Yesterday Mr. Pinault and I engaged in a full-blown orgy of Olympics viewing while confined to our living room by powerful thunderstorms. How naughty it felt to indulge in roughly 8 hours of televised sports, and it wasn’t even Thanksgiving. Sometime around hour 4, my advertisement-addled brain had convinced me that watching as much Olympics as possible was not only acceptable use of my time, it was my obligation as an American. And, maybe I should buy a Toyota Tundra.
Of course, NBC’s sly Olympics marketing needn’t work so hard to snatch my attention; I’ve always loved the Olympics. I love watching the nations of the world, united and pitted against each other in athletic competition. Pierre de Coubertin, the Frenchman who founded the modern Olympics in 1900, envisioned bringing nations closer together by having the youth of the world compete in sports rather than fight in war. Obviously Coubertin’s vision is a tab naive — if only all international crises could be solved with synchronized diving! — but I myself live in the spirit of Coubertin’s credo by regarding beach volleyball as a perfectly acceptable surrogate for war.
I love the Olympic events that stray from the typical American diet of spectator sports involving ball-handling, ball-whacking, and/or stock cars. I love hearing co-workers lament their lack of sleep because they stayed up late to watch a swim meet. Plus, the Olympics heightens the excitement of every sport it touches. Take women’s gymnastics, which is always a crowd pleaser, but during the Olympics, the high stakes add an exquisiteness to the tension. Who doesn’t love watching those crestfallen muscle-wracked little girls after their lifetime of fanatical work is sidelined by a hop and a wobble on the landing?
I love how the Olympics foment the avid patriotism of my girlhood. My most profound Olympic memory was watching the Calgary Olympics in 1988, when American Debi Thomas and East German Katarina Witt duked it in Women’s Figure Skating. The television’s microphones picked up the pep talk that Thomas’s coach gave her right before she skated the crucial long program: “You can do this. You can do anything. You’re an American.” Thomas skated poorly and wound up with the bronze, and that’s when I learned how a sports spectator’s agony of defeat is intensified by helplessness. That’s also when I vowed myself a mortal enemy of Katarina Witt, and all East Germany. Figure skating is war, after all.
