Yesterday, Mr. P and I indulged in a marathon of Olympics viewing, hunkered down in our living room as thunderstorms raged outside. The guilt-laced pleasure of devoting nearly eight hours to televised sports was palpable—it wasn’t even Thanksgiving. By hour four, my ad-saturated brain had managed to convince me that watching as much of the Olympics as possible was not only a justifiable use of my day, but my patriotic duty. And who knows? Maybe I really did need to buy a Toyota Tundra.
NBC’s cunning marketing didn’t need to work too hard to reel me in; I’ve always been an Olympics enthusiast. There’s something captivating about seeing nations come together, competing fiercely yet united under a shared global stage. Pierre de Coubertin, the French visionary behind the modern Olympics in 1900, dreamed of using athletic competition to foster peace, believing that the youth of the world could compete in sports rather than engage in war. An idealistic thought, perhaps—no geopolitical crisis has ever been resolved by synchronized diving—but I still live by Coubertin’s sentiment, considering beach volleyball a perfectly reasonable stand-in for global conflict.
I love the Olympic events that stray from the typical American diet of spectator sports involving ball-handling, ball-whacking, and/or stock cars. I love hearing co-workers lament their lack of sleep because they stayed up late to watch a swim meet. Plus, the Olympics heightens the excitement of every sport it touches. Take women’s gymnastics, which is always a crowd pleaser, but during the Olympics, the high stakes add an exquisiteness to the tension. Who doesn’t love watching those crestfallen muscle-wracked little girls after their lifetime of fanatical work is sidelined by a hop and a wobble on the landing?
The Olympics awaken the fervent patriotism of my childhood. My most vivid Olympic memory is from the 1988 Calgary Winter Games, where American Debi Thomas faced off against East German Katarina Witt in women’s figure skating. I can still hear Thomas’s coach’s pep talk before her decisive long program: “You can do this. You can do anything. You’re an American.” Thomas faltered, ending up with the bronze, and I learned that the spectator’s agony of defeat was laced with helplessness. It was then that I swore a silent enmity toward Katarina Witt and, by extension, East Germany itself. Because, in my young eyes, figure skating was war.
