Paris 2024 - Day 24 (August 9th) - Taekwondo

Today, we are off bright and early to the Grand Palais to see taekwondo. Fortunately, the trip to the Grand Palais is only about 15 minutes, so we grab a croissant at our “local” patisserie and then hop on the Metro. We get off at the Invalides station just like we did for archery. While we could normally walk across the bridge to get to the Grand Palais, that is not how it works during the Olympics. In order to separate the incoming spectators for the two events, we walk down the Seine to the next bridge. Across from the bridge is the Assemblée nationale:

This is the home of the lower house of the French legislature, the equivalent of the US House of Representatives. Then we head across the Pont de la Concorde. This was the start/finish area for the men’s and women’s triathlons. Here is the view from the middle of the bridge:

The Place de la Concorde is directly in front of us as we come off the bridge, but we can’t see it because it is part of the venue for skateboarding/breaking/3x3 basketball and is surrounded by barricades. We have a very nice walk along the Seine as we head back toward the Pont Alexandre III that you can see in this picture. We turn onto Avenue Winston Churchill to the Grand Palais.

The Grand Palais is a Beaux-Arts exhibition hall built for the Universal Exhibition of 1900. Here is a view of the interior:

Pretty cool! I really like these “reused” venues and hope that the trend will continue. The brand-new modern facilities are nice, but these add a little culture and greatly decrease the costs of hosting the Games.

I don’t think that I’ve talked about the rules for taekwondo so here is the short course. Taekwondo is Korean and translates as the way of foot and fist. Matches consist of up to 3 rounds of 2 minutes each. Contestants wear outfits equipped with pressure sensors on their torso and head. You can get 1 pt for a punch to the torso, 2 pts for a kick to the torso, 4 pts for a turning kick to the torso, 3 pts for a kick to the head, 5 pts for turning kick to the head and 1 pt for a penalty on your opponent. There are a variety of penalties, but the most common are punches to the face or punches or kicks below the waist. I should also point out that just touching the head or torso is not enough. The punches or kicks have to be hard enough to register on the pressure sensors.

We’ve got two groups fighting today – preliminary rounds in the women’s under 67 kg and men’s under 80 kg. Besides the constant action, the reason that we enjoy taekwondo is that athletes in almost every country can compete. In this session, we see athletes from Mali, Kazakhstan, US, France, Cote D’Ivoire, Hungary, Egypt, Spain, Belgium, Dominican Republic, Fiji, Jordan, China, Nigeria, Thailand, Brazil, Serbia, Uzbekistan, Chile, South Korea, Iran, Italy, Burkina Faso, Australia, Tunisia and Denmark. We also get to see an athlete from the Refugee Team. Here are some of the pictures that I took:

Some of the matches were pretty big mismatches, but the matches where the two competitors were evenly matched were really great. You could see that it was only really small differences between the athletes who went on to compete for medals and those that were eliminated in the round of 16.

After the event, we had tickets for the Louvre. But before that, we get this view of the Petit Palais across the street:

The Petit Palais was also built for the Universal Exposition of 1900 as a kind of bookend to the Grand Palais across the street. Unlike the Grand Palais, which has had a kind of varied history since this Exposition, the Petit Palais was always going to be an art museum afterwards. Today, it houses the City of Paris Museum of Fine Arts. There are too many museums and too few days left for us to visit, but we hope to see the inside on a future trip.

According to Google, the Louvre is only 2 km (1.2 miles) from the Grand Palais along the Seine, but we are not allowed to exit the venue in this direction because it would interfere with the spectator flows into the other Olympic venues. So, we have to take a 3-mile detour and approach the Louvre from the back. Eventually, we see these:

The first is the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel which was built in the early 19th century to celebrate some of Napoleon’s victories. The second is the statue of Joan D’Arc. Joan of Arc is the patron saint of France, was born a peasant, became a military commander in the 15^th century and eventually was burned at the stake by the English.

Just beyond Joan’s statue is the Musée du Louvre:

The Louvre is one of the world’s most famous museums and we have all been looking forward to our visit for a long time. The pyramid leads to the entrance area and is surrounded in almost all directions by other parts of the museum. Inside are entrances to the three largest parts of the museum. Sean has very different interests from Beth and I, so we agree to meet in the entrance area later.

