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Last week, I found news sources that I could use to follow Team GB in the Olympics in Paris. Tina brought us her experience with The Kitchen Diaries by Nigel Slater.

Since I promised myself that I would watch more Olympics than I have since I was 14, I’ve been seeking out the coverage of sports that barely show up in the Prime-Time broadcast.

One of those sports was synchronized diving. I watched when Tom Daley and Noah Williams took silver for Team GB in the men’s 10-meter platform synchronized diving competition.

So, I got a kick out of this journalist’s fascination with how synchronized the two divers were when they played Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Tom Daley was in the Olympics in 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2021. This year, he competed in his fifth Olympics.

Daley was given the honor to be the British flag-bearer alongside rower Helen Glover. The two of them caused some hilarity by recreating the famous scene from the movie Titanic at the front of their boat, only with the genders reversed. The Sun shared photos. The shenanigans must have brought them some luck because Helen Glover’s rowing team also won a silver medal.

Tom Daley is well known as the guy who knits while sitting in the stands watching his fellow divers compete. He shared his latest creation on Instagram this week.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Tom Daley (@tomdaley)

The Brits captured another synchronized diving medal — the bronze in the women’s 3-meter springboard competition. Yasmin Harper and Scarlett Mew Jensen won Team GB’s first medal of this year’s Olympics.

Another odd sport that I enjoyed this week was Equestrian Eventing. That’s a three-day affair where three different skills are showcased. The first day was dressage (basically, horse dance steps), the second was cross-country (a long run through various landscapes while encountering a variety of hazards to be jumped or splashed through), and the third was jumping (jumps with rails in an arena). It takes a special horse and rider to display all three skills at a world-class level.

The first gold medal earned by Team GB in the Paris 2024 games came when the team Eventing competition was completed. Laura Collett, Tom McEwen, and Ros Canter stood at the top of the podium in their stunning venue — the grounds of the Palace of Versailles. Sky Sports has a nice interview with the riders telling their own stories.

They don’t make it super clear in the interview (because who wants to talk about it?), but Laura Collett had a horrendous fall from a horse in 2013 that resulted in multiple injuries. Her life was saved by an emergency tracheotomy performed by paramedics and a six-day induced coma. She is blind in one eye as a result of that.

What cool stories have you learned from the Olympics?