicz's act received much support in Polish society, which resented Soviet control over Eastern Europe (Poland was in the midst of labour strikes that led to the creation of the labour union Solidarity less than two months later). After the 1980 Olympics ended, the Soviet ambassador to Poland demanded that Kozakiewicz be stripped of his medal over his "insult to the Soviet people". The official response of the Polish government was that Kozakiewicz's arm gesture had been an involuntary muscle spasm caused by his exertion.

Sarajevo 1984

• In what is to this day cited as the greatest figure skating performance of all time, the now-legendary British ice dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean become the only team to ever get full sixes across the board for artistic merit. Well deserved. Their ice dancing interpretation of Maurice Ravel's "Bolero" is still legendary — not just for the breathtaking fluidity and intricacy of their choreography, but for their utterly magical chemistry on the ice. (They also were among those to set a precedent for "dying" in their routine, which is no longer allowed.)
  • In fact it became so iconic that you almost have to pity any other ice dancing pair that even tries to use "Bolero" as the music to their routine. One couple tried it afterwards - and they got booed, which is probably why you only see solo skaters use it instead.
• The silver medal-winning pairs skate of brother-and-sister team Paul and Kitty Carruthers, which many felt deserved gold.

Los Angeles 1984

• The 1984 Summer Games was the first year that there was a women's marathon. American Joan Benoit came in first; but fifteen minutes later Swiss runner Gabriele Andersen-Schiess staggered into the stadium, half-paralyzed and barely able to stay on her feet due to heat exhaustion. When medics rushed to stop her, she ducked away from them, knowing that if anyone touched her she would be disqualified. So the medics followed her as she painfully staggered the final lap around the stadium, occasionally stopping to hold her head before lurching on towards the finish line. When she reached the finish line, she literally collapsed over it into the arms of waiting medics who rushed her to an ambulance. Anderson-Scheiss came in thirty-seventh, but was more awesome than any medalist due to her determination.
• Romania deserves a mention, because it was the only nation from the Eastern Bloc to participate at the Olympics, after the other 14 nations from the Bloc, led by Soviet Union, boycotted. During the opening ceremony, the Romanian athletes were greeted with warm applause from the crowd, partially due to that defiance. By the end of the Olympics, the nation placed second to the United States in the gold medal tally.
• As does Nawal El Moutawakel, a Moroccan who won the inaugural running of the women's 400m hurdles, becoming the first-ever gold medalist from her country. And the first Muslim woman to win Olympic gold.

Calgary 1988

• When the Jamaicans entered a team into the bobsledding competition for the 1988 Winter Games, everyone treated them as a joke. They were Jamaicans, from a near-equatorial country that had no natural snow, and they had almost never practiced on ice. They did not win—in fact, they crashed rather horrifically. Then, when everyone was sure they were dead, they emerged from their overturned bobsled, hoisted it up, and walked it across the finish line. And then it was made into a movie...
• Figure skater Debi Thomas winning bronze, becoming the first African-American to win a medal at the Winter Olympics.
• Canadian Elizabeth Manley's silver medal winning performance. To this day, it is unanimously agreed that she was the best skater of the night and the one who deserves to win gold and would have had it not been for compulsory figures that decided the competition before the skaters even began their performances.^note Actual figure skating as in tracing patterns on the ice, contributed 60% to a skater's total score. Some skaters who were not very good at free skate were excellent at compulsory figures and would use that to create insurmountable leads. There had been a movement to eliminate compulsory figures from Olympic skating before Calgary, and that really settled it. After Calgary, they were gone.

Seoul 1988

• Greg Louganis repeating his 3m springboard and 10m platform gold sweep from 1984. What makes this even more amazing is that in the 3m preliminaries, he hit his head on the board^note He's dyslexic and dysmetric, which can cause mishaps like this, but still managed to come in third. He then won the gold by just a shade under 26 points. Did we mention that he was diagnosed as HIV positive before the Olympics?
• Naim Süleymanoğlu of Turkey^note An ethnic Turk, he had previously competed for his birth country of Bulgaria as Naim Suleimanov and Naum Shalamanov before his defection, nicknamed the "Pocket Hercules" due to his 147 cm—roughly 4'10"—stature, setting records in the featherweight division^note 60 kg of weightlifting by lifting 190 kg^note 419 lbs. in the clean and jerk—more than three times his body weight—and a combined 342.5 kg^note 755 lbs..
• Florence Griffith-Joyner winning gold in the women's 100m, 200m, and 4*100m relay. She set records in the 100m and 200m events, the first of which stood until 2021 when it was beaten by Jamaica's Elaine Thompson in Tokyo, while the second is still standing today.^note She already had the 100m world record coming into Seoul.
• Flo-Jo's sister-in-law, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, won the heptathlon with a record score of 7,291 points, which is also still a record to this day. Her 1,264 points for her 7.27m long jump is still the highest score for a single event in the heptathlon. Oh, and did we mention she also overcame severe asthma?
• During a race where Canadian sailor Lawrence Lemieux was in 2nd place and all but guaranteed to advance to the medal round, he noticed that the Singapore team had capsized, were injured and were in serious danger of drowning. Deciding that winning a medal was not worth letting people die when he could do something, Lemieux turned back to save them, which cost him the race. However, since the world saw this Heroic Sacrifice, things worked out—the International Yacht Racing Union unanimously voted to officially award Lemieux with 2nd place in the race. In the end, he didn't get a medal for a top-three place in the medal round...but he was awarded the Pierre de Coubertin Medal, the supreme and rarest of all Olympic medals, for exemplifying the spirit of the Olympic Games at its finest.
• Daniela Silivaș of Romania stole the show in women's gymnastics:
  • Her compulsory floor exercise is to this day cited as the best compulsory floor routine ever done in Olympic gymnastics. Compulsory routines are usually thought of as rather boring even by the sport's die-hard fans, being composed of very simple elements designed to allow judges to evaluate technique instead of the more show-stealing, high-difficulty elements in optional routines — but Silivas' incredible artistry and flawless technique turned a "boring" compulsory floor exercise into an absolute masterpiece.
  • Silivaș medaled in every single event at this Olympics, something which only the legendary Maria Gorokhovskaya, Larisa Latynina, and Věra Čáslavská had done before her and which no gymnast — male or female — has ever achieved since. This makes her the only gymnast in the modern era of the sport to have accomplished this feat.

Albertville 1992

• Kristi Yamaguchi becoming the fifth American woman to earn an Olympic gold medal with a performance that was so good she won even though she fell^note It probably helped that everyone else fell too, but still. Her medal and Nancy Kerrigan's bronze marked the third time two US women had been on the podium, the last time being in 1960 (interestingly, that was also a 1,3 placement).
• Midori Ito finally landing her elusive, signature triple Axel jump^note She was the first woman to land one and coming from behind to win the silver medal—the first Olympic figure skating medal for the Far East—after a disastrous week that left many wondering if she would medal at all.
• Additionally, they both made history as the first women of Asian origin to earn Olympic medals in ladies figure skating.
• American figure skater Paul Wylie. After years of a disastrous career, he ended up at the Olympics on a fluke and wasn't expected to win anything. Instead, he skated not only the best performance of his life, but of the night and won the silver medal.
• Czechoslovakia's Petr Barna becoming the first man to land a quadruple jump at the Olympics, earning him a completely unexpected bronze medal...
• ...and Annelise Coberger of New Zealand winning silver in the women's slalom, becoming the first athlete from the entire southern hemisphere to win a Winter Games medal.
• American women winning nine of the 11 medals that the US won, including all five of the golds.

Barcelona 1992

• Anyone remember the 1992 Olympics? No? Well, Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, and Magic Johnson, along with several other NBA greats were there. When they played, they won by several miles. The closest any team had against them was 33 points. And they never called a timeout during the entire tournament.
• Vitaly Scherbo was there too. And how. A Belarusian representing the post-Soviet Unified Team in gymnastics, he won five individual golds, tying Eric Heiden's record from the 1980 Moscow Games. Though this accomplishment would be greatly tarnished in later years; see farther down this list.
• Also on basketball, the bronze medalists of Lithuania were a great case of overcoming the odds, to the point a documentary on them was named The Other Dream Team. The country was still rebuilding following their departure from the Soviet Union two years prior, and the basketball federation did not have any funds. The team's re-establishment depended on two players who had won the gold for the USSR in 1988, Arvydas Sabonis^note Who, along with his agent, started looking for Lithuanian-born or descended players and Šarūnas Marčiulionis^note Who was in the NBA and thus got financial backing in America—including from the band Grateful Dead!. After losing the semi-finals to the U.S., Lithuania beat the Soviet reminders of the Unified Team for the bronze, making the victory both political and symbolic.
• Paralympic archer Antonio Rebollo lit the cauldron with a flaming arrow. Best. Torchlighting. Ever!
• American gymnast Shannon Miller's Ensemble Dark Horse victories. She went into the games well in Kim Zmeskal's shadow, as it was Zmeskal, the reigning world champion, who many predicted would come home draped in medals of varying colors—only for Miller to emerge as the most decorated athlete of the Games, with two silver and three bronze medals. See the two flawless vaults that nearly cinched Miller the all-around gold before Tatiana Gutsu of the Unified Team, who was also competing the meet of her life that same night, just barely edged her out by twelve thousandths of a point. The results of that meet have been hotly debated for decades, and it is still the closest women's all-around in the history of the Modern Olympics.
  • In the wake of the #MeToo era, Gutsu revealed that she had been raped in 1991 by a teammate, the aforementioned Vitaly Scherbo, but like so many victims, had kept quiet out of shame and fear (or was forced to in the spirit "team unity"). That at 15 she could stomach having to be near her rapist, yet put on a happy face and turn out a gold medal performance is remarkable.
• Trent Dimas of the US winning a completely unexpected gold medal in the horizontal bar event.
• Indonesia got their first gold medal in badminton—which debuted that year. Who got it? Alan Budikusuma in men's singles and Susi Susanti in women's singles. They're credited as the "Golden Couple". And eventually, they got married. Doubles as Heartwarming.
• Michael Carruth breaks Ireland's gold medal drought (which started in 1956), defeating Cuba's Juan Hernandez Sierra in the welterweight boxing final.

Lillehammer 1994

• In the ice hockey final, Sweden ties the favored Canada in the final minutes and it goes to penalties. After five penalties, it's still tied. After an extra round of penalties, it's still tied. Then Peter Forsberg steps up to take a penalty, skates towards the Canadian goal...and puts it in one-handed, while skating backwards around the goalie, winning Sweden's first Olympic hockey gold ever. Sweden put him on a stamp for that one.
• Nancy Kerrigan finally putting to rest the demons that had plagued her even before her vicious attack, namely, a lack of confidence and tendency to crack under pressure, and skating her best performance. So what if she only won silver?^note Too bad she kind of ruined it via whining about the woman who won the gold, Ukrainian Oksana Baiul. In particular, after coming off the ice, she's gushing about how "I got to do it!" In that moment, it didn't matter what color medal she won, if at all, she just wanted to know that she could skate cleanly instead of falling apart the way she always did. What's more, regardless of color, she joined the very small group of skaters to earn two Olympic medals.
• Oksana Baiul was really awesome back then—giving Ukraine its first, and up until now, only figure skating gold at age 16/17, and after quite the Dark and Troubled Past as well—dead mom and grandparents, absent dad, growing up in Soviet/post-Soviet Ukraine, etc.
• Chen Lu is frequently overlooked because of all the Tonya/Nancy/Oksana hype, but when she won the bronze, she earned the first Olympic figure skating medal for China and put the sport on the map for her country—with the exception of the Sochi Games, China has earned 1-2 medals in the sport at every Olympics since, but in pairs skating. Lu remains the only Chinese skater to win an Olympic medal in women's singles skating.
• American speed skater Dan Jansen finally winning the Olympic gold, then taking his victory lap while holding his baby daughter in his arms.
• The legendary Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean of "Bolero" fame make their return to Olympic ice with "Let's Face the Music and Dance", and it is breathtaking. Ten years on and "T n D" have lost none of their magic, with many fans to this day believing they should have won gold.^note They "only" won bronze, but there is an enduring suspicion that, with this being the first Olympics where professional skaters were allowed, they were being punished for coming back after they'd supposedly 'already had their turn'.

Atlanta 1996

• Media coverage of the U.S. women's gymnastics team focused heavily on Dominique Moceanu and Dominique Dawes, but after a two-fall showing from Moceanu, Kerri Strug was the last gymnast to vault on the U.S. team rotation. She proceeded to fall on her rear on her first vault and badly tore two ligaments. Nonetheless, when told by coach Béla Károlyi that she had to vault once more for enough points to clinch the gold, she calmly walked back to the end of the runway, vaulted again, and appeared to stick her landing on one foot^note Actually both feet, but she immediately pulled up the injured foot. Her courageous vault, which tore another ligament in her already injured ankle and ended her career, sealed the first U.S. women's team gold in Olympic history, and marked the first time since the dawn of the Iron Curtain that women's team gold was won by a nation outside the Eastern Bloc. Although, it later turned out her vault wasn't needed to win gold, but they didn't know it at that point.
• The entire U.S. women's gymnastics team. Their performance that night was so spectacular that they would have won even without Kerri Strug's valiant second vault — they had that many points and were that far ahead of the competition that even Moceanu's two falls and Kerri's one didn't dent their lead.^note At the time, Kerri and the rest of the team didn't know this — Kerri was slated to vault before the last two Russian women had gone on floor exercise, and both were capable of extremely high scores.
• And on the men's side of the sport, Ioannis Melissanidis surprised everyone by winning gold in the floor exercise—the first medal of any color for Greece in men's gymnastics since the Intercalated Games of 1906 (no longer recognized by the IOC), and officially the first since the first modern Games of 1896.
• Muhammad Ali lighting the torch. To put it in perspective, his participation was kept secret until the second he stepped out of the shadows to receive the torch. His body wracked by Parkinson's, his hands shaking, and it looks like the biggest effort of his career simply to hold the torch up to the crowd...and the entire audience—and probably a sizable portion of the billion people watching on TV—go silent for half a second, refusing to believe their eyes, and then they all stand up and cheer for the greatest boxer of all time, with many audience members even chanting "Ali! Ali!"
  "But look who gets it next."
  "The Greatest!"
  "Ohhhh my!"
• Anti-abortion terrorist Eric Robert Rudolph planted a bomb in the Centennial Olympic Park. Security guard Richard Jewell noticed an unattended backpack and immediately began to evacuate the park. The explosion killed two and injured 111, but the casualty toll could have been in the thousands had it not been for Jewell's quick-thinking and bravery. Not to mention his heroic dignity and bravery in facing the onslaught when the media got wind of the FBI investigation of him^note You try living under law enforcement surveillance cameras 24/7 and see what it does to your stress levels. The media and entertainment industries decided he was the chief—indeed, only—suspect and treated him accordingly. When exonerated, he sued several news outlets and won, received public apologies from law enforcement and served as the Grand Marshal of the Carmel, Indiana July 4th parade, where the theme was "The Unsung Hero". And he did get another job, as a sheriff's deputy, before dying at age 44 of heart trouble.
• Kurt Angle winning Olympic gold in the men's 220 lb. freestyle with a broken freaking neck!
• Five weeks before the Olympic Games, Romanian gymnast Gina Gogean underwent an emergency appendectomy in Bucharest. She came out of that Games with four medals, including a silver in the all-around and bronzes on both vault and balance beam. Five weeks after she had abdominal surgery.
• Hong Kong windsurfer Lee Lai-shan's gold medal win in the women's mistral, the first ever medal for the former British colony since its first appearance at the 1952 Helsinki Games. Her famous declaration that "Hong Kong athletes are not rubbish!" is still an enduring rallying cry for the city, which, despite its handover to China, has also inspired its subsequent generations of athletes and the general public.
• Naim Süleymanoğlu winning his third consecutive gold medal in weightlifting in a historic battle against Greece's Valerios Leonidis, with the two of them setting records in the 64 kg division several times during the event. In the end, Leonidis set the clean and jerk record at 187.5 kg — which Süleymanoğlu also matched, but Leonidis held the record due to his lower body weight at the time — while Süleymanoğlu set the combined record at 335 kg.
• No Brazilian women had ever won any medals since they debuted in 1932, twelve years after the men. Come the 1996 Atlanta Games, the new Olympic event of women's beach volleyball had an all-Brazil final, ensuring the first medal they get is a gold! There was also a silver in basketball^note With the country's greatest players ever Paula, Hortência and Janeth easily coasting over other teams before facing the unstoppable U.S. team and a bronze in indoor volleyball^note Improving on a 1992 fourth place.
• The Nigerian men's soccer team, after qualifying from the group stage, faced off against Mexico, Brazil and Argentina in succession. In the semi-finals match against Brazil — to whom they lost 1-0 in the group stages — they overcame a 3-1 halftime deficit to level at the 90th minute, before going on to win by golden goal. Nigeria also scored in the 90th minute against Argentina, this time a game-winning goal to give Nigeria Africa's first ever gold in the sport.
• Canadian sprinter Donovan Bailey winning the 100 metres in 9.84 seconds, setting a new world record and salvaging the reputation of Canadian track athletes after Ben Johnson was stripped of his medal for taking steroids in the 1988 Games in Seoul.
• Syria's Ghada Shouaa winning the heptathlon, becoming the first gold medalist (and as of 2016, only gold medalist) for the country.
• Jackie Joyner-Kersee, who had to pull out of the heptathlon due to a leg injury, still managed to compete in the long jump and got a jump of 7 metres even in her final attempt, which was good enough for the bronze medal. Chioma Ajunwa (Nigeria), the winner of the event, managed a jump of 7.12m...in her very first attempt no less.
• Don't forget Karch Kiraly. The American volleyball legend, already with golds in 1984 and 1988 with Team USA in the indoor version of the sport, won gold along with Kent Steffes in the debut of men's beach volleyball. To this day, he remains the only individual to have won medals of any color, much less gold, in both indoor and beach volleyball.

Nagano 1998

• The Czech National Ice Hockey Team wins the gold medal. In 1998, the NHL allowed to have a break for the Nagano Games for the first time. The national ice-hockey teams could send their very best players and build all-star ideal teams, and Canada and the U.S. were nearly 100% sure that they would be playing the final. However, the U.S. lost to the Czech Republic in the quarterfinals — with the Czechs four unanswered goals after being down 1-0 after the first period—and Canada was subsequently beaten by the Czechs in the semi-finals in a nerve-biting shootout. The Czech national team won the whole thing. The Czech national ice hockey team is usually solid and there are always some great players with lots of ice hockey heart, but Nagano took it up a notch. Needless to say, everybody in the Czech Republic was watching, every major square in Prague was full of people, and everybody was participating, or at least watching, their welcoming ceremony. It created several memes and started a new golden era of Czech ice hockey. It is fondly remembered as one of the most awesome moments of Czech sport ever.
• Tara Lipinski's surprising gold-medal win^note While she was expected to medal, Michelle Kwan was expected to win the gold. With nothing to lose and knowing that she was bound to win a medal of some color, she simply went out and skated the performance of her life, full of energy and zest, edging out Kwan's technically flawless but very reserved performance and becoming the sixth American woman to earn gold in this event.
• Lipinski and Kwan's 1-2 finish not only marking the fourth time two American women were on the podium, but also being the first 1-2 finish for the US since Albright and Henley in 1956.
• After a year of struggling that sent her sliding into obscurity, Chinese figure skater Chen Lu got her act together to win bronze again in what she had decided would be her final competition and bowed to her trainers as a show of gratitude and respect.
• Surya Bonaly doing an illegal back-flip and finishing her program with her back to the judges, ending her career by basically telling them "Screw you" for what she felt was years of unfair scoring due her being an atypical skater—black, with an "athletic" style instead of the usual winsome faerie princess: garish costumes and music. Surya explains her rationale and the skating world's problem with her image in this Vice article and in this episode of NPR's Radiolab.
• Ruby Galindo's beautiful performance to Swan Lake which has become something of legend in the skating world. And boy, is it not hard to see why. This post goes into further detail just how much a Moment of Awesome it was for Rudy personally.

