Olympic Fanfare
(John Williams)
One thing about me is I love the Olympics. I’ve been told this is “off-brand”.
And honestly, that’s fair. No one would ever accuse me of being a sports person. But every other year when the Olympics roll around, I lock the fuck in.
I have always been this way. I remember watching Sarah Hughes, Sasha Cohen, and Michelle Kwan skate as a kid, back when I still figure skated too. (Photos below for reference.) In 2004, I lined up all my stuffed animals and renamed them alphabetically after current Olympians (I regularly renamed a bunch of my stuffed animals; you have to keep them on their toes, you know!): swimmers Natalie Coughlin and Amanda Beard, gymnast Carly Patterson, volleyball players Kerri Walsh and Misty May, etc. They didn’t keep these names very long (again, gotta keep the stuffed animals—and my poor parents who tried desperately to keep up—on their toes), but the Olympics hyper-fixation was strong enough to warrant it in the first place…
But I recently realized that I don’t love the Olympics in the same way every time. Each Olympics cycle, there’s something new, some new reason for watching. There are Olympics cycles when I’m in awe of the sheer athleticism or maybe I’m particularly focused on all the year-round training involved or the passion that these achievements necessitate. In 2012, I was fascinated by the team spirit of it all — something about the US swimmers dancing to Call Me Maybe triggered my deep desire to belong to something and I developed a parasocial relationship with Missy Franklin.
This year, the reason I love the Olympics is this: they make the world feel bigger.
I don’t know anything about ice dancing. (This is another funny thing about the Olympics — I learn all the rules and all the drama for every sport and then immediately forget and have to relearn all of it four years later.) But there are people who know EVERYTHING about ice dancing. The athletes themselves, of course, but also their coaches and probably their family and close friends. There are fans who follow these skaters obsessively. There are scientists who know all about ice temperature and hardness and how to calibrate a rink for different sports. There are companies that design and make the skates and the dresses and there are intricacies to those I can’t even begin to understand.
Around every sport on my TV screen, even the ones I don’t really watch (like curling, sorry), there is an entire culture. It’s like seeing an ant hill and knowing that below it lies a whole colony, many feet of tunnels and millions of lives.
Every year of my life so far, the world has grown more and more interconnected. We can access just about anything we want to online. Everything is at our fingertips. My job enhances that feeling for me too, I think. Part of why I love my work is that I get to learn about something new with every episode I edit. I get to learn about international trade, semiconductor technology, and the ins and outs of the fashion industry.
I learn a lot through work, I read widely for fun, and I love a good internet rabbit hole. It’s easy to take it all for granted. It’s easy sometimes to feel like I know, if not everything, at least enough.
The Olympics prove me wrong and I love that. Every time I turn on the TV, I’m humbled. I’m reminded that I have no idea what monobob is and why it’s different from luge. I’m reminded that there are people who can read the weather on a hill and know what adjustments to make for the wind on a ski jump. I’m reminded that some people can watch a girl leap and twirl in the air and understand fluently that she under-rotated by a quarter of a spin or can tell by a skater’s posture that he’s struggling through a lift. I learned the other day that there’s someone whose job is “ski technician” and that they can tell which skis an athlete should use by the temperature and snow quality on the mountain.
It’s one thing to not know a thing. I think this is the difference between the episodes I edit and learn from daily and what I get out of the Olympics. I learn new stuff all the time, but it’s usually something I knew I didn’t know… you know? Like, yes, I know I understand very little about international tariffs. So when I learn about them, I think: “okay, interesting! That’s a thing I didn’t know and now I know it!”
But everything I learn through the Olympics… it’s all stuff that I didn’t even know I didn’t know. Questions that would never have crossed my mind because I didn’t know enough to ask or because I didn’t know the sport existed in the first place. It would never have occurred to me to wonder how the temperature on a mountain affects the snow quality which affects the particular skis an athlete chooses. It would never have occurred to me to wonder about the training involved in monobob because I did not know that monobob existed.
So, every new thing I learn shows me just how much more I don’t know. It’s like an endless web of passageways: I turn one corner and suddenly there are dozens of doors in front of me all full of new worlds of information. I can scroll through (the terrible user interface of ) the Peacock app and click on a sport and discover a vast ocean of “shit I know nothing about” and there is something thrilling and liberating about that.
I don’t have to know everything! In fact, I don’t want to know everything! I want the world to keep surprising me.
There were certainly Olympic cycles in which I was envious of the athletes, in which I wondered what it would take for my body to do all of that. I might have wondered “what if I had kept up with any of the sports I tried briefly in my youth?” Figure skating, ice hockey, soccer, crew, swimming… could I have been good at any of them if I’d really tried?
Now, I have zero desire to do what these athletes do. I like my life and my body and the amount of weight I can lift and I have no desire to sacrifice anything (much less everything) for a glorified game.
But what I do want is to keep learning about the world. I want to follow rabbit holes about sports I’ve never heard of and learn about entire sub-cultures of athletes and their fans and know that there’s no bottom to the well of newness out there. Watching the Olympics reminds me that that’s possible.
There are so many bigger, more important things happening in the world right now, but I can’t help but be transfixed by people chasing their dreams and reminding me how much I don’t know.
In related news, it’s homophobic to schedule the women’s hockey gold medal game at the same time as the women’s free skating. If you’re also into the Olympics, please chat with me about them <3
I love your brain and the way you think about things and find the sparkle in everything!!!