Great morning.Stop me if youve heard this one before: If California were its own country, it would rank 5th in an Olympic medal count.Dr. Costs Mallon, who had recently landed in Tokyo when I reached him by phone this week, couldnt state for sure whether that held true. He told me, the state would rank “nearly certainly in the leading 10.”What he could say for sure was that, in regards to producing Olympians, Californias universities are at the top of the list. Since about 2012, Mallon stated, Stanford had sent 289 American professional athletes to the Games, the most of any school. That was followed by 277 from U.C.L.A., 251 from the University of Southern California and 212 from U.C. Berkeley.He had me think the fifth-place university. I couldnt, but it was Harvard. “They produce a great deal of rowers,” Mallon said.In other words, even before skateboarding and surfing were included to the Games, which have their opening event today, the Golden State was a robust existence at the Olympics– a testament, Mallon said, to the states ideal weather for year-round training, its large population and the existence of a kind of snowball impact for athletes at leading universities. (Athletic success begets more success.)But the “Californization” of the Olympics dates all the method back to the 1920s, according to Mark Dyreson, a teacher at Penn State who focuses on the history of sport.In a 2013 paper, Dyreson composed that it was an extremely deliberate strategy by the federal government, sports promoters and business owners.”During the 1920s, American financial and cultural power started a westward shift,” he wrote. While New York and Washington were still the nations centers of financing and federal government, “Los Angeles ran as the core of the countrys burgeoning lifestyle market.” That consisted of style, celebs, traveler sites and recreation.California controlled in Olympic swimming pool building, “and swimming pools became signs of both American abundance and American power,” Dyreson wrote.By the time Los Angeles hosted the 1932 Olympics, California had come to represent to the world a vision of American abundance, of an excellent life– one that would ultimately remain out of reach for most.The launchings of skateboarding and browsing at the Games this year, Dyreson told me in an e-mail, reinforce this pattern.No matter their historic origins (in the case of surfing, thats in Hawaii, not California), action sports have actually tended to “take off when they get drawn into the California cultural production industry and changed into way of lives complete with clothing lines, iconographic stories and liberal doses of California cool,” Dyreson wrote.Thus, the sports are extensions of American– and particularly Californian– consumerism delivered to the world via the “mega-spectacle” that is the Olympics.Updated Aug. 5, 2021, 3:59 p.m. ETNeftalie Williams, a postdoctoral scholar at U.S.C. and a visiting fellow at the Yale Schwarzman Center who studies skateboarding culture, had a more generous assessment. The addition of skateboarding in the Olympics signals acknowledgment for professional athletes of diverse backgrounds who have actually been marginalized and criminalized, he informed me.”It makes you think of the truth that here are Olympians that can get arrested skating down the street,” he informed me. “No ones getting arrested playing water polo.”Unlike athletes in other sports, elite skateboarders arent siloed from the rest of the neighborhood, which implies young skaters can engage at whatever level they desire. Representation at the Olympic level has a different kind of resonance.Williams acknowledged concerns that skateboarding in the Olympics represents a kind of mainstreaming and commercialization of a sport “born in the streets” with a countercultural ethos. For now, including skaters in the Olympics is a way of offering the sports progressivism and creativity a larger platform, he said.”All organizations need to alter,” Williams stated. “My concern is: What are you going to do?”Barbecue fans worldwide can discuss the functions of a Platonic Texas brisket, or what makes a best Kansas City sauce.So what defines California barbecue? That, my coworker Tejal Rao composed recently, has been more difficult to answer.But whether its traditional Santa Maria tri-tip or smoked pork stubborn belly char siu handed off in a Rosemead parking lot, Cochinita Pibil in East Los Angeles or West Oakland hot links, theres one thing that joins the ever-evolving barbecue of the Golden State: Its delicious.Read on here, however– as is always the case with Tejals stories– do not click unless youre prepared to get actually hungry.California Today goes live at 6:30 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you wish to see: CAtoday@nytimes.com. Were you forwarded this email? Sign up for California Today here and read every edition online here.Jill Cowan grew up in Orange County, graduated from U.C. Berkeley and has actually reported all over the state, including the Bay Area, Bakersfield and Los Angeles– however she constantly desires to see more. Follow along here or on Twitter.

Good morning.Stop me if youve heard this one before: If California were its own nation, it would rank fifth in an Olympic medal count.Dr.”What he could state for sure was that, in terms of producing Olympians, Californias universities are at the top of the list. That was followed by 277 from U.C.L.A., 251 from the University of Southern California and 212 from U.C. Berkeley.He had me think the fifth-place university.”Barbecue fans around the world can discuss the functions of a Platonic Texas brisket, or what makes a best Kansas City sauce.So what specifies California barbecue? Sign up for California Today here and read every edition online here.Jill Cowan grew up in Orange County, finished from U.C. Berkeley and has actually reported all over the state, consisting of the Bay Area, Bakersfield and Los Angeles– however she always desires to see more.