The real Olympic medals are given out according to rules about speed, scores, perfection, actually defeating your opponent, all that boring stuff. But what if they weren’t?
What if there were another set of medals we could give to some of the best achievements of the games, even if they weren’t in officially recognized sports? We tried to think of what we’d hand out. So here are nine additional medals — call them the Extra Golds — for some of the additional feats of strength and cleverness that have delighted us in the last two weeks.
The one-man lift of one man

It would have been enough that Cuba’s Mijain Lopez Nunez won his fifth consecutive gold medal for Greco-Roman wrestling — becoming the first Summer Olympian ever to hit that milestone. After he finished, he unlaced his shoes and set them on the mat to mark his retirement. But it wasn’t all poignancy — he also playfully flipped one coach onto his back, then lifted another and carried him a few steps. It’s one thing to win your match; it’s another to set a record in a grueling event and then celebrate by picking up an entire wrestling coach and carrying him around.
The 400-meter WHAAAAT?

Team USA sprinter Quincy Hall was going to lose the men’s 400 meters. It was obvious. Heading into the last 150 meters or so, he seemed to have been bested by not one, not two, but three of the other guys in the race. And then he just accelerated. It looked magical. One of the curious things about sprinters is that when they’re speeding up, it can almost look like they’re slowing down.
As Hall pushed toward the finish line, if you were watching him in a vacuum, you might think he was more spent, more tapped out. But he was somehow passing everybody! And he leaned at the finish line and just edged out Matthew Hudson-Smith of Great Britain to win the gold medal. We still have to admit: We don’t entirely get what happened.
The athlete drop

Olympic sports begin in a lot of ways. A whistle blows, or a pistol bangs, or an athlete runs or serves or jumps. But the gold medal in athlete-dropping can only go to the kayak cross. In this event, several competitors are kept suspended above the course they are about to paddle through. Then they are dropped. Yes, they are flat-out indifferently dumped into the water the way you would release an undersized fish. And, crowded together, they have to navigate a course of buoys and get to the finish line. Anybody can run when a whistle blows or start a game when the referee says so. This is something entirely different.
The 6.25-meter maximum flex

Swedish-American pole vaulter Armand Duplantis — Mondo — already was guaranteed a gold medal. He didn’t need to jump anymore. But Mondo does not jump because he needs to. No, Mondo jumps because he wishes to. And at the Paris finals, even when he already knew he had won, he wished to do something more: swipe the world record held by his greatest rival … [checks notes] himself.