I know the Olympics are cheesy. I know this. But I can't help it. I love them.
I love everything about them. The spectacle, the melodrama, the simple poetry of humans from all over the world gathering together for the sole purpose of doing amazing things. I spend every fourth year looking forward to them. And when they finally start, it's like two weeks of Christmas in July.
It started when I was a kid. The '92 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. The summer in between my sophomore and junior years of high school. The two weeks of our vacation at the beach happened to coincide that year with the two weeks of the Olympics. As a teenager, I was living a nocturnal existence; staying up all night doing nothing, and then sleeping all day in order to rest up for another night of doing nothing the next evening. There's nothing to do in the middle of the night in the small beach town where we stayed, and the TV in the cottage we were living in only got about six channels. And, of course, the only thing on was the Olympics. They played Olympic coverage almost all night. (And all day, but who was awake to see that??) I literally had nothing better to do, and a night full of hours to kill, so I started watching.
Late-night coverage of the Olympic Games at the time tended to favor the less-popular sports, giving recaps of the events of the day that hadn't made it into the daytime and primetime broadcasts. Handball. Water Polo. Badminton. Archery. Women's Volleyball. Sports that you'd never see on television back then. And I found myself, quite despite my desire to be an apathetic misanthrope, getting really, really into it. I fell in love with the stories of the athletes, and I cheered their amazing accomplishments. And I felt a sense of pride in my country (a completely foreign and somewhat nauseating experience for me at the time, I assure you) whenever Team USA triumphed. It didn't matter if it was a sport that I would never have cared about in a million years if I'd had anything better to do. It was about being fortunate enough to witness humanity's best, doing their best - pushing themselves as hard as they could, striving to be the very best in the whole world - and having the results of all their efforts and hard work displayed on the single greatest stage we have ever constructed, for all the world to see, whether they fell short, or were victorious. I was hooked from that moment on.
I've always been a drama-queen, and never more so than when I was a teenager. And, as cheesy as it was, and is, it was also, undeniably, the greatest drama I had ever seen. Have ever seen. And that is in no small part due to the fact that it is not a story, crafted artfully from a fertile imagination. Better than that, this drama is real.
Men and women from all over the world pushing themselves as hard as they can every single day for four years with the single-minded purpose of being the very best in the entire world at what they do. And every four years the entire world gathers to watch these people, the best in the world, compete and crown their champions. The best in the world. None faster. None stronger. No one.
What a great fucking story!
And that amazing story is made up of countless other single, just-as-amazing individual stories. Kerri Strug sticking her landing on a sprained ankle to win gold at the '96 Atlanta games. The '04 games returning to Athens. Michael Phelps at the '08 Beijing games winning eight gold medals, more than any other person has ever done before or since, and breaking his own World Record by more than two seconds! (He set new World Records in six out of the eight events he swam in!) And Usain Bolt in the same games, setting new World Records in both the 100m and 200m. (Whenever I remember that, I can't help but think of one of my favorite scenes from the pilot episode of Sports Night. As a runner half-a-world away is setting a new world record, Casey McCall, an anchor for a late-night Sportscenter-like TV show, calls his young son, waking him up in the middle of the night, and instructs him to hurry up and turn on Daddy's channel. Then he says, "I'll call you tomorrow and tell you all about it. But for now, you just watch him run. He's not doing much. He's just running faster than any man's ever run before.")
And those are my absolute favorite Olympics moments - when I see that "WR" flash up on an athlete's results, and I realize that I've just seen a human being expand the boundaries of what is possible, and push themselves to do something that no other human being has ever been able to do before. It is literally awe-inspiring, and I absolutely love it.
And I don't care if that makes me a cheeseball.
No comments:
Post a Comment