I can’t be the only one who is delighted and amused but also profoundly baffled by Snoop Dogg’s constant television presence at the Olympics — like a museum-goer at an early exhibition of surrealist art. It seems that every time you turn on NBC or one of its affiliates, he’s there, in full riding gear with his hair slicked back, for example, playing twins with his TV wife — seriously, why are they always together? — Martha Stewart. Their helmets matched and their tall boots gleamed. Snoop pronounced the term for the maneuver called “passage,” rode the last vowel like a nimble horse, and — probably for the first time in history — the word sounded not only snooty but elegant, and also genuinely hilarious. “That’s a damn good Crip walk,” he said after a particularly beautiful horse move. Later, Snoop sat courtside next to basketball genius A’ja Wilson, cheering on the childish antics of Joel Embiid, the U.S.’s hulking, highly talented center, who seemed at the moment to be making a series of chopping motions toward his crotch. (Embiid, born in Cameroon, is a regular sparring partner in France with crowds—he was granted French citizenship in 2022 but declined to represent the country at the Olympics—and Snoop Dogg knows a thing or two about stylistic feuds.) When Simone Biles and her teammates won gold in gymnastics, Snoop, far from the tiny prodigies but prominently placed in the crowd, danced smoothly, cheering, 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 watch the highlights of the badminton doubles match between the Chinese and American teams, you might have heard Snoop’s dynamic, super-fast commentary on a particularly energetic series of volleys. He used the diction of a rapper and showed off the processing power of a supercomputer:
Breathless, half-witted, repetitive in the service of rhythm, accents everywhere, interested in everything – to my ear he sounded a little like Gertrude Stein from her “Stanzas in Meditation”:
Snoop’s baffled on-air partner, the staunchly straight Mike Tirico, could only laugh. “That was a good point,” he said of the rally, bluntly stating a fact Snoop had already laid out in pure tones. There’s no denying it: Snoop is incredible. He oozes personal style, physically and verbally. He’s preternaturally comfortable in his own skin and deserves some kind of acting award, maybe a lifetime achievement Emmy, for an insanely long performance – never a flicker of doubt – as himself. When I think of “good television,” the first image that comes to mind is of Snoop. Wherever he is, he somehow belongs. He’s, excuse me, cool as hell.
Yet every time I see Snoop in Paris as Snoop, I wonder what exactly the people at NBC are trying to tell me – the Americans – by making him the Pied Piper of the Olympic Games as they are seen on screens across the United States. The final round of the Summer Olympics, which took place under the depressing cloud of COVIDsuffered ratings losses. (Not that I knew it then: I gorged myself on them greedily, as I have at every Olympics, summer and winter, since I admired the elegance of Nancy Kerrigan as a child in 1992.) In 2020, the ethos and aesthetic of Olympic competition—an always odd synthesis of rivalry and cooperation, nationalism and boundless affection—felt strained in a world where working together to fight disease has failed. The idea now is: Let’s add a layer of pure personality and let the good times roll! Sport is entertainment in and of itself, but maybe we need an entertainer to remind us what’s so fun about competition in the first place. According to a Twitter-fueled rumor started by venture capitalist Henry McNamara (who apparently heard the story over dinner from an “NBC executive”), NBC pays Snoop $500,000 a day to be a “special correspondent.” And why not?
I love that the Olympics come in election years: both endeavors make us think anew about what it means to belong to a place – what it’s really like to be a citizen, to have your personality shaped at least in part by where you come from. Maybe Snoop’s job really is to be an idealized American. Once slightly disreputable – early in his career he was acquitted after a long, very public murder trial; I remember trying to buy his first and still best album, Doggystyle, as a kid and my mother flatly turning him down – but now he crackles with the music of clean fun: a West Coast Gatsby without the sad story at the end of the story. He’s confident, charming, witty, and knows how generous it can be to be seen having fun.
