Letters to Sports: Breaking news! Was that really in the Paris Olympics

Break dancing appears to be a new Olympics sport. When I watch “America’s Got Talent,” I guess I’m watching the future of Olympics sports — human/dog acrobatics, human pyramids, acrobats spinning 30 feet up in the air, complex acrobatic dance groups, etc. Are quick change artists, knife throwing and magic tricks coming next?

Richard Holmen
Trabuco Canyon

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Break dancing? I thought, why not tiddlywinks, then I watched it. What great entertainment. The young people involved were very athletic, funny, kind, and very supportive of each other. They all looked like they were enjoying it very much. I vote to keep it in the 2028 Games in Los Angeles.

John Lalonde
Camarillo

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One of the great sportsmanship moments in Olympic history was high jumpers Mutaz Barshim and Gianmarco Tamberi sharing the gold medal after tying in Tokyo. Amazingly, a high jump tie happened again in Paris with Hamish Kerr of New Zealand and Shelby McEwen of the U.S. They elected to have a jumpoff, and it became an Olympic low light: 11 consecutive misses by fatigued jumpers (at descending heights!) until Kerr secured the gold. Our collective obsession with winning and medals disregards the mission statement of modern Games father Baron Pierre de Coubertin: “The important thing is not to win, but to take part.”

Brad Kearns
Stateline, Nev.

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No one cares about the Olympics anymore. Cheating, corruption, dirty water, insulting shows, men fighting women, French ideology forced upon the athletes, the housing and food virtue signaling, terribly unsafe venues, bias officiating throughout the events, terrible programming and TV schedules, the massive arrogance of the athletes, the uncontrolled atmosphere of impending acts of terrorism, and much much more to come in 2028. The Olympics are killing the interest in sports the same way the Academy Awards has killed the interest in movies.

Russell Beecher
Canyon Lake

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Thank you for the fantastic daily email newsletter during the Paris Olympics. John Cherwa’s excellent wrap up of the action each day sprinkled with his own amusing attitude and observations were nearly as entertaining as the competitions themselves. More of this sort of spirited reporting and perhaps big-city newspapers will not go extinct after all.

Steve Weinstein
West Hollywood

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Brittney Griner states, “My country fought for me to get back and I was able to bring home gold for my country.” It appears that she learned a valuable lesson: namely, that the United States is not a perfect country, but it is a country we can still be proud of and shed a tear for during the national anthem.

David Waldowski
Laguna Woods