I can’t be the only one who is delighted and amused but also, on a deep level, totally baffled—like a museumgoer at an early exhibition of Surrealist art—by the constant televisual presence of Snoop Dogg at the Olympics. It seems like every time you turn on NBC or one of its affiliates, there he is, dressed up, for instance, in full equestrian gear with his hair pulled back, playing twinsies with his TV work wife—seriously, why are they always together?—Martha Stewart. Their helmets matched and their high boots gleamed. Snoop sounded out the term for the maneuver called “passage,” riding that final vowel sound like a fleet horse, and—probably for the first time in history—the word sounded not only snooty but sleek, plus truly hilarious. “That’s a hell of a crip walk,” he said after a particularly nice horsy move. Then, later, Snoop was sitting courtside next to the basketball genius A’ja Wilson, cheering on the puerile high jinks of Joel Embiid, the huge, hyper-skilled U.S.A. center who, at the moment, seemed to be making a series of chopping gestures in the direction of his crotch. (Embiid, born in Cameroon, is in an ongoing battle with the crowds in France—he was granted French citizenship in 2022, but declined to represent the country in the Olympics—and Snoop Dogg knows from stylish feuds.) When Simone Biles and her teammates won the gymnastics team gold, Snoop, far away from the diminutive prodigies but prominently placed among the crowd, smoothly danced in celebration, all shoulders and swaying torso. Biles saw him and smiled—a Snoop dance is its own kind of medal—and danced right back in his direction.
If you happened to be watching highlights of the doubles badminton match between the Chinese and American teams, you might have heard Snoop’s kinetic, super-quick commentary on a particularly energetic series of volleys. He used the diction of a rapper and displayed the processing power of a supercomputer:
Breathless, half-sensical, repetitive in service of rhythm, emphases everywhere, interested in everything—he sounded, to my ear, just a little bit like Gertrude Stein, from her “Stanzas in Meditation”:
Snoop’s astounded broadcast partner, the ur-straight-man Mike Tirico, could only laugh. “That was a good point,” he said about the rally, encapsulating straightforwardly a fact that Snoop had already propounded in pure sound. This is uncontroversial: Snoop is amazing. He’s oozing with personal style, physical and verbal. He is preternaturally comfortable in his own skin, and deserves some sort of acting award, maybe a Lifetime Achievement Emmy, for a crazily durational performance—never a doubt-inducing flicker—as himself. When I think of “Good TV,” an image of Snoop floats to mind first. Wherever he is, he somehow belongs. He is, I’m sorry, fucking cool.
Still, every time I see Snoop being Snoop in Paris, I wonder what exactly the execs at NBC are trying to tell me—to tell Americans—by making him the Pied Piper of the Olympics as they appear on Stateside screens. The last round of Summer Olympics, which took place under the depressing cloud of COVID, suffered in the ratings. (Not that I would have known this then: I shoved them down my gullet greedily like I have every Olympics, Summer or Winter, since I was a kid admiring the elegance of Nancy Kerrigan in ’92.) In 2020, the ethos and aesthetics of Olympic competition—an always curious synthesis of rivalry and coöperation, nationalism and borderless affection—felt strained in a world whose collaborations against disease had fallen flat. The idea now is, Let’s add a layer of pure personality and let the good times roll! Sports are themselves entertainments, but maybe we need an entertainer to remind us what’s so fun about competition in the first place. According to a Twitter-fuelled rumor started by the venture capitalist Henry McNamara (who apparently got the dish from an “NBC exec” over dinner), NBC is paying Snoop five hundred thousand dollars per day to be a “special correspondent.” And why not?
I like that the Olympics happen on election years: both enterprises make us ponder anew what it means to belong to a place—what it’s really like to be a citizen and have your personality conditioned, at least in part, by where you’re from. Maybe Snoop’s job is really to be an idealized American. Once vaguely disreputable—early in his career, he was acquitted after a lengthy, very public murder trial; I remember trying to buy his first and still best album, “Doggystyle,” when I was a kid and being roundly denied by my mom—he now crackles with the music of clean fun: a West Coast Gatsby without the sad business at the end of the story. He’s confident, charming, funny, and knows how generous it can be to be seen having a great time.
