Sports & Politics Make The Olympics
August 10, 2016 at 3:54 p.m.
By -
I love it for all of the romantic reasons of kids and young adults from over 200 countries around the world competing in sports that we rarely see on television.
I love to watch Americans compete, but I also don’t mind telling you that I sat and watched the last two periods of a men’s water polo match between France and Montenegro (Montenegro won 7-4) because it’s Olympic water polo.
But as I have been watching these Games of the XXXI Olympiad, I realized something about me, and I am not so sure I am proud of it or like it much because I am not sure what it says about me. Maybe you can help me figure it out.
I was watching swimming Sunday and Monday, as a lot of you were, and I saw some things that normally would really bug me.
I saw a Russian swimmer who had been banned from her sport for 16 months for doping and then tested positive after that, still be allowed to compete in these games.
And I was really glad she was.
I watched NBC cameras focus on two swimmers in a holding room, waiting for their semifinal heat in that event – one doing everything he could to make the other notice, the other staring. No one quite knows for sure what he was staring at, but Michael Phelps was staring a hole through whatever it was.
And I loved every second of it.
And that, my friends, is where I wondered “what in the world I was thinking!”
If you have listened to me on the radio for the last quarter-century or read this column for the last couple years you know that one of the major themes of “me” is the importance of sportsmanship and fair play.
I am all about doing it right – about being the best you can be while being respectful of the sport and your fellow competitors at the same time.
But I won’t lie, I was all-in on watching a swimming cap throw-down on prime time national broadcast TV.
Where on Earth did that come from?
I’ll tell you where – it came from the 1970s and 80s.
In my youth, communism was at its peak. The Olympics were not only about the best athletes in the world in their sport going for gold and seeing who was the best of the best. It was also East vs. West. It was a battle of ideals: freedom vs. oppression. It was professional, full-time athletes from countries behind the Iron Curtain taking on college kids and amateurs and people from ordinary streets in tiny towns in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.
It was about rivalries … on a lot of levels.
It was fabulous theatre, and we got a taste of that in the pool (and the waiting room next to it) this week.
That should bother me, right? That should so offend my values and sense of righteousness that I can’t be seen in public for months because of it.
But it doesn’t.
Is it possible that, for the purpose of drama alone, I am suspending my sense of right-and-wrong at age 48 for the thrill of the moment?
What we had in Munich, Los Angeles, Lillehammer and cities like them were white-hatted American heroes taking on the villains from East Germany and the USSR.
But that curtain has been lifted.
Be clear, I don’t miss communism in any form. I don’t miss the Berlin Wall and people having to sneak out of their home country in the name of being free. I don’t miss the fear of looking out my high school classroom windows and seeing a mushroom cloud.
But the conflict makes the Olympics better. I guess I missed that. I guess I needed that sense of good and bad in sports to bring it back to life for me.
We got that back a little this week.
Now I have to figure out if I am OK with it.
I love it for all of the romantic reasons of kids and young adults from over 200 countries around the world competing in sports that we rarely see on television.
I love to watch Americans compete, but I also don’t mind telling you that I sat and watched the last two periods of a men’s water polo match between France and Montenegro (Montenegro won 7-4) because it’s Olympic water polo.
But as I have been watching these Games of the XXXI Olympiad, I realized something about me, and I am not so sure I am proud of it or like it much because I am not sure what it says about me. Maybe you can help me figure it out.
I was watching swimming Sunday and Monday, as a lot of you were, and I saw some things that normally would really bug me.
I saw a Russian swimmer who had been banned from her sport for 16 months for doping and then tested positive after that, still be allowed to compete in these games.
And I was really glad she was.
I watched NBC cameras focus on two swimmers in a holding room, waiting for their semifinal heat in that event – one doing everything he could to make the other notice, the other staring. No one quite knows for sure what he was staring at, but Michael Phelps was staring a hole through whatever it was.
And I loved every second of it.
And that, my friends, is where I wondered “what in the world I was thinking!”
If you have listened to me on the radio for the last quarter-century or read this column for the last couple years you know that one of the major themes of “me” is the importance of sportsmanship and fair play.
I am all about doing it right – about being the best you can be while being respectful of the sport and your fellow competitors at the same time.
But I won’t lie, I was all-in on watching a swimming cap throw-down on prime time national broadcast TV.
Where on Earth did that come from?
I’ll tell you where – it came from the 1970s and 80s.
In my youth, communism was at its peak. The Olympics were not only about the best athletes in the world in their sport going for gold and seeing who was the best of the best. It was also East vs. West. It was a battle of ideals: freedom vs. oppression. It was professional, full-time athletes from countries behind the Iron Curtain taking on college kids and amateurs and people from ordinary streets in tiny towns in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.
It was about rivalries … on a lot of levels.
It was fabulous theatre, and we got a taste of that in the pool (and the waiting room next to it) this week.
That should bother me, right? That should so offend my values and sense of righteousness that I can’t be seen in public for months because of it.
But it doesn’t.
Is it possible that, for the purpose of drama alone, I am suspending my sense of right-and-wrong at age 48 for the thrill of the moment?
What we had in Munich, Los Angeles, Lillehammer and cities like them were white-hatted American heroes taking on the villains from East Germany and the USSR.
But that curtain has been lifted.
Be clear, I don’t miss communism in any form. I don’t miss the Berlin Wall and people having to sneak out of their home country in the name of being free. I don’t miss the fear of looking out my high school classroom windows and seeing a mushroom cloud.
But the conflict makes the Olympics better. I guess I missed that. I guess I needed that sense of good and bad in sports to bring it back to life for me.
We got that back a little this week.
Now I have to figure out if I am OK with it.
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