All you need to know for this summer’s Rio Olympics
Has there ever been a more controversial run-up to the start of the Summer Olympics than to the one starting Friday in Rio de Janeiro? From the Zika virus to massive Brazilian corruption to Russia’s partial ban for systematic doping, it’s a wonder anyone’s going to show up. But show they will, which explains this week’s buying guide.
Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated goes the limit with its full-blown Olympics coverage, including a 12-page pictorial of some of the athletes who are going to compete in Rio, to put that once-confident workout routine of yours in sharp perspective. Even though the magazine devotes a whole section to women US athletes, it baffles us with the decision to set aside only a flabby photo spread of Simone Biles, the 19-year-old US gymnastics phenom, who’s anticipated to be the first woman to ever take home five gold medals in a single Games. A longer take on the crime-ridden, Zika-inflicted city of Rio, and the athletes who came out of it, is worth the read.
Self
Self magazine’s cover star is Natalie Coughlin, the 2008 gold medal-winning swimmer who’s looking to make a comeback in Rio. There’s a challenge in covering the Olympics in an engaging way when they haven’t even happened yet, and Self is ill-equipped for the job. The Coughlin profile is about as paint-by-numbers as could be. She exercises a lot. She visualizes greatness. She wants to win but also to have a balanced life. Real enlightening. The rest of the magazine is what you’d expect: diet tips next to chocolate ads, exercise regimens you probably won’t do, bathing suits you probably won’t wear.
Outside
Ryan Lochte gets “Captain America” billing as the cover boy for Outside magazine, in a story that all but anoints him as the king-slayer who’ll top swimmer Michael Phelps. The profile isn’t very good, though. First, it’s contained within a fold-out ad for some schlocky sunglasses brand. Then, it’s larded with lines like this: “Look at his face. Ryan Lochte believes in Ryan Lochte,” Tom Chiarella writes of the former E! television star. When Outside isn’t shilling for Olympic stars, it is at its best with “Skull on a Stake,” a story of a trek through the dangerous wilderness on the border of Colombia and Panama.
Vogue
Vogue gives its cover real estate to Gigi Hadid, who’s not an Olympian, and Ashton Eaton, the US decathlete and contender for greatest all-around athlete ever, so that kind of balances out. The dual profile makes a very clumsy attempt to link the two (Hadid is friends with Kendall Jenner, whose dad Bruce was an Olympian like Eaton?) and it mostly focuses on the model for the rest of the coverage. We know Anna Wintour’s gotta sell magazines. Nobody’s saying to not do that, but it just felt a little thin and forced together.
Time
Time’s guide to the Summer Olympics in Rio has intriguing profiles of gymnast Simone Biles, swimmer Michael Phelps and sprinting legend Usain Bolt. While Bolt recently pulled a hamstring, he has “made a habit of entering major races with nagging injuries and underwhelming tune-ups, then winning anyway,” the newsweekly observes. But what’s most amusing is the Q&A on the back page with none other than Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s disgraced president. “Brazil does not have a monopoly on corruption,” Rousseff tells the Q&A column, which is normally reserved for Hollywood types launching a new TV series and talking about their diets.
New Yorker
If you haven’t already had enough of journalists blogging Cleveland and Philadelphia, The New Yorker’s Jill Lepore seems impressed that attendees “didn’t quite believe in representation anymore…because the system was rigged, because the establishment could not be trusted or because no one, no one, could understand them, their true particular Instagram selves.” That last formulation, we would submit, sums up nicely the liberal establishment’s enduring contempt for — and hopeless incomprehension of — those who are no longer nodding and agreeing with everything they read and hear in the media. (Hint: The key to understanding Trump’s supporters won’t likely be found on Instagram.)
Harper’s
Harper’s runs a review of Donald Trump books (“The Art of the Deal” and “Crippled America”) by British author Martin Amis, whose breathtaking superciliousness on matters American is well-documented. Take, for example, his book “The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America,” which needs no further elaboration. Amis manages a few giggle-worthy jabs, even as he asserts that Trump, “both cognitively and humanly, has undergone an atrocious decline” over the past 30 years. Still, he can’t quite match the sheer hilarity of Trump himself, who recently explained, “My fingers are long and beautiful, as, it has been well-documented, are various other parts of my anatomy.” Also check out Tom Wolfe’s devastating takedown of Noam Chomsky, revealing that it’s not just his knee-jerking, America-hating politics that are deplorable: His decades-long assertions about linguistics, his professional field, are as undocumented as they are bizarre.