Going for Gold: Paris 2024 Olympics Review

How absolutely fantastic were the Olympic Games this year? I loved it. Whether your battle cry is Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Jai Hind, whatever it is we say for Team GB or something else, surely you can’t deny that it’s been two weeks of pure joy. 

In adherence to an unwritten rule in our household about sports not counting as screen time, we threw all ‘screen-free childhood’ caution to the Parisian wind, and had the TV on for every single time-zone appropriate minute of the Games. I feel as though I know each of the athletes personally, so invested am I in their journeys, and I am quite sure Jasper considers the Channel 9 (Australia’s Olympic broadcast partner) sports anchors part of the village by which he’s being raised. What better platform is there, with which to introduce Jasper to the emotive power of sports than one where there are great chunks of gold at stake? 

Another unwritten rule we have in the home is that whoever’s team is playing does not have to do household chores. Unless he’s calmly invested in watching the match in question, Jasper is also regarded as a chore, in case you’re wondering, and so for the non-competing spouse, the hope is always that Jasper is more into hockey, artistic gymnastics or canoeing that day than he is into washing up. 

The first week of Paris 2024 was the best week for us, because all three of our teams were competing in the Hockey—and as a family, we love hockey. Yes, that’s right, we have three teams to support: mine is Team GB, Dylan’s is Australia and Jasper’s is India. At the start of the Games the hockey was more exciting than it was stressful. The teams were collecting points rather than fighting for survival and for a brief while, that podium was anyone’s. Until, that was, the gloves came off and Jasper’s team reared up to beat Dylan’s team and mine, on two consecutive days. Not long after that, hockey matches of interest thinned out as we all threw our somewhat bitter weight behind India, who did at least medal in the men’s. 

To Jasper’s utter delight (and our dislike), India did very well in a lot of the projectile-on-target-based sports: archery and shooting. We aren’t quite sure where he’s getting it from, but he is very into guns at the moment and we aren’t doing very well at discouraging him from proclaiming everything to be a gun: a stick, a banana, a lego sculpture, a half-eaten stick of cucumber. Under normal circumstances I try to deflect his imaginary weapons by narrating them into water hoses by calling him a fireman and adding pshhh noises, but when India was being awarded medals for firing bullets into targets better than other countries, I found it rather hard to convince him they were using water pistols. Especially when his sports’ teacher brought water pistols to class one day to bring India’s bronze medal win to life. 

At least it’s acceptable to glorify archery, pivotal as it is in Hinduism to the story of Lord Ram (who kills Ravana with an arrow to the belly button) and popularised as it is elsewhere by Robin Hood and Cupid. Jasper acting out archery in public makes me cringe less than him shouting ‘pow pow’ at someone who has served him lunch on the wrong plate or looked at his tennis ball funny. He does have an archery set which saw some use during the Games period, although luckily it was only the Paw Patrol toys who saw the suction cap end of the arrows.

We were saved from shooting fatigue by the arrival of Artistic Gymnastics, which we thought might be a nice way to show Jasper the official use of the various equipment items he had encountered while misbehaving in his own gymnastics classes. I unsubscribed him from those particular classes after witnessing how disruptive he was being for the other children. But now, having seen the women perform somersaults on the beam and hurl themselves between the parallel bars, he has started to ask about it again. I will leave some time for the Olympic dust to settle before I reinstate him because, to answer his question ‘Can I do that, Mummy?’, he has a very long way to go from face-planting into the foam pit to winning a medal. And I am not 100% convinced that he has a deep enough appreciation for the risks involved in launching himself upside down, round and round, off a pommel horse.

Every morning we would watch the highlights from overnight which would inspire us for what to look forward to in the evenings. Jasper, quickly realising that the Olympics, or Yimpics as he pronounced it, was synonymous with a lot of vocabulary and activities with which he was unfamiliar, began describing to us which channel he would like us to find. 

The one with the horses and the swimming pool was, of course, equestrian—so named because I had wondered out loud why there was such a fancy pool next to the dressage arena (the answer: Modern Pentathlon). The one where they sit backwards but go forwards was the Rowing. The swimming one where they have to jump from a high thing—the diving. It took a bit of time for me to recognise ‘sticky jump’ as the pole vault. ‘You know mummy, the sticky jump. The one with the stick where they have to jump’. The one where they throw a ball with a harness was the hammer throw. The bike one where they fall over was the BMX.