The Louvre was originally built in the late 12th to 13th centuries and eventually became the residence of the Kings of France for about 150 years starting in 1546. When Louis XIV built Versailles and moved there, the Louvre hosted the royal collection, and it has been a museum ever since.

We start in the “main” wing of the museum. This is where the Mona Lisa is located. We don’t have any interest in seeing it, but it is easy to avoid because you just go where the crowds don’t go. We start out in the near eastern and Islamic sections. It is easy to get overwhelmed because the Louvre just has so much stuff – more than 500,000 pieces! But we rapidly become dissatisfied because the labeling is almost entirely in French and in many cases is not detailed enough to learn anything about a particular piece or even the region and time period it comes from. It feels more like they are saying. “Come see our stuff. We have a lot of stuff!” To add to our frustration, the museum is huge, and the maps are not very easy to read. We wanted to go to the African section and after searching for the right location for a while, discovered that it was closed for the day.

We eventually stumble into the Egyptian section. They start with the Roman (think Anthony and Cleopatra) era. It goes on and on and on and ever further back in time until we reach the age before the Pharaohs. Around this time, we get a text from Sean saying that he has had enough (he was having the same complaints we were) and was heading toward the exit. We do the same, but at this point, we are about as far from the exit as we could be. We go upstairs and downstairs through the various buildings and in the underground walkways that connect the buildings always focused on the sortie sign (exit). Along the way, we find some of the original parts of the Louvre and many, many Roman sculptures. I guess that it could take days to fully view the Louvre. Eventually, we get back to the entrance and find Sean. His complaints were similar to ours – too much stuff and not enough education. Oh well, they did have a lot of really cool stuff!

Here are some of the pictures that I took:

Getting out of the Louvre is almost as complicated, as they don’t want the people coming out to get in the way of the people coming in. We eventually find a Metro station and head for home. For dinner, we pick a Chinese/Japanese fusion restaurant where we can eat outside. Sean, after listening carefully for a few minutes, decides that the owners and work staff speak Mandarin. He orders his meal in Mandarin which, as usual, attracts all of the staff to our table to see this Caucasian kid speaking reasonably good Mandarin. It really makes for a good show for Beth and I! Steps for the day: 11,284.

Paris 2024 - Day 23 (August 8th) - Athletics

Long-time readers of these blogs will know that one of the big draws of the Olympics for me is the opportunity to see an athlete produce a top performance under all of the pressure that comes with being in the Olympics, and that they did not believe they were capable of. So far, we have seen mostly team events so there were relatively few opportunities for these kinds of break-out performances. But tonight, we have one of our favorite events: athletics (track & field to many people) and based on past history, we should have a chance to see some of these performances. Since Beth has the same amount of melanin as Snow White, we are going to an evening event that starts at 7:00pm. That leaves us the rest of the day to do something, and Beth has purchased tickets to visit the Musée D’Orsay – currently the 6^th most visited art museum in the world.

Musée D’Orsay started life as the Gare D’Orsay at the beginning of the 20th century and was the main railway station for all routes headed toward south-western France. By 1939, the station’s platforms had become unusable for the longer trains coming into service and by 1970 a new Gare had been built under the Gare D’Orsay. The old station was threatened with destruction. Fortunately, the Museum of France proposed the formation of an art museum that would bridge the gap between the Louvre, which exhibits antiquities and the newly built Centre Pompidou which was ultra-modern. This idea was accepted by then-President George Pompidou and the museum finally opened in 1986 showing primarily French art from after the Revolution (1848) and 1914. Walking into the museum, you can immediately see that it was a train station:

Sean heads off to view an exhibit on the architecture of modern Paris. While Beth and I are trying to decide what to see, a couple come up to me and ask to trade pins. They have produced their own pin that copies the Fabulous Las Vegas sign, where they are from, except that it says Bienvenue (welcome) Paris. I’m thinking that there must be some copyrighted material here that they didn’t think twice about using, so I tell them that I’m not interested in their pin, but I give them one from my giveaway pocket.

