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Sat. Aug 14, 2004

Olympic Passion and Bad TV

I know I’m probably in the minority in my passion about the Olympics, and it’s largely due to my history. I remember watching some of the coverage from Mexico City in 1968, and in 1972, I was glued to the events in Munich. That was also about the time I started competing in track and field, in junior high and high school. And, of course, I wallowed in the 1996 Games when they came to Atlanta. So while my “Olympic roots” go pretty deep, I realize a lot of people view the Games the way some view the Presidential Election; once every four years, there’s an event of dubious interest that the whole world seems caught up in, while you’re bored to tears by it all.

So it’s interesting to see the various reactions to these Games. Some have legitimate complaints about the medium by which we’re forced to view the Olympics, whether it is the “galactically slick TV packaging,” or that it appears to be “technologically impossible … to broadcast live from Greece,” or the universal world-wide condemnation (read the comments) of their country’s yackety-yack TV coverage of the Opening Ceremonies. Others lament the fact there’s no Great National Enemy for us (capital U.S.) to vanquish on the playing fields, and therefore consider the Games a “bloated, cheerless extravaganza [...] Ultimately, I would be willing to overlook the Olympics’ moral failings, as I do with sports that I like, if I were interested in the outcome. But I’m not.”

Of course you’re not. We can read your byline: “Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.” You prefer to view the world in those kind of binary terms, and the Olympics no longer fit that paradigm the way they did during the Cold War, or in the Berlin Games of 1936 (which, by the way, were mere momentary historic coincidences that one might expect in over a century of Games). I’ve never really looked at the Olympics in quite the nationalistic way that some do. I see events, I see athletes, and I see what country they are from. The latter is the least important.

In addition, most people only know about or pay attention to the Olympic “glamour events”; gymnastics, swimming, track and field, and for the past couple of decades, basketball. While I enjoy those as much as anyone, I think you can learn a lot and gain enjoyment from what you might call “niche events.”

For example, today I watched the Women’s Synchronized 3 Meter Springboard. An event that, prior to today, I did not even know existed. While it’s not an event I would exactly pay to attend, it was interesting to watch, learn about, and enjoy the drama that can be found even in such a “minor” event. Because to those involved, it’s not minor at all, and that is a palpable presence.

While each of those teams of divers of course had worked hard towards the ultimate goal of a gold medal, the Olympics are rarely a showcase for “zero sum” emotions. There is no sense of one winner and a bunch of losers, there is a sense of measuring yourself against the world’s best in your field, and if you come in third … that can be a joyous accomplishment, not a “loss.” In fact, in this particular event, it was the bronze medal winners from Australia who seemed the most overjoyed at the results. In our tiny TV exposure to them, we might see them as merely the third best performers in that 30-45 minutes of “show.” For them, it’s the culmination of years of training. Years of competition against hundreds (if not thousands) whom you’d bested. And while a home viewer might merely perceive a third place performance, on the other end of the telescope, you usually find an athlete thinking … “in the whole wide world, there are only two better than me.”

I saw something similar in 1996 at the Women’s 10,000 Meter Walk, long after the three medal winners had been determined:

Women crossing the finish line fueled only by an inhuman determination, only to collapse helpless a few feet past that line. Women hugging each other with obvious joy, not because they’d won a medal, but because they’d finished.

They had fulfilled their greatest dream. To compete against the finest athletes on the planet in the Olympics, to give it their absolute best effort, and to be joyful in the participation, regardless of the results. For this regular guy, that is the piece of the Olympics that touched my heart, and left me humbly grateful for this experience, for I found it in the least expected place.

So be sure to catch the expected big moments of drama in the glamour sports of these Games. But also look for the smaller moments. And the bigger lessons.

And at times, you may have to turn off the sound.