The Olympic Games are not perfect. But they have an undeniable stature and power.
The Olympic Games are not perfect. But they have an undeniable stature and power.
N othing quite brings history to life like losing a race at the site of the ancient Olympic Games in Greece. On a visit to Olympia in 2017, I managed this ignominious feat among friends on the very course of the Olympic sprint. In doing so, I joined a long parade of utterly forgotten obscurities: the athletes who made it to those games and lost. History recalls little of what they did there.
The modern Olympic Games have been around for 128 years, but as they were inspired by these ancient contests, they can lay claim to a history even more extensive than that. Those interested in this legacy need not visit the ruins in Olympia, however: The modern Olympic Games have already produced ruins of their own. Structures used in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro games have since joined their abandoned forebears in Athens, Berlin, and elsewhere. Sarajevo’s 1984 Winter Olympics edifice featured prominently in the wars that tore Bosnia and Herzegovina apart a few years later. Look upon these works, ye mighty, and despair.
Those interested in doing so could add these rapid-onset ruins to the long list of reasons to be cynical about the Olympics. Yet even stacking the deck against the Games cannot diminish their undeniable power and stature.
In the interest of fairness, let’s give Olympics haters their due. Yes, there is graft and corruption involved in the selection and construction of venues — enough of it to make the case for the Games to rotate through a small number of fixed venues, instead. Yes, there is a history of cheating, even going back to the ancient Games. Yes, the Games often fail to achieve their desired outcome of increased international comity, instead merely reflecting or even exacerbating existing international tensions. Yes, they often provide a showcase for authoritarian regimes, such as Communist China and Nazi Germany. And yes, some modern aspects of Olympic pomp have a bizarre character or unsavory history.
Each new Olympics seems to offer more ammunition for the cynics. As the Games are all about testing the limits of the human body, concerns can get viscerally biological. In 2016, there were worries about the Zika virus. The Covid-delayed Olympics of 2021 in Tokyo were inevitably marred by the still-active coronavirus. And the fresh concern of 2024 is over the freshness — or lack thereof — of Paris’s Seine River. The city’s mayor even swam in the river herself in an attempt to assuage athletes’ concerns about the water’s E.coli levels.
Those who wish to make a sport out of trashing the Games have plenty of material. In this sport, National Review alumnus Kyle Smith would have a gold medal. In 2021, Smith derided the superfluity of uninteresting sports at the Games, victory (or defeat) in which bears not at all on a nation’s greatness, as well as the unhealthy obsessiveness whereby “little girls and their moms are dragging themselves out of bed at 3 a.m. to train to win a contest all but one of them will not win.” Of the forced splendor of the proceedings themselves, he wrote in 2012 that “the combination of the pompous and prosaic calls to mind what the U.S. Postal Service would be like if it were run by the Hapsburg dynasty.” In 2006, noting the Games’ imperfect record at improving friendliness between nations, he even outlined “a proposal to increase harmony and goodwill among nations,” namely: “Cancel the Olympics forever.”
Olympics skeptics can summon a lot of arguments in their favor. As a human institution, the Games are, unsurprisingly, imperfect. But if they did not exist, we would have to invent them. If they were canceled, they would eventually come back to life. And not just out of raw inertia or status-quo bias. There is something both thrilling and transcendent about the Olympic Games. Smith and others may be right that not all of the events are very exciting to watch. Enough are, however, to give the entire affair a suitably epic quality that arises from the assembly of the world’s most physically skilled humans. Sticking with the sport I know best, I recall Jesse Owens’s four gold medals in Berlin in 1936 (so much for Aryan supremacy), Abebe Bikila’s 1960 barefoot Olympic marathon win, and Carl Lewis’s matching Owens’s achievement in 1984.
It is not surprising that so many of the most thrilling historical Olympic episodes lend themselves so readily to film adaptations, with Games from nearly 90 years ago still being depicted on screen as recently as last year’s The Boys in the Boat. The Olympics are tailor-made to leap into myth, and above their many obvious faults.
Whether each individual event is engaging to spectators, though, is beside the point. The Olympic Games are a proving ground for the capabilities of mankind. The journey of each athlete to the starting line, diving board, or gym mat has entailed undulations of trial and error, success and failure, euphoria and sadness. That in some cases it all comes to an end in an instant ought not negate the process. We should look with admiration on the feats of these Olympians.
The modern Olympiad, more even than the myriad sporting events featured regularly throughout the world (of which it is an apotheosis), also attests to and displays the virtues attendant to physical fitness. This is not to say the athletes themselves are inherently virtuous. But discipline, determination, delayed gratification, and individual agency are essential traits for Olympic athletes, and for all of us. We need not all be Olympians, nor can we be, as I have learned to my own disappointment. But at a time when cultural forces increasingly deny the possibilities of the individual save in service of untrammeled self-expression, and when so many have surrendered to self-destructive, unhealthy behavior often disguised as self-love, it is good to have paragons of pure potential running, cycling, and rowing among us. They remind us of something we sometimes forget, in a digital age: We are embodied beings.
It is true that all but a select few athletes will fall short in their bids for immortality. When the Games are over, all the participants will return to their homes and prepare for what comes next. Eventually, their quest for glory will recede into memory, where, if they’re lucky, it will stay. But as they recall, while they still can, what they did, they may feel something to which we all can relate. Something I felt back in Olympia, as I left the ancient stadium where I myself lost: the feeling of connection and aspiration to something bigger, something greater, that will endure after all rational hope of earthly remembrance has diminished. And that feeling is something not even cynics should sneer at.