With each successive Olympics, it becomes increasingly popular to dismiss the games as irrelevant or unworthy of that fleeting attention span that Americans proudly possess. But as this year’s games once again proved, the Winter Olympics are not mere filler for the sports abyss that lies between the Super Bowl and Opening Day. To me, the Olympic Games are captivating. Or, to put it more precisely, the Olympics are exactly the drama that NBC so desperately seeks for the other 50 weeks of the year.
Unlike the pampered professionals, whose antics make headlines for most of the year, Olympic athletes rarely earn a livelihood from their craft. From a young age they develop incredible talents in sports that certainly weren’t common to my suburban high school. Take curling, a game of focus and precision, in which competitors slide a 42-pound granite “stone” down a sheet of ice while a teammate attempts to control the object’s speed by sweeping the ice ahead of it. Curling dates to the 16th century, and though it’s somewhat similar to shuffleboard, somehow I can’t imagine my grandparents playing it. The biathlon, another unusual sport, combines cross-country skiing and riflery—two sports destined to be together, while ski jumpers catapult themselves through the air at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour and receive scores not just for distance but for style as well.
Olympians polish these skills through training regimens that make a first-year law student’s life look like paradise, because even the longest competitions last only a few days, and the difference between glory and despair can be mere fractions of a second. The result is two weeks of intense competition in sports that the world rarely gets to see, all for personal satisfaction and the chance to stand atop a podium with a medal while draped in one’s homeland flag.
For these two weeks of the year, there is no Yankees-Red Sox or Giants-Cowboys. Instead we unite to root for the likes of Apolo Anton Ohno and Gretchen Bleiler, Shaun White and Shannon Bahrke. At some of the most challenging moments in our history, the games have brought us national pride and triumph: Jesse Owens’ great victories before Adolph Hitler, the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” in Lake Placid, and Michael Phelps’ improbable gold medal quest in Beijing. And while this year’s Olympics may not have had a moment that transcends generations, it certainly did not disappoint. So, if this column sounds nostalgic, maybe it’s because the Olympic Games have ended, and London 2012 is just too far away.
COUNTERPOINT: Winter Olympics: Big Brother on Ice