Photo Courtesy of @wemakeaplay on Instagram
By Alexander Bernhardt Bloom | alex@queensledger.com
At the time of this column’s presentation to press the Olympic games in Paris had been on less than a week but many a neck had been hung, yet, with heavy metal.
The Republic of Moldova, for example, was awarded two, bronze in color and merit, for its athletes’ outstanding performance in competitive Judo. Sweden’s amounted to three, two thirds of which celebrated its teammates’ success in Target Shooting and Womens’ Cross-Country Mountain Biking.
China and Japan led all of the rest in golds at six apiece, but it was our own Team USA, ever the outsized presence, with the most medals overall at twenty. That’s nothing to shake a baguette at.
All twenty of them will return with hometown heroes to hometowns someplace, but a few merit special recognition here for their winners’ proximity to our own metropolitan area.
Lauren Scruggs, Queens native, Harvard scholar, and Fencing phenom, receives first mention. On her way to the championship match Scruggs faced Italy’s Arianna Errigo, ranked number one in their Foil field worldwide. In a heated contest the two fencers did frequently remove their flag-stamped protective masks to reveal faces marked with anguish and determination. Tied at fourteen strikes each the two advanced along the jousting strip toward one another and leapt at the same moment, each making contact on the torso of her opponent.
Off came the masks, Errigo screaming into the air in satisfaction, for she was sure she’d won it. But the judges went to review and in the moments in between as they deliberated the Queens came out in Scruggs, composed but indignant, her gesturing with her arms in a language we in the boroughs understand well: ball don’t lie. The judges ultimately agreed.
On went Scruggs, and she’d face USA teammate Lee Keifer in a match for the gold less volatile and more decisive, Scruggs defeated 15-6, and followed by the two embracing and hoisting American flags side-by-side with their coaches on hand. We’ve surely not seen the last of the foil from Ozone Park.
Olympic Swimmer Nic Fink is from Morristown, New Jersey. Close enough.
Like Scruggs, Fink made his debut on the Olympic stage this week, and his glory would arrive in the Men’s 100-Meter Breaststroke event. All races in the Olympic pool are nail biters, but if you didn’t catch Fink’s come-from-behind dazzler in this one please request a replay from your search browser.
The burden of high expectations, in this case, rested mostly on the enormous shoulders of China’s Qin Haiyang and Briton Adam Peaty, and they led the race for most of the way. But, executing the turn and slithering into the return length it was Italian hotrod Nicolo Martinenghi leading them thereafter, and Fink was a good extended arm’s length behind him and the rest.
Breaststroke swimmers have the appearance of the devout in enthusiastic prayer, rising and bowing in supplication then repeating again, an image that will leave you visually awestruck. Fink may have been praying in earnest, because, in an impossible last push to meet the wall, his fingers arrived at the precise moment as did Peaty’s, and the two were awarded matching silver medals.
Fink’s wife Melanie, a competitive swimmer and former Olympian herself, was watching at home, carrying the couple’s first child. She’d asked him to remind her to breathe as he took to the pool.
“I’m very speechless right now,” he explained in an interview afterward. Well, us too.
Kassidy Cook is not from anywhere near the tri-state area in Plantation, Florida, outside of Fort Lauderdale. But many New Yorkers vacation and retire there, and those who watched her performance in the Women’s Synchronized Springboard finals last week would unquestionably offer the diver a key to our city.
In this event, team members climb to the top of a diving platform which extends two planks in parallel out over the pool below. Just over ten feet to fall, the thrill is not in the speed or distance so much as the beautiful connectedness and precise grace exhibited by the divers who do it well.
Cook and her diving partner Sarah Bacon do it better than that. In the first round they approached the edge of the springboard backwards, securing their toes in a stoic moment before Cook’s firm countoff began their flexing of the ground beneath, finally catapulting the two divers up. They hinged their bodies at the highest moment before plunging head over heels to be swallowed gently by the deep end.
They were only getting started, the three dives to follow seeing them approach head on, in some cases dancing toward the bouncing edge before flying off it, diving inward and outward both, adding pirouettes to the flips which became hard to count in number before the duo finally met, and always with a slicing immediacy, with the chlorinated depths beneath.
They finally finished a near second to the pair of divers from China, a testament to the level of competition that rises to the 3-meter altitude, but Cook and Bacon will carry home heavy metal as hometown heroes, nevermind the color.
Lauren Scruggs (Photo Courtesy of @usafencing on Instagram)
Nic Fink (Photo Courtesy of @finknic on Instagram)
Kassidy Cook and Sarah Bacon (Photo Courtesy of @teamusa on Instagram)
