These Games are a triumph – in spite of Olympic chiefs! Superstars like Simone Biles provide a protection from warranted criticism of Thomas Bach and Co, writes RIATH AL-SAMARRAI

They all want to see Simone Biles. On Thursday, her night of wonder and redemption at these Olympics, that meant a few familiar names showed up. Zinedine Zidane was there at the Bercy Arena, and so were Bill Gates and Stephen Curry, and what a performance it was, just as they knew it would be.

Biles is the star and Biles is the show. Biles leaves everything in her dust and Biles brings the smoke. And for one man in particular, she was also the screen, which brings us to another spectator, Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee.

It was Bach who hung the sixth gold medal around Biles’ neck, and he beamed the grin of a man on the job: You can always count on the Olympics to provide 10 distractions from a crisis.

Biles was Bach’s blanket on Thursday. As she soared to such incredible heights, culminating in her 8:20 p.m. win in the all-around title, Bach was fully aware of the storm that had been raging in the French capital for most of the week.

It was around 11:30 that morning when Italian welterweight Angela Carini decided she could not go on any longer. It had taken her 46 seconds in the company of Imane Khelif before she prioritized her instinct to “save my life” over her sporting ambition.

Football legend Zinedine Zidane was on hand at the Bercy Arena to watch the American star in action

We now know enough about Khelif and why those words took the world by storm. That is, we know that Khelif and a Taiwanese fighter, Lin Yu-Ting, were banned from the 2023 World Championships in March because, according to the head of the body that organized that tournament, unspecified gender tests had shown that they had the XY chromosomes that determine that half the population is male.

Bach also knew all the context, and we could say that the blood on Carini’s shorts was the blood on his hands. Because the IOC intervened to direct the boxing here and it was the IOC that made them fight.

To follow Bach’s muddled reasoning from Saturday morning: if your passport says you’re a woman, you’re a woman, and that’s enough. The scientific understanding that has been gained in this area over the past decade, not least because of the Caster Semenya case, seems to be far less important than your travel document. There’s the wind, go pee in it.

The market is too busy to say that those decisions represent the biggest derelictions of duty in Bach’s 11 years in charge — I’d say that cozying up to Vladimir Putin for so long has eaten that cookie — but it sucked. It stinked. It was a scandalously irresponsible move to choose inclusivity over fairness in a workplace that’s dangerous enough without the burden of a craven leadership.

Still, Bach had Biles, and when you have Biles, the show goes on. That seems to be the solution, because volume always wins — the IOC knows it can almost drown it out with great sport. When Khelif fights her quarterfinal on Saturday, Biles will have just fallen into the vault; when Lin fights next, on Sunday morning, Novak Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz will be warming up for a gold-medal match.

Biles is the star and Biles is the show. Biles leaves everything in her dust and Biles brings the smoke

And it’s a fitting comparison. I’m extremely uncomfortable about the boxing decision, but in a few months I’ll remember the last 400m of Alex Yee’s triathlon. I’ll remember Muhamed Aly’s beautiful shades of madness in the handball arena, Biles soaring high above the floor, Leon Marchand in the pool, Antoine Dupont’s happy feet. To that list I’d hopefully add Katarina Johnson-Thompson in the heptathlon and Keely Hodgkinson in the 800m.

The Olympics always find a way to make us favor the good. But these Games will be a triumph despite the IOC and despite Bach, not because of them or him.

And we must not forget that. We must want to see that change. We must continue to emphasize that the IOC makes huge profits by setting up and branding this beautiful tent, but that it promptly withdraws and hides behind the federations and passports when a subject becomes too hot under its feet.

It is a truly bizarre paradox: the IOC’s tentacles and restrictions are notoriously restrictive, yet they lack the legal skills to find a way to keep a child molester out of their beach volleyball tournament.

They should be extremely ashamed of that debacle, of the appalling way they left their posts. But they haven’t voiced it. Just as they should be ashamed of other allegations. One is the claim that they threatened to have Salt Lake City removed as host of the 2034 Winter Games if U.S. investigators refused to curb tough questions about Chinese swimmers here and the flawed investigation into their failed drug tests. That looks bad.

It was Thomas Bach (pictured right) who hung the sixth gold medal around Biles’ neck, and he beamed the grin of a man on to something

This was also explained in an email to reporters two weeks ago about the Russian delegation in Paris. Their participation as neutrals was conditional on an IOC requirement that they not support the invasion of Ukraine or have any ties to the military. A human rights group presented evidence to the IOC that two-thirds of the group had violated the conditions, but they say this was ignored.

That didn’t get much attention because there was too much sport ahead. That may be the way of the Games.

I will always find the Olympics of Biles and Marchand and handball breathtakingly fantastic. And I will always understand that some rough edges are impossible to smooth out on something that big.

But you can always hope for better and it would be truly wonderful if Bach and his gang of traitors would grab their own passports and go to a place far, far away.

Farewell to Andy Murray and a tribute to Dan Evans

Farewell Andy Murray, a fighter to the end. Many tributes have been written to him in recent days, but one goes instead to his partner, Dan Evans. By skipping the Citi Open in Washington to be here, he is expected to drop 110 places in the world rankings and thus outside the top 170.

Playing in the Olympics is not a huge sacrifice, but his main reason was to support Murray and for that he deserves great respect. Evans was once portrayed as a bit of a hell-cat with a big heart – these days he only fits half of that description.

Farewell Andy Murray, a fighter to the end. Many tributes have been written to him

By skipping the Citi Open in Washington, he is expected to drop 110 places in the world rankings, dropping him outside the top 170.

Chelsea are desperate

Chelsea’s desperation to sell Conor Gallagher is entirely understandable. It’s understandable because he has one year left on his contract and a fee of £34m would do wonders for the balance sheet.

It is also understandable because the club’s management is completely mad. Their failure to recognise the deeper value of a home-grown player with considerable talent is not really a surprise at this point.