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When word broke that service on several Paris train lines had been disrupted on July 26th, just hours ahead of the Summer Olympics opening ceremony, some feared that terrorism had reared its ugly head and indelibly marred the event before it even began. But the train “attack” turned out to be a minor nuisance, and the Games have carried on mostly without a trace of controversy. Christine Brennan is the award-winning national sports columnist for USA Today; she appeared on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program to express her delight in covering an Olympics where the athletic endeavors have been the main story lines.
“The biggest news outside of sports and any sports controversy,” Brennan told Berman and Riedel, “was the trains, the vandalism of the trains on Friday morning. That was troublesome for a lot of people, but that was, it turned out, vandalism, not terrorism. And as I said, knock on wood, I’m standing right outside on the Champs Elysees, having just walked past the 3-on-3 venue in skateboarding on my way back to my hotel, and I’ve got to tell you, it’s beautiful. It’s like a county fair, like the greatest time at the amusement park rolled in with, like, a street party.”
The biggest athletic spectacle at the Games may be the saga of Algerian transgender boxer Imane Khelif, who made it to the gold medal round. Brennan, however, thinks the Khelif controversy is being built up as something larger than it is. “The International Olympics Committee didn’t have just one press conference, or two, or three. They had four press conferences saying she is a woman, her passport is a woman, she is competing as a woman, the Algerian boxer is a woman. They said it over and over again, so I’ll quote them. The other fact is people are talking transgender- she is not transgender. That is a fact, and in fact, if she was transgender in Algeria, she would probably in prison or worse. So that piece of it really exploded, but I think it was one of those things where, in the United States and around the world, social media just kind of crash-landed right here in Paris.”
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