We headed off to the gallery showing most of their Impressionist paintings. The first thing we see is a long line. It is not clear what this line is for but thinking that it is the line to get into the gallery, we get in line. When we get closer, we realize that the view out of the outward facing clock was used in the Opening Ceremonies:

You can see the Seine, the Olympic flame balloon, the Tuileries Garden and the Sacré-Cœur in the background. Okay, I can see why everyone wants this picture although I’m probably zoomed in too much.

Here are some of my favorite pictures from the Impressionist gallery:

I have wanted to see Van Gogh’s Stary Night, but there is a sign where it normally hangs to indicate that it is currently on exhibit in Arles – if I’d only known! Here are some of the other pieces of art that we liked:

This is really a spectacular museum, and we really enjoyed our stay, but it is time to head to Stade de France for our Athletics session.

We get to the stadium a little faster than the crowd and have some time to walk around. All of the restaurants on the same street are packed with people either getting in their pregame meals or getting ready to watch the events on TV while consuming mass amounts of alcohol.

We’ve got really good seats again:

Women’s long jump will be contested tonight and we’re either going to be along the run in or near the pit depending on which way the competitors are going. Men’s javelin and the women’s shot-put part of the heptathlon are off to our left and most of the track events (women’s 1500 m semifinals, men’s 200 m, women’s 400 m hurdles, men’s 110 m hurdles and the 200 m part of women’s heptathlon) will start/end across the field from us. While we are waiting for things to get going, we go to get something to eat and drink. Here I make a mistake. I’ve found the chicken curry baguettes to be quite good, so I decide to be somewhat healthier by going for a vegetarian curry sandwich. It looks good, but when I start eating, I discover that rather than being a sandwich full of vegetables cooked in a curry sauce, I get an imitation chicken curry sandwich with some sort of vegetarian chicken substitute. As the French would say: Il n’est pas très bien (it is not good!)

Back at our seats, we find that we are very close to the start of the in run for the women’s long jump so everyone is working on setting the markers for where they should start their in run to hit the takeoff board cleanly (toes not over the takeoff board). An athletics event is a little bit of a 3-ring circus with a bunch of stuff going on at the same time. The long jumpers and the heptathletes come in first and begin warming up. Here is a picture:

There are two shot-put throwing rings in the background with a runway for the javelin in-between. After everyone has finished their long jump warmups, they have to get out of the way because the women’s 1500 m run is starting in almost the same place.  Here are some pictures from this event:

I like this last picture because out of the 17 shoes in the picture, only 2.5 of them are on the ground. Maybe that’s why these women are flying around the track! It takes the fastest ones less than 4 minutes to complete the race. In the first semifinal, Faith Kipyegon from Kenya is the fastest qualifier with Laura Muir from Great Britain and Elle St. Pierre from the US right behind. I’m excited to see that Klaudia Kazimierska from Poland qualified with a personal best of 4:00.21 minutes and even more excited to see that while she did not qualify for the finals, Maia Ramsden from New Zealand ran 4:02.20 minutes. That was both a personal best and also the fastest time ever run by a New Zealand woman! It is too bad that these moments are often lost in the focus for who wins each race. In the second semifinal, Diribe Welteji from Ethiopia won in 3:55.10 minutes; a little over 3 minutes faster than Faith won the first race. Jessica Hull from Australia and Nikki Hiltz from the US finished 2-3. But Susan Lokayo Ejore from Kenya, Revee Walcott-Nolan from Great Britain, Salome Afonso from Portugal all ran personal bests and Agathe Guillimot from France, Weronika Lizakowska from Poland, Marta Perez of Spain and Sintayehu Vissa of Italy all ran personal bests and set national records!

While this had been going on, the heptathletes had been competing in the shot-put. We couldn’t see very well, but Nafissatou Thiam, who we’ve watched in Rio and who is competing in her 3^rd Olympics, won with a throw of 15.54 m worth 892 points. If you think that this doesn’t sound very far, try throwing a bowling ball 51 feet!

