I'm excited to see the women's 400M hurdles final.
The guy from Italy who won the 100M looked like he could play linebacker in the NFL. Without Usain Bolt, the 100M is kinda boring. His 100M win in Beijing was one of the 2-3 most amazing things I've seen in sports.
The Beijing Olympics had several great moments, that being one. The other was the come from behind relay for Phelps to be able to 8 golds. Most intense swim I've ever seen.
That's the weird thing about swimming. Is there any other sport where someone could win 8 medals (let alone gold) in one Olympics? It seems like the different swimming events just test the same set of skills over and over. In track and field, getting 3+ medals is pretty rare. Not saying that Phelps' swimming wasn't amazing but I enjoyed Bolt a lot more.
A gymnast can win six (beam, bars, vault, floor, all around and team). The medleys that Phelps won require four different swimming strokes so I don't know how fair it is to say it's the same set of skills.
Simone Biles (greatest gymnast, OAT?) won 5 (four gold, one bronze in 2016). Carl Lewis and FloJo each won four medals in the 1980s in track.
I am definitely not going to undercut Phelps' accomplishments for winning 8 golds but yeah, it is fairly crazy to me how an elite swimmer can rack up tons of hardware but other very capable athletes are lucky to walk away with more than 1 just based on the event. I get there is so much effort into it all, and that each stroke isn't like a carbon copy of the next, but it's still so much.
And if you're a player on a team sport, then you're really hosed, best you get is 1 medal, but there are still plenty of individual medals that basically are one event too, thinking of like tennis (and I mean individual, not doubles) or golf or judo or w/e.
To me it's like in a totally different and more judgey arena accomplishing an EGOT is really freaking easy if you are a composer and way harder for everyone else.