Sydney 2000

• The Miracle on The Mat. Rulon Gardner was never a legend in American wrestling up to this point—he was good but never great, but through sheer hard work, he found himself in the Olympic finals against the legendary Alexander Karelin, a man who had not lost in international competition for thirteen years, hadn't even been scored on for seven years, and had already won three Olympic gold medals in the 1988 Seoul Games, the 1992 Barcelona Games, and the 1996 Atlanta Games. This video shows the resulting match perfectly.
• British rowers Steve Redgrave, Matthew Pinsent, James Cracknell, and Tim Foster winning the gold medals in the coxless fours. As he had also won gold medals in 1984, 1988, 1992, and 1996^note The last two in the coxless pairs with Pinsent, Redgrave became the first person to win a gold medal at five consecutive Summer Olympics. Pinsent would later win a fourth consecutive gold medal four years later in Athens 2004.
• The men's 4×100 freestyle relay is probably one of the best swimming relay races of all time, with Australia winning against Team USA who had never been defeated since the race's introduction in 1964. To top it off, both teams finished almost 2 seconds under world record pace, with Ian Thorpe just barely edging out Gary Hall Jr to take the gold and set a new world record.
• Colombian weightlifting champion María Isabel Urrutia won Colombia's first ever gold medal in its Olympic history.
• Le dunk de la mort^note French for "the dunk of death", the name given to this incident by that country's media. NBA star Vince Carter, playing in a pool match for the U.S. against France, pulls off what could be the greatest dunk in basketball history. Getting the ball off a steal, the 6'6"^note 1.98 m Carter drives to the basket, only to find France's 7'2"^note 2.18 m center Frédéric Weis in his way. What does Carter do? Keeps going...takes off...and jumps over Weis' head to throw it down.^note All right, so he did brush against Weis' head, but still...
• The opening ceremony is just full of these. Special note goes to the Tin Symphony, which features, among other things, a dragon turning into a windmill and a flaming violin, and then shortly after, a tap-dancing performance featuring Adam Garcia from the dance troupe Tapdogs, capped off with angle grinders!
• During the women's all-around final, an unusual number of gymnasts had falls on the vault — far more so than at other international competitions. Halfway through the competition, Australian gymnast Allana Slater — who was, mind you, a sixteen-year-old girl — stood at the end of the runway and flatly refused to vault, insisting that the apparatus had been set incorrectly. Despite her coach telling her to go, Slater refused until the officials finally came out to examine the vault — and discovered that it had been set over two inches too low. Given the catastrophic injuries that had occurred on vault in the past, including the one that rendered Chinese star Sang Lan a paraplegic at the Goodwill Games just two years earlier, what Allana Slater did that night could very well have saved lives.
• Cathy Freeman won the women's 400m events, making her the second ever Aboriginal Australian Olympic champion ^note the first being her teammate Nova Peris-Kneebone, who won gold for field hockey at Atlanta in 1996, and the first to win an individual gold. To cap it off, she ran her victory lap while holding the Australian Aboriginal flag in spite of unofficial flags being banned at the Olympic Games. ^note While recognised as official in Australia, the Australian Aboriginal flag is neither a national flag, nor recognised by the IOC.

Salt Lake City 2002

• The opening ceremony, with the torch's final run being led by several notable past gold-medal winners, before ultimately being lit by the United States 1980 Hockey Team.
  • The damaged Ground Zero flag being brought into the stadium.
  • The opening ceremony marked the first time ever that all five of the Native American nations indigenous to Utah^note Ute, Goshute, Shoshone, Paiute, Navajo had gathered together in one place at the same time. Led by Tiger, Auburn University's golden eagle mascot flying over the stadium^note Tiger, a rescue from an illegal breeding facility, flew over home football games at Auburn for many years. She lived to be 34, an immense age for an eagle, the leaders conducted a ceremony bestowing gifts to the athletes, and imparting their blessing upon the games, followed by hundreds of native men, women and children dancing to traditional drum circles, and Mohawk rocker Robbie Robertson performing live with the Cherokee women's group Walela. This whole amazing moment can be seen starting from the 1 hour 15 minute mark in the IOC's official upload of the ceremony
    Beating hearts, beating hearts
    Come as one, come as one–
    This is Indian country! This is Indian country!

    And at the end of that first song, "Unity", the five drum circles arranged themselves on the ice to form the first appearance of the Olympic rings.

  • The beginning of the ceremony had an announcement as follows: "Ladies and gentlemen: Tonight, we continue a tradition that began seventy-eight years ago," followed by a fanfare accompanying a sequence of skaters representing each of the previous Winter Games in chronological order, with the announcer calling out the year, followed by the host city's name. Each skater was dressed in a costume based upon what was worn at those Winter Games^note Based on photos from each of them carrying a flag with the year and the city's name, each flag a slightly different color, each a bit warmer and brighter color than the last, and then when the final flag-bearer skated in, "Two-Thousand and Two: SALT LAKE CITY!" and the Salt Lake City flag is designed to look like blazing flames^note The Salt Lake City games' slogan was "Light the Fire Within". And that was the moment that the first of that opening ceremony's many elaborate and beautiful pyrotechnics were set off.
  • Also noteworthy: when President George W. Bush declared the games open, he did so not from a private box in the VIP section but standing amid the American athletes in their bleachers. This led later to a Funny Moment when one of the American athletes dialed their mother on their cell-phone and handed it to the President. Judging by the looks on their faces, the surprised parent was incredulous.
  • The sign for Team Germany was carried into the stadium by a local man named Gail Halvorsen. A USAF transport pilot during the Berlin Airlift, Halvorsen was immortalized as "Uncle Wiggly Wings" for airdropping candy to Berlin children, many of whom had not had candy in years.
  • Who better to light the cauldron than the 1980 Men's Hockey Team? The Miracle on Ice reunited!
• Sarah Hughes' not only becoming the seventh American woman to earn gold in ladies figure skating with this electrifying figure skating performance, it was also the first repeat victory in this event since Albright won in 1956 and Heiss won in 1960. Much like Tara Lipinski in the 1998 Nagano Games, she knew she was bound to earn a medal of some color. And much like Lipinski, without the pressure on her to earn gold like it was on Michelle Kwan, she skated the performance of her life.
• Despite Kwan's disappointment at not winning gold, hers and Hughes 1-3 finish marked the fifth time two American women had been on the podium.
• All controversy aside, one cannot deny the magnificent performance of Sale and Pelletier.
• Belarus defeats Sweden 4-3 in the quarter-finals of the men's ice hockey tournament, one of the greatest upsets in international ice hockey history. Belarusian Vladimir Kopat shoots the puck on Swedish goaltender Tommy Salo just past the center line, bouncing off the latter's shoulder and slowly inches into the net for the game winning goal. To add to the unexpectedness, the Belarus team had already booked their airplane tickets to go home post-game, but had to re-book them because they were guaranteed two more matches in the tournament—the semi-finals and the bronze medal match!
• Canada was facing tough competition in men's hockey, having lost to Sweden and tying with the Czech Republic in the round robin. The general manager of Team Canada, Wayne Gretzky, would go on to deliver an emotional response against the media questioning the team, their competition, and Canada's playing style. The most heated topic was regarding the game against the Czechs, when Canadian player Theoren Fleury was clearly cross-checked from behind, but the referees failed to call a penalty. Gretzky's reaction: "[If] we would've did what they did tonight, it would be a big story. He blatantly tried to him. I don't understand it...If it was a Canadian player that did it, it would be a big story; if it was a Czech player, it's okay. Am I hot? Yeah, I'm hot, 'cuz I'm tired of people taking shots at Canadian hockey." These words not only reinvigorated Canadian players, but took them straight to the finals, winning their first Olympic gold medal in ice hockey in exactly fifty years.
• Battle between Russian skating legends Alexei Yagudin and Evgeni Plushenko, which is considered one of the greatest rivalry in figure skating. And boy it was epic. Yagudin's short program to "Winter" is considered a timeless classic. Plushenko fell in the short program which ultimately cost him the gold medal. He came back strong after the freeskate—while performing the most technically difficult program, which contained the crazy 4-3-3 combination jump, and managed to secure the silver medal.
• The introduction of female bobsledding, capped off by the U.S. winning gold, making Vonetta Flowers the first African-American to win a gold medal at the Winter Olympics.
• Speed-skater Steven Bradbury winning Australia's first ever gold medal in the Winter Olympics! And he won it not by being faster than the other competitors, but by being smarter. He knew he couldn't beat their pace, and with each skater (other than himself) being under extreme pressure to win gold ^{To wit...}Ohno was expected to win all four of his events on top of dealing with host nation pressure, Li had won Olympic medals but was yet to take a gold medal, Turcotte only had one individual event and thus one shot at individual gold, and Ahn had been the form racer at the Olympics so far, there would definitely be a fight for first place. He'd also noted their aggressive skating styles, and knew from experience that the other skaters would likely crash into each other when they fought (this was how he made it into the final, after coming second in the semi-final when most of the skaters in front of him crashed - including Li and Turcotte). So he hung around at the back out of the way, and in the final lap, what he suspected would happen, happened. The other four competitors crashed into each other while jockeying for first place during the final lap, letting Steven pass them and finish first for the gold. Little wonder that "doing a Bradbury" has entered the Australian vernacular as a term for achieving an unlikely success.
• Shortly after Bradbury won his event, Alisa Camplin wins Australia's first gold medal in freestyle skiing aerials (and its second gold medal in the Winter Olympics), by landing a pair of triple-twisting, double backflip jumps. And she did it with two fractured ankles!
• Great Britain's Women's curling team not only won the nation's first gold medal in the sport since 1924 (when the men won, though it should be noted that Curling wasn’t an Olympic sport from 1936-1998), they also won it with their last stone.
• An overall excellent Games, including the U.S.' best performance at the Winter Olympics yet, despite the 9/11 attacks having taken place only five months earlier. There had even been serious discussion of cancelling the Games altogether due to security concerns.

Athens 2004

• The 2004 Athens opening ceremony deserves special mention, as they manage to summarize the history of Greece — which began around 1750 BCE — in a matter of minutes. Without any narration.
• Chilean Tennis player Nicolás Massú became the only male player to have won both the singles and doubles gold medals in the same Olympic Games. He first got gold in doubles with his partner Fernando González against Germans Nicolas Kiefer and Rainer Schüttler, and then he won singles gold against American Mardy Fish. What makes it doubly Awesome? Those two gold medals were Chile's first ever two gold medals.
• Russian judoka Dmitri Nossov broke his arm in the semi-finals and still won the bronze afterwards!
• With seven kilometers to go in the marathon, crazed Irish priest Neil "Cornelius" Horan invaded the track and pushed Brazilian Vanderlei de Lima, who was leading the race, into the crowds alongside the course. Then comes an awesome moment as a huge Greek bystander named Polyvios Kossivas helped Lima get free^note The Brazilian NOC later paid Kossivas a trip to the country, and another as despite Lima being distressed enough to let two others pass him, he still got the bronze medal, being visibly happy in the final sprint.
• The Romanian women gymnasts. Not only did they win team gold for the second straight year in a row, but they won gold in three out of five individual events (vault, beam, and floor).
• Speaking of gymnastics, Carly Patterson's gold medal win in the women's all-around—the first since Mary Lou Retton twenty years earlier, and the first for an American at a fully attended Olympics^note Retton won her gold at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, which was boycotted by two of the three strongest gymnastics powers at the time — the Soviet Union and East Germany — as well as other strong Eastern Bloc programs in Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. Of the medals won at the World Championships in 1983 and 1985, two-thirds were won by countries who boycotted the 1984 Games; it is generally understood that, had their athletes been present, she couldn't have won. Patterson began what is currently a five-peat all-around women's gold streak for the Americans, followed by Nastia Liukin in the 2008 Beijing Games, Gabby Douglas in the 2012 London Games, Simone Biles in the 2016 Rio Games, and Sunisa Lee in the 2020 Tokyo Games. Even better, another American—Paul Hamm—won the gold medal in the men's all-around that same year.
• And the one remaining gold medal in women's gymnastics? Émilie le Pennec of France took gold on the uneven bars for France's first-ever Olympic women's gymnastics medal, and first for any gender in the modern history of the sport^note they won a couple of medals in men's gymnastics in the very early 1900s, but gymnastics was so different in those days that it can barely be called the same sport.
• For the U.S. women's gymnastics team, disaster struck in the team final when team anchor Courtney Kupets fell to injury. Having only warmed up the three athletes planned to compete on the balance beam — including Kupets — the team sent up instead 25-year-old Mohini Bhardwaj, who hadn't so much as set foot on a beam in three days. Under the glare of the Olympic spotlight, in the highest-pressure situation of her competitive career, and with the Americans' medal chances riding on her slender shoulders, Mohini, a ten-year veteran of elite and NCAA gymnastics, delivered a clutch performance that almost undoubtedly kept the United States in medal contention. The team won the silver medal, behind only an outstanding Romania. (In fact, Kupets has since stated that she would have pushed through the injury had she thought it was necessary^note and she did go on to perform on floor in the final rotation, alongside Patterson and Bhardwaj, but didn't do so in this case specifically because she was confident Bhardwaj would be able to pull it off — and she was right.)
• Another American gymnast, Annia Hatch, not only finally making the Olympics happen but doing pretty well for herself once she got there. Hatch, then going by the name Annia Portuondo^note Hatch is her married name, ostensibly retired from gymnastics in 1997 after her native Cuba refused to send her to the 1996 Olympics even though she had qualified. Eight years, a marriage, a five-year break in training, a change of country, and a torn ACL later^note that last occurring less than a year before the Olympics, Hatch finally got her trip to the Olympics, helped the team win a silver medal, and won one for herself on vault.
• In the men's sailboard, Gal Fridman became Israel's first-ever gold medalist.
• Chinese athlete Liu Xiang, winning the 110m hurdles, with a world record-equaling time of 12.91 seconds, matching the feat of Colin Jackson at the 1993 Stuttgart World Championships. Liu became one of the few men to win the event in under 13 seconds and was China's first men's Olympic gold medalist in a track and field event. Particularly notable because Chinese athletes do not traditionally excel in track events.
• Morocco's Hicham El Guerrouj had won practically every possible title in the men's 1500 m... except Olympic gold. Until Athens, when he not only won the 1500 but also added gold at 5000 m, making him the first man since Finnish legend Paavo Nurmi in 1924 to win both events.
• Australia winning its first ever gold medal in men's field hockey, defeating the Netherlands (who were the defending champions) 2-1.

Torino 2006

• Chinese figure skater Zhang Dan fell while attempting a quadruple salchow jump during the free skate program, injuring her leg as a result. But she and her partner Zhang Hao decided to continue the program and they had enough points to finish with a silver medal.
• Canadian cross-country skier Sara Renner broke a ski pole during the women's team sprint event, and finished only because she was quickly handed a replacement ski pole — by the coach of the Norwegian ski team, Bjørnar Håkensmoen. Because of this supreme act of sportsmanship by Håkensmoen, Renner and fellow skier Beckie Scott won the silver medal in the event. Adding to the significance of this act, their silver medal finish meant that the Norwegian team ended up finishing fourth in this event, instead of winning a bronze medal.
• Canadian speed skater Cindy Klassen winning five medals^note One gold, two silver, two bronze, making her the only female speed skater in history to win multiple medals in a single Winter Olympics.
• American and Canadian women were dominating ice hockey for as long as the international scene began: At every world championship and Olympics, both nations were either a runner-up or tournament champion. However, the 2006 Turin Games saw a shift, as the Swedish team defeated the Americans 3-2 in the semi-finals, sending them to the gold medal game against Canada. This was the first time in women's international ice hockey history — excluding the "Four Nations Cup"^note Composed of Canada, Finland, Sweden, and the United States — that another team besides the Americans or Canadians made it to the finals.^PostscriptThis wouldn't happen again until the 2019 World Championships, in which Finland took down Canada in the semifinals before a controversial overtime loss to the USA in the final.
• Russian figure skater Evgeni Plushenko skated lights out and won the men's figure skating gold medal with a convincing 27.12 point lead over the silver medalist, Stéphane Lambiel. Plushenko also set a new personal best and world record in the short program.
• Russian figure skating team shows its dominance by won gold medal in three out of four disciplines^note Men's singles, Pair skating, and Ice dancing and one bronze from the Ladies^note Ladies' singles.
• Team Canada's stellar men's curling win, led by skip Brad Gushue, the first Newfoundlander to win Olympic gold. Schools across the province were shut down by government order so that students could watch the match.
• Shani Davis becoming the first black men to win a gold in the Winter Olympics, winning the 1000m speedskating event.
• In the last public performance he ever did before he passed away in 2007, opera singer Luciano Pavarotti sang "Nessun Dorma" at the Opening Ceremony.

Beijing 2008

• While many people will forever remember Michael Phelps winning a record eight gold medals, and also tying Heiden and Scherbo with five golds in individual events, the greatest feat of aquatics in the history of swimming goes to Jason Lezak.^note Yes, still. His final split of 46.06 seconds is the fastest 100m freestyle split ever as of 2020. Not even Michael Phelps has swam it that fast. In the 4*100 freestyle relay, the Americans were favored just slightly ahead of the French. The French, namely Alain Bernard, decided to talk some trash—note that the following is paraphrased — "We're going to smash them like guitars". After the third leg of 100m in the four-man relay, Bernard had a one body length lead on Jason Lezak. In the last 25m of the total of 400m race, Lezak came back and won the race by 8/100ths of a second. Here it is. Of course, Michael Phelps' eight gold medals accomplishment is still something well worth going into detail about, especially about how he won one of them with water in his goggles and another one by a mere .01 second.
• The win of Matthew Mitcham in the men's 10m platform. China had been bragging about sweeping all of the diving competitions, and came very close. Mitcham, after a less than stellar dive, was somewhere around 7th place. After an amazing dive, and a less than amazing dive by the Chinese diver, Mitcham shot up to 2nd. Another near-perfect dive—which achieved the highest single-dive score in Olympic history (a record that remains unbroken to this day)—and he took the gold. This also made him the first openly gay Olympic athlete to win gold, Mitcham having come out earlier in the year.
• As a country, Togo doesn't have much going for it. Enter Benjamin Boukpeti, a slalom canoeist who was leading 2008's K-1 Kayak Single event through the final round. While he dropped to third in the end, he nonetheless earned his country their first-ever Olympic medal. And There Was Much Rejoicing not just in Togo, but around the world just from seeing him hang on to a podium finish. Seeing him triumphantly snap his paddle in two just showed how awesome this moment was.
• Usain Bolt winning the 100m and setting a world record. While showboating for the last 20m. With his shoelace untied. It's become one of the most defining moments of the Beijing Olympics. He wasn't just showboating, but showboating in a way that actually increased drag and made him slower. He was just that far ahead.
• Oksana Chusovitina^note Who first competed for the Soviet Union, later for her native Uzbekistan, and then for Germany after she and her husband got help there to save their son's life was made of this in Beijing. Not only is she one of the very few gymnasts to return to competition after having kids^note And several girls who compete today consider her an example for that, but she won the silver medal for vault at the age of 34, and four years later in the 2012 London Games she did pretty well there too. She has gone to six Olympics. Most female gymnasts hardly dare to dream of going to one.
• American gymnasts Nastia Liukin and Shawn Johnson's 1-2 finish in the women's all-around.
• Speaking of American gymnasts, the American women's gymnastics team had a serious stroke of bad luck, with both Samantha Peszek and Chellsie Memmel sustaining ankle injuries that limited them to competing only on the uneven bars, and the team unable to sub in an alternate because their alternates were stuck in Japan with visa problems ^note Peszek's injury occurred too late for a substitution in any case. This could have been disastrous, especially in qualifications where they lacked a cushion every other team had^note the qualification round counted 4 scores, but teams were allowed to put up 5 gymnasts and drop the low score; on three events, Team USA had to put up only four gymnasts, so they couldn't drop a score if there was a major mistake, but they managed to overcome it and come out with a silver medal.
  • In qualifications, Shawn Johnson put up the highest combined score of the day, qualifying to the all-around in first place but also contributing four substantial scores to the team effort. In the team final, she performed all four events, the only gymnast on the team to do that.
  • Nastia Liukin qualified to the all-around just behind Johnson, putting up three big scores of her own and even managing a pretty good score on vault, despite her relatively low difficulty value. In the team final, she earned a whopping 16.9 on the uneven bars, the single highest score received by any gymnast on any event in the team final.
  • Alicia Sacramone is unfortunately remembered primarily, at least as far as the Olympics go, for her falls on balance beam and floor exercise in the team final. However, it could have been much worse; both of her falls occurred early in her routines (on beam, it was literally the first element — her mount), and that kind of thing can often get in a gymnast's head and cause further mistakes later. But this was not the case for Sacramone, who came back from both errors to deliver solid routines, keeping the team in medal contention and ultimately allowing them to take the silver^note and it's worth noting that China's margin of victory over the USA was greater than the value of those two fall deductions, so Sacramone's mistakes didn't affect the outcome as much as one might expect.
  • Bridget Sloan, the only person on the team who had never competed at a major international event of this caliber (all of the others had been to at least one World Championships), was suddenly thrust into the spotlight after her teammates were injured. While it's impossible to know what the lineups would have been with everyone healthy, it's likely based on her teammates' strengths that she was only meant to be used on one or two events in qualification ^note Memmel and Peszek both had the potential to score much higher than Sloan on beam and floor, so it's unlikely Sloan was meant to go up for either of those, but with her teammates unable to compete, not only did she have to perform all four events, but she had to do three of them with the pressure of knowing that no matter what happened, Team USA would have to count her scores, so a significant mistake could throw a major wrench in the works. She kept her cool under pressure and rose to the challenge, getting through her set with only one significant mistake (on bars, which was luckily the one event where the team still got to drop a score) ending up with the eleventh-highest combined score (though she was kept out of the all-around final by the two-per-country rule), which helped the USA qualify second to the team final.
  • Despite her injury, which was later revealed to be a broken ankle rather than the minor injury that had been implied, Chellsie Memmel hit a solid bar routine in the team final, capping it off by sticking the tricky blind landing on her dismount. On a broken ankle. (For comparison, the landing is difficult enough that many gymnasts have difficulty hitting it even when they're not injured.) Unfortunately, she had a major mistake in qualification — a routine like the one she did in the team final would have likely been enough to qualify her into the event final on bars.
• Brazilian long jumper Maurren Maggi had underperformed in the 2000 Sydney Games, missed the 2004 Athens Games due to both a doping suspension^note Due to an anti-scarring gel sheet containing a forbidden substance and a pregnancy, and went to the 2008 Beijing Games at the age of 32, promising to bring her daughter a medal. And it was the gold, with her first attempt!^note And the country's first woman to get an individual gold! If that doesn't seem extraordinary, in 2016 Maggi revealed that she slept only four and a half hours prior to the finals, having been up until 5:30 playing on her tablet.

