SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
You know, some of our NPR colleagues get all the luck. They're in Paris to cover the Olympics in person. The rest of us have to watch at home, trying to catch every pole vault, every photo finish in the pool. That includes our pop culture critic Linda Holmes, who does her best to watch as many sports as she can. After all, you don't pull anything if you're just watching. At least, I don't think so. Linda joins us now. Linda, thanks so much for being with us.
LINDA HOLMES, HOST:
Thank you for having me, Scott.
SIMON: What have you been watching most avidly?
HOLMES: Well, in 2021, during the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, I made it a point to watch some of every sport. And as a result of that, I have an interest in a lot more sports than I used to. So I'm watching the big stuff. I watch swimming and gymnastics, but I also love water polo. I've started to understand rugby better than I used to. So Friday was the trampoline competition, the beginning of that, which is a form of gymnastics, for the uninitiated. And I love watching trampoline. It's beautiful. It's very terrifying. Those people get about as high in the air as anybody who's not attached to anything. I love the BMX freestyle, which is basically bike tricks. So I get a lot out of watching sports that I don't get to watch very much the rest of the time.
SIMON: You mention gymnastics. My gosh. Watching Simone Biles, and I must say not just Simone Biles - I mean, all of these young women has been enthralling, certainly for me and my family. You have also watched the Netflix docuseries "Simone Biles Rising." How does that affect what you see of Simone Biles performing?
HOLMES: Well, you know, after she pulled out of most of her events in Tokyo, she had the twisties, which is what gymnasts call this condition where you lose the ability to know where you are in the air, which is very dangerous for them, obviously. She took a lot of abuse. There was a pretty concerted effort to shame her for that. And what you see in that docuseries is, in part, the difficulty of coming back. It took her a long time before she was really back at it in the gym. It was something she had to get past, the twisties part of it.
I think seeing her vulnerability made it even more impressive to me that she did it anyway, showed up and was still better than everybody else. And I think the message from the series for all of the athletes is that whether they meet their goals or not, Olympians' experience is really unknowable unless they choose to explain it to you. And it may look entirely like triumph, but a lot of the time, it's impressive even more when you remember that they're very complicated people with a lot going on even when they're not performing.
SIMON: Used to be you watched the Olympics, one channel, hundreds of millions of people watching together. It's different now, right?
HOLMES: Yeah. You know, I think they're actually finally getting it right. For a long time, it was very hard to find things, to keep up with things as they transitioned into cable and then into streaming. And you can still watch the Olympics in primetime on NBC, if that's what you prefer. But if you're like me and you do want to watch trampoline and BMX freestyle and those kinds of things, it's very easy to find that stuff on Peacock, if you have Peacock. It can take a little digging. But once you get the hang of how the interface works, I've been really pleased with how accessible a lot of the coverage is. And with social media being what it is now and the time zone difference not being too punishing, you can really get a buzz going around some of these things that aren't necessarily just happening in the primetime coverage.
SIMON: The AI commercials have been attracting a lot of attention.
HOLMES: Well, you know, they made a big push with AI commercials during these Olympics. They haven't gone over very well. I wrote about one for NPR that was about letting AI write a fan letter for you. A commercial so many people disliked that they've now pulled it - it was a Google ad for their Gemini product, and they've pulled it. They're not showing it anymore. I don't think those commercials are going over very well. They've shown it over and over and over. It's at least my hope that one, the fan letter one, I hope to never see again.
SIMON: Linda, as a fan, what are you going to be watching this coming week?
HOLMES: Plenty of track and field. They're just kicking up the track and field. Canoe slalom is still going. Love canoe slalom. Handball is still going. They haven't started sport climbing yet or the breakdancing, which is a new thing.
SIMON: Yeah.
HOLMES: I love sport climbing in Tokyo. I plan to watch all that stuff.
SIMON: Linda, I don't mean to ask you an impertinent question, but I mean, do you have anything else in your life at this particular point?
HOLMES: (Laughter).
SIMON: I don't know anybody else who's watching so much of this (laughter).
HOLMES: You know what? I never...
SIMON: We're here. We're here for you, Linda.
HOLMES: I never thought of myself as somebody who watched a ton of Olympics. And then I did that project where I watched some of every sport. And what I said at the time was, they're all the best sport in the Olympics, for their own reasons.
SIMON: Yeah.
HOLMES: And it definitely turned me into kind of a superfan of watching Olympics on TV.
SIMON: Ah, all right. Well, we're superfans of yours, Linda Holmes, host of the NPR podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour. Thanks so much for being with us, Linda. Now, back to the set.
HOLMES: Thank you so much, Scott. I will enjoy it and report back, I'm sure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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