Olympic Fever

Love Affair

I love the Olympic Games. I love that, for a few weeks every two years, people around the world can all be focused on something positive and uniting. So often when something takes the world spotlight, it's a crisis: natural disaster, war, famine, climate change, or scandal. But the Olympics offer something different. For a few weeks, we all look to swimming pools and tracks, ski slopes and skating rinks, balance beams and judo mats, and we cheer people on to celebrate what humanity can do. We test the limits of human endurance, celebrate the emotions that accompany victory and defeat, and unite around our shared humanity. I know that there are places where young athletes do not have the resources to train, and there are countries that cannot field teams. But when I see swimmers from Japan, Zimbabwe, Canada, Australia, China, France, and the Netherlands in the pool together, it gives me hope that someday all the nations really will be represented. I love the colors of flags and faces, the sound of voices in all different languages shouting exuberantly for the accomplishments of people they've never met.

Dreaming
When I was growing up, I, like so many little girls around the globe, was fascinated with figure skating and gymnastics. My sister and I would watch the figure skaters: Kristy Yamaguchi, Nancy Kerrigan, Scott Hamilton, gliding gracefully over the ice and flying through the air. Then we'd go out and rollerskate around our driveway, creating routines and imagining that we, too, were skating stars. Both of us had taken gymnastics as kids and, while neither of us stayed with it for very long, we still watched in awe and delight as Shannon Miller and Dominique Dawes competed in the Olympics. I wished I could do parallel bar routines and tumbling runs during floor exercises, too. It's strange to me now to realize that most of the athletes are younger than I am. Katie Hoff, for instance, swam in her first Olympics at age 15 and is now in Beijing at 19. It's amazing to me that these young people can balance the expectations of an entire nation on their shoulders as they push their bodies to the limit.

Fourth Place
I always feel bad for the athletes who win fourth place at the Olympics. They've trained countless hours and years, practiced, competed, and pushed themselves, and they've done very well. To even make it to the Olympics is an incredible honor, and to do so well as to be fourth is incredible. Yet these fourth-place contenders do not get a place on the medal stand. Their photographs don't make the newsstands, and their names fade to obscurity, if they were ever brought up at all. And yet, it's the fourth-place contenders who really represent us. Most of us aren't Michael Phelpses. We work and our efforts are neither recognized nor remembered. We don't get medals or get our pictures in the paper. But we don't work for the recognition. We work because the endeavor is worth it. We struggle because there is joy in trying, in being in motion. So I salute the fourth-place contenders, and their fifth- and sixth-place competitors. Thank you for keeping up the effort, for working toward a goal. Thank you for playing because you love the sport, because you want to be better, and because you hope for more. And thank you for accepting fourth-place gracefully, knowing that your efforts still have merit.