Vancouver 2010

• After never winning a gold medal on home soil, the Canadian athletes were determined to put an end to that drought... and they did, with freestyle moguls skier Alexandre Bilodeau leading the pack and the first historic gold medal, while saving the fourteenth and best gold medal for last^note Breaking the record for most gold medals won at a single Winter Olympics and being the first host country to lead the gold medal count for men's ice hockey, where Canada defeated the U.S. in overtime and the entire country erupted in celebration.
  • Sidney Crosby's overtime goal and the incredible assist by Jarome Iginla in the gold medal game for men's hockey has to be the best way to end an Olympic tournament, while the icing on the cake is the fourth arm of the cauldron got repaired and Catriona LeMay Doan was finally able to light it.
  • Not to mention that the hockey gold made Team Canada's head coach Mike Babcock the first (and to this day only) member of the Triple Gold Club as a coach.^note The Triple Gold Club is made up of individuals who have won gold medals at both the Olympics and IIHF World Championships, plus the Stanley Cup.
  • Everyone thought the Canadian men's hockey team would have an incredibly tough tournament ahead of them after losing to the U.S. in the round robin, alongside the pressures of playing on home ice. When they were pitted against their bitter Russian rivals in the quarter-finals, fear and tensions mounted, since the Canadians have never defeated the Russians in an Olympic hockey tournament for years. The game ended with Canada winning 7-3—at one point, Canada was winning 6-1. As Russian goaltender Ilya Bryzgalov stated in an interview, the Canadians were "like gorillas coming out of a cage."
• The U.S. men's hockey team had very little international experience and weren't even expected to get a medal, much less have a chance at beating Canada, a team made up of the best players in the NHL. They went undefeated in the preliminary round, including defeating the heavily favored Canadian team 5-3, and went on to win the silver medal.
• Though overshadowed by the men's team performance, the Canadian women's hockey team completely overran their opponents on their way to the gold medals. In the round robin, they beat Slovakia 18-0, Switzerland 10-1, and Sweden 13-1, followed by a 5-0 win over Finland in the semi-finals and a 2-0 win over the U.S. in the gold medal game. This would be their third consecutive gold medal win in three Winter Olympics. They were similarly dominant in the 2006 Torino Games. In the group stage, they beat Italy 16-0, Russia 12-0, and Sweden 8-1, followed by a 6-0 win over Finland in the semi-finals and a 4-1 victory in the gold medal game against Sweden.
• Slovenian cross-country skier Petra Majdič takes a brutal spill in practice, falling about ten feet down a hill into a gully. She comes out for the qualifying run and qualifies collapsing in pain and unable to stand after. After returning from x-rays at the hospital, she wins her quarter-final, then gets a lucky loser spot in the semi-finals to qualify for the final, all in abject agony. Four races, five broken ribs, and one pneumothorax later, she came out of it all with a bronze medal.
• South Korean Yuna Kim completely cleaned the field in the 2010 Vancouver Games when she set the world record for both the short and free program in women's figure skating by skating two flawless performances, and won the gold medal in the process.
• Another Moment of Awesome at the 2010 Games, but a really sad one, was Canadian Joannie Rochette who competed in women's figure skating despite losing her mother days before the event. She skated two strong performances, and won a bronze medal.
• The fact that the Games happened at all. It was one of the warmest winters on record, in a city already given to mild winters, and to even make some of the the events possible, snow had to be brought in by trucks and helicopters from north of Whistler, British Columbia, as much as 160 kilometres^note 100 miles away.
• Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo of China winning gold in figure skating pairs. They are the first Chinese figure skaters to win gold in any figure skating category. To double the awesome is their coach Yao Bin, who is considered one of the first pioneer Chinese skaters and came last in the 1980 World Champions with his partner, being laughed at and ridiculed for years. Now, he proudly watches as his former students, along with his other team Pang Qing and Tong Jian, winning gold and silver respectively in the figure skating pairs.
• The opening ceremony is often overlooked—especially since the 2008 Beijing Summer Games was such a Tough Act to Follow—but Vancouver did well with its relatively simplistic style. Case in point: Who Has Seen The Wind, a tribute to the Canadian Prairies. A person on a wire, huge projectors, and some beautiful music took many a viewer's breath away. An honourable mention to the Vancouver-area First Nations for performing traditional welcoming dances throughout the Parade of Nations.
• The U.S. finally wins their first bobsled gold medal since 1948. This is after struggling for decades after decades—even using second-hand sleds imported from other countries up until 1992, when Geoff Bodine^note Yes, that Geoff Bodine from NASCAR decides to build his own bobsled, because he deemed it unacceptable that the U.S. used sleds from other countries. Needless to say, Bodine's sleds successfully led the bobsled team to the long-lost glory. Heck, Bodine even said that this victory was far more incredible than winning the Daytona 500!^note Which Bodine did win in 1986.
• This sentence said by John Furlong, CEO of the Vancouver Organizing Committee, during his speech at the Vancouver 2010 closing ceremony: "Alexandre, your first Gold Medal gave us all permission to feel like and behave like champions. Our last one will be remembered for generations." The mention of Alexandre Bilodeau’s name brought cheers from the audience, while the last part brought a one-minute standing ovation, ending with the chant of "Lou".
• Shani Davis becoming the first man to defend his gold medal in the 1000m speedskating event.
• Vanessa James and Yannick Bonheur making history as the first black couple to compete in Olympic figure skating.

London 2012

• Special points to one scene in the 2012 opening ceremony, where James Bond and the Queen parachute out of a helicopter into the Olympic Park. All right, they were stunt doubles there, but still... but in the video presentation up to that point that was actually the Queen herself (and one can't help but wonder if she would have jumped out of the helicopter as well if given the option). So much awesome in just five minutes of an awesome-packed ceremony.
  • The entire Industrial Revolution segment, especially the moment when you realized that they were forging the Olympic rings.
  • But Wait, There's More! Surprise! Ladies and gentlemen, the Spice Girls!
• The 2012 closing ceremony were just as amazing as the opening, with Eric Idle singing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" from Monty Python's Life of Brian, as well as Queen performing "We Will Rock You" alongside Jessie J, which was preceded by a clip of Freddie Mercury.
• Open the Beijing 2008 folder and read the first entry. Done? All right. Fast-forward four years later, and this time, the U.S. and Australia were overwhelmingly favorites for the gold, Australia sporting the "missile" James Magnussen along with Eamon Sullivan and Jamie Roberts, and the U.S. having multi-medal winners Michael Phelps or Ryan Lochte to lead their relay. The commentaries before the race mostly focused on whether Phelps would be enough to beat Australia. The first leg saw the U.S. leading Australia, and after three legs, the U.S. still lead everyone by more than half a second. So, guess who ended up beating them during the last 50m? That's right, France, who was considered, along with bronze-medalist Russia, to be a challenger. Talk about Best Served Cold^note To make it even better, at the World Championships the following year, France did it again after not even being in the top three for most of the race—you can listen to the commentators being flabbergasted when they realize, after 375m, that France is in the race.
• The British men's gymnastics team winning Great Britain's first medal in gymnastics in 100 years.
• Elizabeth "Beth" Tweddle, three-time Olympian and the greatest gymnast Great Britain has ever produced, finally winning an Olympic medal, a first for British women's gymnastics. She capped off her eleven-year career winning bronze on the uneven bars at the age of 27, when most female gymnasts' careers are long over. And just to make it that much better, she did it in front of a home crowd.
• The women's epee semi-finals. South Korean fencer Shin A-Lam refused to leave the piste^note Fencing platform after her match with Germany's Britta Heidemann. Why? Shin and Heidemann had fought to a draw. There was one second left in their overtime; however, the clock didn't start and Heidemann took more than one second to land her winning touch. By refusing to leave the piste, Shin refused to officially accept the judges' ruling^note A peculiarity of the fencing rules means you can only object to the result while you're still on the piste. Even after the Korean officials appealed the decision and lost, Shin still refused to leave. She eventually had to be taken away by security. The crowd gave her a standing ovation. Also qualifies as a Tear Jerker.
  • In her distraught state, she then had to compete in the bronze medal match which she lost, leaving her empty-handed. The International Fencing Federation has offered her a "special medal", but she refused it.
  • She got a medal in the end, as a member of the silver-medal winning Korean team epee team. Doesn't compensate, but at least it makes the deal a little less bitter.
• After qualifying for the finals for 200m freestyle, 17-year-old U.S. swimmer Missy Franklin had less than fifteen minutes of rest before she had to appear for the 100m backstroke finals. Proving that being a young Plucky Girl has its perks, she won the gold and broke the American record for the event. WOW.
• Ruta Meilutyte winning the 100m breaststroke. At the tender age of 15, she became not only the youngest Lithuanian to win the gold, but also became the first Lithuanian to win a gold medal in swimming.
• Upon winning the 4*200 freestyle relay, Michael Phelps earned his 19th overall medal, 15 of which are gold. This made him the most decorated Olympian of all time. He ended with 22 medals, 18 of which are gold. Good luck to future athletes who want to surpass him.
  • South African Chad le Clos gets a special mention for beating Phelps, his idol, by milliseconds.
  • Phelps' teammate Ryan Lochte also gets a special mention for besting Phelps in the 400m individual medley with a gold medal performance, whereas Phelps placed fourth.
• Yi Shiwen broke the world record for the 400m individual medley on her way to the gold, beating her personal best by 5 seconds
• Canada has long been dismissed as a gymnastics lightweight, not really able to compete at the same level of skill or difficulty as powerhouses like the U.S. or Russia. What's their response to this? In the 2012 London Games, Canada not only qualified for the team final, but placed fifth, just a couple of points behind the "Big Four" of women's gymnastics—the U.S., Russia, China, and Romania, who have dominated the sport for decades. Ladies and gents, Canada has arrived. And it was awesome.
• Canada's women's soccer team came last in the 2011 World Cup and Canada has not won a medal in a traditional team sport since 1936. After having new head coach John Herdman, these girls were determined to reach that podium despite being the underdog of women's soccer. They played several amazing games to reach the semi-finals, with captain Christine Sinclair scoring 6 goals in this tournament. In the chase for the bronze medal, the team was struggling against France after an emotional 4-3 semi-finals defeat against the U.S.. And with less than a minute remaining in added time, Diana Matheson scored the winning goal and they won the bronze medal. It was not gold, but the team and the rest of the country saw it as one, having reached the podium and brought soccer into the spotlight for Canada. The team then raced from Coventry to London to take part in the medal ceremony after the Gold Medal match at Wembley Stadium that evening.
• Clara Hughes. She had already shown her awesomeness before 2012 in being the only Olympian in history to ever win multiple medals at both the Summer and Winter Olympics, for cycling and speed skating, respectively. She's tied with fellow speed skater Cindy Klassen for the most decorated Canadian Olympian with 6 medals. However, she qualified for the road race and road time trial for the 2012 London Games, despite previously retiring from cycling 12 years prior. She finished a disappointing 32nd in the road race. Clara later admitted that during a race earlier in the year, she'd fractured a vertebra. She had been training and competing for the last six weeks before the London Games with a broken back. That makes her 5th place finish in the time trial seem a lot more awesome.
• Meet Oscar "Blade Runner" Pistorius, the first double amputee to compete in the regular Olympics. Not only did he beat several full-bodied Olympians, he came in second in his heat and advanced to the semi-finals! He didn't make it to the finals, but his mere presence in these games was awesome enough by itself.
  • The semi-finals was followed by a Heartwarming Moment when Grenadian Kirani James, who would go on to win the 400m gold, came up to Oscar and traded bibs. Even later on during the 4*400m relay heats, South Africa's runner Ofentse Mogawane fell just before Oscar was to take the baton. It was ruled that he was interfered with and South Africa was allowed to run in the finals in lane nine with Oscar on the anchor leg^note The runner who crosses the finish line. South Africa sadly didn't win the race—they were in eighth by the time he got the baton—however, Oscar put forth a sub-46s split, good for second best on the team.
  • Speaking of the men's 4*400m relay, in the second semi-finals, American lead-off runner Manteo Mitchell ran 46.1 seconds to help his team qualify for the final, and they eventually won silver. This is despite him breaking his leg halfway through his part of the run.
• For years, British tennis player Andy Murray had been constantly bested by Roger Federer, most painfully at Wimbledon 2012. As fate would have it, the men's singles finals turned into a rematch between him and Federer on the very same court the two had faced each other just four weeks before. Murray proceeded to defeat the World No. 1 he was never able to defeat before in straight sets, causing the crowd to go wild and Britain to get its first gold medal in men's singles since 1908 (it should be remembered that there was no tennis at the Olympics between 1924 and 1988).
• The U.S. women's gymnastics squad, aptly dubbed the "Fierce Five", who first qualify as a group for winning the gold. By the end of the competition, they were so far in the lead that Aly Raisman, last to go in the team final, could've face-planted on every single tumbling pass in her routine and they still would have won.^note Needless to say, Raisman did not face-plant even one tumbling pass, let alone four of them. Instead, she went on to become the Olympic champion on floor exercise. As you do. Some individual accomplishments of note, however:
  • American gymnast Gabrielle "Gabby" Douglas became the first African-American and first woman of color in Olympic history to become the individual all-around champion, and the first American gymnast to win gold in both the individual all-around and team competitions at the same Olympics. This was also the third straight Olympics where an American won the women's all-around.
  • The Fierce Five's captain, Aly Raisman, wasn't even seen as a contender for the all-around, but in the qualifying rounds, she upstages Douglas and Jordyn Wieber and ends up knocking out the latter from the individual all-round finals. After clinching the team gold medal, she tied the score of the bronze-medal-winner in the individual all-around, but placed fourth by a tiebreaker. Instead of giving up or getting unnerved, she proved that tenacity, perseverance, and poise under pressure have their perks by winning the bronze in the beam final — ironically, by tying again, but this time the tiebreaker worked out in her favor — and the gold in the floor final, becoming the first American to win the floor event final in Olympic history. Although not as hyped by NBC as her teammates, Raisman ended up becoming the most decorated gymnast of the "Fierce Five".^note Aly had her revenge on that all-around tiebreak fourth place finish... by coming back for another Olympics, making the all-around final again, and winning the silver medal.
  • Jordyn Wieber, the reigning world champion going into the Olympics, deserves credit for recovering from the disappointment of not being in the all-around^note She finished 4th in qualifying, but there's a two-per-country rule to help start the U.S. women's gymnastics run to the gold with the very first routine for the USA. She continued to shine on every event she performed, nailing a beautiful vault — the very first U.S. routine — solid bars set and a spectacular floor routine to boost the team to gold.
  • McKayla Maroney was brought to the Olympics for one reason: to do a spectacular vault. And she didn't just deliver — on a broken toe, she nailed a vault so unbelievably, jaw-droppingly spectacular that it earned the highest score in London Olympic gymnastics competition. Later on, despite falling and settling for silver on the individual vault finals, she was able to make fun of herself, which is notable itself. Worth noting: sitting on one's behind on a vault landing is usually a mortal sin that puts a swift and painful end to any podium hopes you might have. Unless you're McKayla Maroney, in which case you merely have to settle for silver (and for a few minutes in there, it was not out of the question that she might win gold despite the fall). She is just that good.
    • McKayla deserves another one just for making fun of the "not impressed" meme. She owns it, and it culminated in this picture with U.S. President Barack Obama◊.
    • Maroney deserves major kudos for even making that Olympic team; one of the team alternates was Elizabeth Price, who had a surprising surge in early 2012 and made a bid for the Olympics that very nearly succeeded. In fact, reports suggest that, after McKayla broke her toe, team coordinator Márta Károlyi was debating up until the very last possible minute whether or not to pull Maroney and put in Price; "Ebee" had the second-best Amanar vault in the world and a floor exercise nearly the quality of Maroney's, and was a much better all-arounder to boot^note Maroney had an unfortunate tendency to falter on beam and bars, events where Price was solid. But Maroney's vaults^note and the plural is important here: to make the event finals on vault, a gymnast must show two different vaults from two different vault families, and Price didn't have a competitive second vault were so far superior to anyone else on the team that they kept her in, despite her broken toe meaning she couldn't be used on floor exercise. McKayla Maroney made it into Olympic competition by being just that damn good at her job.
  • Kyla Ross was more than solid on the beam, as well as on the bars, shoring up a notorious American weak spot. At age nine, she whispered to her best friend, "Let's work really hard... so we can go to the Olympics." Seven years later, she won Olympic gold — holding her best friend McKayla Maroney's hand. They'd been best friends, teammates, and training partners for over a decade.
  • The order of finish for the podium was an exact repeat of the 1996 Atlanta Games: U.S., Russia, Romania for gold, silver, and bronze.
  • And considering that the entire U.S. team^note as of 2018, all five athletes have confirmed that they were victims had been molested by team doctor Larry Nassar for years, you're looking at a group of extremely badass spirits. More than 100 women gymnasts, plus over 200 women in other sports, have spoken up about what this creep did to them. This had been going on for decades.
• The home country had a bit of a rough start to the Games, but they started to pick up the pace with a Rowing gold and, of course, Bradley Wiggins winning the men's time trial so soon after winning the Tour de France, in turn making him Britain's most decorated Olympian. Then came the velodrome. Out of a possible 10 gold medals, they took 7^note A disqualification cost them an 8th, and they also took a silver and a bronze. No other country took more than 1. They also blew away more than a few world records in there.
• Britain's 'Super Saturday', where three different athletes won gold medals in track-and-field events within 45 minutes. First was Jessica Ennis, who won a gold in the Heptathlon event. Then came Greg Rutherford, who was the champion of the long jump event. Finally Mo Farah, a former Somalian refugee turned long distance runner for Great Britain, blowing past the fierce competition from Kenya and Ethiopia to win a gold in the 10,000m event and set the seal on a magical night for British sport. Each individual victory had its awesome moments as well. Jessica Ennis was considered the 'face' of British female athletes, and was sorely disappointed at having to miss the 2008 Beijing Games through injury, but she made up for it by winning gold in front of her home country fans. Greg Rutherford ensured the gold medal with his second jump, without needing any more (although he would extend his lead with his fourth jump). And for Mo Farah, who didn't even make the finals in Beijing, beating the Ethiopian world record holder and previous champion Kenenisa Bekele was a supremely awesome moment. There was also the emotional bonus of seeing his best friend and training partner Galen Rupp of the U.S. managing to come in second, and later celebrating with his wife and little daughter on the track while a riotous hometown crowd including Sir Paul McCartney and Prince William and his wife, Catherine cheered him on. Not to mention that Farah would add gold at 5,000m to his collection the next Saturday.
  • The British team started the day by winning two golds in rowing. The first was in the men's four, where they beat traditional rivals Australia in the final. The next gold came in the women's lightweight double sculls - and for one of the pair, the Olympics was their first senior race. The third gold came in the women's team pursuit in cycling - which was made more awesome when you consider that the broke the world record each time they took to the circuit. The previous owner of the record before the Olympics? The same trio - having broken it each time they took part in the World Championships a few months earlier. In short, they broke their own record five times in a row. Then a good day was made great - possibly the greatest day in British Olympic history - with the three athletics golds listed above.
• Katherine Grainger, British rower who's career spanned back to Sydney 2000, had only managed to win silver at her three previous games, with the defeat in Beijing being so crushing that she nearly retired. But she came back and won gold in front of a home crowd in the women's double sculls.
• Alex Morgan's game-winning goal against Canada in the 123rd minute of the women's soccer semi-finals.
  • Followed a few days later by the U.S. women's team defeating Japan in the final, avenging their loss to Japan in the previous year's Women's World Cup.
  • How about Megan Rapinoe's Olimpico goal^note scoring directly from a corner kick against Canada, making her the only person in the world to score one in the Olympics. And it wasn't the last time she did this; see Tokyo 2020.
• Epke Zonderland won the first men's gymnastics medal for the Netherlands with an epic high bar routine^note The moment starts at around 18:45 that got him gold by a wide margin and led many viewers to dub him the "Flying Dutchman". Plus his name is Epke Zonderland.
• Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh Jennings, the Golden Girls of three consecutive Olympiads and a duo so dominant they are known simply as Misty-and-Kerri, finishing their partnership as the greatest beach volleyball team the world has ever known. Three-time Olympic gold medalists, in the 2004 Athens Games, the 2008 Beijing Games, and the 2012 London Games, they end their career together undefeated in Olympic play, dropping only a single set out of forty-three and winning all twenty-one of their matches over three Olympiads. Best friends, best partners, number one in setting and blocking, with a win percentage above 95% over twelve years together, they are untouchable, unparalleled and unrepeatable. With the final match of the London Games and Misty's retirement from the sport, the world waves goodbye to a team so legendary its like will never be seen again.
  • As revealed only after the Olympics, Kerri Walsh Jennings was also five weeks pregnant during the Games, but didn't let that stop her from being aggressive.
  • The Austrian Schweiger sisters, Doris and Stefanie, deserve a MoA for being the only team to steal a set from Misty-and-Kerri in their Olympic career.
• Jen Kessy and April Ross, the U.S. beach volleyball team who upset the top-seeded Brazilians to set up an all-U.S. final. They fell to Misty and Kerri in two sets, taking home silver and giving the U.S. a 1-2 sweep.
• Katie Taylor's gold medal win in the women's lightweight boxing, essentially putting the sport on par with the men's event and causing massive celebrations among the Irish.
• Claressa Shields, the champion in the middleweight division, also deserves a mention. You might ask why—she's American, after all, and aren't Americans supposed to win gold medals? Answer: Not if they're from Flint, Michigan. Ireland has had a bad few years; Michigan had a bad decade or so starting around 2002; Flint has been in the toilet since the 1980s.^note If you're interested in Flint and why it deteriorated so badly, watch the films (especially Roger & Me) of Michael Moore, who is from there. Thus why when Shields' mother said her daughter's victory deserved a ticker-tape parade, people didn't say she was just an overly-proud mom; the city needs something to celebrate.
• Colombian Olympic medal wins are quite rare—even a bronze medal is something remarkable. But in the 2012 London Games, the hard work finally paid off and they saw medals in such diverse events as weightlifting, long jump, judo, Greco-Roman wrestling, and Olympic BMX.
• The Mexican soccer team winning their first Olympic medal. Gold, against Brazil. Even better, the first Mexican goal was scored within the first thirty seconds.
• The South Korean soccer team beat out the hosts in the quarter-finals in penalty shoot-outs, and went on to win their first Olympic medal, a bronze, against Japan in the bronze medal match.
• David Boudia pulling off the diving performance of his life to win the gold medal in the men's 10m platform against the heavily-favored Chinese a la Matthew Mitcham. What makes this even more amazing is that he barely qualified for the semi-finals and that it had been 20 years since the last time a U.S. diver had even gotten on the podium in this event. Honorable mention goes to 18-year-old Tom Daley who managed to nab a rare diving medal for Britain in third place too.
  • Also a nod to the rest of the U.S. diving team, who, after having been shut out the previous two Olympic games—2004 Athens and 2008 Beijing—got three other medals in synchro.
  • And Ilya Zakharov, who upset the Chinese in the men's 3m springboard.
• Ugandan Stephen Kiprotich went into the men's marathon with perhaps an outside shot at a bronze in a loaded field, including three Kenyans and three Ethiopians, who have dominated the marathon for years. In a major surprise, Kiprotich found himself in the top three, running with two of the Kenyan favorites. They tried to drop him in a series of turns and nearly succeeded, but he kept pace with them, until he finally made his own move. He blew past them and ended up with such a huge lead towards the end that he had time to grab a Ugandan flag from one of his presumably delirious countrymen and crossed the finish line flying it over his head. An ultimate Dark Horse Victory if there ever was one.
• Winning the discus gold medal was awesome enough, but German Robert Harting's celebration propelled it to this category: He rips his shirt off while roaring then, for shits and giggles, decides to jump the hurdles that were being set up for a race. He cleared most of them too—all except for the last one, which was still being set up. Not bad.
• Usain Bolt not only repeating his victories in the 100m, 200m, and 4*100m relay from the 2008 Beijing Games, but becoming the first man to do so.^note This was before a retest of Nesta Carter’s 2008 sample revealed he had used a performance enhancer, thus stripping Bolt of the relay gold.
• Grenadian Kirani James winning the country's first Olympic medal ever—a gold in the 400m.
• Serena Williams dominating on her way to Olympic gold. With the gold, she became only the fourth player ever and just the second woman to win a singles Golden Slam^note All four Grand Slams plus the gold, and the first ever to win a career Golden Slam in singles and doubles. For good measure, the next day she and Venus successfully defended their doubles gold.
  • Speaking of Golden Slams, the Bryan brothers, American twins Bob and Mike, won in men's doubles to complete a career Golden Slam. Which was the prelude to an even more awesome accomplishment... winning the next four Grand Slam events, becoming the first men's doubles team in the Open Era to hold all four Grand Slam titles at once.
• Alistair and Jonathan Brownlee, two British brothers, getting gold and bronze respectively even after Johnny, the younger, got a 15-second penalty. Awesome.
• The fact that the aforementioned Oksana Chusovitina not only competed in gymnastics at the age of 37, but qualified for the vault final is a MoA in itself. Most gymnasts' careers are over well before 30, but Mrs. Chusovitina was still competing while nearing 40!
• The Brazilian women's volleyball team entered the tournament with low expectations due to bad performances earlier in the year. Then they are nearly eliminated in the group round. Following a tense quarter-finals match with Russia and a somewhat easy semi-finals match with Japan, comes a Heroic Rematch with the U.S. team. The first set is a 11-25 loss, but the following three are won for the second gold in a row!
• Katie Ledecky, at 15 the youngest member of the U.S. swimming team, swam in the grueling 800m race. The normal conventional wisdom for such a long race is to conserve your energy, let someone else swim out in first at the start, then swim out ahead near the end after that initial first place swimmer has tired herself out. Ledecky didn't go with that. She was in first place by the end of the first lap and stayed in first for nearly the entire eight minutes of the race!^note One swimmer did briefly get ahead of her at the second lap; the fourteen remaining laps were all Ledecky. By the end of the race, she was several body lengths ahead of everyone else!
• The greatest 800m race ever run in the men's final, when Kenyan David Rudisha trashed his own world record time and became the first man ever to run under 1 minute and 41 seconds, posting a 1:40.91 time. Every runner in the race either posted a new national, personal, or seasonal best, and the runner who finished last still finished in a time that would have won him a gold at the previous three Olympic 800m finals.
• Can we just say the entire Games were a Moment of Awesome for Britain? There were many rumors about the stadium not being finished on time, complaints about the special Olympic lanes, bad weather, etc. In short, people thought Britain would flop. Instead, not only are some people calling them the best Games ever, but it got Britain's economy up and running again when it was in a pretty much hopeless state. And the organizers of the Games have been called over to Rio in order to organize their Games.
  • A moment of awesome for Danny Boyle as well. It's a guarantee that you'll find no one who didn't get goosebumps during the Industrial Revolution scene of the opening ceremony. And those Olympic rings forming over the stadium... Awesome.
  • Two words: Olympic Cauldron. Instead of an actual cauldron, they had over two hundred and five copper "petals"—each one carried in alongside the flag-bearer and placard-bearer for one of the athlete delegations^note 204 for nations, 1 for Independent Olympic Athletes, namely 3 athletes from the recently dissolved Netherlands Antilles and an athlete from the just-formed South Sudan which has yet to organize an Olympic committee—and had them all come together in a perfect metaphor. Wow.
• Russian gymnast Aliya Mustafina tore her ACL in 2011, which is usually a career ending injury for gymnasts. But for Mustafina? Not only is she able to compete at the London Games a year later, she came out of the Games as the most decorated gymnast there, with a gold on uneven bars, a silver in the team competition, a bronze in the all-around, and a bronze in the floor. And just to make it sweeter, her uneven bars gold ended a twelve-year Olympic gold-medal drought for Russian women's gymnastics. Plucky Girl, thy name is Aliya.
• Chilean gymnast and Memetic Badass Tomás González qualifying for the vault finals and being this close to get in the podium. For a guy competing pretty much alone against massive men's gym powerhouses, it was really damn good.
• American Kayla Harrison was a long way coming. She was abused by her trainer as a kid, became disenchanted with the sport, and then found a new start with an honest coach. Six years later, she competes in the 2012 London Games, makes the world number 1 submit in the semi-finals, and then beats the surprise home-country finalist to win the U.S.'s first-ever gold medal in Judo.
• Another American woman, Kristin Armstrong. By the standards of the Olympics, she was pretty old^note She was 38 during these Games, and a mother of two. In fact, soon after winning gold in the 2008 Beijing Games, she left the sport. She changes her mind, gets back on the bike. She had to ride hurt, as in the months leading up to London she broke her collarbone. In the road race, she crashed and scraped her elbow. But on the event she won four years ago, the time trial, she beats the field comfortably and goes out on top. Or so they thought... see Rio 2016.
• In field hockey, British skipper Kate Walsh had her jaw broken in their opening game, which was expected to see her miss the rest of the tournament. Instead, it kept her out of the tournament for two games before returning to the tournament and captaining the team to the bronze medal.
• When you're at championship point, you'd expect to be wearing the gold medal in a few minutes, wouldn't you? The Brazilian team in the men's volleyball probably thought so as well. Instead, Russian Dmitry Muserskiy carried the team over, as they turned the third set and won the next two with 31 points by him, leading to Russia's first gold medal in the event—as well as the first from either them or the Soviet Union in a non-boycotted Games since 1968^note The Soviet Union won gold in the event in 1980, but those Games were heavily boycotted.
• Ireland's Katie Taylor winning the inaugural women's lightweight boxing event, becoming the first ever Olympic female lightweight champion.
• The U.S. winning the gold medal at the women's 4*100m relay after mishaps at the previous two Olympics^note They were disqualified at the 2004 Athens Games for a late pass, and they failed to qualify for the final in the 2008 Beijing Games due to a baton drop. Even more Awesome, they set a new world record, one that had been set 27 years prior!^note They also broke the Olympic record which had been set at the boycotted 1980 Moscow Games.
• China manages to sweep gold across all badminton sectors, alongside winning two silver medals and a bronze medal, making it the first time in badminton history that only one country manages to get gold. Safe to say that coach Li Yongbo is highly effective in terms of bringing China to its utter dominance in Badminton.
  • Special mention goes to Lin Dan, who manages to won his second consecutive gold medal, and Zhao Yunlei, the only badminton athlete to ever won two gold medals on the same event (she plays on both women's doubles and mixed doubles).

