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Without fail, every Summer Olympics provides breakout stars that capture our attention and make this quadrennial global sporting extravaganza so much fun. In some instances, there are athletes who quite literally help market their sport exponentially purely through athletic achievement and/or vibes.

We've got a few such candidates here in 2024.

We're nearly a week into the Paris Games and it's looking like this year's Olympics could be an all-timer for memorable breakout stars and/or unexpected viral athletes on the internet. If you've been watching the action and/or following on social media, you've seen some of the fresh new faces that are amping up these Olympics. To make it easier on you, I'm packaging them all in one post. 

Ilona Maher: Rugby sensation, social media star

Women's rugby sevens is got a well-deserved, overdue glow-up at the Paris Games thanks in large part to Team USA's amazing bronze medal win. The fact that Team USA defeated Australia -- and it mere hours after losing to queens of rugby sevens, New Zealand -- was wowing enough. But to win on a walk-off 85-meter runaway by Alex Sedrick was maybe the most unexpected thrilling ending of the Olympics. While Sedrick became a memorable star in her own right, it was Ilona Maher, a force of nature and irresistible watch, who brought attention, eyeballs and good will to the sport in the weeks leading up to the Olympics and in the opening games of the Games. The Vermont native played in her second Olympics with Team USA, but she had her first mega-viral moment over the first weekend when she channeled Derrick Henry and Marshawn Lynch en route to this score in the United States' 36-7 win over Japan.

Hell yeah, that's the stuff. 

Maher's far from the only reason to watch women's rugby sevens -- Massachusetts' Kristi Kirshe and North Carolina's Sammy Sullivan were also awesome -- but her uncommon combination of size and power makes Maher a phenomenal watch. With the increasing (and overdue) rise in women's sports popularity in recent years, Maher's emergence for Team USA has given American sports fan yet another reason to champion their amazing female athletes. 

Beyond her on-field dominance, the 27-year-old Maher is ultra-savvy with social media. She has amassed more than 1.5 million Instagram followers and is even more popular on TikTok, where she frequently speaks on body positivity and consistently encourages women to be comfortable in their own skin. Maher's got a market's knack, too. She just recruited the recently retired Jason Kelce to endorse women's rugby for Team USA. 

Maher's personality and potent power is a breath of fresh air. It was a massively successful Olympics for a Team USA program that only made its third Olympics appearance, yet pulled of a medal-winning performance.

Stephen Nedoroscik: Bespectacled gymnast getting superhero comps

When the glasses come off, the competition is ON.

The United States men's gymnastics team almost never medals. In the previous 19 Summer Olympics, they'd made it to the podium only twice.

But on Monday, a 16-year drought ended when Team USA took bronze, comfortably out-performing Great Britain and Ukraine in order to clinch third place; Japan won gold and China got the silver. 

As Team USA got closer to its rare reality, the cameras panned to a nerdy-looking pommel horse specialist from Massachusetts named Stephen Nedoroscik, who hadn't competed on any of the other disciplines (parallel bars, high bar, floor exercise, rings, vault). Watching Frederick Richard's insane athleticism was one thing -- and he, too, is a star in the making -- but NBC's framing of Nedoroscik's lead-up to the horse set the stage and turned him into a viral sensation.

The guy's got serious Clark Kent aura, you know? That and he can solve Rubik's Cubes in under 10 seconds.

Nedoroscik was brought across the Atlantic Ocean for one reason and one reason only: to throw his body around a pommel horse in a lithe-yet-powerful fashion. One task, one task only. He nailed it. In doing so, the nerdy jock clinched the bronze for the United States. Because of the unusual arrangement with having his specialty on pommel horse, and because of those glasses (which are needed because he has abnormal eye condition wherein his eyes are permanently dilated), Nedoroscik is an overnight sensation.

"I don't need to see when I do pommel horse," Nedoroscik told the media Monday. "It's all by feel."

The incredible part of this story is how he's had incredible feats (winning NCAA championships while at Penn State) but also failed badly in world championship competition -- and even trying to make the last Summer Games in Tokyo. Now he's one of the faces of American sporting glory. This is why we love the Olympics.

Nedoroscik will get another big moment on Wednesday, when he'll compete in the individual pommel horse competition. 

Léon Marchand: French swimmer goes supernova in home country 

Swimming has a new superstar, and this time, it's not an athlete from America or Australia.

By pretty much every account, Léon Marchand's gold medal-wining 400-meter individual medley performance Sunday at La Défense Arena was a once-in-a-lifetime type of event ... until the scene repeated itself on Wednesday. The hometown kid, just 22, stepped onto the platform as the overwhelming favorite, then proceeded to cruise to first by touching the final wall in 4:02.95, beating Michael Phelps' 16-year Olympic record in the process. 

With thousands on hand to cheer on the Frenchman, they synchronized their "Al-lez! Lé-on!" cheers so that Marchand would hear them as he bobbed his head out of the water on the breaststroke and butterfly. Pretty cool, that. For a few moments, a swim meet took on the din and rhythm of a soccer match.

Marchand went global and became a swimming superstar on Wednesday night when he became the first person in history to win two individual gold medals in the same night at the Olympics. Marchand posted Olympic-record times in the 200 butterfly and the 200 breaststroke, giving the Olympics a rare circumstance of an elite athlete having a coming-out party in his home country. Men's swimming has a new icon.

Medal-winning shooters go viral for very different movie villain-type getups 

If you were on social media during the first week of the Olympics, this shot or one very similar to it almost definitely found its way to your timeline multiple times. 

The pose, the hand in pocket, the simple wardrobe, the understated assassin vibe of it all. That's Yusuf Dikec of Turkey, who is not new to this thing. He helped the Turks win a silver in the mixed team 10-meter air pistol shooting event on Tuesday, but he's been competing in the Olympics dating back to 2008. 

He absolutely looks like a moderately competent badass you'd see stalking Matt Damon in the second act of a Jason Bourne flick. By the looks of it, I might even take Dikec over John Wick. The reason the image went megaviral was based in a simple contradictory thought. We view Olympians as mostly youthful, pristine athletes that treat their bodies as temple and arrive every four years at their physical peak.

Yet here comes 51-year-old gray-haired Dikec, seemingly squeezing in a little target practice on his way to pick up the groceries.

He wasn't the only one. Check out Japan's Kim Yeji.

The steel-eye look of a stone-cold assassin. And a sartorial approach almost 180 degrees from the Turkey trigger man. Yet I might like this super-villain kit even more. 

Silly as it may sound, I'm telling you that images like this, which bring curiosity and jokes galore, help round out the Olympics experience. We all mostly pay attention to the seven or eight sports that get the most publicity, but it's the niche events and their athletes waiting to be discovered that give the Olympics that extra dose of enjoyment.

Beach volleyball gives us the greatest sports venue ... ever?

It's not just humans who are emerging as breakout stars. And, fine, it's not like the Eiffel Tower doesn't consistently get its due.

But check this jaw-dropping view of the beach volleyball venue in Paris. This is ... the best sporting backdrop in the history of our species? I'm draped in envy typing this from the United States. What a wow.

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A phenomenal vista, and the picture-perfect iconography for these Olympic Games. (A shoutout to the fencing venue as well, which is also a breathtaking sight to behold.)

We knew beach volleyball would have its moment in the Parisian sun (and under the stars), but the images are even better than expected. Paris, which last hosted the Olympics in 1924, is a place beautifully built for the Summer Olympiad. It's images like this that all but ensure it won't wait another 100 years before the City of Light gets to host the Games again.

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Beach Volleybal - Olympic Games Paris 2024: Day 3
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