I didn’t get to watch as much of the Paris 2024 Summer Olympic Games as I would have liked, but I watched more than I have in the past couple of decades. I don’t follow any particular sport regularly, but one of the things I love about the Olympics is that you get to watch the best of the best in these niche sports that you’d never get to see otherwise. The Winter Olympics have sports like luge, curling, biathlon, and my favorite, short track speedskating. The Summer Olympics has the headliner sports like swimming, gymnastics, and track and field, but also archery, fencing, rowing, shooting, table tennis, and many more.
Those who excel at these sports are a world unto themselves. The hours and hours of intense, grueling training to compete in activities that are measured in minutes, seconds, one hundredths of a second means that these athletes’ lives are hyperfocused and somewhat circumscribed. In the human interest stories that the networks love to broadcast, we get brief glimpses into these regimented worlds of early morning practices, fancy training facilities, and the often humble, unassuming beginnings as children who just loved to swim or tumble or follow an older sibling around a playing field. For most of these athletes, the Olympics is the pinnacle and the dream.
That’s why one of the parts of the Olympics that fascinates me most is the medal ceremony. There, the gold, silver, and bronze medal winners stand on pedestals and officials come to hang medals on their necks and shake their hands. And then the flags of each of their nations are raised as the gold medal winner’s national anthem plays. There are no mics to pick up any conversation among the athletes and officials; it’s just the visuals and the commentators narrating the scene. But even the hosts usually fall silent as the anthem plays and the camera zooms in for a close-up of the gold medalist’s face.
This is the moment I watch for. As the music swells, I’m waiting for the tears. Some athletes are stoic, their faces placid and controlled, aware that dozens of cameras are on them. Others are smiling throughout, sometimes singing along, and when the music stops, their smiles get bigger, they raise their arms and wave like the champions they are. But I like the criers. For some, the tears flow almost immediately, and for others, it takes a few beats as they take it all in; they take deep breaths, a hand over their heart, their lips might quiver, their eyes well up.
The silent drama that plays out on their faces is captivating because it’s such a private, solitary experience that is simultaneously so public. With the gold medal hanging around their neck, are they finally feeling the weight of their accomplishment? The responsibility of having represented an entire nation on the biggest stage of their lives? Or, are they overwhelmed with gratitude for the sacrifices their families made for them to be there? Relief that all they’ve poured into and given up for their sport was worth it? Yes, these are happy tears, but also perhaps the tears of having overcome pain and injury or any number of mental, social, political hurdles that added degrees of difficulty to their trajectory. Most poignant are the athletes whose wins really beat the odds, whose countries don’t dominate multiple sports, and who are securing perhaps the only gold medal for their nation.
You could argue that these athletes embody a universal story about struggle and triumph, sports as metaphor for life. But as much as they become symbols for us, making us all feel like winners for a little bit, the spectator’s gaze has a limit. Watching them cry, I can only guess at their reasons, can only wonder what they’re thinking, what their inner life is like. Most of those watching may not really care about that inner life; what matters is that each gold medalist is the best at a very specialized, rarefied thing; they are an arrow that hit their target. On the podium, though, their tears humanize them for me – having withstood the pressures of years of intense training and of those critical moments in competition, there’s release. In the midst of the spectacle that is the Games, the podium seems a place of stillness, a brief resting spot atop a mountain before another climb.
Contrary Frog 