Sochi 2014

• The opening ceremony for the 2014 Sochi Games, which captured 1000 epic years of Russian history, had, unlike many other opening ceremonies, absolutely no criticism. From anyone. It's been held as one of the best opening ceremonies ever, full stop. Equally matched by the opening and closing ceremonies for the Paralympic Games - the latter of which featured a live game of Tetris.
• U.S. President Barack Obama sticking it to Russia's homophobic laws by sending two openly gay athletes, and no high level politicians, to participate in the ceremonies.
  • In a similar vein, Google putting up a rainbow-colored Olympic doodle with a quote from the Olympic charter about how "every individual must have the possibility of practicing sport, without discrimination of any kind."
  • The U.K. got into the act with this and the BBC's coverage was headed by Clare Balding, who is openly lesbian. The Guardian website colored its letter G with the rainbow colors.
  • Germany may as well have been flipping the bird with their yellow, green, and blue striped uniforms.
• Indian luger Shiva Keshavan crashing and recovering. At the other end of the rankings, Russian Albert Devchenko and Italian Armin Zoeggeler get silver and bronze in it... at age 42 and 40, respectively.
• And on the other side of the spectrum, the Russian figure skater Yulia Lipnitskaya gets a gold medal alongside her fellow Russian ice skaters...at the age of 15. Well done, kid!
• Canadian Alexandre Bilodeau winning his second consecutive Olympic gold medal in freestyle skiing moguls, which has never been done before, and is the first Canadian since Catriona LeMay Doan in the 2002 Salt Lake City Games to win individual back-to-back gold in the same event. Likewise, Canadian bobsledders Kallie Humphreys and Heather Moyse win their second straight gold medal in two-women bobsledding, becoming the first in the sport to do so.
• Japanese Ayumu Hirano and Taku Hiraoka get silver and bronze in halfpipe snowboarding. Even more so for Hirano—like Lipnitskaya, he's 15.
• Slovenia, a country with 7 ice rinks and 148 registered senior players, qualified for the Olympic ice hockey tournament, which is a moment of awesome in its own right, and they made it into the quarter-finals too. David Rodman commented before leaving to Sochi: "Five years ago, had you asked me whether I'll ever play in the Olympics, I'd have said not in this life."
• 19-year-old Yuzuru Hanyu from Japan breaks his own world record for the men's figure skating short program and becomes the first male skater to score over 100 points in said short program. He then goes on to become the first Japanese male figure skater and only the second male teenager in history to win gold in spite of falling twice during his free skate — the rest of his skating was just that good.
  • From the same competition, Denis Ten was in a distant 9th place heading into the free skate, but thanks to a combination of a great performance and mistakes from other competitors, he was able to climb all the way up to 3rd place to win Kazakhstan's first-ever medal in figure skating.
  • He may not have won a medal, but 17-year-old Michael Christian Martinez deserves a mention on this page for teaching himself to skate in the Philippines — a country that has a grand total of three ice rinks — and succeeding in becoming the first-ever Filipino athlete to qualify for any Winter Olympics and also the first-ever Southeast Asian figure skater at the Winter Games, where he qualified for the free skate and scored the best out of his opening group.
• Swiss skier Dominique Gisin just barely qualified for the 2014 Sochi Games after a career that included nine knee surgeries and a horrific crash in her only run in the 2010 Vancouver Games, which resulted in a concussion and immediate withdrawal from those Olympics. However, in Sochi, she has the run of her life, posting a score that was ultimately tied by Slovenia's Tina Maze. After all she went through, she won the gold medal and immediately called her grandparents when she won.
• Polish Justyna Kowalczyk wins gold in the women's cross-country skiing classic...on a broken foot.
• Jeremy Abbott of the U.S. crashed hard on his attempted quad in the men's short program and hit his hip hard on the boards, looking like he would have to withdraw. After lying on the ice for a few seconds, he got up, and landed his triple-triple combination and skated the rest of the program cleanly.
  • Jeremy, who has been criticized many times throughout his career for crumbling under pressure, skated an amazing long program and was one of the few who skated cleanly that night.
  • All this after Jeremy, who drew the unlucky position of skating after home country favorite and skating legend, Evgeny Plushenko of Russia in the team event, fell apart and was panned by people on message boards and the press.
• Japanese Noriaki Kasai gets a silver medal in ski jumping... at age 41. Against jumpers who are at least between 15-20 years younger than him. The only one who could beat him was the Pole Kamil Stoch, and with a minuscule difference that mostly came from his first jump.
• TJ Oshie of the U.S. scoring 4 shootout goals in the U.S. vs. Russia hockey game. And that's just one part of the truly epic game!
• The ice dancing free dance was a cavalcade of personal bests. From Nathalie Pechalat and Fabian Bourzat in fourth to Meryl Davis and Charlie White in first, the top four teams broke their own records for scores, with Davis and White scoring the highest score ever recorded in the history of the sport under the new code. And to make it even better, they won over training partners Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, who had beaten them for gold in the 2010 Vancouver Games. Sochi was, simply put, a triumph of an Olympics for ice dancing.
• Norwegian Ole Einar Bjorndalen wins gold in the biathlon mixed relay event, his 13th Olympic medal in six Winter Games, becoming the most decorated Winter Olympian in history.
• In the Switzerland vs. Sweden women's hockey match for the bronze medal, the Swedes lead 2-0 by the start of the third period. The Swiss women react and shift momentum, and with less than ten minutes left until the end of the game, turn the tables against the Swedes and make it a 4-3 victory, giving Switzerland their first medal in women's ice hockey.
• Darya Domracheva from Belarus and her three gold medals in Biathlon.
• Latvia upset Switzerland in men's ice hockey during the qualifiers, and then went on to hold gold-medal favorites Canada to a 1-1 tie up until the last several minutes of the game. Special credit to their coach, Ted Nolan, who is a Native Canadian from northern Ontario who has inspired the players with his positive coaching style, and to Latvian backup goalie Kristers Gudlevskis, who stopped 55 shots from the Canadians — compared to Latvia's 16 total shots on goal — and needed medical attention after collapsing from exhaustion and dehydration at the end of the game. That is an Olympic performance!
• In a heart-stomping, sweat-breaking minutes until the end of regulation time, the Canadian women's ice hockey team comes back from trailing 2-0 to tie the gold medal game against the U.S., winning 3-2 in overtime, making this their fourth consecutive victory at the Winter Olympics. This also makes Canadian forwards Caroline Ouellette, Jayna Hefford and Hayley Wickenheiser — who are considered the greatest female ice hockey player in the world — the first athletes in the sport to achieve four back-to-back gold medals.
• The Canadian women's curling team, led by skip Jennifer Jones, goes undefeated during the entire round robin and the rest of the tournament, winning the gold and making her the first female skip in Olympic history to achieve a perfect 10-0 record. This also marks Canada's second gold medal for women's curling since its inception in the 1998 Nagano Games^note And also redemption after losing the gold medal match four years ago in the 2010 Vancouver Games in the extra ends.
• The Canadian men's curling team, led by skip Brad Jacobs, winning gold over Great Britain 9-3, making it the first time Canada has won gold in both men and women's curling. In a lesser moment of awesome for the British team, the silver was their first medal in men's curling since the sport had been re-introduced as an Olympic event in the 1998 Nagano Games, and Great Britain's fourth medal overall — tying their record Winter Olympic medal haul.
• Canadian Kelsey Serwa winning the silver medal in women's ski cross, despite having surgery on both knees for torn ACLs.
• Mao Asada skating probably the best long program of her career after having a complete disaster in the short program that included a fall and an omission of a required element. The long program included landing the triple axel — the hardest jump a female can perform and the jump Mao fell on in her short program. She cried Tears of Joy, and her brilliant long program pulled her all the way from 16th place to 6th place.
• Evgeni Plushenko skating his fourth Olympic at age 31, and becoming the second person in the history of figure skating who collects four Olympic medals^note The first one was Swede Gillis Grafström, who won four Olympic medals in the Winter Games of 1920, 1924, 1928, and 1932. Plushenko managed to place second in the short program and placed first in the team event long program while competing with guys who were 10 years younger than him. He contributes a massive 19 points, which secures Russia's hold on figure skating for the team event gold, despite a) being 31, which is geriatric in figure skating terms, and b) having to skate with torn meniscus in both knees and four bolts holding his spine together. Badass.
  • It should be noted that the only reason he withdrew from the men's event was because one of the bolts in his spine broke. To paraphrase a quote, only God could keep him off the ice. The broken bolts are made from medical-grade metal, which is also used as materials for aircraft. Now imagine how much force his body takes after each landed jump.
  • The music he skated to was nothing to sneeze at either: A combination of the most memorable parts of Plushenko's most well-known programs, arranged by long-time friend and collaborator Edvin Marton. The title? "The Best of Plushenko".
• As controversial as it may be, Adelina Sotnikova's winning performances in the 2014 Sochi Games were unexpected, due to her history of inconsistency. She was left out of the team event in favor of Yulia Lipnitskaya, and she used this as motivation to finally put together two clean skates and win. Her win may be disputed, but most will agree that she earned her place on the podium.
• Canada defeats Sweden 3-0 in the men's hockey game for the gold medal, causing both Canada's men's and women's hockey teams to have a perfect Olympic Winter Games, going 11-0 combined—6-0 for the men, 5-0 for the women. In the men's case, Canada finally erased the ghosts of the 1994 Lillehammer Games' hockey shootout loss to Sweden from their collective minds.
• On 15 February 2013, a meteorite exploded above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. One year later, the first anniversary of the event happened during the 2014 Sochi Games. To mark the anniversary, all of the gold medals awarded on that day had pieces of the Chelyabinsk meteorite embedded in them with the date of the meteorite explosion inscribed, because a meteorite impact is as global an event as the Olympic Games are.
• In speed skating, there were four medal clean sweeps—achieved by the Netherlands. The women's 1500m saw the four Dutch skaters take the top four positions. They won at least one medal in every event and their domination saw them more than double their previous record medal haul.

