Not Your Father’s Olympics

For sports that go on unnoticed most of the time, the Olympic Games are a bonanza.  Over the next two weeks, I’ll be watching every moment of track and field available, just as I watched every second of the U. S. Olympic Trials, but I’m not fooling myself—the Olympics probably won’t present the best performances, the best competition, or even the best stories.  For the loyal fan of track, the Olympic competition has become a strange beast.

As with most sports, the best track and field stories will be unexpected, Bud Greenspan moments back in the pack where athletes demonstrate again what heart we humans have.  Running and jumping and throwing are so elemental they often illuminate the essentials of sport—will, risk, courage.  The Olympics will provide performances no network or advertising executive can anticipate.  They always do, and I’ll be watching, loving it.

Yet… those stories aren’t unique to Olympic years—they are just more visible. Like the music fan who looks askance at people who have just discovered his favorite band, I can’t help feeling a little resentment.  Sometime over the next couple of weeks, one of the commentators will talk about an athlete “performing on the biggest stage” when, in track and field, the stage is the same 400 meters, the same infield.  It’s only the theater, the size of the house, that has changed.  A track and field aficionado might appreciate every notable performance on any stage, but, in this big Olympic house, the media spotlight is narrow and hot.

It’s true the Olympics present the best track and field athletes—no other competition is as selective.  To qualify in the U.S., athletes have to be one of the top three in one meet (the Olympic Trials) or the rest of their success—even world records—won’t matter.  Other nations who nominate athletes can be even more selective.  Sweden will send only eight track and field athletes to the Olympics, having deemed all others out of range for receiving medals.  The Olympic Committee itself posts “’A’ Standards” that athletes have to meet.  In recent years, some distance race winners in the Olympic Trials have not been eligible because they haven’t met those standards.  Whereas, in events like 110 Hurdles and the 400 meters, four or five Americans might reach the finals if that number were allowed to participate.

Does this selectivity—or elitism, if you like—lead to better competition?

In shorter races, you have to be at your absolute best to win against the best.  Though athletes posture between races, they can’t hold back during them.  Yet world records are relatively rare in the Olympics because the stakes are so high. Who wants to mess up?  The situation doesn’t encourage going for broke.  One of my coaches pointed out that you can run a track meet without a watch, but the absence of rabbits in Olympic distance races means they are nearly always strategic, filled with “sit and sprint runners” saving their best effort for the last laps or turn.  It is not uncommon to see faster times in heats than in finals.  Olympic final times rarely rank among the best times for the year.  So much is at stake, even talented runners become conservative, aiming for no more than is required.

And, though I’d never lead the cry to return to the naïve world of  “amateurism,” track and field has suffered from the same ills of professionalism all sports have.  Money makes winning everything, creates the impulse to take performance enhancing drugs, leads to packaging athletes for advertisers, and turns events into competitions of personality instead of accomplishment.  What’s great about smaller meets is absent in the Olympics: the presence of journeyman and journeywoman athletes fueled by devotion, desire, and hope.  Those qualities were once associated with “The Olympic Spirit.”  Anyone might dream, whereas, in this new world of professionalism, elite sometimes means privileged.

The warmth of the Olympics nearly always comes from the bit player, and yet network sports doesn’t work that way, focusing all its attention on one or two participants instead of telling the stories of all the athletes who have reached a final. I take some perverse pleasure when some unnoticed runner streaks to a win—it’s fun imagining the flummoxed announcers shuffling their notes—but I’d rather deal with the race as anyone’s race from the start.  Aren’t all races anyone’s, regardless of origin or popularity—isn’t that the idea of the Olympics?  Otherwise, why run?  In any case, a race that’s anyone’s is so much more interesting and stirring.

As a fan of Bud Greenspan’s Olympic documentaries, I recognize many of the stories of the Olympics are available only in retrospect and formulated to suit the outcome.  None of my misgivings will prevent me from watching.  Yet, at the same time, I can’t help lamenting how synthetic these “Games” can sometimes seem.  Though the performers will undoubtedly be among the world’s best, you might find just as much passion—and more “’Olympic Spirit”—in your local high school meet.

My coach was right, you don’t need watches to run a meet…or cameras either.