The Olympics

It’s Olympics time again, the Winter Games in Vancouver, where we’re already experiencing the “heartbreak” of Lindsay Vonn, whose entire life has been building towards this moment when she was expected to win as many gold medals as Michael Phelps did in the Summer Games. The heartbreak being, of course, that she was injured just before the games began, that she failed to win multiple golds, and wiped out completely in several races. The list of injuries that led to this disappointment, however, is just as heartbreaking: uprooting a family, a divorce, and not speaking to her father for the last four years. But hey, if that’s what it takes to produce a
world class athlete, who am I to quibble. As these games come to an end, this post is about the previous Olympics, where there was just as much hype and heartbreak.

I was turned off to competitive sports a long time ago when I was on the YMCA swim team as a pre-adolescent. So when the Olympics roll around every four years I usually don’t bother to watch much, even — or especially — the swimming competition.
During the last summer Olympics, however, it was hard to avoid the hype about Michael Phelps and his quest for eight gold medals, more than anyone has ever won in a single Olympics game. I ended up watching him easily win several freestyle events, then swim the heart-stopping butterfly event where he was behind and won only by one-hundredth of a second, and finally swim for his eighth gold medal in the medley relay event, where he had to depend upon his three other teammates to also swim their best race. Now, at 23, he can sit back and watch the endorsements come rolling in. But what does he do with the rest of his life?

I also watched some of the gymnastic events, mostly the girls’ team competition and a few of the individual events. It’s much more difficult to watch a sport like gymnastics as opposed to swimming: the subjectivity of the judges and the opportunity for costly mistakes make it excruciating for me as a spectator and, I imagine, excruciating for a competitor to have to experience. Several times during the course of the competitions the T.V. cameraman stuck his lens in the face of some poor young woman who had just made some momentary, but irreparable, mistake that cost her a medal in her event. Her tears and anguish were on display for millions of people around the world to witness. It’s just another example of the lack of privacy any public figure must relinquish, but you feel sorry for her, nonetheless. And per usual, there were complaints that the judges unfairly awarded a medal to the host country’s Chinese competitor, despite the major error she committed in one of her individual events.
Of course these athletes, with their flag waving and anthem signing gestures of patriotism, complicity agree to participate in these games that are political games as well. They interviewed Serena and Venus Williams about coming to the Olympics despite having to rush back to the States for the U.S Open, and they delivered the expected paean to patriotism: we’re so happy to be representing our country and participating in one of the most exciting and important events in the world. What else could they say? We’d get accused by the media of being unpatriotic and selfish if we didn’t come to play so we have to do this for our careers? We have to show the Chinese that despite their dominance of gold medals, America is still the most powerful imperialistic country in the world and intends to remain as such no matter what it takes? Neither Serena nor Venus won an individual gold medal (they won in the doubles) but neither did the Chinese. Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers was also there to do his patriotic duty to himself by telling the interviewer that his team was a special team that appreciated the significance of representing your country, doing damage control for previous basketball teams of NBA superstars who were accused of not taking the games seriously enough, and damage control for his own reputation as an accused rapist and renegade.

Then there was Dara Torres, the 41-year old wonder who was participating in her fourth or fifth Olympics (not in consecutive order) who was out to prove that with millions of dollars in endorsements to pay for the state of the art training and attention it took to get her body into shape to beat 20-somethings in the 50 meter freestyle, anyone could be in the Olympics at 41. They showed pictures of trainers walking on her muscles for massage, while others hovered over her weight-lifting routines, and still others directed her Pilates, yoga, and meditation sessions. All for her eleven seconds of fame, where she came in second. She was very gracious and smiled her toothy grin, but you can bet she was devastated.

So back to what you do with your life after the gold or silver. Mark Spitz became a dentist, of all things (see the blog spot Dental Insurance, Or the Lack Thereof). Michael Phelps gets caught smoking a hookah on camera. Some of the ice skaters join the Ice Capades, a few become sports commentators, but most of them join the rest of us in obscurity, where we have to generate our own sense of self worth without the aid of the TV camera. I finally threw out all my swimming medals from when I was a kid when my own children were still kids. Max was appalled, and made me give him several golds to put in his pile of accumulated junk. Now his chess trophies line the top of the dresser in his former room, and when he comes home for xmas/hannukah this year we’re going to make him put them away somewhere so we have more room for our accumulated junk.

A postscript about the Winter Olympics. Because NBC overbid for the rights to broadcast the games and had to make as much money as possible, the frequency of commercials ruined my already lackluster attempts at watching even the interesting sports, like figure skating. After two hours of commercial bombardment during prime time at night, like most baby boomers I was already nodding out by nine, when they showed the skaters in contention for the medals, and asleep by ten (only for a couple of hours, though, as that’s all I get at one stretch these days; if they aired the show at midnight, I might have seen a few triple axels or double salchows, whatever they are). Ah well, it’s finally over, the Canadian hockey team beating the Americans. Amen.