The five things you should know if you were only going to know five things about the final weekend at the Olympics.
1. Jamaica’s 4x100m relay team ran around a track in less than 37 seconds, the gold medal and shattering the world record in the process. It’s unfair enough that Jamaica is allowed to use Usain Bolt in this event—let alone every event, because, you know, that whole thing about the Olympics being contested by actual humans—but to pair him with Yohan Blake, someone who runs so fast that it scares people into thinking he will jump into the stands and eat them, is ridiculous. The U.S. came in second and was actually kind of close until Bolt took the baton, but unless he decided to retire mid-race, the Americans stood no chance. But hey, they still set an American record! USA > USA.
2. The American women took first in the 4x100m relay, also shattering the world record and basically coming as close to lapping the competition in a one-lap race as possible. They also took gold in the 4x400m relay. (Allyson Felix was on both teams and won gold in the 200m. She is the best.) And the U.S. women’s basketball team won gold for a record-breaking fifth time in a row. Oh, and the women’s water polo team won its first-ever gold. American women the Olympics, winning 66 percent of the country’s golds and more than half of its total medals.
3. Great Britain was actually in its own Olympics, winning 65 medals and 29 golds. Mo Farrah, the long-distance track specialist/masochist, won both the 5,000m and 10,000m. Farrah is a Somalia-born Muslim, and he was the face of the London Olympics for the host country. That seems maybe way more important than any medal total, world.
4. The U.S. men’s basketball team gold, edging by Spain, 107-100. Vin Diesel was at the game, which means this was pretty much the most important thing that’s ever happened. Also, technically, the U.S. men won the other major team-sport competition, as Mexico Brazil in soccer’s gold-medal match. The U.S. didn’t qualify, after losing to Canada and then tying El Salvador, but that’s not important. The U.S. pre-Olympic team beat Mexico in February. Mexico then won the gold medal in August. Therefore, according to math, the U.S. is the best Olympic soccer team in the world, which means they should all get gold medals. Good job, guys!
5. The Olympics are over. The closing ceremonies last night. If you missed them, they were basically one giant, Illuminati-constructed, crypto-British, sea-monster-dominated, Beatle-faced, what-the-hell-is-George-Michael-doing-here attempt at hypnotizing the entire world. I woke up this morning inside my refrigerator with a 20-dollar bill taped to my forehead, so it may or may not have worked. But in all, the London Olympics were weirdly captivating and captivatingly weird, which I think sums up what a competition, where Americans and Botswanans compete as equals and where you win the same award for sitting on a horse in a sand pit as you do for running faster than any human being ever, should be.