Paris Bids Goodbye To 2024 Olympics As USA Top Final Medal Table

• On the final day upset for China
• Los Angeles to host 2028 Olympic Games

Amid a dreamlike, science fiction-inspired light-show spectacular that closed with Tom Cruise flying through the air from the stadium roof and whisking the Olympic flag off to Los Angeles, the United States topped the medal table at the just-concluded Paris Olympics with 40 gold medals.

In the final medal battle decided on Sunday, the Americans finished above China only because of their 44 silver medal haul, courtesy of their women’s basketball team.

Digging deep, the American women secured their country’s pre-eminence on the medal table by edging past host nation France 67-66 in a breathless finish to win the final gold of the Games.

China, the last team apart from the U.S. to top the standings when they did it on home soil at the 2008 Beijing Games, also won 40 golds but managed only 27 silver medals. Overall, the U.S. also won the most total medals with 126 to China’s 91

Fittingly, Stars of sport, screen, and music came together at the Paris 2024 closing ceremony to bring the 33rd Olympic Games to an end. Indeed, the Parisians were splendid in closing their record-breakingly successful Olympic Games on Sunday night.

As expected, it was a stunt-filled final ceremony that began with a mysterious, golden intergalactic traveller wandering through a gloomy, barren futuristic landscape, tasked with resurrecting the Olympic spirit, even as the French capital gets set to the 2024 Paralympics from 28 August to 8 September 2024.

In his closing speech, International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach reflected on a “sensational” Games. According to him, Paris 2024 had been “sensational, or dare I say, ‘Seine-sational'” – a play on words referencing the river which flows through the host city.

Bach, who will step down as IOC President in 2025, they were the “Olympic Games of a new era” as the first “delivered completely under our Olympic agenda reforms: younger, more urban, more inclusive, more sustainable and the first Olympic Games with full gender parity”.

The German praised athletes for their “simply amazing” performances, saying they showed “what greatness we humans are capable of”.

Besides reflecting on the Olympics in Paris, the closing ceremony provided a showcase for Los Angeles, which will host the Games for a third time in 2028. The American city had previously done so in 1932 and 1984. That will put it on par with Paris (1900, 1924, 2024) and London (1908, 1948, 2012) for the most Olympics hosted