[Ads-l] Olympics-related WOTY?

[Yagoda, Ben]

The acronym GOAT, meaning greatest of all time, was, for a long time, applied exclusively to Mohammed Ali. According to the Grammarphobia blog<http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2016/07/goat.html>  Ali’s wife, Lonnie, incorporated Greatest of All Time, Inc. (G.O.A.T. Inc.) in 1992. In 2000, the rapper LL Cool J released an album called “G.O.A.T. (Greatest of All Time)," and in recent years the appellation has frequently  been used in reference to Michael Jordan.

But it has exploded during the current Olympics. A Google News search<https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&authuser=0&q=%22greatest+of+all+time%22&oq=%22greatest+of+all+time%22&gs_l=news-cc.3..43j43i53.2925.6876.0.8515.23.2.0.17.0.1.363.625.2-1j1.2.0...0.0...1ac.1.yzP7yFJGsWE#q=%22greatest+of+all+time%22+goat&hl=en&gl=us&authuser=0&tbs=qdr:m,sbd:1&tbm=nws&start=40> shows that the GOAT tag has been applied to the celebrated Michael Phelps, Simone Biles, Katie Ledecky, and Usain Bolt, but also to the more obscure Kohei Uchimura (men’s gymnastics), Ethiopia's Tirunesh Dibaba (women’s 10,000 meters), Kenya’s Ezekiel Kemboi (men’s steeplechase), and American cyclist Kristen Armstrong.

Ben



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