Hello, fellow Olympians! The Paris Games are in full swing, with thousands of athletes from around the world competing in 32 sports (29 of which you won’t hear about until the next Olympics). I’m glued to the competition, with equal appreciation for athletic excellence and for random heroes like Bob the Cap Catcher, who achieved international fame by jumping into a swimming pool to retrieve a swimming cap. Here are some of the highlights, lowlights, ongoing dramas, and random observations from the Paris Games.

The Seine is full of shit

The biggest story of the 33rd Olympic Games is likely to be whether the Seine is too polluted for human safety.My God! The river, it is full of mare!” said a French official (who I made up) on the matter. It is a big problem because you can’t have swimming competitions in a literal sewer.

Just hours before the men’s triathlon’s swimming leg was scheduled to begin on Tuesday, officials were mulling whether to go ahead as planned, postpone it until later in the week, or cancel it altogether. Everything depends on the results of water purity tests. The hope is that E. coli levels in the Paris waterway will drop to “safe for humans,” but since E. coli rises when it rains, the future of the race could depend on whether storms planned for later this week materialize.

An official with World Triathlon, the sport’s governing body, told CBS that the swimming portion of the triathlon could be eliminated altogether. “It would be a biathlon,” he added.

While canceling the swim might work for the triathlon (although triathletes who are good at swimming will be upset about this), the marathon swimming events scheduled for later in the games have no alternative.

Why Olympic Street Skateboarding Is Terrible

On the third day of the Olympics, the finals of the street skateboarding competition took place. Japan’s Yuto Horigome won the gold medal, and Americans Jagger Eaton and Nyjah Huston won silver and bronze. But it was very stupid and bad, because as a concept, a “street skateboarding competition” is fatally flawed.

First, because of Olympic doping testing. Skateboarders who enjoy smoking cannabis are not eligible for Olympic competition, which severely limits the number of athletes. Step one to improving Olympic skateboarding is to end testing for cannabis.

But more importantly, streetboarding, as it is actually practiced, is nothing like the way it is “played” at the Olympics. Skaters do not compete by running for 45 seconds and scoring their best two tricks on a scale of 0-100 points. Skaters compete by playing SKATE

In SKATE, a skater does a trick, then their opponent has five attempts to repeat it or lose a point. Then they switch places. This is practiced all over the world in schoolyards and random staircases, and would be a much more interesting way to determine who the best street skateboarder is. SKATE involves direct competition, and has an objective outcome that is not dependent on the judges’ interpretation. And it comes of the sport itselfand not from any Olympic governing body that came up with the fake rules for Olympic street skating.

This is a great time to be playing women’s rugby

Why did no one ever tell me rugby was so great? All these years I thought it was like cricket, a foreign sport for people who can’t handle real sports, but I’ve been glued to every game of the Team USA women’s sevens rugby team during these Olympics, and it’s awesome. And we’re tear shit up.

We beat Brazil a few days ago and on day three Team USA went to war against our eternal rivals and villains of the world, Great Britain. People in Britain really care about rugby – they invented the game after all – but Team USA crushed them 17-7 and barely broke a sweat. Highlights included a clutch score from team captain Naya Tapper midway through the game, Sammy Sullivan meanly stalking the camera after putting the game out of reach in the second half, and literally everything Ilona Maher does, both on the field and on TikTok.

This win puts an American rugby team in the semi-finals of the Olympics for the first time ever. We play New Zealand on day four. They are very good, but I have confidence in the mighty USA sevens.

American Women’s Basketball: The Anti-Underdogs

While the U.S. women’s sevens rugby team is a scrappy underdog, our Olympic women’s basketball team is not. We crush every competitor to the point that it’s not even funny. Our win against Japan adds a 56th game to the U.S. winning streak. The team hasn’t lost a game since 1992. We play Belgium on Thursday. I don’t think they have much of a chance.