From Parmesan Girl to Pommel Horse Guy, the Paris Olympics are bringing the memes

Among the Olympians who have gone globally viral in Paris, the weirdest situation might be Parmesan Girl.

Parmesan Girl is Italian artistic gymnast Giorgia Villa. She and her teammates won a shock silver here, tucked in just behind the monolithic American team led by Simone Biles. They’re big news in Italy.

But in the rest of the world, Villa is more famous for her sponsorship choices. At one point, she helped promote Parmigiano Reggiano.

She starred in a moody photoshoot, draped over great honking wheels of cheese in her sparkly leotard. Here she is jumping over cheese. And doing a handstand over cheese. And sitting on stacked blocks of cheese. It is, I grant you, a real aesthetic choice.

The Internet thought so, too. For a couple of days, Villa was online famous for cheese. An Olympic silver medal became a superfluous detail about her.

There are a lot of different Olympics going on at the Olympics. But in terms of bulk impressions, the most important is the Meme Olympics.

The Games have always been big, but they have never been quite this connective. Unlike other big sports happenings — say, a World Cup — they are the playground of both the extremely online and offline, and everybody in between.

They are easily accessible and at least mildly interesting to most people. Whether you are an extreme-sports nerd in Beijing or a bored stay-at-home worker in Sao Paolo, you are seeing the same stuff happening at the same time.

You are probably just as likely to watch a sport you don’t know as you are one you do. No other sports event is like this. And having watched something you don’t get, you will want to talk about it.

The old way of doing this was to talk sports talk. Oh, did you see how fast so and so was? How about that time/weight/score?

What's happening today at the Olympics

Such discussions are necessarily exclusionary. Most of them turn into bone-headed lectures, where one person who doesn’t know anything about synchronized diving explains what happened to another, less confident person who also knows nothing about synchronized diving.

If your goal is engaging as many people as possible, you don’t want to talk sports talk. You want to talk about the weird things you see when you watch the Olympics.

Like that Turkish guy who looks like he got lost getting out of the parking lot and wandered into the world’s most high-intensity target-shooting contest.

In a sport where competitors sometimes kit themselves out like RoboCop, he’s the one who shows up in an untucked T-shirt and competes with one hand stuck in his pants pocket.

Even if you don’t know a single thing about shooting, and I am 98 per cent sure you don’t, you may know Turkish Shooting Guy. He is the new online shorthand for someone who is very good at something they don’t care all that much about.

You made a three-hour drive in 2 hours 15 minutes? Got a raise that you didn’t ask for? You, too, are Turkish Shooting Guy.

The real Turkish Shooting Guy is Yusuf Dikec. He also won a silver medal here in Paris. But people don’t bother with that part.

We cannot talk about this without addressing Pole Vault Guy — ANRKA (also not really known as) France’s Anthony Ammirati.

In Olympic terms, Ammirati isn’t much of a pole vaulter. He finished 12th in his qualifying group here. But how he failed has dazzled the world.

Let’s quote from his Wikipedia entry: “Ammirati qualified for the 2024 Olympics … Subsequently, a video of one of his attempts where he knocked down the crossbar with his penis went viral.”

It’s not Shakespeare, but it gets the idea across. Pole vaulters wear contoured body socks. Maybe Ammirati was doing jumping jacks in his because when the crucial moment arrived, his body sock was not quite contoured enough.

Try naming the guy who won the pole vault in Paris. Which country is he from? What does he look like? You and me both — we have no clue.

But Ammirati is mind-bendingly famous. No matter what you’re into, you cannot idly scroll Instagram at the moment without encountering his historic snag on slo-mo repeat.

For a couple of days, Ammariti attempted to hide from his notoriety. He was too junior an Olympian to have attracted a single interview at the competition. But then he succumbed. After releasing an athletic sort of comment through French authorities, he issued an online sort on TikTok.

In slangy French, he was filmed eating lunch and staring into the middle distance while thinking, “POV: You make more buzz for your package than your performance.”

It doesn’t matter what Ammirati does from now on. This Olympics has defined him. But unless he has a great sense of humour, not in a way he can frame and display on a mantel.

This broadening of how the Olympics intersects with average people — from a sort of holy sporting rite to a greenhouse for online LOLs — is the key to the Games’ continued dominance.

There’s already too much sports in the world. If successful, the move to add women’s-only versions of all the established leagues will eventually double sports’ demand on attention.

At a point — and we’ve probably already passed it — it will be impossible to be generally familiar with what’s going on everywhere. Not in the way a sports fan of 30 years ago could know most of what was happening in all four major leagues.

