Ah, the Olympic Games, where the finest athletes from all over the world come together after years and years of training to compete for the ultimate athletic awards, bragging rights, legacies, and personal bests. Truly, the Olympics are the greatest coalescence of Earth’s champions.
But then there are the athletes who don’t quite make the Olympic cut. For those who are the best of the best, not making the Olympics is some of the best motivation around to just keep going until you do.
The people you are about to see are not the best of the best, and they’re embracing it.
If you’ve been making your TikTok rounds as of late, you may have noticed a fair share of videos cropping up with the caption “sorry to announce that I was not selected for the 2024 Paris Olympics,” or some variation of it.
These videos are comprised of some absolutely gut-busting athletic bloopers, which range from uncleared hurdles, to faulty pole vaulting, to clench-worthy balance beam mishaps, and everything in between. These are often accompanied by a bass-boosted remix of the United States national anthem, which only punctuates the humor of it all.
The joke, of course, is that these videos are being played off as faux-tryout snapshots for the Olympic team, which would obviously reject athletes who are prone to such spectacular blunders as these.
Except, they wouldn’t, because United States national team superstar Suni Lee cheekily chimed into the trend with a mishap of her own, proving that even the Olympians are human at the end of the day, even if they’re capable of transforming that failure into bronze, silver, and gold glory.
Enjoy these videos to their fullest, folks, because this is probably the closest we’re ever going to get to average Joes and Janes competing in the Olympics purely for reference.
The 2024 Paris Olympics began on July 26 and will run until Aug. 11.