New Gold Dream
When I was young I loved the Olympics. Winter or summer games, my family watched the nightly ABC three-hour telecast, Jim McKay taking us from venue to venue, sport to sport. Yes the range of sports was limited and the coverage mostly American-centric, but watching the games was the only chance most of us had to see on television sports like bobsled, downhill ski racing, ski jumping, track and field, swim races, diving, and gymnastics. Yes there was Wide World of Sports, but the Olympics were an event. It was special.
It’s hard to believe in this age of infinite channel choice and YouTube’s infinite archives of everything that there was a time when you couldn’t just open a browser or app and search for the live stream or the video reel of whatever you wanted when you wanted to watch it. And in the days before VCR (or as in our case, parents who didn’t want one) you had to watch when it was on. And the Olympics were usually only on from 8–11 every night, maybe more hours on Saturday or Sunday afternoon.
A prime example that comes to mind of it being special, it being an event that you had to watch when it was shown, is the US winning the men’s ice hockey gold in the 1980 Lake Placid Winter games. Not so much the gold medal match, but the semi-final against the USSR. It was still the Cold War era, the Soviets were essentially professionals playing against a group of college kids. The match wasn’t aired live because I think it started late afternoon, so ABC was saving it for prime time. But I accidentally heard the score because after dinner I was in my room reading and listening to news radio (I was a news nerd even as a kid) and the KYW announcer told us what happened. The rest of my family didn’t hear it, and when we gathered to watch, I was able to keep my mouth shut about the score. But still it was thrilling. It was special, an event. A communal event. One that wouldn’t be immediately uploaded for replay.
I loved the Olympics so much that in 7th or 8th grade I wrote an in-class essay about my dream of competing in the games. I can’t remember what sport I thought I’d do (probably middle-distance running), but I remember writing about wanting to compete and the thrill of representing my country. By “my country” I can’t remember if I meant the US or Denmark, but I know I wanted to wear the colors and compete. This did not happen of course, but my English teacher Mr. Bundy took me aside and complemented me on my essay. Without understanding it then, I learned the lesson or write about what you know and/or like with some sort of sincere passion, and people will respond.
I bring all this up because the Paris Olympic Games took place recently and by many accounts, not just mine, they were a joy to watch. Why? Well mostly because the concept, design, and execution was ambitious, comprehensive, and well-done, and the athletes rose to the occasion.
First, the committee did a fantastic job of staging the event. They set out a goal of incorporating the city into the Games and the Games into the city. From the audacious and inventive opening ceremony, to beach volleyball under the Eiffel Tower, to the bicycle road races surging up Montmartre, to the long-distance swimming in the Seine, and to the cauldron floating above the Jardin de Tuileries, they accomplished that goal. It wasn’t perfect, but they went for original, inventive, and open and I think they succeeded. I wanted very much to be there. A friend who went had a fantastic time. I’m not often jealous of other people through what I see on social media but I was of him and his wife for those two weeks.
For those of us watching from home, the streaming companies did their job well, finally and fully delineating the before times from the now in the way we watch events like this. Back in the days of an over-the-air broadcast network condensing the day’s competition to a few hours every night, you could only get so much actual competition given commercials. It only got worse as the networks, especially NBC when they took it over in the US, started leaning in heavily on up-close-and-personal segments and puff pieces. We seemed to get more time learning about the athletes’ lives than seeing them compete. NBC tried to stream more with the Triple Cast, and then putting all events at the Tokyo games live on Peacock. While well-intended, the UX was a bit of a mess, there were buffering lags, and it was difficult to get a handle on what was being shown when.
But credit to them this year. I heard NBC/Peacock did a much better job with event streams, making them easier to find and the streams more reliable. Here in Denmark because we have an HBO subscription (can’t bring myself to call it Max, sorry) we got the Eurosport coverage. The UX was clean, the streams worked, the announcers were very good, and replays were available soon after the event concluded.
So this year I watched the swimming sessions from start to finish, same with track and field. No commercials, no puff pieces. Even better for track and field that they had some individual event streams. It was almost meditative and soothing to just have heat after heat, attempt after attempt just keep playing, whether high jump, pole vault, or the general session coverage that showed all track events while going to big moments for the field events. It was also interesting getting to see the athletes in the call rooms, seeing their individual approaches to getting ready for their heats. Some were nervously toe-tapping or stretching, some were intense and focused, big headphones and swim glasses or sunglasses blocking out the world. Some just sitting serenely and waiting to go.