Rio 2016

• Rio's opening ceremony had a lower budget than London and Beijing, and still managed to be visually spectacular and raise awareness of the environment. The closing ceremony got even better. The "Rio to Tokyo" handover had a flashy clip featuring Captain Tsubasa, Hello Kitty, Pac-Man, Doraemon, and Mario! Just to get hyped for the 2020 Tokyo Games. The real highlight, however, of said closing ceremony was Shinzo Abe, the Japanese Prime Minister himself appearing on top of a green pipe, holding a red ball all while dressed up as Mario. At this point, that alone should make anyone watching it hyped for the 2020 Tokyo Games.
• Even before the Games started, Oksana Chusovitina qualified for her seventh Olympics, at the age of 40; she turned 41 before the Games started. While this is impressive itself, what really makes this a CMOA is that Oksana is a gymnast. This is a sport where most competitors are in their teens, and very few compete past their early-20s, maybe mid-20s.^note To put it in perspective, Team USA captain Aly Raisman was called "Grandma Aly" by her teammates... at age 22. Again, Oksana is in her early-40s, making her both the oldest and longest-running Olympic gymnast. In the end, not only did Chusovitina make the vault finals, in the finals themselves, she attempted the infamous "Produnova" vault, at the time the hardest vault in women's gymnastics — and almost managed to hit it ^note she got it fully to her feet, which many gymnasts who attempt this vault struggle to do, but hit the mat too low and with so much force that she buckled down almost double after landing, causing her to bounce forward and fall. (And if she had hit it, depending on how clean it was, there's a chance, albeit a slim one, that she would have not only medaled, but potentially upset reigning world champion Maria Paseka for the silver.)
• Refugees are allowed to compete as an Olympic team of their own for the first time. The cheer for the Team Refugee delegation was one of the loudest ones to come from this Parade of Nations, beaten only by Brazil and maybe Portugal's. And then Fehaid Aldeehani^note From Kuwait, who was barred from the Olympics in the 2012 London Games due to government interference. Because the suspension was not a result of player tampering, like the Russians have been accused of, he was granted permission to compete as an independent, at double trap, becomes the first independent Olympic athlete to win a gold medal.
• This is Kosovo and South Sudan's first time competing under their own flags. Less than two days after the start of the Olympics, judoka Majlinda Kelmendi won the first medal for her country, Kosovo. And just not any medal—it was the gold medal. What a way to make history.
• Juan Martín del Potro won the bronze medal in men's singles tennis in the 2012 London Games, but had been plagued by injuries since then to such an extent that he spent almost two years out of competition to undergo multiple wrist surgeries and was ranked only No. 141 at the time of Rio. To make matters even worse, he drew World No. 1 Novak Djokovic as his first-round opponent. Del Potro, however, refused to be discouraged by his constant bad luck—not only did he beat Djokovic, but he also beat Rafael Nadal in a grueling semi-finals to make the gold medal final, where he still had enough energy and guts left to battle with defending gold medalist Andy Murray for over four hours! Murray beat him to become the first tennis player to win two singles gold medals, which in itself is a Moment of Awesome, but seeing del Potro better his London bronze with silver against all odds and after all the hardships he'd gone through was an Awesome and Heartwarming sight for much of the tennis community.
• Rafaela Silva, a judoka in the 57 kg weight class, is the first to give Brazil a gold medal. To make things Heartwarming too, she's a native of one of the most dangerous parts of Rio de Janeiro, and had initially started taking judo as a joke. To switch back to Awesome, she defeated the No. 1 ranked fighter in the world^note At least, for this weight class for the medal, Sumiya Dorjsuren, and had been disqualified for an illegal move four years prior in the 2012 London Games^note Leading Internet Jerks to shower her with racist insults, making Silva determined to turn 2016 into a Redemption Quest.
• Boxer Robson Conceição got Brazil's first gold in this sport. He came from a poor upbringing in Bahia, took boxing to get better at street fights, and had lost in the opening bout in both the 2008 Beijing Games and 2012 London Gomes. Come his third Olympic opportunity, all uncontested wins to the title and the crowd's delight.
• After getting silver in the 2012 London Games, the Japanese male gymnastics team led by Kohei Uchimura finally gets gold in the team all-around. Uchimura then becomes the first man in 44 years to win back-to-back gold medals in the men's all-around gymnastics, in an incredibly high-quality final that saw him win by less than a tenth of a point over Ukrainian Oleg Verniaiev.
• Weightlifter Óscar Figueroa Mosquera gets the third gold medal for Colombia, with a total of 318 kg in the men's 62 kg class. In the 2008 Beijing Games he was injured, in the 2012 London Games he lost the gold to the Indonesian Eko Yuli Irawan, and since he had planned to retire after Rio... here he gets it in his last chance. He then left his shoes on the mat to signal his retirement. He went out in style.
• Another one for weightlifting: In the men's 77 kg class, Kazakhstan's Nijat Rahimov not only wins gold but also sets a world record in clean and jerk... of 214 kg, with the total being 379 kg.
• Lithuanian Aurimas Didžbalis celebrates his weightlifting bronze medal... with an incredible backflip.
• The entire U.S. women's gymnastics team. With a total of 9 medals^note Simone Biles won gold in the all-around, vault, and floor exercise, and bronze on the balance beam; Aly Raisman won silver in the all-around and floor exercise; Madison Kocian won silver in the uneven bars; Laurie Hernandez won silver in the balance beam; plus the team gold, they have been deemed the greatest team in history. To wit:
  • After dominating in qualifying^note The top three scores; Gabby Douglas was left out of the all-around because of the two-per-country rule, the team, led by Simone Biles, successfully defended their team gold, dominating from beginning to end—they were so far ahead by 10 points after the qualifying round that the commentators quickly conceded that the real battle was for second and third place^note It was even commented, half-seriously, that with that much of a lead, the U.S. team could perform disastrously the next day and still win. They won by more than 8 points after having won by 5+ in the 2012 London Games, and they also achieved the highest combined score in every single event (which they had not done in London). Their nickname is the "Final Five", since starting with the 2020 Tokyo Games, only 4 members will be allowed per team and, more heartwarmingly, because this was the final bow for Márta Károlyi, closing just about three decades of training gymnasts between her husband Béla and herself.^note It turns out the "Final Five" will not in fact be the final five-person team, since the gymnastics governing body announced in 2019 that they'll be returning to the five-person team format for 2024 and beyond. The latter meaning still stands, however.
  • Individually:
    • As predicted, Simone Biles got the gold in the all-around^note The first time the same country has 4-peated that, becoming both the second African-American woman to win the all-around, as well as the second American gymnast to win both the team and the all-around at the Games, after teammate Gabby Douglas first accomplished that in the 2012 London Games. To put Simone's dominance in perspective, according to Olympic records, her margin of victory is larger than all the margins for the Women's all-around since 1980...combined. Biles also later earned gold on the vault, becoming the first U.S. woman to do so, and by no small margin either—she scored the two highest vaults in the competition, 15.900 and 16.033^note The next highest was 15.533 by Swiss Giulia Steingruber, which gave the country its first ever gymnastics medal with the bronze. Biles followed this up with a bronze on the balance beam, which would have been at least a silver and could have been yet another gold had she not touched the beam in an effort to not fall^note She finished almost eight-tenths behind gold medalist Sanne Wevers of the Netherlands, and that near-fall probably cost Biles around that much between the half-point deduction for grabbing the beam and the additional deductions for the skill error that led to it, but Sanne Wevers also had a more difficult routine planned and decided after Biles' mistake that she didn't need to go for it and played it safe instead, so it's hard to say who would've won, and capped off her Olympics with a fourth gold on floor exercise^note which she did just as dominantly as she did in the vault—it wasn't even close, tying the record for the most golds and the most medals won by a female gymnast in a single Games. And just to cap off the Awesome, in the process Biles also did something that hadn't been done in twenty years, and only twice since 1972: She came into the Games as the reigning world all-around champion and won the Olympic all-around^note Ludmilla Tourischeva of the Soviet Union, the 1972 Olympic champion, was the reigning world all-around champion going into Munich. The next to accomplish this feat was 1995 world all-around champion Lilia Podkopayeva of the Ukraine, who also won the all-around in the 1996 Atlanta Games.
    • Meanwhile, teammate Aly Raisman made up for barely losing the bronze in the 2012 London Games by getting the silver in the all-around, marking only the second time that U.S. gymnasts have gone 1-2 in the all-round competition^note Nastia Liukin and Shawn Johnson did so at the 2008 Beijing Games. Raisman was just fine with the silver because she knew who she was up against, and expressed the same sentiment about her silver medal in the floor exercise^note During the run-up to the 2016 Rio Games, Raisman jokingly lamented, "I'm the reigning Olympic champion on floor [exercise], my routine is harder than it was in 2012, and I still can't catch Simone!".
    • Laurie Hernandez, a 16-year-old in her senior international debut, not only contributed excellent scores on three of four events in the team finals, but went on to make the balance beam event finals and win silver. Now that's how to start your senior career off with a bang.
    • Madison Kocian was brought on for one event—the uneven bars. In her three performances, she: 1) qualified first into the event finals, 2) tied her own teammate Biles (on vault) and Russia's Aliya Mustafina (also on bars) for the highest score on any event in the team finals, and 3) won silver in the event final, finishing less than a tenth behind the aforementioned Mustafina, who was the defending Olympic champion on the event and who brought out every trick in her arsenal for potentially the last routine of her career. What American weakness on the uneven bars?
    • Though she was the only one of the "Final Five" to walk away without an individual medal, Gabby Douglas performed a spectacular series of routines in qualifying to place third overall, though she was kept out of the individual all-around final by the two-per-country-rule — had she been allowed to compete and done even close to as well as she did in qualifying, not only would she have almost certainly gotten on the podium, but she might have even been able to challenge Raisman for the silver. She also put up a huge score on the uneven bars, qualifying to the event finals in third place only a tenth of a point behind Kocian, and with the highest execution score to boot (the top two qualifiers edged her out with their higher difficulty scores). She then went on to perform an equally stunning routine for an identical score on bars in the team final. Though she ultimately missed the podium because of a mistake in the finals, she was a real medal threat going in, and most likely would have medaled with a hit routine (her qualifying/team final score was a solid two-tenths above the score that German gymnast Sophie Scheder won the bronze medal with).
• Four years after the 2012 London Games and six years after her all-around win at the 2010 World Championships, Russian gymnast Aliya Mustafina wins the bronze medal in the all-around, repeating what she did in London four years earlier and becoming the first woman since Simona Amanar in the 2000 Sydney Games to make the Olympic all-around podium in two consecutive Games. Given that an ACL tear in 2011 had many questioning whether she'd even return to the sport at all, the fact that she is not only back at the Olympics, but once again on the podium, proves that she is indeed one of the sport's greatest. And then she capped off her magnificent career by successfully defending her Olympic gold in her best event, the uneven bars, just edging out American Madison Kocian.
• Even though she didn't medal, Chinese gymnast Shang Chunsong had an incredible all-around competition, missing the podium by only the tiniest of margins (with quite a few fans believing she should have edged out Mustafina for bronze), despite the fact that she fell ill shortly after arriving in Rio, limiting her ability to train/practice. Her results may have been a disappointment, but her performance most certainly was not.
• Sanne Wevers wins the first ever individual Olympic medal for the Netherlands in women's gymnastics with an incredibly difficult and gorgeously performed routine on the balance beam — and it's gold.
• In fact, every individual apparatus final in women's gymnastics had a historic medal won by a gymnast from a country other than the gymnastics "Big Four"^note the USA, China, Russia, and Romania, though Wevers' was the only gold. For comparison, in 2008 and 2012 combined, there were only three medals won by gymnasts from non-Big Four countries^note Hong un Jong (North Korea) and Oksana Chusovitina (Germany) winning vault medals in 2008, and Beth Tweddle (Great Britain) winning an uneven bars medal in 2012.
  • Giulia Steingruber of Switzerland, like Wevers, won her country's first-ever medal in women's gymnastics with a bronze on vault, and actually had the second-highest combined execution score after Simone Biles. How good was her execution? Silver medal winner Maria Paseka, the reigning world champion on vault, had a seven-tenths difficulty advantage over Steingruber, but Steingruber's final combined score for her two vaults (30.432) was less than a tenth of a point behind Paseka's (30.506) — one less deduction and she'd have had silver^note and more than a few fans think she should have had it anyway, as Paseka's score on her second vault was a bit high compared to how other vaults were scoring. Over the reigning world champion.
  • Sophie Scheder of Germany won the first medal on uneven bars for post-reunification Germany with a bronze on that event — only their second medal overall, and the first won by a native German gymnast (the other was won in 2008 by Oksana Chusovitina, a former Soviet gymnast transplanted to Germany).
  • Amy Tinkler of Great Britain won her country's first medal on women's floor, the country's second women's gymnastics medal overall ^note not counting a team medal from 1928, when women's gymnastics was so different as to be virtually unrecognizable, also a bronze.
    • This one is also a moment of awesome for British women's gymnastics as a whole, because their only previous individual event medal was won just four years earlier at the London Olympics. After failing to medal even once for decades, they win their first and second medals in back-to-back Olympics.
• Dipa Karmakar, India's first ever female Olympic gymnast (and first of any gender for half a century) not only qualifying to the vault finals but coming within two-tenths of a point of a medal. No, she didn't quite do well enough to medal, but it's still an impressive performance for someone who was essentially breaking her own path the whole way — and it potentially paves the way for other Indian girls to follow in her footsteps.
• Great Britain had never won a gold medal in men's gymnastics in its 116 years of competition...until Max Whitlock wins two gold medals on the same day in floor exercise and pommel horse. In addition, Alexander Naddour wins bronze on the pommel horse, the first U.S. medal in that event since the 1984 Los Angeles Games. And Brazil managed to win silver and bronze on the floor.
• Danell Leyva originally wasn't even supposed to compete at the Olympics — he was brought in as an alternate on the U.S. men's gymnastics team after one of its members became injured — but he made the most of his unexpected opportunity by winning two silver medals in one day on parallel bars and horizontal bar to become the most successful U.S. male gymnast in the 2016 Rio Games.
• Third Time's The Charm applies for Brazilian gymnast Diego Hypolito, after two floor competitions that went badly, a quadrennium where he was dismissed from his old club and suffered from depression, only to to finally go well and get a silver in front of his home crowd in 2016: "First I fell on my butt, then I fell on my face, but now I fell on my feet!"
• German artistic gymnast Fabian Hambuchen wins the gold on high bar, after winning the bronze in the 2008 Beijing Games and the silver in the 2012 London Games. Rio is his last competition, and he topped off an incredible career with the one medal he wanted most.
• Kristin Armstrong from the U.S. gets gold in the women's individual time trial for the third time^note She also got it in the 2008 Beijing Games and the 2012 London Games... the day before she turned 43. What a birthday present.
• Kayla Harrison of the U.S. defended her judo gold, and with authority, too. All her victories came by scoring ippon, the highest class of technique and an instant win. This included the finals. She was ahead by way of penalties, but with just seconds to go, she forced her longtime rival, Audrey Tcheumeo of France, to tap out to her infamous armbar. And this after being out of the sport for some time, due to knee surgery and time spent wanting to become a firefighter. Harrison's Arch-Enemy Mayra Aguiar, who only lost the semi-finals to Tcheumeo because the Frenchwoman kept on doing nothing and thus had Aguiar lose on accumulated penalties, easily got the bronze to celebrate with the home crowd.
• Rugby sevens is played for the first time at the Olympics. What country gets the honor of winning the first gold medal in men's rugby sevens? None other than the tiny island archipelago of Fiji, 43-7 against Great Britain. To make things even more Awesome, this is Fiji's first ever medal in any Olympics.
• And how about golf, the sport that entered the Olympics alongside rugby sevens?^note In this case, an Olympic sport for the first time since 1904. Justin Rose took gold after a hole-in-one in the first round and out-dueling reigning Open Champion Henrik Stenson in the final round with a tight pitch shot on the last hole, and Matt Kuchar shot an outstanding eight-under 63 in the final round to steal bronze. For many Brazilians, this was their first world-class exposure to the sport, and the finish delivered.
• The women's golf tournament was a strong follow-up to the men's, whose finish wound up with some parallels to the end of the men's tournament: Seven-time major champion and former World No. 1 Inbee Park added a gold medal to her incredible career by finishing at Justin Rose's winning score of 16 under par, and then-current World No. 1 Lydia Ko won silver with a 72nd hole birdie, every stroke as clutch as Rose's—she also carded a hole-in-one earlier in the tournament for good measure. And this field was much more top-heavy than the men, including nine of the top ten players in the world—the odd woman out was because South Korea had more than four players ranked in the top 15 to begin with!
• Simone Manuel becoming the first African-American woman to win an individual swimming medal—a gold in the 100m freestyle. The best part: She tied with Canadian Penny Oleksiak for the gold, both of them beating out heavy favorite Cate Campbell in an incredible dash to the wall and breaking the Olympic record on the event in the process. They both were surprised and delighted with the results, and hugged each other after getting their gold medals. The following night, Manuel swims again, this time as the anchor in the women's 4*100 medley relay, and the Americans win comfortably, reaching another historic milestone: The first country to amass 1000 gold medals in the modern history of the Games.
  • Oleksiak's performance is also Awesome on its own: at the age of 16, she surprised everyone by becoming the first Olympic champion born in the 2000s and the Canadian with the most medals in one edition of the Summer Games^note Four: that gold, a silver in the 100m butterfly, and two relay bronzes, where, as the anchor, she swam fast enough to get the Canadian team onto the podium.
• Michael Phelps got his 4th consecutive gold medal in the 200m medley, and broke a record for most individual golds...a record from the Ancient Olympics.
• Michael Phelps had won all the gold medals he competed for...until it was time for the 100m butterfly competition. Then, the Singaporean Joseph Schooling—who had taken a photo with Phelps in 2008◊ — blew Phelps, his rival Chad Le Clos and the Hungarian Laszlo Cseh out of the water, winning the gold, which was the first Olympic gold ever for Singapore, and setting a new Olympic Record. To be fair to Phelps, Le Clos and Cseh, all three tied for silver, which is noteworthy in itself.
• Katie Ledecky accomplishes a mission she set out years ago and claims four gold medals in Rio, in the process becoming only the second female swimmer in history, after Debbie Meyer in the 1968 Mexico City Games, to sweep the distance freestyles—the 200m, 400m, and 800m. And if you thought her performance in London was impressive, in the 400m and 800m, she literally left everyone else in her wake^note The gap between gold and silver was nearly five seconds for the 400m and over eleven seconds for the 800m and took nearly two seconds off each race's world record. In the process, she maintained an impressive undefeated streak in individual finals: Starting with that first gold in London 4 years earlier, she was in 15 finals in international competition^note Including the Olympics, the World Championships, and the Pan-Pacific Championships... and won every one of them.^note On top of that, many argued that none of the races in which she'd won Olympic gold was her best event! That would be the 1500 m, which didn't make its Olympic debut for women until 2020... make that 2021.
• The controversy concerning Russia's Yulia Efimova, who was re-admitted at the last minute following an appeal after the Russian doping controversy, proves moot in the 100m breaststroke. American Lilly King beats Efimova for the gold while her countrywoman Katie Mieli wins the bronze just behind Efimova.
• Hungarian swimmer Katinka Hosszu had been to three Olympics, getting at most a fourth place. After a quadrennium where, driven mostly by her husband, she trained so hard and swam so dominantly to earn the nickname "Iron Lady", Hosszu won the 400m individual medley with a world record^note Finishing 5 seconds ahead of the silver medalist, the 200m medley with the Olympic record, a third gold in the 100m backstroke, and a silver in the 200m backstroke...
• ...losing to Maya Dirado, where third time proved the charm after two silvers in the individual medleys. But in their final encounter in the 200m backstroke, Dirado managed to chase down Hosszu on the final stretch and out-touch her by a mere 0.06 seconds. What a way to Earn Your Happy Ending.
• In men's swimming, Ryan Murphy continues an American hot streak on the backstrokes dating back to 1996 in Atlanta by sweeping the 100m and 200m and then going on to set the 100m world record during his leg of the 4*100 medley relay^note In the medley relay, the backstroke has to go first because it's the one stroke that starts in the pool. Because the first leg of a swimming relay has a regulation start and end, it can officially count for records. Meanwhile, also in the 100m, David Plummer took the bronze in the event; not bad for a 30-year-old, and not bad for a US swimming team full of first-timers^note The aforementioned Maya Dirado, Lilly King, Katie Mieli, and Simone Manuel are included along with Murphy and Plummer.
• In the 2000 Sydney Games, Anthony Ervin surprised the swimming world by tying with fellow American and defending champion from Atlanta Gary Hall Jr. for the gold medal in the 50m freestyle. In spite of the 16-year gap since that time, Ervin jumped in the pool and out-touched defending champion Florent Manaudou by 0.01 second to win the gold, becoming the oldest swimmer to win gold at age 35 in a highly-competitive field where the difference between him at gold and fellow American Nathan Adrian at bronze was just 9 hundredths of a second.
• Dutchman Dorian van Rijsselberghe won the gold medal for the second time in a row in the men's RS:X windsurfing. And just like four years ago in London, the actual^note Double scoring medal race was a complete formality. After the penultimate race, his lead was so big he only had to sail the last race to win—although he went on to win that one, too, because why not?
• Italy's Tania Cagnotto, after finishing 18th at the 2000 Sydney Games, 8th at the 2004 Athens Games, 5th at the 2008 Beijing Games, and missing the bronze medal in the 2012 London Games by a very few points, finally managed to break the string of bad luck by winning the bronze medal at the 3m individual diving. And, just a few days before, she and her fellow countrywoman Francesca Dallapé won the silver medal at the 3m synchronized. The kicker? These are her last Games! That's a great way to sign out!
• Almaz Ayana from Ethiopia destroying the competition in the women's 10,000m to win gold, breaking the world record that had stood since 1993 by a staggering 14 seconds. And the rest of the field wasn't even slow, either—Kenya's Vivian Cheruiyot set a national record while winning silver and Ethiopia's Tirunesh Dibaba ran a personal best too to win bronze and get on the podium for this event for a third consecutive Olympics. Even more: All of these women plus Kenya's Alice Nanowuna broke the Olympic record from the 2008 Beijing Games, which belonged to Dibaba at 29'54"66.
• Wayde van Niekerk of South Africa won the men's 400m, at the same time breaking Michael Johnson's 1999 world record of 43.18 seconds by finishing in 43.03. And he did all this in the outside lane, a lane which is statistically harder to win from. And Johnson, to his credit, was a Graceful Loser.
• Jamaica's sprint dominance continues:
  • A gold for Elaine Thompson and a bronze for Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce^note The 2008 and 2012 Olympic champion in the women's 100m dash.
  • Another gold for Elaine Thompson in the 200m dash.
  • A bronze for Shericka Jackson in the 400m dash.
  • A gold for Omar McLeod in the 110m hurdles—Jamaica's first ever gold in this event.
  • A silver for the women's 4*100m, the women's 4*400m, and the men's 4*400m relay teams.
  • And the legendary Usain Bolt three-peated his victories in the 100m, 200m and 4*100m relay, becoming the first man to win these events three times in three consecutive Olympics, with speeds in all races that were his slowest yet, yet still faster than his competitors^note A record likely to stand for a long time. It will not be until 2024 or 2028 that we'll know if someone will even tie it, and even if so, it's unlikely it will ever be broken. He's now tied with Carl Lewis and Paavo Nurmi for the most Olympic track and field medals, and with Lewis, Nurmi, Mark Spitz, and Larisa Latynina second only to Michael Phelps for the most gold medals won for a single sport.
• Though the Americans weren't as dominant on the track as they have been in the past, Brianna Rollins, Nia Ali, and Kristi Castlin pulled off a first: Going 1-2-3 in the women's 100m hurdles, the first time the American women pulled off such a feat, and the first time this event ever got swept.
• Anita Włodarczyk, hammer thrower from Poland, completely outclassing her competition by first setting a new Olympic record, then breaking it and her own world record in the next throw. She was so much better than the rest, even her worst throw would give her silver medal...and the best would give her gold in men's competition four years ago^note Granted, the women's hammer is much lighter.
• Michelle Carter winning the U.S.'s first Olympic gold in women's shot put.
• Pole vaulter Thiago Braz da Silva gives Brazil its second gold medal, setting a new Olympic record and defeating the gold medalist from the 2012 London Games, Frenchman Renaud Lavillenie, in the process, while using a high risk/high reward strategic move^note He wanted the bar to be set at 6.03m, a height he may not have practiced with before, in order to one-up the Olympic record set a few minutes earlier by the Frenchman. Quite amazing, especially since Thiago is only 22 years old!
• Christian Taylor becomes the first athlete to repeat as champion of the triple jump since 1900-04. Even more amazingly, between the 2012 London Games and the 2016 Rio Games, Taylor was forced to start from scratch by switching legs. Throughout his career up through London, he launched from his left foot, but after he began experiencing terrible knee pain there, he switched to launching with his right foot, and still managed to best the field in Rio with his very first jump. In fact, all the medalists made their marks with their first jumps.
• Despite possibly being overshadowed by Usain Bolt's triple-double, Ashton Eaton defended his decathlon gold, becoming only the third man to do so, after fellow American Bob Mathias in 1948 and 1952 and Britain's Daley Thompson in 1980 and 1984.
• And Mo Farah defended his 2012 golds at 5,000 and 10,000 m, joining Finland's Lasse Virén (1972 and 1976) as the only runners to win this double in consecutive Games.
• Puerto Rico obtains its first gold medal thanks to tennis player Monica Puig, who beat three Grand Slam champions — Garbiñe Muguruza, Petra Kvitová, and Angelique Kerber — to win it.
• Despite being eliminated from the singles and doubles tournaments in the first round, Venus Williams still became the second person in history to win five Olympic medals in tennis^note The first was Britain's Kathleen McKane Godfree, who won five medals at the 1920 Antwerp Games and 1924 Paris Games with a silver in the mixed-doubles game.
• American Helen Maroulis defeats 3-time Olympic gold medalist^note Albeit in 55 kg and 13-time World gold-medalist^note 2002-2015 except 2004; 2014-2015 in 53 kg Saori Yoshida to win the 53 kg freestyle wrestling gold, and the first American woman to win a gold.
• While her fellow countrywoman Saori Yoshida was unsuccessful, Japanese wrestler Kaori Icho managed to win her fourth consecutive gold medal, becoming the first female in any sport to win individual event gold at four consecutive Olympics. Incidentally, Icho won the bout 3-2 after being down 2-1 after the first period and scoring a critical two point takedown in the final seconds.
• Three of Icho's teammates — Eri Tosaka^note 48 kg, Risako Kawai^note 63 kg, and Sara Dosho^note 69 kg, also won gold in Rio. Kawai dominated her match, not conceding a single point in her final, while both Tosaka and Dosho earned critical two point take-downs in the final seconds of their matches^note Tosaka won 3-2, and Dosho won 2-2 since she was the more recent wrestler in her bout to score.
• Ahmad Abughaush winning for Jordan its very first medal in their entire history, for Taekwondo — 68kg. And it was a gold!
• Kimia Alizadeh Zonoozi became the first woman to win a medal for Iran: A bronze in Taekwondo — 57kg. A Muslim, she wore her traditional khimār scarf under her helmet.^note Islam allows women to participate in any sport as long as they can cover. Several companies now offer appropriate sportswear for Muslim female competitors.
• Even though it was their first gold in the event since the 2004 Athens Games, the Chinese winning the men's 10m platform isn't necessarily notable. What is notable is the winner, Chen Aisen, getting three of his six dives over 100: One over 102, another over 105, and his final dive a 108.
• In their previous twelve tries to gain Olympic gold, the Brazilian men's soccer team had never succeeded. Cue the 2016 Rio Games for the gold medal, when, after a 1-1 slug-fest against Germany — the same country which had destroyed the host Brazil 7-1 in the 2014 World Cup — the game heads to penalty kicks. With the count at 4-4 the Germans suffer a blocked kick. Neymar Jr., the Brazilian captain, comes up for his last penalty kick, and makes the shot, securing Brazil's first soccer Olympic gold medal ever... on home ground. Here's the clip.
• Repeating the women four years before, the Brazilian men's volleyball — which is probably the country's second favorite sport after football — were nearly eliminated in the group round. Despite the female team suffering a Tear Jerker elimination the day before^note They had not lost a set in the group stage... only to lose the quarter-finals in the tie-break to a China team who had been struggling — and went on to beat two Ensemble Darkhorses for the gold, the men handily beat Argentina in the quarter-finals — to the crowd's delight, as the neighbors are an Arch-Enemy in soccer and The Rival anywhere else. Come a semi-finals match against Russia, who in the 2012 final against Brazil had a staggering comeback to get gold, Brazil steamrolls, 3-0. Final with Italy, who beat them in the group stage, and had a huge semi-finals comeback on favorite United States? Another 3-0! It was even more Awesome for Brazil's libero Sérgio Santos, who managed to be chosen tournament MVP at age 40.
• Great Britain win their first gold medal ever in women's field hockey. Against the Netherlands. Who are ranked number one in the world. Mostly thanks to their amazing goalkeeper Maddie Hinch, who saved every goal in the penalty shootout. Two of the members of the British team — Kate and Helen Richardson-Walsh — also created history by being the first same-sex married couple to win gold medals.
• And on the same day as the above, Nick Skelton — who has competed in seven Olympic Games — wins gold in the individual showjumping... at the age of 58. What makes this even more amazing? Not only did he have a hip replacement back in 2011, but he broke his neck in 2000 and was told that another fall would kill him.
• Niger, the poorest country in the world, won its second medal ever^note (Issake Dabore won the bronze medal for light-welterweight in the 1972 Munich Games) when Abdoul Razak Issoufou got a silver on Taekwondo.
• Spanish Carolina Marín became the first non-Asiatic woman to win the gold medal in badminton. After losing the first set.
• How many countries won their first Olympic gold ever in Rio? Not one, not two, not three, but nine: Bahrain, Fiji, Ivory Coast, Jordan, Kosovo, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Tajikistan, and Vietnam. Plus the aforementioned gold by Fehaid Aldeehani, the first under no country's flag.
• Marriage proposals can be both these and Heartwarming Moments. Doing so on public stage even more so. And it's hard to have more public a stage than the Olympic Games. Interestingly, Rio has brought forth the idea of athletes proposing to one another like never before. There were at least five marriage proposals during the Games, and all were accepted. And to further emphasize the idea of acceptance and openness from the Games, two of the proposals were made to homosexual partners.
• Normally, the host country of one Olympics goes on to do poorly in the next one. Great Britain bucked that trend massively and made Rio their best Games since 1908, even better than the 2012 London Games. In fact, they actually won more gold medals than China^note (Although China beat the U.K. in total medals on account of a lot of bronzes). For added Awesome, many of the medals the athletes won were in sports that Britain had not won any medals in for years.
• Vinicus and Tom (the mascots) having their own cartoon.