Even apart from Snoop’s presence, NBC’s coverage of the Olympics – radically US-centric, unless you happen to pay for the bottomless open fire hose of NBC’s streaming service Peacock – is an examination of American archetypes. There’s the cocky sprinter Noah Lyles, who seems to have decided that the only way to stay relevant in track and field is to flaunt an ego big enough to encompass the entire country from coast to coast. He talks shit constantly, almost every time he’s near a microphone. His nerdy, whiny voice, bright eyes and big, protruding teeth seem designed solely to convey the message that he’s the best. NBC’s fuzzy coverage reminds us that he was a sickly kid who suffered terribly from asthma and other ailments, but the cameras tell the real story: They catch him blabbing all the time. When he won the 100-meter race by a handful of thousandths of a second – a race and result that can be watched endlessly – he took off his name tag and waved the name “LYLES” in the air for all to see. On Thursday, he ran the 2000 and finished third, good enough for the bronze medal, then collapsed so badly that he needed medical attention. Once he recovered, Lyles revealed that he had been diagnosed with: COVID two days earlier. “I’ve never been more proud of myself for being able to come here,” he said. This is the America I know: ruthlessly insisting on carrying on, whether there are germs or not.
And then there’s 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 company. He’s riveting, sitting at a computer and talking to his colleagues on a videoconferencing app that looks suspiciously like Zoom, scheduling meals, and always showing up for his workouts. It 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 drudgery of remote work. We’re supposed to admire Fink for his hyperproductivity, his everyday collage of normality and heroism, but the story depresses me. Employers everywhere are probably wondering: So why My do people need that much free time? Still, I cheered and celebrated with Fink when he took silver in the 100-meter breaststroke – his first medal, which was a long time coming for a 31-year-old man. He pretends to like his job, but I’m kind of hoping this moment of fame will make him shut the laptop, at least for a while. Can’t the Wheaties people write this guy a check?
Sha’Carri Richardson, the doe-eyed sprinter with long, curly hair – like a carnival snake once it gets going and wind – is a comeback kid after a deeply disappointing last time out. This time she was beaten in the women’s 100 meters by St. Lucia’s Julien Alfred, a marvel of muscle and focus, but seeing her medal at all felt like the kind of redemptive catharsis we want to see at the Games. Simone Biles’ return to the gymnastics mats – even more successful, snagging three gold medals – is a similar All-American coronation, as refreshing as stone fruit in summer. She survived the dreaded “twisties” – a chronic feeling of being lost in the air – and endured a barrage of online criticism for “quitting” at her last Olympics. Now she is jumping around freely again, performing liberated aerial movements, achieving countless victories and, in between her victories, repeatedly making sporting advances towards other athletes, especially towards the Brazilian power woman Rebeca Andrade, who won gold for her floor exercise, while Biles took silver and Jordan Chiles took bronze.
The dominance of the U.S. men’s and women’s basketball teams is no surprise anymore. On the men’s side in particular, some of the other nations are slowly catching up – an echo of our increasingly multipolar geopolitics – but on the world stage, basketball is still a top-level sport for a country that is most comfortable when it is comfortably ahead. (They almost lost a semifinal game to a Serbian team led by versatile center Nikola Jokić, and you could see their sudden nervousness.) My favorite character among the players is Anthony Edwards, the charismatic young guard who recently celebrated his 23rd birthday in Paris. He jumps like he’s shot it, dunks like he’s settling a vendetta, and, not unlike Snoop Dogg, always has a smile on his face. He talks rubbish, 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 modern-day Davy Crockett. There is a video of him charming the US women’s table tennis team. They told him that any of them would knock him out with their rackets. “I don’t believe it,” Edwards said. “I’m not going to put up with that. Eleven to zero? I’m hitting one Period!” Later, Edwards bravely sat in the crowd and watched his new girlfriend Lily Zhang play. It was all in good fun.
Maybe one day Edwards will be our new Snoop – all jokes and no worries. Bombast without a hint of worry. Like Whitman, the boy celebrates himself and sings himself. Like Emerson, he does his own thing, follows the call of his own genius and seems to go through the world guided by his mood. Oh, if only that were all there was to being an American! For a few more days we can tune in and pretend. ♦