The next great phase of sports expansion is into not-quite-sports-sports-related content. What did the players wear going in to the arena? What are they doing on holiday? Who are they dating and what’s that person trying to sell?

Teams and leagues can’t control most of this. It’s on the players to do the work, motivated by appetite for fame. Some will be better at it than others. Those leagues whose employees are good at it will rise. Those who aren’t won’t.

Except the Olympics. They’re above this fray. Ten thousand athletes show up. The whole world watches. The law of averages suggest some quirky weirdness is going to happen every single day. Once it does, it is repackaged, repurposed and narrowed for thousands of niche audiences.

You cannot buy this sort of targeted advertising because it is organic and authentic. Sponsors will pay anything to be perceived as real.

Medals will always be the sole focus of the few here who are capable of winning them. But for everyone else, there is now the chance that they, too, can make a global mark.

If you’re lucky — or very, very unlucky — you can also become a famous Olympian. Just be careful what you wish for.

Pommel Horse Guy (Stephen Nedoroscik, USA, gymnastics)

Nedoroscik became the Internet’s new boyfriend when he took off his Coke-bottle glasses and stood at the apparatus squinting and blinking. He has significantly impaired vision. Despite that hindrance, he is amazing at pommel horse. The disparity has delighted people.

He was also seen either in deep contemplation or half-asleep with his eyes closed directly before he competed. People liked that even more.

After a while, all the super humans at the Games begin to look alike. But Pommel Horse Guy reminds us that regular-looking people can also do incredible things. On a pommel horse.

Volleyball to the Face Guy (Moritz Karlitzek, Germany, volleyball)

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In the midst of a match between Germany and France, a towering Frenchman rose up and hammered the ball toward his opponents. Moritz Karlitzek was there to stop it. With his nose.

The volleyball was coming at him like a brick tossed off the top of the building. Karlitzek absorbed the blow like a heavyweight. When medics came out to check on him, he laughed and sent them away. This man is a paragon of toughness.

But all people will remember is the ball to the face. Sadly, this is the Olympic meme most likely to be sustained after the Games end.

Passed over for that Christmas bonus? Dumped by your girlfriend the day before prom? There’s a meme for that — this German guy whose name no one remembers catching a volleyball right in the face.

Rugby Girl (Ilona Maher, USA, rugby)

Not so much a meme as a movement, no one here has done a better job of leveraging the attention of the Games to grow a personal brand.

Maher TikToks about all sorts of things — food, what it’s like to be a physically imposing woman, her friends on the rugby team, looking for love in the athletes village. All of this is done in a self-deprecating style that never quite tips over into bathos. A born performer.

Her content output here is so frequent and so professional, it’s hard to believe she finds time to compete. No problem on that score — her U.S. team won a bronze medal.

Maher’s online presence isn’t new, but Paris 2024 supercharged it. She’s become a face in the United States. If you haven’t seen or heard about her yet, congratulations. That means you are never online. I congratulate you on having achieved Zen mastery of the self.

Bob the Cap Catcher (An unidentified lifeguard at the Olympic pool)

Someone lost their swimming cap in the Olympic pool. Rather than send an Olympian down to fetch it, they called ‘Bob’.

While viewers looked on, Bob appeared in a Speedo about the same dimensions as your average wallet, or maybe a beer coaster. What the Australians call a budgie smuggler.

In a typical milieu, Bob would look like a specimen of manhood. Shapely, even. But in this context, surrounded by Greek statuary, Bob looked a little out of place.

That said, he did not lack for confidence. Smooth entry into the pool. Cap fetched in short order. In and out and onto the next. The competition was barely delayed.

Bob is now the visual byword for competence and good form. As many have called him online, he is a legend of the Olympic pool. And he probably got his spot here through an ad in the newspaper.

Tom Cruise (USA, actor)

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This meme has yet to happen, but it’s guaranteed. At some point in Sunday’s closing ceremony, Cruise will appear.

Reportedly, he will rappel off the roof of the Stade de France. Then he will race a motorbike through Paris. Then he will show up in Los Angeles holding the Olympic flag.

I’ve seen this movie. It was called Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1. It was terrible the first time. I’m not sure it will be any better the second.

Mostly, I’m interested to see if Cruise runs. He is the greatest runner in the history of film. Perfect form. I could watch that man run all day.

Cruise has been everywhere here in Paris, hoping to make a splash. It hasn’t happened yet. He’s been swamped by Snoop Dogg, a human meme-creating machine.

But the big show, in concert with the idea that the Summer Games is headed to Hollywood, should be enough to create the lasting Olympic moment Cruise clearly prizes so much.