Just moments after the American wrestler Sarah Hildebrandt won a gold medal at the Paris Games, she let the whole world know what she was thinking:“Oh my gosh I just won the FREAKING OLYMPICS hahahahah DUUUUDE,” she wrote on social media from the event venue. But at the Olympics, it’s part of a new twist — and one of the keys to returning to the sense of a shared national experience that defined the Games of yesteryear. For the last decade or more, it has seemed like the Olympics have struggled to capture relevance the way they did a generation ago. Blame was assigned to a fracturing media landscape and a long string of asterisks (pandemic restrictions in Tokyo, time zone issues in Beijing, a Zika outbreak in Rio de Janeiro, geopolitical tensions in Sochi). But the reason may have been simpler: The Olympics has largely been missing from social media.

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Persons: Sarah Hildebrandt, DUUUUDE, ” Organizations: Paris Games Locations: American, Tokyo, Beijing, Rio de Janeiro, Sochi