I watch the Olympics: ice dancing and pairs figure skating in the winter, gymnastics in the summer. While I know all Olympic contenders’ athletic skills are phenomenal, like Superman or Wonder Woman, I don’t get it. What does one do with the ability to fly over the high bar or twirl three times on a balance beam? Those aren’t transferable skills.
It’s not my fault, totally, for thinking this way. I grew up in a practical household, where one must work an 8 to 5 job, have health insurance, and choose a solid, safe profession. Writing, dance…those are hobbies, not careers. Follow such creative passions in your free time, never mind that working forty hours a week severely limits your ability to engage in such passions. While one can write at any time in life, dancing—or any other sort of physical career—is usually best started early.
Perhaps I’m a bit jealous as I watch the twenty-something Olympians do Yurchenkos or triple twisting double layouts while parents and siblings watch in the stands, having supported and encouraged such dreams from the start. Since my mom died 14 years ago, my family doesn’t even care if we get together for Christmas, as though it’s just not that important anymore. And with a sister who kept score in some silent competition I never signed up for, I doubt I’d find her in the stands should I ever complete a perfect uneven bar routine and stick my landing.
Not that I would ever want to be an Olympian, although I wonder why ballroom dancing is not an Olympic sport. I imagine the life of a gymnast: practice the same routines hour after hour every day, maybe go to college/maybe not, heal from subsequent injuries, barely have a life outside of the gym, then perform a 40-second pommel horse routine…and fall off, ending your career for another four years.
I don’t get it.
I understand the Olympic tradition, stemming from ancient Greece, where such athletes were treated as gods (they also fought to the death, so go figure). Our society reveres athletes as gods too, paying them salaries that would feed a third world country for a decade. But Olympians…how does that work if one doesn’t find sponsorships, if one doesn’t become the face for the next insurance company, energy drink, or SUV? What about all those children—and they were children years ago, when twelve-year-old girls competed as gymnasts in the Olympics—that don’t make it onto the Olympic team? Or those that do and then fall off the balance beam or injure themselves during a vault? Coaching, maybe?
But if you make it—you can retire at 25.
But such a risk, the risk of impracticality, where one can train for years, but only a few make it. Like all the arts: dancers, actors, artists, NFL football players. Whereas as long as one passes a test, one becomes a lawyer. Maybe a shitty lawyer, but a lawyer nonetheless. Doctors, teachers, contractors, politicians, mechanics…the list is endless of careers that let you in even if you’re shitty. But one could argue that happens in the art world or the celebrity world or the athletic world too: nepotism opens doors nothing else can. So does money.
But that’s getting beyond the point. I marveled as I watched the men’s team final, especially Stephen Nedoroscik, whose only marketable skill is the pommel horse.
Men’s gymnastics doesn’t have the celebrity plight or prestige that women’s gymnastics has always possessed (which I couldn’t help but smile that women finally had something over the men). This year’s team wanted to change that, deservedly so, since the only male gymnast I can name is Mitch Gaylord, thanks to watching American Anthem countless times as a tween in the Eighties (and of course we all know Tim Daggett because his contract states he must say “Fly high and stick the landing” every 60 seconds) (I’m still trying to work that into everyday conversation, just because I like the challenge).
But something happened to me as each rotation concluded, like the Grinch whose heart grew. I was invested in their plight—their plight for a team medal, which hasn’t happened in 16 years. While I would like to zap the next person who yells “Let’s go” out of the universe (and I remember the gymnastics of the Eighties and Nineties where such celebration when still on the mat would have been a no-no), I needed them to win, too. I have no idea why, per say. I hadn’t expected much when I sat down to watch the Olympics that night, especially when the qualifying round had been so embarrassing. Despite Abby Lee Miller’s taunting of “second place is the first to lose,” those five boys—and they are just boys to me at my age—wore smiles of pure joy just at the possibility of getting third place. Their enthusiasm for each other’s routines, their celebratory fist pumps after completing an apparatus (just please stop yelling “Let’s go”) was infectious as it wafted through my television. Maybe it’s because in our world today, rarely do we see people smile and mean it, with a sparkle in their eyes that holds no ulterior motive. The purity of the moment, untouched by societal conflict or upheaval.
Maybe that’s why we watch the Olympics. As the audience, we’ve invested nothing into it, yet reap the joy of a win nonetheless.