Just moments after the American wrestler Sarah Hildebrandt won a gold medal at the Paris Games, she let the whole world know what she was thinking:
“Oh my gosh I just won the FREAKING OLYMPICS hahahahah DUUUUDE,” she wrote on social media from the event venue.
The post may seem like something athletes always do. But at the Olympics, it’s part of a new twist — and one of the keys to returning to the sense of a shared national experience that defined the Games of yesteryear.
For the last decade or more, it has seemed like the Olympics have struggled to capture relevance the way they did a generation ago.