PyeongChang 2018

• Probably one of the biggest Moments of Awesome came before the games even began: North and South Korea decided to compete together as a unified Korea. They're even running a women's hockey team composed of people from both nations. Given the tensions between the two nations, this is a very big deal indeed.
• Maame Biney becoming the first African-American female to qualify for the speed skating team. She didn't win a medal, but it's still a remarkable achievement.
• 30 years after Calgary and the first Jamaican bobsledding team, they finally send their first women's bobsledding team. Joining them for the very first time is Nigeria, another country not known for winter sports. Even more remarkable is that two of them participated in the 2012 Games, making them part of a very small group of athletes to compete in both the Summer and Winter Olympics.
• Redmond "Red" Gerard, at only 17 years old, nails his final run in slopestyle snowboarding to win America its first gold medal. He's also the first person born in the 2000s to get a Winter Olympics medal, and the youngest American to medal in a snowboarding event. (Also, he got away with saying 'shit' on international television.) In the same event, Canada’s Mark McMorris winning the bronze medal a year after suffering a near-fatal accident
• Simen Hegstad Kruger of Norway had a difficult start in the Skiathalon event, getting caught up in a collision in the first moments of the race that broke one of his ski poles and forced him into last place. A setback like this would be devastating for most athletes, but Simen got back up, replaced his pole, and set out into a long 30km cross-country race. His determination was ultimately rewarded with a Gold Medal and a 1-2-3 finish for his country.
• Figure Skating:
  • Music from Yuri!!! on Ice being used for Miu Suzaki's and Ryuichi Kihara's ice skating routine can come across as this for anime fans.
  • History being made every which way:
    • Mirai Nagasu becoming the first American woman to land a triple axel at the Olympics, propelling the US to bronze in the team competition.
    • German's Aljona Savchenko/Bruno Massot taking gold in the pairs' event—the first time Germany has won this event since 1952.
    • Canada's Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford taking the bronze after landing a throw quadruple salchow.
    • Despite their overall poor performance that left them in 15th place, the American husband and wife team of Chris and Alexa Scimeca Knierim became the first to perform a bit quadruple throw twist.
    • 17-year old Vincent Zhou landing a quadruple Lutz. Even better, he landed it in combination with a triple toe.
    • Yuzuru Hanyu becoming the first man to defend his Olympic men's figure skating gold medal since 1952. Noteworthy that this was his first competition back since suffering a major injury three months beforehand, missing out on two competitions that season! His short program set to Chopin's Ballade no. 1 was skated flawlessly; upon finishing it he hugged his coach Brian Orser and stated, "I'm back." His free skate "Seimei" was slightly less successful - performing on painkillers, he stumbled out of two jumps (but did not fall) - but still gave him his second gold. During practice, he couldn't land a single quad for the program, but he landed them when they mattered.
    • Shoma Uno getting the silver medal along with Hanyu's gold medal made it the first time Japan took the top two podium spots at the Winter Olympics since 1972.
    • Javier Fernández, in his final Olympics, winning the bronze medal in the men's side and thus becoming the first Spaniard to get a medal in the Olympic figure skating.
    • After setting a new short dance record for Olympic ice dancing, Canadians Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir are awarded the gold following the free dance. Coupled with their medals won in Vancouver, Sochi and earlier in these games^note (Gold for ice dancing at Vancouver, dual silver for ice dancing and team event at Sochi, and gold in the team event at Pyeongchang), the two become the most decorated figure skaters in Olympic history.
    • And this was the first Olympics in which all figure skaters were allowed to use music with lyrics in competition. (Ice dancers have been allowed to use such music since the 1997–98 season after dealing with in-score classical compositions.)
  • Nathan Chen had an unfortunately lackluster short skating performance (with all the media attention and pressure on him probably to blame), leaving him in 17th place for that day. How does he come back? By landing six quads (an Olympic record) and scoring 215.08 in the free skate (higher than gold medallist Yuzuru Hanyu's 206.17), bringing himself up to fifth place overall.
• After placing second in the 2014 men's freestyle skiing moguls in Sochi, Canadian Mikael Kingsbury wins the gold, capping off his repertoire of being the most accomplished mogul skier of all time. He also extends Canada's dominance in men's moguls at the Winter Olympics, succeeding Alexandre Bilodeau after his consecutive victories at Vancouver and Sochi.
• Snowboarder Chloe Kim winning gold in the half-pipe, honoring both of her countries, as her parents are from Korea. The best part is she secured gold on her first run, and didn't have to go all out on her final run because she was the last snowboarder and had she already won. Yet she did anyway, nailing back to back 1080s and beating her own score. And like the above mentioned Red Gerard, she's only 17 and the youngest woman ever to medal in snowboarding.
  • Or, she was for all of one day, before France's Julia Pereira de Sousa-Mabileau, 16, won a Snowboard Cross silver medal.
• Mixed doubles curling made its Olympic debut at Pyeongchang, with all eyes set on Canadians John Morris and Kaitlyn Lawes, veteran curlers who won gold at Vancouver and Sochi, respectively, for the traditional team sport. Not only did they capture gold, but Morris and Lawes became the first Canadians to hold two Olympic gold medals in the entire sport. What's especially impressive is they never worked together before: Morris was to pair with Rachel Homan, but she had to withdraw when her women's team qualified instead. They had only played together for 30 minutes before entering the mixed-doubles trials to qualify, won the right to represent Canada, and then took it all the way to gold.
• Never before had a Canadian ever stood on the Olympic podium for luge since its Winter Games debut, but that all ended when Alex Gough, who competed in her fourth Winter Olympics, nabbed the bronze in the women's singles race. Days later, Gough, along with men's singles competitor Sam Edney, and men's doubles duo Tristan Walker and Justin Snith, continued to establish Canada's rise in the sport for mixed team relay, winning the silver.
• In what might be one the greatest upsets in Winter Olympics history, 22-year-old Czech snowboarder Ester Ledecká takes the gold medal in women's super-G. Repeat: a snowboarder wins gold in a skiing event. Adding to such an achievement, Ledecká only started alpine skiing two years earlier, with her coaches simply wanting her to make it to the top-15 at Pyeongchang. Topping this craziness is Ledecká's pair of skis were previously owned by American alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin—though contrary to some reports, they weren't borrowed from Shiffrin; Ledecká's alpine coach confirmed shortly after her super-G gold that her camp had purchased said skis 18 months before the Games.
  • A week later, Ledecká does it again by becoming the first woman to earn two gold medals in different disciplines at a single Winter Games, winning the women's snowboard parallel giant slalom. This also marks her as the third Winter Olympian to medal in different events at the same Olympics.
• After a disappointing 2014 at Sochi for not having made the podium, Germany was determined to get back on it in Pyeongchang with two-man bobsledders Francesco Friedrich and Thorsten Margis (Friedrich placed at a disappointing eighth at Sochi, with the last time German teams were left off the podium was in the 1994 Lillehammer Games). Both men placed first by the final run; in a twist, Canadian bobsledders Justin Kripps and Alexander Kopacz would match their competitors' time, awarding both teams the gold. Incidentally, twenty years earlier at the 1998 Nagano Games, Canada was also awarded a gold medal upon tying the Italians' in the final run of two-men bobsledders.
• Jessi Diggans and Kikkan Randall ending the US' 42-year medal drought in cross-country skiing with a gold in the women's Sprint.
• Two 16-year-old New Zealanders, snowboarder Zoi Sadowski-Synnott and freestyle skier Nico Porteous, won bronze medals within two hours of each other to end the country's 26-year medal drought.
• The ending of the Men's Mass Start in biathlon, won by France's Martin Fourcade for about five centimeters (less than .01 sec - the mass start lasts for 15 km) against Germany's Simon Schempp - making him temporarily the joint best gold medallist in France's Olympic history (he became the sole holder of the title two days later when France won the Mixed relay). What makes it incredible and a bit karmic is that four years before, he got beaten in similar fashion, in the very same race, by Norway's Emil Svendsen.
• After twenty years since the inaugural women's ice hockey tournament at the 1998 Nagano Games, the United States women achieve their second gold medal victory against Canada, tying 2-2 in regulation time, heading past overtime into a shootout win.
• Since the 1980 Lake Placid Games, Hungary has not won a single medal at the Winter Games, but that streak ended with the men's 5000 metre relay for short track speed skating, with Shaoang Liu, Sándor Liu Shaolin, Viktor Knoch and Csaba Burján winning the nation's first gold medal in the Winter Games ever, beating out medal favorites South Korea and China, even achieving a new Olympic record for the event.
• Just like men's moguls were successfully defended by Canada since Vancouver 2010, Canadian women continue to dominate ski cross since its debut in those Games: Ashleigh McIvor was the first and Marielle Thompson at the 2014 Sochi Games. Although the latter was unable to finish in the quarter-finals at Pyeongchang, it's Kelsey Serwa, the silver medallist from Sochi, who takes the gold, followed by fellow Canadian Brittany Phelan.
• The German men's ice hockey team going on what is a "Cinderella run" to the gold medal game against the Olympic Athletes from Russia by upsetting higher-ranked Sweden and Canada by identical 4-3 scores; the last time a German team had a medal in the sport was the 1932 Lake Placid Games^note (Technically, West Germany achieved a bronze at the 1976 Innsbruck Games, but this was not a unified team). What's more is they needed a shootout win over Norway in the group stage and an overtime win over Switzerland in a qualifier just to get to the quarter-finals.
  • They ended up losing 4-3 to the Olympic Athletes from Russia in the final, but they took the heavily favored Russians to overtime in the process.
• The US men's curling team (John Shuster, Tyler George, Matt Hamilton, John Landsteiner, and alternate Joe Polo), after a slow start (which at one point saw them at 2-4), rallied back to win the first curling gold medal for the United States, beating out several curling powerhouses, including the No. 1 ranked man in the world, Swedish skip Niklas Edin, with an amazing eighth end in the gold medal match that saw them score five points in one fell swoop. And this after Shuster and Landsteiner were told 'thanks but no thanks' by USA Curling after their poor performance in Sochi. Shuster took that as a challenge, assembled a new team with Landsteiner and the others (which he dubbed 'The Rejects'), and the team brute-forced their way back into USA Curling's good graces by beating their hand-picked teams.
• When Great Britain's Lizzy Yarnold won Gold in the Women's Skeleton, she not only became the first Brit to defend a Winter Olympics title, but the most decorated British Winter Olympian ever, edging out the legendary ice dancers Torvill and Dean (Who have one gold and one bronze medal).
• For the first week, the US appeared to be on track to have their worst Winter Olympics in 20 years^note  And technically, they still did, as it was indeed the smallest medal haul since the Nagano Games. But the team pulled itself together and finished 4th place in the medal count.

