Meme Madness at the Olympics

Sports and Platonic philosophy in the era of the very online.

I realized midway through the Olympics opening ceremony that the whole affair was, as the kids say, “very online.”

It was at the ceremony’s hinge moment—a set-piece performance of the theme of Liberté, featuring the cloaked torchbearer stumbling into a performance of Les Misérables.¹

As the barricade echoed with “À la volonté du peuple," we were suddenly tête-à-tête, or rather dans les bras, with a beheaded Marie Antoinette singing "Ça ira" from a window of the Conciergerie—the prison where she was held before her decapitation.

Before I could even process the grisly joke, the heavy-metal band Gojira morphed the revolutionary song into a manic tribute to the hyper-violent birth of French liberty.

I loved it. And so did the internet.

As the ceremony progressed, there were more memorable poses. Yes, the athlete boat procession down the Seine was a focal point, but almost a sideshow as the camera lingered upon static tableaux.

This made the ceremony fodder for culture war, but its virality was almost certainly by design.

Olympic opening ceremonies have always been about spectacle. But for 2024, I suspect the creators realized their audience would watch across multiple devices, platforms, and syncopations. So they structured the opening ceremony to make it more easily rendered into datums of tweets, TikToks, and short-form video.

---

---

This mode has continued into the Games themselves.

Videos of athletic feats are going viral, but within a larger heterogeneous soup of memes, clips, and athlete-generated content.² All of it teased away from actual sport for commentary, marketing, jokes, or ideological grist.

It’s Bob the Cap Catcher, or gymnasts with cheese, or chocolate muffin tiktoks, or Snoop Dogg doing . . . literally anything.

This memetic mode—one focused on the image, the quip, the short clip—helps explain why the aiming stances in the shooting events, moments of intense stillness, were celebrated in the first week of the Games. Images of Kim Yeji and Yusuf Dikec were especially memed:

Likewise a photo of American gymnast Stephen Nedoroscik waiting in repose before a pommel-horse shred was the visual platform for ten thousand jokes.

This is the Olympics as a vibe, an energy, a transient state.

Changing patterns of media representation and consumption are not new to the Games. Nor is internet virality. But there is something particularly frenetic about this summer’s Olympics.

Ali Feller

, who creates the popular Ali on the Run podcast, noted this shift in how she is personally enjoying the Games:

“Not live. Not even on the nightly replay shows on NBC. I’m getting 100% of my Olympics content from Instagram. The highlights, the TikToks (reposted on IG, because I’m a millennial), the interviews.”

My viewing habits are similar. My wife and I are still wary of exposing the mushy brain of our one-year-old to sparkling, addictive screens. So, most of my Olympic viewing has consisted of YouTube highlight videos, watched in the darkened corners of our loft after the little one has screamed herself to sleep. Ça ira, indeed.

Both Ali’s and my Olympic viewing habits represent an increasing conceptual distance between the beholder and the athletic beheld. Sports are no longer just covered via television. They are reduced to digital abstracts, flattened into “content,” and spun out, decontextualized across innumerable channels.

Memes like this are derived from the word mimeme, “that which is imitated”, and rooted in the Greek word mimesis—a concept with which Western sensibilities have long had an anxious relationship.

In his foundational political text Republic, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato considers mimesis as a copy of reality twice removed from the truth. True reality consists of unchanging, perfect forms or ideas. Physical objects manifest these forms as imperfect copies. And artistic representations (mimesis) are copies of these physical objects—copies of copies, even further from the truth.

This year’s Olympic flame is not actually a flame. It’s an illusion made up of mist and beams of light.

Plato’s famous allegory of the cave visualizes this condition. Prisoners sit chained inside a dark cave, facing a blank wall, only capable of seeing shadows cast by objects behind them, which they believe to be reality.

Watching the Games in 2024, we no longer view the silhouette of shadows. Now we live among the reflections of shadows, indeed caught within reflections of reflections. Increasingly we watch sport amid the representations of representation, imitations of imitation rendered in self-referential, circular, ephemeral spirals.

We are still prisoners, of course, but no longer chained to the cave. Rather we swirl in the messy stew of our own mimetic gumbo, so far removed from the real, we might soon struggle to recognize it.

1. The most egregious sin of the opening ceremony was not the Last Supper controversy, but the willingness to encourage widespread public misinterpretation that the events of Les Misérables occur during the French Revolution. They do not. The uprising depicted in both Victor Hugo’s novel and the musical adaptation was a short, unsuccessful anti-monarchical uprising that occurred in 1832, nearly forty years after the execution of Marie Antoinette.

2. Gear haul TikToks have been particularly popular.