With the 1500 m out of the way, the long jumpers are back out to start their competition. Here are some of the pictures:

Each woman goes through a similar routine. First, they get the crowd fired up. Then they previsualize their jump. Then off they go. They are jumping into a slight headwind so there will be no personal bests or national records here. As it turns out, Tara Davis-Woodhall of the US wins the event on her second jump of 7.05 m although she improved to 7.10 m two jumps later. Malaika Mihambo of Germany takes the silver with a jump of 6.98 m and Jasmine Moore of the US takes the bronze with a jump of 6.96 m.

While the long jump was going on in the foreground, the men’s javelin was going on in the background. The big favorite in this event was Neeraj Chopra from India. But that is not how it turned out. On his second throw, Arshad Nadeem from Pakistan set an Olympic record of 92.95 m (305 ft). This was a personal best by more than 2.5 m and the 6^th longest throw of all time if you only count the best throw for each athlete. He was clearly stunned after the distance was announced – exactly the kind of reaction I am always looking for! Chopra on the other hand, was having a pretty bad day. He fouled on 5 of his 6 throws, but his one good throw was very good, 89.45 m to win the silver medal and Anderson Peters of Grenada threw 88.54 m to win the bronze medal. Here are some pictures:

Next up was the men’s 200 m final. I don’t have any pictures because the start was at the far end of our side of the track and the finish was on the other side. Everyone expected that Noah Lyles of the US would win, but everyone (including his fellow athletes) didn’t know that Noah had contracted COVID-19 the day before. Somehow, he managed to finish 3^rd in a time of 19.70 seconds anyway. But we are very happy when Letsile Tebogo of Botswana wins in a time of 19.46 seconds to become the first Botswanan to win a gold medal in any sport. Kenny Bednarak of the US wins the silver medal in 19.62 seconds.

The 200 m part of the heptathlon is next. They are starting and stopping at the same place as the men’s 200 m, but this time, I get a picture:

The woman in front is Katarina Johnson-Thompson from Great Britain. She finished in 23.44 seconds, which was worth 1035 points, the highest total earned in the three 200 m heats.

We have two hurdle races to end the evening. The first one is the women’s 400 m hurdles. This was expected to be a head-to-head race between Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone of the US and Femke Bol from the Netherlands. The great thing about this race is that they go all the way along the track, so we get a good view from our corner. Here are some pictures:

You can see how far ahead Sydney was near the end of the race. She set a new world record time of 50.37 seconds and probably could have lowered that time if she had not been ahead by 1.5 seconds! After the race, her family gave her a tiara because she is the queen. Second was Anna Cockrell in a personal best time of 51.87 seconds. Bol took the bronze medal in a time of 52.15 seconds. She must have been devastated to lose by so much, but still appreciated all the support she has received from the Dutch fans.

The final event was the men’s 110 m hurdles. The favorite was American Grant Holloway, but Holloway was also the favorite in Tokyo and finished second to Jamaican Hansle Parchment. Parchment is back in this race and is probably the second favorite. But from the start, Grant dominates and wins in a time of 12.99 seconds. Daniel Roberts of the US is second in 13.085 seconds beating Rasheed Broadbell of Jamaica by 0.003 seconds. Here are some pictures:

What a great evening! We head toward the RER B station as we did for rugby sevens and got stuck in the same crowd. This time, we stay in the RER B line. We have a nice conversation with a family of 4 from Dublin (Ireland) who are attending their first Olympics and would like to know what our favorite was. We tell them that Lillehammer was our favorite Olympics because it was the only time where you dump 200,000 Olympic tourists in a town of 15,000 and surround everyone with the awesome Norwegian sports fans who root very hard for their own athletes but also really appreciate outstanding athletic performances by anyone else.

We finally get up to the platform and just as I’m getting in the train, a SNCF employee runs up and wants to trade pins. He points to a pin and just as the doors are closing, he hands me the Inoui pin (an advertisement for the SNCF TGV high speed train) that he wears on his uniform. It isn’t a pin that I collect, but this is the kind of experience that I hope for when I wear all of these pins! It has been a good day! Steps for the day: 15,292.