Tokyo 2020

• The fact that the 2020 Tokyo Olympics even happened at all after previously having these Olympics be delayed from the initial 2020 dates due to the COVID-19 Pandemic causing an unprecedented year-long delay (though keeping the 2020 year as a part of marketing purposes for some reason) thanks to how the virus spread itself throughout the world and caused thousands upon millions of deaths upon it. It also meant that calls for inclusion and diversity before and during the +1 celebrations were more in a manner that the IOC debuted new branding that was teased in early-2021. Unfortunately, the Olympics being held this time around didn't have any spectators at any of the Olympic venues due to poor planning for vaccinating the rest of Japan^note only 15% of Japan's overall population was fully vaccinated by the time they got the Olympics going as opposed to the U.S.A. having almost half of its population being fully vaccinated (over 55% of it at least getting one dose by that time) by that same time, but aside from the What Could Have Been moments that might have been had if we got a proper crowd instead, the Olympics still must go on, now with the athletes being fully vaccinated for participating in these Olympics.
• Oksana Chusovitina's back! Yep, she qualified for her eighth Olympics.
• Brazilian footballer Formiga participated in her seventh Olympics, a record for a player in a team sport.
• The fact that video game music is used for the opening Parade of Nations. Not just any video game music, but some of the best of the genre, from iconic game franchises like Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Tales of..., Monster Hunter, Kingdom Hearts, Chrono Trigger, Sonic the Hedgehog, Phantasy Star Universe, Nier, the Soul Series, and plenty more.^note A full list is available here. "Video games are real music" indeed.
• Ahmed Hafnaoui of Tunisia, who swam the slowest of the qualifying swimmers in the men's 400 metre freestyle, swam the race of his life and got Tunisia its first gold medal of the 2020 games.
• Hidilyn Diaz winning the Philippines' first-ever Olympic gold medal by lifting an Olympic record of 127 kg in the women's 55 kg weightlifting final to beat out heavy favorite Liao Qiuyun by 1 kg.
• Japan winning its first gold medal in table tennis by upsetting China — who had won every single gold medal in table tennis in the last three Olympics — in the mixed doubles final.
• British diver Tom Daley, who had made his Olympic debut aged 14 at Beijing, had already won two bronze medals, one in the individual 10m at London 2012, and one in the synchronised 10m in Rio 2016. However, he was almost ready to quit after failing to make in individual 10m final in Rio, but decided to give it one more shot to try and win. He finally got the gold medal he craved in Tokyo 2020/21, with dive partner Matty Lee in the 10m synchronised. Their reaction, not to mention that of their coaching team, to winning not only brought tears to the eyes of BBC commentator Leon Taylor (himself a former Olympic silver medalist in the 10m synchro), but also a collective lump to the throat to a nation, who due to the time difference, were trying to eat their breakfast at the time. The fact it was also the second of three gold medals that Team GB won that day (The others being Adam Peaty in the swimming, who became the first British swimmer to defend an Olympic title, and Tom Pidcock in the cross country mountain biking), along with two silver medals, had the British media dub the day "Magic Monday".
  • Daley, when he wasn’t knitting in the stands, then added a bronze in the 10 metre individual to his gold, making him the most successful British diver ever - he’s also won titles at the World and European championships and the Commonwealth games.
• Momiji Nishiya wins Olympic gold in women's street skateboarding at the tender age of thirteen, making her Japan's youngest Olympic champion (and third youngest overall). The other two medalist were fellow thirteen year old Rayssa Leal of Brazil, and 16 year old Funa Nakayama of Japan.
  • The women’s park skateboard also gave us a bronze medalist (Great Britain’s Sky Brown), who was thirteen, and a silver medalist (Japan’s Kokona Hiraki), who was twelve.
• Abe Hifumi and Abe Uta, with their wins in Judo Men's 66kg and 52kg respectively, became the first ever SIBLINGS to win Olympic gold on the same day in individual events!
• Anna Kiesenhofer, postdoctoral fellow of mathematics, winning Gold in the women's individual road race, netting Austria its first Gold in the Summer Olympics since 2004, and only its second gold in cycling since the very first Olympics in 1896!
  • What makes this even better is how much of an utter upset it was. Kiesenhofer had not trained with a coach or a professional team, was Austria's sole representative in the race, and due to the route she took, was isolated from the other leading racers for the final 41 km. The silver medalist, Annemiek van Vleuten, (herself making a spectacular comeback from her horrific crash at the Rio Olympics), hadn't even realised she had been beaten to the gold until halfway through her interview!
• Flora Duffy won Bermuda's first ever Olympic gold medal in the women's triathlon, and in doing so, Bermuda, with a population of just over 70,000, became the smallest country to ever have an Olympic champion.
  • Silver medalist, Great Britain's Georgia Taylor-Brown, deserves a mention as well. Weeks before the event she was on crutches with a stress fracture to her leg and only just managed to qualify for the event. Then on the final kilometre of the bike route, she got a flat tyre, but rode it out instead of stopping. The incident caused her to slip further back into the field, but once she started running she made up the ground lost and finished in second. Talk about determination. She then went on to win gold for GB in the Triathlon mixed relay, alongside the men's silver medalist Alex Yee, London 2012 bronze medalist and Rio 2016 silver medalist Jonny Brownlee (finally winning his gold medal in his third and possibly final Olympics), and Jessica Learmonth.
• Hong Kong absolutely pops off this year, having a higher medal tally in this Olympics (6) than all previous years combined (3).
  • Edgar Cheung Ka-long of Hong Kong (ranking 19th in the world) beating out Daniele Garozzo of Italy (7th in the world, reigning Olympic champion) in Fencing Men's foil, winning the city's second Olympic gold to date, and the first Gold in a quarter of a century for the city since Lee Lai-shan (see Atlanta 1996). People from his hometown are understandably ecstatic, and quickly gave him nicknames like "Prince of Foils" (花劍王子) and "Hong Kong's God of Swords" (香港劍神) in honour of his victory.
  • Siobhan Haughey gaining not one but two silver medals in Swimming, in the 100m and 200m freestyle events respectively, on top of setting new Asian records for both events.
  • In the Table Tennis women's team event, Doo Hoi-kem, Lee Ho-ching and Minnie Soo Wai-yam defeating the German team 3-1, securing the city a bronze medal to join the lineup.
  • Grace Lau gaining a bronze medal in the Women's kata event of Karate, gaining the city a second bronze for the year.
  • Sarah Lee Wai-sze coming in third in the Women's sprint event in Cycling, bringing home the third bronze medal for Hong Kong this year.
• Charlotte Dujardin becoming Britain's most decorated female Olympian when she won bronze in the Dressage. Her current haul is three golds, one silver and two bronzes, and since she is only 36, and competing in a sport you can still do comfortably into your fifties, it's a fair bet to say that there is plenty of time for her to win more.
  • Track cyclist Laura Kenny (née Trott) then drew level with Dujardin after winning a silver in the Team Pursuit, and then a gold in the Madison. Kenny has more gold medals (5 + 1 silver), so actually overtook Dujardin in the table, and became the first British woman to win gold medals at three successive Olympics.
  • Laura Kenny's husband, fellow track cyclist Jason, then got his own moment of awesome when he won the men's Keirin. That then made him the most successful British Olympian ever with 7 golds and two silvers. That's means that overall, the Kennys have a very impressive 15 medals, with 12 of them being gold, between them.
    • How Kenny won the race should be mentioned. First off, some clarity. Jason Kenny had previously retired, but came back for Tokyo and stated in interviews that he was tired and not performing to his best, which was true; he only managed to win silver in the Team Sprint, and didn't even qualify for the Individual Sprint, both of which he was the defending champion. This meant that the other riders underestimated him - which he took full advantage of. The second that the pacemaker had left the track, Kenny (who was at the front) looked behind him and noticed that a gap had opened up between himself and the Australian rider (who was more concerned with the strong riders behind him, particularly the race favourite from the Netherlands). Knowing that it was now or never, Jason Kenny sprinted away from the field, and “went for it”, to quote the surprised commentators narrating the race, leaving the other riders stunned and struggling to catch up. He basically won the race with three laps still to go, when the Keirin is usually won after a burn up in the last couple of metres. See here.
• New Zealand rower Emma Twigg had a very unfortunate track record with the Olympics. After coming 9th in single sculls in 2008, she proceeded to come 4th in both London and Rio, with the last one being with a difference of only three microseconds, resulting in her retiring from the game. However, she decided to come out of retirement to try one more time to nab the elusive prize; handily winning Gold in the women's single sculls at the age of 34! Capped off by this occurring on the heels of the NZ women's coxless pair of Grace Prendergast and Kerri Gowler winning gold and followed by the women's eight getting silver and the men's eight getting gold (which included rower Hamish Bond, making NZ history at having won gold in rowing in three consecutive Olympics), resulted in a magical rowing afternoon for the Kiwis.
• The women's 200m freestyle relay having THREE teams break the world record — Australia, China, and the USA — with China ultimately taking the gold in a massive upset over Australia and Katie Ledecky swimming a great last leg to clinch silver for USA over Australia.
• Great Britain winning their first Olympic team medal in women's gymnastics since 1928 (when the sport was so different as to be virtually unrecognizable). In case anyone had been wondering whether their individual medals from the 2012 and 2016 Games were flukes, it's now become clear that GB is here to stay as a contender in the sport.^note The victory was extra sweet because much controversy had erupted around British Gymnastics' decision to leave Becky Downie, a Rio Olympian with an incredible — but inconsistent — bars set who didn't have a complete all-around program, off the team in favour of four all-around gymnasts — the argument being "the team has no chance at a medal anyway, so bring Becky, who at least has a medal-worthy bars set". Alice Kinsella, Amelie Morgan, and Jennifer and Jessica Gadirova vindicated themselves and then some by keeping cool heads in a final where more or less every other team fell apart in some way, and came back from a seventh-place standing after the first rotation to take the bronze over, most notably, Italy, France, and China.
  • Alice Kinsella, the veteran and leader of the young team at all of 20 years old, deserves special recognition here, being the only gymnast to compete all four events in the team final and putting together perhaps the best competition of her career after faltering in qualifications.
• The US women's gymnastics team holding on to win silver despite losing Simone Biles after the first rotation. Most of the media coverage focused around them not getting the gold, but the trio of Jordan Chiles, Suni Lee, and Grace McCallum (all first-time Olympians and Chiles had never even been to a World Championships) deserves major props for what they managed to do: they went into the second rotation without their top performer and with a low score on vault (from the vault Biles performed before withdrawing) that they had to absorb, and still managed to secure a top-two finish — most teams would probably not fare nearly as well under that set of circumstances. Credit especially goes to Chiles and Lee, who had to add routines on events they hadn't expected to be doing in the final (bars and beam for Chiles, floor for Lee), and Chiles in particular had struggled on those events in qualification, but both hit their last-minute routines in the team final to keep the team in the podium race.
  • MyKayla Skinner — the girl who didn't make Trials in 2012, didn't make the Games in 2016, and thought her Olympics would end after qualifications when she initially didn't make any finals — stepping up to win silver on the vault after Biles withdrew and Jade Carey faltered, placing behind only an outstanding Rebeca Andrade of Brazil. And she did it just a handful of months after being bedridden with COVID. Now that is a Cinderella story.
  • Jade Carey, after her disappointment on the vault the previous day, won gold in floor exercise, ensuring all 6 US women would leave Tokyo with at least one medal.
  • After withdrawing from the team, all-around, and first three event finals, Biles decided to make one last run at a medal by competing in the balance beam final, where, despite doing significantly lower difficulty than usual (she had a broken connection in the middle of the routine and also downgraded to a non-twisting dismount, which cost her almost half a point between element and connection values), she hit her routine well enough to win the bronze, finally getting one moment of pride and glory in an otherwise-disappointing Olympics.
• The women's gymnastics all-around final had two awesome performances:
  • Rebeca Andrade won Brazil's first-ever Olympic medal in women's gymnastics when she took silver in the event. Before this, the best a Brazilian woman had placed in the Olympics all-around final was eleventh place — who also happened to be Andrade herself at the 2016 Rio Olympics, so she improved on her Rio standing by a whopping nine spots here. And as if all that weren't enough, Andrade had spent most of the previous five years out of competition with injury after injury, and was one of the last gymnasts to qualify for the Games, punching her ticket at the Pan American Games after missing the 2019 World Championships with a third ACL tear (and Brazil failed to qualify a full team at those World Championships, so Andrade's only chance to get there was to qualify as an individual). Now that is a comeback. Even better, she then went on to win gold in the women's vault final.
  • Sunisa "Suni" Lee, after stepping up to the plate to help the US take silver in the women's team final following Simone Biles's withdrawal, became the first Asian-American woman to win gold in the all-around final. And as if that's not enough, Lee is also the first Hmong-American Olympian of any gender in any sport. That's right, the first ever Hmong-American Olympic athlete, at the age of just 18 years old, won gold in the most prestigious event in women's gymnastics — and while she was at it, extended the American all-around winning streak to five consecutive Olympic Games.
• The sheer number of historic medals in gymnastics. In addition to the aforementioned cases from the team and all-around finals, the gymnastics competition also featured:
  • The Russian women taking home team gold for the first time since the Unified Team in 1992. After having come so close Olympics after Olympics, to see them take it home at last was unbelievably sweet.
  • Likewise, the Russian men won team gold for the first time since 1996. They were led by Artur Dalaloyan, who had sustained a partial Achilles tear just a scant few months earlier but somehow held himself together with rubber bands and a shoestring and kept himself out of hospital long enough to compete all six events in qualifications, the team final, and the all-around (where he placed an almost miraculous sixth).
  • Artem Dolgopyat winning Israel's first ever medal in gymnastics in the men's floor final — and it was a gold.
  • Two historic medals on women's vault: Rebeca Andrade became the first Brazilian female gymnast to win gold just two days after she became the first to win any medal, and Yeo Seo-jeong became South Korea's first female gymnast to win a medal when she took the bronze.
  • Max Whitlock (Great Britain) defended his Olympic gold on the pommel horse, which, along with all his World, European, and Commonwealth titles, made him the most successful gymnast on that apparatus.
  • Lee Chih-kai (Chinese Taipei), Artur Davtyan (Armenia), and Ferhat Arican (Turkey) also won their countries' first Olympic gymnastics medals with a silver on pommel horse, bronze on vault, and bronze on parallel bars respectively.
  • Nina Derwael won gold on the uneven bars, which is not only Belgium's first-ever medal in women's gymnastics, but is also the first gold medal ever, first individual athlete medal ever, and first medal of any kind in a full century for a Belgian gymnast (Belgium's sole Olympic gymnastics medal up to this point was a silver in the men's team final in 1920). Oh, and her bars routine is a Moment of Awesome in and of itself.
  • The women's floor final also had two, with Vanessa Ferrari of Italy and Murakami Mai of Japan winning their countries' first individual event medals in women's gymnastics, with Ferrari taking silver while Murakami tied for bronze. Murakami's is especially sweet as it happened in her home Olympics (although the sweetness of a home win may have been tempered by the lack of a true home crowd), while Ferrari's is sweet because she had had fourth-place finishes (often considered the single most agonizing placement) in the event in 2012 (by a tiebreaker, no less) and 2016, as well as the fact that it's Italy's first women's gymnastics Olympic medal period since 1928.
  • The rhythmic gymnastics also produced a few of these. Russia were expected to win both the individual and the team, only for Israel’s Linoy Ashram to cause a massive upset and win the individual, beating the three time world champion, and gold medal favourite Dina Averina into second place, and also winning Israel’s first ever medal in the discipline. Bulgaria then upset the apple cart even more by winning the gold in the team event, and knocking the Russians down to second.
• Great Britain entered Tokyo having won a medal in practically every discipline of cycling throughout the years apart from one: BMX. That all changed when Kye Whyte finished second in his race, giving Britain its first ever medal in the sport. Twenty minutes later Team GB had two, when Bethany Shriever won her race, beating the two-time Olympic champion in the process. Shriever's win is even more remarkable when you realise that she had take to a job as a teaching assistant and crowdfund her way to the Olympics when UK Sport stopped the funding to the women's BMX team, saying that they weren't medal prospects. The fact that Whyte was hanging around at the finish line, cheering her on, and picked her up after the race when she collapsed from exhaustion, not only doubled down on the awesome, but made it a Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming as well.
  • The huge cherry on top of this BMX sundae for Great Britain came in the women's BMX freestyle final. Hannah Roberts, the heavy favorite to win gold, had put up a nigh-unbeatable first run that scored a 96.1, over 6 points more than anyone else's first run. Britain's Charlotte Worthington, who had fallen on her first run and scored only 38.6 for it, responded to that by pulling off an absolutely stunning second run that included a 360 backflip that had never been landed by a woman in competition before and scored a staggering 97.5 to edge out Roberts for the gold. When Declan Brooks also won bronze in the men’s event, it meant that all the British BMX riders were leaving Japan with a "shiny".
• Not only did the Fiji men's team repeat their gold medal run in rugby sevens, but the women too did well enough to get bronze. It should be noted that the women's rugby union program in Fiji only has a few hundred members in total, and cannot possibly hope to compete with the funding and talent pool of Canada, Australia and Great Britain, all of which they beat in the tournament. And at an Oceanian sevens tournament just before the Olympics, a couple of their star players had to be replaced through injury.
• Great Britain having its most successful games in the pool in a century:
  • Adam Peaty becoming the first British swimmer to defend his Olympic title.
  • Tom Dean and Duncan Scott finishing first and second in the men's 200m freestlye, the first time in over a hundred years that there's been two men on the podium. Both men then went on to take gold in the men's relay team.
  • Then came the 4×100 mixed medley relay, where they not only took gold but broke the world record, too. Even more impressive was that their first swimmer slipped on the wall when starting the race so was last in the first 50 metres, so the team were playing catch-up in the first three legs of the race. To start the race in last place, overtake the whole field and still break the world record is an amazing achievement.
  • Duncan Scott then became the most successful British swimmer in one Olympics when he won his fourth medal (a silver) in the 4×100 metre medley relay.
• While not as overwhelming as it has been in the past, the United States still demonstrated both expected and unexpected dominance in the pool.
  • On the expected side, while the middle distances (200m and 400m) were taken by rising Australian star Ariarne Titmus, Katie Ledecky, in her third Olympics, still had it where she always had it: at the long distances, winning the first women's 1500m freestyle contested at the Olympics and then comfortably defending her title again at the 800m, becoming the first swimmer to three-peat at that distance.
  • Also expected, Caeleb Dressel went into Tokyo a heavy favorite at the shorter distances. And in every individual discipline he challenged, he emerged with the gold: the 100m freestyle, the 100m butterfly (with a world record), and the 50m freestyle (with an olympic record). He would also lead off the Americans to gold in the 4×100m freestyle relay and swim the fly leg in the 4×100m medley relay for another victory, for a total of five gold medals.
  • The unexpected hero for the Americans turns out to be Bobby Finke, who would compete for the men at the long distances as Ledecky did for the women. For the first time in over a century, men would swim for gold at the 800m freestyle, and with just a length to go, Finke was in fourth place. But suddenly, he did something very uncharacteristic for long-distance swims: he put on an incredible final burst of speed and managed to overtake everyone with a stunning 26.4 seconds in the final 50m to win the gold. But then he outdid himself at the 1500m. For 29 lengths of the pool, he kept at a well-contested third place...and then he did it again, completing the final length in only 25.7 seconds to win his second gold by almost a full length: finishing an American sweep of the long-distance swims.
• Speaking of Ariarne Titmus: Not only did she beat Katie Ledecky twice (200m and 400m freestyle), she set a new Olympic record for the former in the process. Terminator indeed!
• Emma Mc Keown deserves mention as well: she beat out Siobhan Haughey (who set a new Asian Record) in the 100m freestyle by setting a new Olympic Record, taking gold.
• San Marino had never won an Olympic medal until Alessandra Perilli won bronze in the Women's trap shooting. A couple of days later they had two, when Perilli teamed up with Gian Marco Berti in the Mixed Trap, and they won a silver medal. That also made San Marino (population 33,600) the smallest country ever to win an Olympic medal. A few days later, wrestler Myles Amine would win the microstate’s third medal of the games, having gone 61 years before winning one. Three medalists... out of a total competing delegation of five.
• Jamaica not only sweeping the women's 100m dash, gold medalist Elaine Thompson defending her gold in from Rio, as well as shattering Florence Griffith Joyner's Olympic record from 1988. Meanwhile, silver medalist Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce won an unprecedented fourth medal in this event (she won gold in 2008 and 2012, bronze in 2016). Thompson later defended her gold in the 200m, becoming the first woman to have repeat victories in both races.
• Italy winning their first 100m medal with Lamont Marcell Jacobs taking gold. They then won the gold in the men’s 4×100 metre relay, by pipping Great Britain on the line (who would later lose their silver medal when one of their team failed their drugs test.).
• Yulimar Rojas of Venezuela breaking the women's triple jump world record in her last jump. She had already broken the Olympic record with her first jump, and was over 60 cm ahead of the rest of the competition by the end.
• Canadian swimmer Penny Oleksiak continued to show that she is one of the country's greatest athletes, earning silver for the 4×100 m freestyle and bronze for 200 m freestyle and 4×100 m medley. Combined with her four medals from Rio 2016, the 21-year old Oleksiak becomes Canada's most-decorated Summer Olympian and the most-decorated Olympian in Canadian history, surpassing Cindy Klassen and Clara Hughes.
• Great Britain winning the eventing team gold for the first time in 49 years with an inexperienced team all competing in their first Olympics. Incredibly, one of of the team, Laura Collet, is lucky to even be alive, let alone still be riding a horse. In 2013, she was placed in a coma for six days after she had a heavy fall from her mount and suffered a broken spine, shoulder and ribs, along with a punctured lung and a lacerated liver. She also lost most of her vision in one eye and had to be resurrected in the ambulance on the way to hospital five times.
• The women's badminton doubles being won by Indonesia's Greysia Polii and Apriyani Rahayu, the first unseeded pair to win the title, beating out China. The most impressive part? Polii's racquet broke mid-rally so, without stopping the rally, she hurried off to the side, swapped out the racquet for a new one and was back in the space of a few seconds. Not only did her teammate successfully hold her own without her, but they ended up winning the point.
  • What makes this even more awesome is that Polii had a rough history in Olympics. She was first disqualified in 2012 due to match fixing and lost in quarterfinals in 2016, and almost retired by then. Ever since she's partnered with Rahayu, she keeps going and now she's officially the oldest badminton olympic gold medalist at 33 years and 356 days old.
• British sailor Hannah Mills winning her second gold medal in the 470 class. With three medals (two golds and a silver) she is the most decorated female sailor in Olympic history.
• Brazilian tennis players Luisa Stefani and Laura Pigossi were an extreme case of Underdogs Never Lose: ranked only 23rd and 202nd of the world, they only got their spot eight days before the Games started. And yet they beat the seventh seed in the first game, and clawed a comeback in the next two games to reach the semifinal. Which were actually a luck reversal, opening 4-0 in the first set, but suffering a turnover. But then the bronze medal match had them losing the first set and managing it to win it all, being threatened by eight match points along the way!
• The 400m hurdles finals for both men and women:
  • Men: As background, going into July 2021, the world record of 46.79 s had been set by Kevin Young... at the Barcelona Olympics. However, two contenders for the record emerged: Norway's Karsten Warholm, whose best time was 46.87 in August 2020, and American Rai Benjamin, who ran a 46.83 in the US Olympic trials near the end of June 2021. Then on July 1 in Oslo, Warholm set a new world record of 46.70. Now, fast-forward to the Tokyo final. Warholm took the event to a completely new level, running a 45.94, making him the first man ever to break the 46-second barrier. Benjamin also obliterated Warholm's previous world record, running 46.17. And, the bronze medalist, Brazil's Alison dos Santos, ran 46.72, meaning that the medalists had just recorded three of the four fastest times in history.
    • This commentary argued it was the greatest track race ever for the following reasons: (1) Benjamin's second-place time would have been the largest improvement of the world record in that event since 1968... but for Warholm. (2) Outside of the athletes in this race, only Young had ever come within a second of Warholm's new record. (3) Per scoring tables of World Athletics, the sport's international governing body, the only men's world record performances superior to Warholm's were Usain Bolt's 100 and 200m records. (4) All eight finalists set best-ever marks for their respective race placements. (5) In addition to the three medalists, three other finalists set national records.
    • Leigh Dilley's call for NBC as Warholm crossed the line is its own MOA:
      The world record holder is trying to hold him off and he will! It's going to be gold for Norway. 45.94, it's a world record, it's an Olympic record! Warholm has just blown the world record apart!!
  • Women: In July 2019, American Dalilah Muhammad set a new world record of 52.20, breaking the record of Russia's Yuliya Pechonkina that had stood since 2003. That October, Muhammad broke her own record, running 52.16... and was pushed right to the line in that same race by fellow American Sydney McLaughlin, who ran a 52.23. McLaughlin then took the world record from Muhammad, running the first sub-52 second time in history at 51.90 at the US Olympic trials. This made the women's 400 hurdles one of the most anticipated events of the Games, and the pair didn't disappoint. Both McLaughlin and Muhammad blew away the former's world record from just five weeks earlier, respectively running 51.46 and 51.58. And, as in the case of the men's final, the bronze medalist, Femke Bol of the Netherlands, recorded the fourth-fastest time in history (52.03, which would have been a world record just six weeks earlier).
• Brazilian swimmer Bruno Fratus re-enacted a popular Bronze Medal meme after winning a said medal from the 50-meters freestyle swimming.
• After achieving the bronze medal for decathlon at Rio 2016, Canadian athlete Damian Warner was determined to win the gold in Tokyo, placing first in the 100 m sprint, long jump (with an 8.24m jump that would have won the bronze medal in the long jump proper) and 110 m hurdles events. His final point total would be 9,018, setting a new Olympic record for decathlon as the first Canadian to not only win the gold, but also the first athlete to break the 9,000-point barrier at the Games.
• Chinese winning gold and silver in the women's 10 meter platform: Expected. Not expected: The winner, 14-year-old Quan Hongchan, getting straight 10s on 2 of her 5 dives (and 6/7 judges gave her final dive a 10, with the other judge giving her a 9.5).
• After winning the bronze in two consecutive Summer Games at London 2012 and Rio 2016 for football, the Canadian women went into Tokyo with the intention of wanting to "change the color of the medal". Pitted against their American arch-rivals in the semi-finals, the Canadians hold to a 1-0 lead and advance to finals, erasing the ghosts of the semi-final match against the United States from London. Beating Sweden in a penalty shootout after a 1-1 tie in extra time, this Olympic gold medal makes the Canadian women's football team the first in the country's history to achieve it for a traditional team sport in the Summer Games.
  • This also makes one of the Canadian team’s starters, Quinn, the first openly transgender and nonbinary athlete to win an Olympic medal!
  • This also marks the first Olympic gold for team captain Christine Sinclair, the highest international scorer ever with 187 goals and a 22 year career.
  • And in the bronze medal match pitting the USA and Australia, the USWNT's Megan Rapinoe did it again... her second Olimpico^*again, scoring directly from a corner kick at the Olympics (having done so back in 2012). To this day, no one else has even done it once at the Olympics.
• With the bronze medal win for the men's 4×100 m relay, Canadian sprinter Andre De Grasse became the most decorated male Olympian in Canadian history, tying the same record as Cindy Klassen and Clara Hughes: 3 from Rio (bronze for 100 m and 4 × 100 m, silver for 200 m) and 3 in Tokyo (bronze again for 100 m and 4×100 m, gold for 200 m). Notably, De Grasse's gold in the 200 m made him the first Canadian to win it in 93 years.
• New Zealand canoeist Lisa Carrington winning Olympic gold for the women's K1 200 m, (maintaining her dominance of this category from London and Rio) K2 500 m with Caitlin Regal, and K1 500 m (the first two of which had their semifinals and finals occur on the same day, forcing her to canoe in 4 different races in the span of a couple hours). With her now five gold medals and one bronze from the K1 500 in Rio, Lisa becomes New Zealand's most decorated Olympian ever, beating out the record of her former coach, canoeing legend Sir Ian Ferguson.
• Team USA's men's basketball team had virtually every odd stacked against them, coming off of potentially game breaking injuries for some of its athletes like Kevin Durant, and the extremely close proximity of the NBA Finals to the beginning of the Olympics, with Devin Booker, Jrue Holiday and Khris Middleton touching down in Tokyo only hours before their first game due to them playing for the Phoenix Suns and Milwaukee Bucks respectively for the 2021 NBA Finals, with the whole team never getting any practice time as a whole unit prior to the matches beginning. On top of this level of chaos were the traditional expectations of perfection that come from the likes of the Dream Team and Redeem Team, which then turned to worries that it might lead to another 2004 (or worse) scenario with losses in practice matches to Nigeria and Australia early on. Despite setbacks, jet lag, stiffness and an early loss to France in their first game due to a blown lead with a few minutes left in that game, the team came together in time to start dominating under the sterling leadership of Kevin Durant, finally winning 87-82 in their rematch against France in the finals, securing Team USA's fourth consecutive gold medal in the category!
  • The above not only made Durant the first US men's basketball player since Carmelo Anthony to win three gold medals, but made Jrue Holiday and Khris Middleton, both of the Milwaukee Bucks, the first duo to win both the NBA Finals and Olympic gold in the same year since Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen in 1992. It also means that JaVale McGee, whose mother Pam led the US women's team to gold in 1984, are the first American gold medal mother-son duo, and the first kind of duo from any country in Olympic basketball. And for bonus measures, Gregg Popovich solidified his all-time greatness as a head coach with a gold medal to go with the 5 NBA Finals championships he won with the San Antonio Spurs.
  • Kudos must also be paid to the women's basketball team, for winning their SEVENTH consecutive gold medal! This also makes Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi the first basketball players, male or female, to win FIVE Olympic gold medals.
• 21 years after the 'Miracle on the Mat', American Freestyle Wrestling produced two magic moments in Tokyo. First was David Taylor, at 86kg. Up against perhaps Iran's greatest wrestler, Hassan Yazdanicharati, down a point with just 20 seconds to go, Taylor finds an opening to shoot and complete a two-point takedown in the final seconds to win the gold, fully justifying his nickname, "The Magic Man". But then came the 125kg gold medal match. Gable Dan Steveson, named after the gold medalist wrestler from 1972, after dominating his way through the tournament, found himself in the fight of his life against Georgia's Gino Petriashvili. Leading 5-2 going late, Petriashvili then used his long arms to wrap up Steveson and take the lead with a six-point rally. Down to the last 15 seconds, Steveson finds an opening and scores two on a takedown. Restarting with just 6.5 seconds on the clock, Steveson kept circling around Petriashvili until, literally at the last second,^note The score was registered with the clock at 0.2 seconds remaining. Steveson gets his back and completes another takedown, taking the gold medal in one of the most exciting finishes in olympic wrestling history.
• Indian Neeraj Chopra winning gold in the men's javelin throw, becoming the first gold win by India at this Olympics, the first gold ever won for India in a track-and-field event (also the first track-and-field medal won by India in general since it declared independence from Great Britain), India's second ever individual gold medal (after shooter Abhinav Bindra in 2008) and the second gold outside of field hockey. In the process, he brought the country's medal haul to seven, its all-time best at the Summer Olympics.
• Ryan Crouser successfully defending his Olympic gold in the Men's Shot Put was pretty expected. What makes it awesome, though, was his absolutely dominating performance. His very first throw broke the Olympic record he set back in Rio, and throughout his six throws, he never let up. His weakest throw was only topped by one opponent: his teammate and the eventual silver medalist, Joe Kovacs.^note New Zealander Tomas Walsh would eventually take bronze, completing a perfect repeat of the podium results from Rio, by being the only other athlete besides Crouser and Kovacs to top 22m in the event. His final throw, setting the final olympic record for the event, came just 7cm shy of the world record he had set exactly two months ago during the U.S. Olympic Trials.
• Allyson Felix, who has stated that Tokyo will be the last Olympics that she races in, finishes a seventeen-year Olympic career (going back to Athens in 2004) winning gold in the 4×400 women’s relay, going out on top and becoming, with eleven medals, the most decorated track-and-field athlete of all time.
• Sifan Hassan, an Ethiopian-born Dutch runner who entered the Games as the reigning women's world champion in the 1500m and 10000m, decided to try going one better... running both events and the 5000m. Due to the scheduling of the events, she had to run a total of six races (qualifiers and finals) in eight days. Hassan started out by winning gold in the 5000, becoming the first Dutch woman ever to win a long-distance event. Next was the 1500, in which her quest for three medals nearly ended in a qualifying heat when she tripped over another runner and fell, and had to sprint the final lap to advance. She ended up with a bronze. Her final race was the 10000; near the end of the race, her was unable to turn her head or feel her arms... but kept going and passed the world record holder to win her second gold and third medal. Hassan became the first woman to win three individual medals in track at a single Olympics since another Dutch runner, Fanny Blankers-Koen, swept the 100m, 200m, and 80m hurdles back in 1948. And also the first runner, male or female, ever to medal in the 1500, 5000, and 10000 in a single Games.
• With four days left in the Olympics, China led the United States 32-26 in the gold medal counts. Cue a string of gold medal results by the United States, culminating in a gold in women's volleyball (the first Olympic gold for US women's volleyball in history!) on the final day, to edge out the Chinese 39-38 in the final gold medal counts.
  • And for the United States, their gold-medal performance encompassed a broad array of athletes literally from one end of the country to the other. Take Lydia Jacoby, from Seward, Alaska, who beat her teammate and defending champion Lilly King to win gold in the Women's 100m Breaststroke: the first ever for the state. Then you have Carissa Moore, from Honolulu, Hawaii, taking the inaugural gold in Women's Surfing. Along the way, you have the likes of Valarie Allman, taking America's first Track and Field gold by winning the Women's Discus, Lee Kiefer, the first American to win an individual gold in Foil (and only the third to win an individual Fencing gold altogether), Nevin Harrison, winning the inaugural gold medal in women's canoe sprint (in the solo 200m), and Athing Mu, the daughter of immigrants from South Sudan, champion in the Women's 800m Run. Indeed, it was the women who carried most of the gold for America in these games (23 vs. 16 for the men).
• During the Closing Ceremony, a beloved song named "A Stroll Among the Stars" has featured in the procedures as the cauldron was being extinguished with telekinesis. Also, Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra appeared during the ceremony.