Even beyond the presence of Snoop, NBC’s coverage of the Olympics—radically U.S.-centric unless you happen to pay for the inexhaustible open fire hose of NBC’s streaming service, Peacock—has been a survey of American archetypes. There’s the braggadocious divo sprinter Noah Lyles, who seems to have decided that the way to keep track and field relevant is to display an ego large enough to blanket the whole country, sea to sea. He talks shit constantly, almost every time he’s anywhere near a mike. His nerdy, whining voice, bright eyes, and big, protrusive teeth seem to have been designed for the sole purpose of getting across the message that he’s the best. NBC’s soft-focus coverage reminds us that he was a sick kid, suffering terribly from asthma and other ailments, but the cameras tell the real story: they’re always catching him gabbing away. When he won the hundred-metre dash by a handful of thousandths of a second—an endlessly rewatchable race and result—he pulled off his nametag and waved the name “LYLES” in the air for all to see. On Thursday, he ran the two hundred and came in third, good for bronze, and then collapsed so troublingly that he needed medical attention. When he’d recovered, Lyles revealed that he’d been diagnosed with COVID two days before. “I’ve never been more proud of myself for being able to come out here,” he said. That’s the America I know: heedlessly insistent on carrying on, germs be damned.
Then there’s the multitasking swimmer Nic Fink, a fitting figure for our overworked, underpaid age. Before his first race, we learned that he also has a nine-to-five job as a project manager at an electrical-engineering firm. Rivetingly, he sits at a computer and talks to his colleagues on a video-conference app that looks suspiciously like Zoom, fits in meals, and always makes it to his training sessions. Turns out you don’t have to take a sabbatical to train for the Olympics. It also turns out that being an Olympian doesn’t necessarily protect you from the drudgeries of remote work. We’re supposed to admire Fink for his hyperproductivity, his quotidian collage of normalcy and heroism, but the story bums me out. Employers everywhere are probably asking, So why do my people need so much time off? Still, I was rooting for Fink and celebrated with him when he got silver in the hundred-metre breaststroke—his first medal, a long time coming for a thirty-one-year-old guy. He purports to like his job, but I sort of hope this moment of glory makes him shut the laptop, at least for a while. Can’t the Wheaties people cut this guy a check?
Sha’Carri Richardson, the doe-eyed sprinter with long, curlicued hair—like a carnival streamer once she’s picked up speed and caught wind—is a comeback kid, after a deeply disappointing last go-round. This time, she was upset by the St. Lucian Julien Alfred, a marvel of muscle and focus, in the women’s hundred metres, but seeing her medal at all felt like the kind of redemptive catharsis that we come to the Games to see. Simone Biles’s return to the gymnastics mats—even more successful; she nabbed three gold medals—is a similar All-American culmination, as refreshing as stone fruit in summer. She survived the dreaded “twisties”—a chronic feeling of lostness in the air—and weathered rafts of online criticism for “quitting” her last Olympics. Now she’s flipping freely again, making emancipated airborne patterns, winning profligately, and, between victories, making sportsmanlike overtures toward other athletes, especially the Brazilian dynamo Rebeca Andrade, who won gold for her artistic-gymnastics floor routine, alongside Biles’s silver and Jordan Chiles’s bronze.
The dominance of the men’s and women’s U.S. basketball teams is, by now, unsurprising. Especially on the men’s side, some of the other nations are slowly catching up—an echo of our increasingly multipolar geopolitics—but on the global stage hoops is still a front-running sport for a country that feels most comfortable when appreciably ahead. (They almost lost a semifinal game to a Serbian team led by the multivalent center Nikola Jokić, and you could see their suddenly jittery nerves on full display.) My favorite personality among the players belongs to Anthony Edwards, the charismatic young guard who recently celebrated his twenty-third birthday in Paris. He jumps as if thrown, dunks as if settling a vendetta, and, not unlike Snoop Dogg, always has a smile to flash. He talks trash, but he seems to have less to prove than Lyles—he just wants to chop it up and tell tall tales about himself, like a latter-day Davy Crockett. There’s a video of him charming the U.S. women’s table-tennis team. They informed him that any one of them would shut him out with the paddles. “I don’t believe it,” Edwards said. “I’m not having it. Eleven to zero? I’m scoring one point!” Later on, Edwards gamely went to sit in the crowd and watch his new friend Lily Zhang play. It was all in fun.
Maybe Edwards will one day be our new Snoop—all jokes and no worries. Bombast without the hint of a care in the world. Like Whitman, the kid celebrates himself and sings himself. Like Emerson, he does his own thing, answers to the call of his own genius, and seems to walk the world guided by whim. Oh, if only this were all it meant to be an American! For a few days longer, we can tune in and pretend. ♦