Jasper and I spent a surprising (to me) number of hours (yes, hours!) watching the men’s road cycling race, henceforth to be known as the one where they eat their snacks while they are on their bikes. I have never been into cycling, preferring to watch a summary—which in these races often means a montage of the biggest pile-ups. But skipping through our available options on the middle Saturday afternoon (morning for France), we came across the road race and Jasper was instantly hooked. 

Despite not being a fan, or in possession of any knowledge whatsoever about cycling, I would say I did an excellent job commentating that race and I would challenge any professional cycling commentator to do so while pinned down by a three-year-old who has 272 kilometres of ‘Why?’ questions lined up inside him. Why were there bikes on the top of cars? Why did that one just pull off to the side? Why didn’t they eat lunch before they set off? Why is that guy on his own? WHY IS THERE AN ELEPHANT? (OK, that one was my question, still unanswered but my educated guess is a safari park?) Why are there no tall buildings? Who lives in that big house? Why are there cows? Where did that man go? Why is that man dressed as a dinosaur? Who is going to win? Why did that man have to change bikes? Who gave him the bike? Why did his tire have a puncture? Why are they eating snacks AGAIN?

You get the picture.

It was exhausting but it was also excellent groundwork for the trip Jasper, Dylan and I are taking to France, with my older sister Liv, later this year. Jasper has now seen some semi-rural France and has been taught how to say ‘Bonjour’, although all he does is laugh when I say it. Now we have some context for when he sees French towns and villages with their churches and public parks and winding roads and occasional Chateau. 

It’s impossible not to be inspired by the Olympics, in my view, in however small a way. For us, the inspiration has manifested in our finally having used the squash courts in the compound where we live. It started as we adults wanting to play but, of course, the idea of Dylan and I booking a time and space away from Jasper has meant that he is the first in line for Dylan’s coaching, no matter how hard we try to exhaust him. And it’s a good thing he’s keen because it’s him we were hoping to inspire. 

Having been very quick off the starting blocks as far as sports are concerned, Jasper’s enthusiasm for all things ball-related has waned in recent months. It started with him bringing more and more matchbox cars to the rugby pitch on Sunday mornings, playing with them instead of knocking around a hockey or tennis ball with me. His enormous box of balls gathers dust in his playroom as his attention has shifted to lego. I don’t remember the last time we played corridor cricket and I worry I might have put him off swimming entirely with a disastrous foray into group swimming classes. 

The Olympics have put the fire back in him. Not only has he graced the squash court, with pants on his head, no less, but he has also established a firm love of indoor golf and has discovered he has the significant core strength to do head and handstands. A slight miscalculation on the compatibility of our door frames with a suspended table tennis ball-on-a-string type set means we have a bat and ball game that can be played while on the toilet: exclusively while one of the players is on the toilet, I mean. While I think we can thank the Olympics for some of it (the handstands mainly), for the most part I think that it’s the example Dylan and I set by trying to escape to play squash that motivates him the most. 

On numerous occasions I have overheard parents here saying things like ‘I am trying to make my daughter like tennis’ or ‘I will make my son play football’ and it strikes me how unlikely Jasper would be to take up something that he hasn’t seen modelled by Dylan or me. He’s a little copycat, not a pioneer. This might explain his complete refusal to dance, I realise, having seen how bad both his parents are at it. 

Now that the Olympics are very sadly over, I am counting down the days to the Paralympics. Something quite magical about the park Jasper and I started to visit on Sunday mornings, when the heat made it less than unappealing to sit on the side of Dylan’s rugby pitch, is that there is a section reserved only for children with special needs or disabilities. For weeks Jasper has asked me who can use the park, because we’ve never seen anyone in it. The other day, while watching the Olympics, we saw an ad featuring paralympians and he immediately put two and two together saying ‘Mama, they have special legs! They can use the park!’

As sad as I am that the Olympics are over, I am excited for the Paralympics because for all that we can learn from the incredible feats of Olympians, I truly believe we can learn more from the Paralympians. Jasper will once again expand his sporting vocabulary, although I must remember to call it ‘wheelchair rugby’ instead of ‘murderball’, because the latter is not something I want to hear him yelling across a playground.