Beijing 2022

• Beijing becoming the first city to host a Summer and a Winter Games.
• Zoi Sadowski-Synnott takes the women's snowboard slopestyle title to win New Zealand's first ever gold medal in the Winter Olympics. As a bonus, she achieved it on Waitangi Day (New Zealand's national day).
  • She then followed it up with a silver in women’s big air, becoming the first New Zealander to ever win more than one medal in a single Winter Olympics.
• Italy's Stefania Constantini and Amos Mosaner put on a commanding performance in mixed doubles curling, winning the gold medal — Italy's first medal in curling —without losing a single match.
• At Turin 2006 the USA’s Lindsay Jacobellis came off the last jump of the Women’s snowboard cross with a healthy lead, and all but guaranteed to win the Gold…until she decided to start showboating. She fell over, allowing a Swiss competitor to goes pass her, and she ended up with the silver medal instead. Come Beijing 2022, and Jacobellis comes off the last jump of the women’s snowboard cross with a healthy lead…and this time decides to keeps racing, allowing her finally win the Gold medal she should have won 16 years previously.
  • Following up, three days later, she competes in a brand new racing event: the mixed snowboard cross, which is essentially a two-stage race where men then women run the course. Coming off her gold, the US strategically pairs her with Nick Baumgartner, the oldest athlete in the American contingent at 40. The pair raced strategically to qualify for the big final, and then went on to win the gold medal: her second and his first, the two oldest competitors in the event.
• The USA’s Nathan Chen looking like he was having the time of his life during the men’s free skate on his way to winning the Gold medal with a routine set to Elton John, as captured here.
• Even though he finished off the podium, Japan's ace Yuzuru Hanyu achieved one more step in his goal of landing the quadruple axel, a jump often considered Beyond the Impossible. His jump was not clean/ratified, but it was certified (acknowledged as a 4A on official records).
• After 2 consecutive Olympics as the silver medalist, Ayumi Hirano of Japan finally winning the Men’s Halfpipe with a stunning performance. Also kudos to Shaun White, who at 35, retires from the Olympics in 4th, ensuring that over the 5 Olympic Games he has competed at in his lifetime, the lowest he ever placed was 4th.
• Erin Jackson winning gold in the women’s 500 meter speed skating, becoming the first African American woman to ever get a medal in the sport.
• Team Canada in the Women's Hockey event finds redemption for their silver medal in Pyeongchang by winning gold this time. In addition, forward Sarah Nurse not only is the first black woman to compete in Olympic hockey, she led in points for the entire tournament and is the first black woman to win gold in Olympic hockey.
• Nico Porteous winning New Zealand's second ever gold medal in the men’s ski half pipe, making this the country's most successful medal haul at the Winter Games ever.
• After four tries, Swedish skip Niklas Edin can finally add Olympic Gold to his resume as skip for Team Sweden's men's curling team.
• On a similar note, British skip Eve Muirhead finally wins Gold in the Women's curling at her fourth attempt, adding to the bronze she won with a different rink in 2014. It was also Britain's first Gold in the sport since 2002. Britain's men also reached their final, but lost to the aforementioned Swedes, and it was the first time both British teams had made the final at the same Olympics.
• Finland finally winning men's ice hockey gold after 70 years of Olympic participation in the sport. Of the Big Six hockey countries^*which also includes Canada, the U.S., Russia, Sweden, and the Czech Republic — Slovakia is sometimes included to make the Big Seven, they were the only team to have never finished atop the podium (with silvers in 1988 and 2006 being their best placements) leading up to this year's tournament. An undefeated record, capped off with a monumental 2-1 win over the Russian Olympic Committee in the gold medal game, propelled the 2022 Finnish men's team to history.
  • On the note of the men's tournament, Slovakia winning its first ever medal — a bronze — in men's hockey with a 4-0 shutout win against Sweden.
• Germany absolutely dominating the sliding events, winning Gold in nine of them, and just missing a medal in the other (a fourth place in the Women’s Monobob).
• Norway not only topped the overall medal table, they also became the first country to win 16 Gold medals at one Winter Olympics.

---