The Olympics’ no. 1 fan: Antoine Griezmann

Some time on Monday night, his head doubtless heavy with sorrow, Antoine Griezmann returned to Madrid. He had stayed away as long as possible, but he was due for his first training session with Atlético Madrid on Tuesday morning. The European football season, long and arduous, hangs on the horizon. Summer, for him, had ended. It was time to return to work.

Quite where his priorities lie, though, became clear within just a few hours. “Bravo Clarisse,” he wrote on his account on X, in honor of the French judoka, Clarisse Agbegnenou, who had just claimed a bronze medal in Paris. She had celebrated her medal with her infant daughter. “The gold medal is in your arms,” Griezmann added.

Griezmann was not going to let the small matter of distance — or having to go through the grueling preseason training of his coach, Diego Simeone — prevent him from either watching the Olympics or proclaiming each French success to the world.

Over the next few days, Griezmann, 33, would relish a gold in triathlon, a silver in swimming and a bronze in BMX, all with the same unrestrained glee. He was so overcome by the success of the swimmer Léon Marchand that he just posted several siren emojis, assuming (correctly) that everyone in France would know what he was talking about.

Griezmann’s “Alertes Medailles” — always capitalized — have become such a feature of these Olympics that X has bestowed upon them their own hashtag: an image of Griezmann in a straw hat, borrowed from a selfie he had taken while attending the Games.

It is a role he takes seriously: When he was late to post an alert for a triathlon medal, he apologized. He is not allowed to have his phone at the table, he said. (This could realistically be a rule enforced by Simeone on his squad or by Griezmann’s wife, an attempt to set a good example to the couple’s three children. Because it is too good a fact not to include, we will note that all of Griezmann’s children were born on April 8, but in distinct years, and move on.)

Even the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has become a devotee of Griezmann’s wholly voluntary one-man wire service. When a story appeared in the magazine Paris Match claiming that Macron had tasked his staff with developing an app to inform him whenever France wins a medal at these Games, Macron replied that “the app is called Antoine Griezmann.”

There is something irresistibly endearing about Griezmann’s unabashed love for the Olympics. Most football players like other sports, of course. Athletes are invariably drawn to the commitment, skill and dedication required by disciplines other than their own; they appreciate, on a level beyond most of us, exactly what it takes to get to the top and stay there.

But Griezmann stands out even among his peers for his passion for, well, pretty much everything. Even well into the second decade of his career, one that has brought him his fair share of disappointment and regret, he remains very much a football fan.

He plays football management simulators in sufficient detail that he once boasted about taking Blackburn Rovers to sixth place in the Premier League. He has previously played with a Uruguayan flag stitched into his boots, a way of marking his admiration for that country’s football culture.

Alongside that is an all-inclusive sports fandom. He once said that he dreamed of visiting every NBA arena, even if he had to go to “Memphis or Utah.” It is not clear what Utah or Memphis, Tennessee, have ever done to warrant this passive-aggressive hostility. (Griezmann’s love for basketball has, at least once, crossed a line, but the affection is sincere.)

He has helped to produce a Spanish-language NFL podcast, with the aim of helping another game he loves increase its audience; he identifies as a Kansas City Chiefs fan, but has expressed an unrelated admiration for Justin Fields, the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback. He collects sports trading cards and plays fantasy baseball.

And now, it turns out, he really loves the Olympics. Before he had to return to Madrid — reluctantly, it appears — he attended as many events as possible, posting images from the equestrianism in Versailles and the swimming in Nanterre and the rugby sevens at the Stade de France. Antoine Griezmann really loves the Olympics.

In an era in which every image is a photo opportunity, every meeting a sponsorship activation, and every breath anyone takes is content, it feels refreshing to see something so (comparatively) unfiltered, so honest, so authentic.

It is a reminder that everyone is susceptible to being swept away by what we are contractually obliged to call the Olympic spirit; that this vast, unwieldy, often troubled event can and does still exert a grip on the common, collective imagination, and that even world champion football players are not exempt.

Too rarely do we see football players as fans. That should not be a surprise, of course. To be a professional football player, particularly one at Griezmann’s level, is to spend a lot of time being criticized and undermined and picked apart; some degree of cognitive disassociation is probably necessary to survive in such a brutal and unforgiving environment.

But at first, and at heart, that is what they are — for the most part, anyway — and they must always have been.

Through the Olympics, through his deep-seated and sincere and quite childlike love for them, Griezmann has found a way to express that. It does not matter whether it is table tennis or judo or triathlon or, when it starts, the sport that will come to be known as kayak fighting. Griezmann wants to celebrate his country, of course, and all of its successes at these Games. But first and foremost, he is here for the sport. Except when he is eating.

Why not build it in the sky?

What was your favorite part of Saudi Arabia’s “bid” document for the 2034 World Cup, the one that FIFA just so happened to release — really unfortunate timing, can’t be helped — in the middle of the Olympics? Was it the part where it was not really a bid document at all, more the lurid and triumphalist garnish to a fait accompli?

Or was it, instead, one of the two shimmering jewels contained within the glossy brochure for a future nobody voted for and very few people want?

Saudi Arabia might have thought that promising to build a stadium in a futuristic city that does not actually exist — the dystopian horror of NEOM — would impress people, but then some of us still remember, with a shudder, Lusail, site of the 2022 World Cup final in Qatar and not in any way a Potemkin village thrown up in order to shroud the ambitions of an autocratic state.

And so it went one better: The stadium that has not yet been built in the city that is not actually there will, the Saudi proposal promises, be built in the sky.

Football has a habit of throwing up these kind of uncanny valley sentences: phrases that make coherent sense as language but are too absurd to grasp, fully, as a concept. The field at the stadium will be hundreds of feet in the air. Why? It was a useful rule of thumb, in Qatar, not to frame the question like that. The better inquiry is: Why not?

Whether any of this happens, of course, will become clear only with time. There were various points on the road to Qatar where it felt inevitable that the whole enterprise would collapse under the weight of its own ambition, and yet the tournament went ahead (basically) as planned. Qatar, in the end, got precisely the event it wanted. The working assumption has to be that Saudi Arabia will do the same.

It is hard, though, not to wonder if there is some sort of shark being jumped. Football is a wonderful game, a common language, a cultural phenomenon, the most popular leisure activity the world has ever seen. Deep down, though, if there is a point where perhaps we have to ask whether it might all have gone a little too far, it is probably the bit when we start building stadiums in the sky.