I also watched lots of other sports you don’t see on television that often, like badminton and table tennis. In fact, one of my favorite things from the first week was a table tennis match between Zeng Zhiying, a Chinese woman in her mid 50s competing for Chile, and Mariana Zahakian, a Lebanese woman in her mid-40s. Very atypical Olympians but there they were. In the Olympics. They weren’t engaged in a frenetic “slam as soon as you can” match, but played at a languid pace, as if trying to get the most out of the moment, to just play for the sake of playing. But you could tell that both still wanted to win
My favorite new thing might have been watching track cycling in-depth for the first time. I’ve seen highlights before, but not full sessions. I had no idea of its internal world full of arcane rules, competition formats, and the resulting tactics.
- The Madison? Anarchic fun, but impossible to make sense of as it goes (to the untrained eye). Let’s do teams of two who swap out by hand slings, have a sprint lap every 10 laps and you can get 20 points if you lap the field. How can the judges tell what’s going on?
- Keirin? Hey, let’s be paced by a dude on a motor-scooter for a few laps, then go all out for the final 3 laps.
- Sprint? Let’s do 1 to 1.5 laps in a cagey “who wants to go lead” dance that sometimes comes to a near stop, then fight for lane position. But wait, the time clock only starts 1/4 or 1/5 of the way into the final lap.
- Omnium? At least that sort of made sense to me. Mostly all racing, first past the post wins.
The world track championships are here in October and you know I’m going to try to get there at least one of the days.
And of course there were the big Danish medal wins; the men’s gold and women’s silver in handball, and Viktor Axelsen’s gold medal run in badminton. I’d never watched so much badminton. But it’s fun…fast paced, exciting. Not what we play in the backyard.
Finally, I think the Games have been so well-received because the world needed it. It was the right time for a joyous communal event. Due to COVID the 2020 Summer Games were mostly staged in empty arenas a year late, with athletes and journalists both saying how dispiriting it was to participate while undergoing constant testing, social-distancing and isolation, and the palpable fear that was present (and should still be) that contracting the illness could be life-altering, even deadly. Living in the US meant years of dealing with political upheaval and tension that added to the stress of COVID. I’m on the left on the political spectrum so living under Trump and seeing January 6th unfold still carries psychological weight. Living in California meant more than a few days of needing masks just to breathe well and keep forest fire ash out of our lungs, and the worry of friends and relatives and strangers in the path of the fires.
COVID is of course still an issue, and there were outbreaks among the athletes and likely among some of those attending. But most were hopefully vaccinated, mitigating risk a bit. And while it’s impossible to shut out the negatives around us (nor should we) the Games did, at least for me and from what I could see on television, provide a release of joy and offer a celebration in watching athletes push themselves to do amazing things, to wonder at the marvel of the human body and what one can achieve with the right mix of genetic luck, hard work and the resulting skill.
Were these Olympics the global peace healing event that IOC presidents claim them to be in opening and closing ceremony speeches? Likely not. There is still much ongoing strife, conflict, and suffering, just as there was back in 1976, 1988, 1996, 2008. In 1972 that strife invaded the Games to deadly effect, in 1980 and 1984 politics led to nations boycotting the event. Even in these Games the IOC has a refugee team to remind us that not everyone is free to live their lives freely and compete for their country. Some athletes were unfairly made the subject of cynical speculation about their genetic and biological make-up, cynical and hateful speculation designed mostly to harass and shame transgender people.
But millions of people came together in-person and via television to celebrate communally, to marvel at the athletic ability of the human body, and ultimately to feel just a little bit better about things, even if just for a couple of weeks. With just a little more joy in our hearts we now go back to hoping for an end to violence in Gaza, the West Bank, and Ukraine. To hoping for a smooth outcome of the US election and a Kamala Harris administration that continues to move the USA along a better path. To hope that the rights of LGBTQ people to be who they want to be are not suppressed by hate and bigotry. To hope that we continue to find solutions to the climate crisis. Does this all sound a bit pollyanna-ish? Maybe. But cynicism is worse, cynicism is corrosive, cynicism is depressing. If the communal joy of the Olympics and what we’re seeing this week at the Democratic party convention get us back to working for a better world, then call me pollyanna.
These were the Olympics that my younger self remembers. They evoked childhood memories of the Miracle on Ice, Nadia Comăneci’s perfect 10, the fearsome Teófilo Stevenson, the power and joy of Sugar Ray Leonard, the imposing Vasily Alexseyev, the super-human speed of Carl Lewis. I’m grateful to them for giving us just a little bit of joy and community. We needed it this year, we will always need it.
