You have to hand it to the Olympic movement, they sure know how to do smoke and mirrors. And yes, I'll watch along like everybody else, writes Scotty Stevenson.
I'll give them this, they can put on a show.
It was only a week ago that I found myself in Paris, right in the thick of the finishing touches to the Olympic venues and the staging of the opening ceremony. The fences hadn't been fully erected, but the rings had taken their place on the Eiffel Tower, ready for the full moon and the first photos to adorn the front pages and home pages of the world's newspapers.
There were cops and military types of every denomination guarding the roads along the River Seine, the circus sirens of Parisienne police cars a constant companion soundtrack. It was hot, and the tourists, sweating and cursing, were circumnavigating the temporary barriers and the grey zones transposed upon the Paris topography, banishing the Trocadero behind Olympic billboards, and disappearing the Louvre.
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The Olympics – this Olympics – felt less an event as an occupation. Locals moaned about the whole shebang over cigarettes and coffee, remonstrated with gendarmes when access to this street or that avenue was denied. Even without a firm grip of the language, you got the gist. National fervour would kick in eventually, but this was the civic inconvenience stage. It takes a lot of gold medals to make up for a pissed off Parisienne.
Ah, but the show goes on, and the show did go on. And on. And on. Where does one begin with the opening ceremony? Perhaps with Serena Williams on a boat trying hard not to throw up, which is exactly what I did when I read this quote from IOC President, Thomas Bach: "Some may say, we in the Olympic world, we are dreamers. But we are not the only ones."
Good grief.
Of course, he would go onto say something about being united in diversity, which is all well and good, except as soon as a few outraged members of the clergy kicked up a fuzz about some of the more diverse members of the opening ceremony cast, the IOC felt compelled to be a little less diverse. Imagine that.
Still, apart from Serena Williams avoiding a very public gastric pollution of the freshly laundered Seine, and the kind of weather that will likely, in the coming days, take out a quarter of the 10,500 athletes courtesy of chest infections, and the IOC President plagiarising a dead Beatle, and someone raising the Olympic flag upside down, and someone else getting their Koreas muddled up, I thought the whole thing was magnificently and terrifically nuts. Which is exactly what the games are anyway, so stop your moaning.
Besides, I'm not here for the pageant, I am here for the action – the real action, the splash of the pool and the whoosh of the foil, the thrill of the floor routine and the grimace on the face of a Lithuanian rower. I'm here for the records, and the victories, and all those pull-at-your-heart-strings stories. Like the Australian hockey player having body parts removed to ensure selection. Costs the fans an arm and leg, but only cost him half a finger.
On balance, a bargain.
I'm here for the heavyweight lifters, and the lightweight boxers; for the cool kids skateboarding and breaking. I'm all for the climbers and the trampolinists, and the shooters and the archers. I'm here for any sport that doesn't have its own bigger event. I'm not here for football.
Maybe what I am here for most of all is the pain. Pain is the human experience, bitter tears the currency of all transactions. Pain is the part we can all agree on, whether we can run fast or jump high or throw long or do precisely none of the above. We can all experience pain, and failure. For most of us it's our baseline state of being. It's the fear of failure that stops most of us trying. It's the missing out we can relate to.
I'm essentially here for the fourth-place getters.
And I'll cheer them on, too. There will be no moment on the dais for them, no talk show interviews and homecoming parades. There will be no bookings on the speaking circuit, or likenesses carved in marble or cartooned in almanacs of Olympic glory. But they can say they were there and they were fourth best in the world at something on that single day. That will be their moment in time unless they are lucky enough to do it all over again in another four years and hopefully then they can be third best in the world at something on a particular day, or second best, or even the very best of all.
Regardless, they'll still be better than the rest of us.
And that's why I will cry with them, and why I will feel their pain. They are the heroes in this pantomime of the human spirit. Thomas Bach can do all the imagining he likes while the show plays out in Paris. He can say he's a dreamer, but he is not the only one.
I'm here for the athletes whose dreams get shattered. That is a spectacle more compelling than anything the opening ceremony could concoct.
If you want to capture the true essence of the Olympics, it will be in the faces of those who fell desperately short.
They are the ones worthy of celebration.
They are the champions of us all.
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